This article aims to demonstrate that it is less important to pigeonhole Oppen's poetics within modernism or postmodernism than it is to understand his poetic practice as a mode of critical public discourse participating in social debates concerning the state of democratic society in the 1960s. Adopting the framework of the Habermasian transformation of the public sphere allows us to understand the political impact of Oppen's volumes of poetry in the 1960s much more clearly, if we construe them as part of a distinct political engagement that reaches beyond his earlier modernist allegiances. The main argument here is that Oppen's middle and later poetry straddles a larger paradigmatic shift that occurs within the 1960s from a politics of subjectivity that is focussed upon the autonomy of the self to a politics of the self that stresses community and relational ethics. Within this context, it can be seen that a volume like Of Being Numerous addresses itself to the question of how to live as both a unique and yet a social being, and how to retain one's individuality whilst also participating within a community. The urgency and pressure of that question characterizes all three volumes of his poetry published in the 1960s, and is explored through a comparative analysis of the discourse of individuality and community in Oppen's poems and various documents of the 1960s.

This article examines the impact on American furniture and clothing styles by women missionaries traveling to Turkey in the Victorian era. Although there has been much discussion of the impact of Western missionaries on Turkey and other parts of Asia, the reciprocal impact on American culture has not been adequately assessed. Missionary work, which started in the 1820s in a modest manner, turned into a systematic and large-scale activity, reaching its climax during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Unlike Western diplomats, whose visits took place in the palaces of Istanbul, far from the realities of everyday life, missionary women had informal contact with ordinary Turkish women. Ottoman Turkish domestic space was highly gendered, so only these missionary women would have had access to authentic Ottoman Turkish interiors and been able to observe them as social spaces. The furniture style and the unique concept of comfort that they observed in Turkey presented an alternative point of view of home life and its organization. After spending years abroad, these women would return to the US to recruit and raise money for their missions by traveling from community to community, often creating interest for their work abroad by presenting examples of material culture. This article will put letters, diaries, travelogues and other contemporary material in the context of American culture of the Victorian era in order to chart the unusual way in which American and Turkish women interacted with each other at this historical moment.

As an outsider with a mysterious childhood, Alexander Hamilton is, as psychologists say, a good “hook” for a projective identification. For his admirers Hamilton is a source of political capital. His ideas and proposals about the debt, protectionism, and an American manufacturing base are in the news in the early twenty-first century. Although the Old Left saw Hamilton as an elitist, possibly a monarchist, and a promoter of industrial capitalism, contemporary American progressives have called attention to his explicit support for habeas corpus, his efforts on behalf of banking, and his surprisingly enlightened attitudes about race and slavery. As one of the founders of a new republic, Hamilton knew he would be in the history books, but his image, representations of his physical presence, and speculation about his private life circulate on the Internet in ways that would surely astonish him. Alexander Hamilton not only has admirers in the fields of politics and history; he also has fans.

In her 1986 book All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, Maya Angelou reflected on the meaning of identity among the people of the African diaspora. A rich and highly reflective memoir, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes recounted the author's experiences, relationships, and quest for a sense of individual and collective belonging throughout the African diaspora. At the core of Angelou's quest for individual and collective identity lay Africa, a continent whose geography and history loomed large in her very personal story, and in her efforts to create a sense of “kinship” among people of African descent throughout the world. Starting with Maya Angelou's All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, this essay considers the significance of “Africa” as a geographical site, political space, and constantly reimagined history in the formation of black identity in the travel writings of black diaspora authors since the 1980s. I compare Angelou's work with that of the Hawaiian-born President of the United States Barack Obama, whose Dreams from My Father (1995) offered personal self-reflections and critiques of the African diaspora from a Pacific world perspective. In Obama's rendering of African diasporic identity, Africa has become “an idea more than an actual place.” Half a decade later, and half a world away, the Caribbean-born Afro-Britain Caryl Phillips published The Atlantic Sound (2000), an account of African diasporic identity that moved between understanding, compassion, and a harsh belief that Africa cannot take on the role of a psychologist's couch, that “Africa cannot cure.” These three memoirs offer insight into the complex and highly contested nature of identity throughout the African diaspora, and present very personalized reflections on the geography, politics, and history of Africa as a source of identity and diasporic belonging. Taken together, these three personal narratives represent a challenge to the utility of a transnational black identity that Paul Gilroy suggested in his landmark book The Black Atlantic.

Scholarship on the theme of Alexis de Tocqueville's changing roles in American culture constitutes a remarkably coherent discourse with distinctive conventions, structures, metaphors, and plots. Especially pronounced in the literature is a constantly repeated narrative – really a myth – that portrays Tocqueville as a vanished hero who suffered a prolonged period of oblivion and then made a celebrated return to play the role of guide to Americans as they faced the perils of the postwar world. Because of the lack of empirical support for this narrative, scholars inadvertently find themselves violating or disregarding elementary rules of evidence and logical argument when they address it. The extraordinary stability and coherence of this discourse are its most notable features: they have persisted, with no oppositional counternarrative, decade after decade for the past forty years. But all discourses have cracks and fissures. This essay reveals the ubiquity as well as the banality of the standard tragic-heroic narrative, and it provides a taxonomy of Tocqueville metaphors – Tocqueville as Orpheus, as Proteus, and as Christ. The supposed facts of Tocqueville's reception (with which these metaphoric clusters are identical) are false. There was no departure, oblivion, or triumphant return of Tocqueville. The mythic discourse advanced an account that had no support in the historical record.

Far from being apolitical, self-indulgent or ineffective, as was suggested by some in the activist community, the NAMES Project Quilt became a symbol of the decimation of AIDS and a beacon for those in the AIDS-affected community, and challenged and transformed public attitudes towards people with AIDS. The NAMES Project Quilt risked sanitizing and homogenizing the particularities of the deceased, but I shall argue that the spectacle of the quilt changed public opinion through its mechanisms of publicity and meaning-making. Building on Michael Warner's notion of the ‘Mass Subject’, the quilt, I will suggest, transformed the mainstream, effectively forcing the formerly abject AIDS-affected community into public consciousness through the mechanisms of mass media.

Heir to the racist configuration of the American art exchange and the delimiting appraisals of blackness in the American mainstream media, Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared on the late 1970s New York City street art scene – then he called himself “SAMO.” Not long thereafter, Basquiat grew into one of the most influential artists of an international movement that began around 1980, marked by a return to figurative painting. Given its rough, seemingly untrained and extreme, conceptual nature, Basquiat's high-art oeuvre might not look so sophisticated to the uninformed viewer. However, Basquiat's work reveals a powerful poetic and visual gift, “heady enough to confound academics and hip enough to capture the attention span of the hip hop nation,” as Greg Tate has remarked. As noted by Richard Marshall, Basquiat's aesthetic strength actually comes from his striving “to achieve a balance between the visual and intellectual attributes” of his artwork. Like Marshall, Tate, and others, I will connect with Basquiat's unique, self-reflexively experimental visual practices of signifying and examine anew Basquiat's active contribution to his self-alienation, as Hebdige has called it. Basquiat's aesthetic makes of his paintings economies of accumulation, building a productive play of contingency from the mainstream's constructions of race. This aesthetic move speaks to a need for escape from the perceived epistemic necessities of blackness. Through these economies of accumulation we see, as Tate has pointed out, Basquiat's “intellectual obsession” with issues such as ancestry/modernity, personhood/property and originality/origins of knowledge, driven by his tireless need to problematize mainstream media's discourses surrounding race – in other words, a commodified American Africanism.

In American society, rural spaces – particularly those of the working class – are seen as stagnant holdovers from a temporal past that “modern” society has evolved beyond. As a result, working-class rurality and those living within these places are viewed as static, ignorant, insular and so on: whatever places do not conform to the appearance of “modern” progress and development simply must be regressed, on both socioeconomic and cultural levels. While scholars in some disciplines are attempting to redress this misconception, other disciplines (like literary studies) largely align with the mainstream perspective that rurality represents a regressed past to our evolved present. However, despite the critical lack of attention to rurality as a viable space in the present, we can see in various fictional works that working-class rural spaces can effectively show us the interrelationship of rural spaces with “modern” society and culture in the present, the continuing relevance and deep history alike of said spaces, and the potential of these fictional working-class rural places to confront America's norms of progress and development within and without their fictional borders. Richard Russo's fiction illustrates the potential to bring out this critical working-class rural voice. Russo's fictional treatments afford the reader an opportunity to witness the ever-changing complexity (not the temporal and cultural regression) of working-class rurality. In turn, Russo's fictional working-class rural spaces offer a counterperspective to the mainstream (defined here as middle-class and (sub)urban) notions of progress that otherwise dismiss these perspectives. In his book Empire Falls, Russo uses nostalgia to assert this counterperspective. This nostalgia not only reaffirms the postwar and early twenty-first-century working-class rural identity of Empire Falls, but it also offers a critique of dominant conceptions of progress and development that continue into our present.

My article argues for reading the novel as political allegory. America's efforts in the early and mid-nineteenth century are represented by Robert Acton trying to compete with a “European family” for international colonizing privileges. A blend of British and French empire can be seen in the person of Eugenia, the Baroness Munster – originally American by birth, who has, though her years as European nobility, adopted the policy of expansionism. To fully understand James's caustic comment on imperialistic ventures – most notably as he pits the pernicious nature of European exploits against the more humanistic pursuit of art for art's sake – we can read Eugenia's brother, Felix, as a proponent of aestheticism, committed to seeking beauty in all life pursuits. In sum, I suggest that the novel need not be dismissed (as it largely has been for so many decades) as a simplistic, insignificant part of James's oeuvre. I use historical research, literary analyses of other scholars, statements made by James in his letters, and critical statements by James in such commentaries as his biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne in order to support my views. Of course, I use the primary text, The Europeans, for much of my support.

This essay studies the emergence of the egghead as a figuration of intellectuals in Cold War American culture. The characteristics of the egghead accentuated his failed masculinity, queer sexuality, racialized identity, and fragile commitment to American ideals. The egghead functioned both to limit those for whom intelligence was culturally available and to malign those who attempted to advocate education and the expansion of intelligence as a vehicle for social change. Though this was often framed as a liberal political intervention, the climate of the Cold War and the attendant social inequalities in the United States in this period ensured that the popular use of the egghead label served chiefly to build up a virulently white, masculine liberalism.

Utilizing the work of two cartoonists who produced for newspapers outside the central establishment of the yellow press, this essay argues for the critical role of political cartoonists in shaping viewers' expectations of US involvement in the Spanish-American War of 1898. It features seventeen cartoons, arranged carefully to reflect the shifting political climate, in order to demonstrate the narrative frameworks, image selections, and paradigm shifts in their representations of war and empire. Their cartoons were emblematic of how artists nationwide harnessed typographies of gender, race, and sexuality to create compelling justifications for and against policies of war and colonial acquisition.

During the second half of the twentieth century, at a time when most observers thought they were in decline, parties were in fact transformed in the US. At the center of this change, scholars argue, was the development, at the national level, of a more centralized and professionally oriented “service” model of party organization within the Republican Party. What the emphasis on the national level obscures, however, is the important role that state parties played in the development of a service style of party organization prior to the 1960s. Nowhere was this more evident than in Ohio, where the postwar Republican Party, led by Ray Bliss, had a significant impact on the development of this new, more centralized “service” approach to party organization. The Bliss model represented one of the most fully developed examples to date, at any level, of the service party, as demonstrated by its organizational continuity over time, and its influence on the subsequent institutionalization of a similar structure within the Republican Party nationally in the 1960s and 1970s.