Although Thomas Pynchon has continued to publish long after the postwar American countercultural era, his politics are critically characterized in relation to that movement's values. The dominant critical positions associate power with rationalism and functionality, and political opposition with creativity and pleasure, positioning Pynchon's novels at a politicized intersection between postmodernism and the counterculture. This article problematizes this dominant critical position, taking Mason & Dixon (1997) as exemplary of Pynchon's reconsideration of the nature of power and potential opposition to it in response to the countercultural movement's failures and successes, and to developments in capitalist social organization in the 1980s.

In 1951, the CIA secretly funded the creation of an ostensibly private group of US citizens called the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME). Pro-Arab and anti-Zionist in orientation, AFME was repeatedly attacked by pro-Israel groups before seeing its links to the CIA exposed by investigative journalists in 1967. Drawing on recent scholarship about “state–private networks” and the cultural history of US–Middle East relations, this article examines the origins of AFME, its characteristic values and relations with the CIA, and the reasons for the decline of its influence vis-à-vis the emergent “Israel lobby.”

This article, which emphasizes the importance of transnational history, tracks the influence of E. Stanley Jones, a missionary to India in the early twentieth century, on evangelicals in the United States. It contends that global encounters pushed Jones to hold integrated ashrams, conduct evangelistic crusades, and participate in the Congress on Racial Equality. During his time abroad, he discovered that racial segregation at home hurt the causes of missions and democracy abroad. Using this Cold War logic, Jones in turn provoked American evangelicals to consider more fully questions of racial inequality.

Interdisciplinary scholarship on the era of the American Civil War has invigorated a well-trodden field. This essay addresses recent scholarship on the history of emotions, medicine, and the environment in the Civil War era, analyzing key themes and suggesting areas for future research. Together, these fields have added nuance to the “dark turn” in Civil War studies, historicized concepts often treated ahistorically, and allowed Civil War historians to engage in meaningful conversations with scholars in other fields and disciplines.

This paper challenges the prevailing notions that John Updike's fiction was mostly apolitical by offering a fresh and unorthodox reading of his debut novel The Poorhouse Fair (1958). It argues that Updike's application of political metaphor to an ostensibly placid plot that revolves around a New Jersey retirement home illuminates mounting disagreements within the New Deal order regarding power, liberty, democracy, and religion. Unlike conventional narratives that attribute the decline of liberalism in the 1960s to external factors such as Vietnam, racial strife, counterculture, and postindustrialism, this counterintuitive reading of Updike reveals that latent internal philosophical tensions were embedded within liberalism long before these formidable challenges materialized.

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, American evangelicals broadened their global outlook and operations, becoming the largest private radio broadcasters in the world. As they expanded overseas after World War II, American evangelicals encountered a world in crisis due to the Cold War, population growth, and processes of decolonization, affecting Western missions. Evangelical broadcasting advocates promoted mass media as a means to address the shifting demographic, political, and religious balance between the global North and South. Global radio broadcasting demonstrated a dynamic tension within American evangelicalism between innovative and conservative impulses, which was particularly evident in the area of reception.

The idea of jazz as “America's classical music” has become a powerful way of defining the music, asserting its national and artistic value, and shaping its scholarly study. The present article provides a history of this idea through a close analysis of its primary theorist and most visible spokesperson, Dr. Billy Taylor. It argues that the idea was not a neoclassical and conservative product of the 1980s, but had important roots in the Black Arts imperatives of the later 1960s and early 1970s. It suggests that Taylor initially made the idea work inventively and productively in a variety of contexts, especially through his community arts project Jazzmobile, but that these contexts diverged as his public profile was stretched thin across and beyond the United States. The idea's disintegration into clichéd ubiquity in the mid-1980s then provides a critical perspective on the idea of the “jazz renaissance,” and an opportunity to consider the role of the jazz ambassador in the context of debates about African American intellectuals.

This article explores a popular tourist vehicle in early twentieth-century Florida: the Afromobile. Beginning in the 1890s, Afromobiling referred to the white tourist experience in south Florida of travelling in a wheelchair propelled by an African American hotel employee. Most prominent in Palm Beach, these wheelchairs developed into a heavily promoted tourist activity in the region. Using promotional imagery and travel literature this paper traces the development of Afromobiling as a tourist vehicle that played upon south Florida's tropical environs. It argues that the vehicle's popularity related to its enactment of benign racial hierarchy and controlled black mobility. Moreover, the Afromobile infused US fantasies about south Florida as a tropical and “oriental” paradise for white leisure.

This essay examines the broad and understudied contributions of pioneer American anthropologist Alexander Francis Chamberlain (1865–1914), who earned America's first PhD in anthropology at Clark University under the legendary anthropologist Franz Boas. Before his untimely death on the eve of World War I, and Boas's rise as a leading scientific spokesman of antiracism at Columbia University, Chamberlain contributed as significantly as Boas to the fields of linguistic and cultural anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, child development, comparative folklore, and Native American and African American culture, and to the cause of equality and justice for all humans. Chamberlain subscribed to an antiracist cultural evolutionism, frequently and passionately condemning ethnocentrism and insisting on the “generic humanity” of all persons, of all races. Close reading of Chamberlain's work suggests not that Boas's work mattered less, but rather that both men participated in an emerging debate on the nature and meaning of race that informed social policy and shaped academic interests during the Progressive Era.

This article examines Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead in dialogue with her speculative reflection upon Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology to read the novel as a radically ambivalent text which exposes an aporia at the core of the Reverend Ames's Christian ethics. This ambivalence appears in the way that Ames's version of his own family history works assiduously to expiate the perceived violence done to ethics by his grandfather's support for abolitionist violence while remaining haunted by the thought that in the unforgiving context of Bleeding Kansas simply to insist upon an absolute distinction between violence on the one hand and ethics and law on the other may be irreconcilable with the workings of good faith and the ends of justice. Reinterpreting Ames's narrative in the light of Jacques Derrida's reflection on the paradoxical structure of ethical responsibility, the article argues that the violence done to Ames's ethical reflection by the memory of the grandfather, John Brown, and the excluded black body reveals the agonistic location of the ethics of abolitionist history between two kinds of violence on the uncertain border between justice and law which defines the ground of every genuinely ethical decision.

This article uses the World Congress on Evangelism held in Berlin in 1966 to explore the cultural dimensions of US leadership in the world of global evangelism post-World War II. It shows how a close alliance with technology and business, as well as traditional anticommunism and belief in Western civilization, spurred US evangelicals to assume global leadership. A closer examination of the cultural and spiritual atmosphere of the congress reveals, however, that beneath the apparent American leadership tensions emerged around race and social issues, expressed forcefully by new theological and political voices from the developing world. These tensions were negotiated through common practices and behaviours, such as during prayer sessions, dinner conversations, and discussions groups, and allowed a genuine transnational evangelical community to arise.

Commemorations of the burning of Atlanta and Columbia reveal the relationship of form and content in Confederate memory. Atlanta monuments announced civic rejuvenation to national audiences, particularly tourists. Columbia ruins lamented the fracture of local elites' political dominance. The divergent cultures informed Margaret Mitchell's fabrication of Lost Cause myth in Gone with the Wind (1936) and Elizabeth Boatwright Coker's excavation of Lost Cause legend in La Belle (1959). The decline of monuments and ruins contributed to the transformation of the Lost Cause into a different configuration of Confederate memory during the decade of the Civil War centennial.

This article identifies the humble beard as a device used in twenty-first-century American literature to examine the contemporary condition of American masculinity. Drawing on readings from key writers of post-9/11 fiction, such as John Updike, Moshin Hamid, and Don DeLillo, the article calls for the need to move on from the reductive rendering of the beard as an irrefutable representation of Otherness to see the beard as a device used to explore the construction of masculinities in relation to key issues such as racialization, sexuality and the queering of the Other, and nationhood in the globalized and globalizing arena of the United States. Reading Amy Waldman's nuanced engagement with the beard in The Submission (2011) alongside key works on hegemonic masculinity, whiteness, and globalized masculinities, the article underlines the power of the beard in the contradictions and complexities of a changing American masculinity now performed beyond the physical borders of “the nation” on the global stage.

The Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974 was the largest global gathering of evangelical Christians in the latter half of the twentieth century. Lausanne was significant, in part because of the struggle between two sets of evangelical leaders: those, led by the US, who wanted to retain a focus on “evangelism,” and the young radicals, led by Latin Americans, who demanded a broader attention to “social concern.” This essay traces the impact of the liberalizing faction, while also following the “evangelism-first” movement and its role in the rise of the religious right in the US in the 1980s.

In 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, offered freedom to any African American who fought for the British cause against the colonial rebels in his province. Dunmore's plan to reconquer Virginia with his “Ethiopian Regiment” ended in failure, not due to a lack of willing volunteers but because of a familiar eighteenth-century killer: smallpox. Five years later, similar proclamations were issued in South Carolina. Yet smallpox again hindered British designs, devastating the eager African Americans who flooded to their lines. This paper uses primary source material and research on smallpox to analyze the experiences of African Americans who actively sought freedom with the British during the Revolutionary War. Focussing on the differing regions of Virginia and South Carolina this paper will assess the impact of smallpox on British military designs for runaway slaves while also evaluating the reasons why the disease had such a devastating effect on African Americans during the period. Overall, this paper will show how smallpox, so common in eighteenth-century Europe, put a fatal end to the first widespread push for emancipation on the American continent and helped derail one of Britain's best hopes for turning the tide in the Revolutionary War.

From 1968 to 1975, Lew Alcindor/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar traveled a turbulent personal path toward self-discovery. His journey had profound implications for the larger cultural landscape of race, sport, politics, and religion. As he became professional basketball's chief superstar, he was framed by the press as sullen and solitary, and he served as the villain in a media-driven storyline informed by popular prejudices. Yet for many African Americans and other progressive fans, he exemplified the ideals that made black power uplifting and affirmative, rather than threatening. His conversion to Islam and his name change further shaped new cultural and political territory for the black athlete. It highlighted a personal struggle within Abdul-Jabbar – he sought a kind of personal freedom, even as he revealed a tendency to subsume himself before strong authority figures. He nevertheless stood, in this period, as the nation's most prominent face of classical Islam. His religious conversion further distanced him from much of the American public, but over time he presented an effective, progressive narrative about the place of Islam in American life.

President Richard M. Nixon and his staff intended his 3 November 1969 Address to the Nation on Vietnam to counteract the growing strength of the antiwar movement. Its appeal to a “Silent Majority” of Americans inspired an impressive outpouring of support, but this response owed as much to White House planning as to public opinion. Drawing on internal White House documents, this article traces administration efforts to secure this response and, then, to claim and promote this new Silent Majority. It demonstrates that White House public-opinion campaigns were designed to maximize control, and not necessarily to change attitudes.

Present at the creation of American Studies, Daniel Aaron belongs on the short list of the academy's most learned and admired custodians of the nation's culture, for which President Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal in 2011. That would have been close to seven decades after the inauguration of Aaron's teaching career. A president of the American Studies Association (ASA), he held the rank of Victor S. Thomas Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard, where his service included chairing its Committee on American Civilization. The lengthy span of Aaron's life in the profession, punctuated by many other honors (including the ASA's Bode-Pearson Prize), has few, if any, counterparts in duration and distinction. Such was the arc of his career and concerns that, as this necrology is intended to suggest, the field of American Studies will not see his like again.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s a number of British “scholarship boys” traveled to America sponsored by British and American foundations. Their experiences in the United States qualify and complicate existing narratives about upwardly mobile meritocrats. First, Americans regarded these figures in a manner that helped alter their view of themselves. Distinctions that mattered in Britain became less significant in America, though scholarship boys remained shrewd enough to penetrate the veneer of a superficial egalitarianism. National identity became a marker that sidelined residual anxieties about social hierarchy. Second, American prosperity affected the bias against consumerism shared by many British intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century. As professionals supported by government or educational institutions, these visitors differentiated themselves from those in the private sector, which pursued other goals. America exposed scholarship boys to a system that assimilated consumerism without sacrificing professionalism and a commitment to social progress.

Established in 1979 by Watergate felon Charles Colson, Prison Fellowship International (PFI) is now one of the largest para-church organizations in world evangelicalism. This article explains PFI's origins with reference to the existence of a transnational evangelical network, the compatibility of PFI's mission with the emergent theme of evangelical social concern, and a general crisis of penology across a number of Western countries. It explores the creative tension between Colson's empire-building instincts and the desire of PFI affiliates to influence the direction of the organization, revealing the transactional manner in which American evangelicals exercised global leadership in the late twentieth century.