Biologist and botanist Reginald Gates is mainly remembered as a staunch scientific conservative, a defender of racial theory and fierce opponent of racial mixing. In post-war Britain and America, Gates's racial views made him something of a pariah. This article explores Gates's post-war career as a micro-historical analysis of racial science and society after the Second World War. It examines the relationship between scientific racists and segregationists in the US, especially concerning the Brown ruling and the establishment of the Mankind Quarterly journal, arguing that science in this period was subsumed into politics as protagonists on both sides of the segregation debate used science to justify ideological positions.

Although this issue is the first to appear during my tenure as Editor of the Journal of American Studies, an expression of gratitude to Jay Kleinberg for ten years of unstinting effort on behalf of the Journal of American Studies, first as Associate Editor (1996–2001) and as Editor (2001–6) is in order. The present issue is one that has taken shape in the period of transition from her Editorship to mine, and her contribution to it has been considerable. I am sure that readers will share with me in thanking Jay for her hard work over the past decade, and in wishing her the very best for future endeavours.

The Hague Academy of International Law was founded in 1923 with funds from the Carnegie Endowment, and soon established itself as one of the premier institutes in its field. However, after the Second World War the Carnegie was joined by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in a coordinated programme to modernize the institution and increase its international influence. The Foundations, contributing to the broad goals of US foreign policy, were keen to make use of this Dutch institution to build an “epistemic community” among the elites of the newly-decolonizing Third World. The academy thereby became an important normative institution involved in a broad strategy to ensure a smooth transition from a colonial to a postcolonial world order. This article traces the evolution of the academy and the consequences of its intersection with large-scale US philanthropy.

Marcus Garvey's ideology had special meaning to West Indian migrants because it helped their economic adjustment in the United States. Despite the relocation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association to New York City, Garvey continued to speak predominantly to West Indians at home and abroad, since he shared their colonial mentality and understood their migrant ideology – the search for economic gain abroad in order to multiply options back home. Garvey scholars have argued that black Americans benefited from Garvey rhetoric as much as West Indian migrants, but tensions between the two communities suggest that black Americans did not think so. Garveyism served to accentuate economic rivalries as black Americans suspected that migrants wanted to transfer their material success back home – indeed, Garvey openly encouraged as much.

When published in July 2004, the 9/11 Commission Report surprised readers with its accessible prose and narrative power. The report won the respect of the American public as much for its literary qualities as for the findings of the 9/11 commissioners. This article argues that the success of the 9/11 Report depended on its ability to challenge literary classification, and to bring down the walls between personal and national experience. More effectively than any other literary work of its era, the 9/11 Report wed the fortunes of a weakened American government to those of a wounded citizenry.

On the face of it, the move to classify any particular cultural period might seem such a slippery, arbitrary undertaking that the result would almost inevitably appear excessively homogenizing or otherwise misleading. The first use of the term “Enlightenment” in the English-speaking world was not until 1865, for example, while the notion of literary Romanticism as a discrete historical phenomenon did not emerge until the later part of the nineteenth century, long after Wordsworth and Coleridge had died.1 The more sceptical wing of microhistorians and new historicists would say this merely exemplifies the categorical distance and difference between particular situations and the subsequent rationalizations imposed forcibly upon them. A counterargument, however, might suggest it is only through retrospective mapping of this kind that what Arjun Appadurai calls the “isomorphic” qualities running through particular eras can be brought to light.2 Works or phenomena apparently quite diffuse and unrelated can be brought together in illuminating constellations, thereby suggesting ways in which structural patterns of certain kinds, ideological as well as economic, have helped to shape, if not altogether determine, cultural narratives at particular junctures in history. Fredric Jameson's 1984 essay “Periodizing the 60s,” for instance, rigorously eschewed both the anecdotal indulgence and the sentimental forms of nostalgia which have accumulated persistently around that decade through its insistence that history “is necessity, that the 60s had to happen the way it did, and that its opportunities and failures were inextricably intertwined, marked by the objective constraints and openings of a determinate historical situation.

An important but little-studied feature of Toni Morrison's novels is their ambivalent relationship with classical tradition. Morrison was a classics minor while at Howard University, and her deployment of the cultural practices of ancient Greece and Rome is fundamental to her radical project. Indeed, the works' revisionary classicism extends far beyond the scope of established criticism, which has largely confined itself to the engagement with Greek tragedy in Beloved, with the Demeter/Kore myth in The Bluest Eye and with allusions to Oedipus and Odysseus in Song of Solomon.1 Morrison repeatedly subverts the central role that Greece and Rome have played in American self-definition and historiography. In Paradise, for example, the affinity between the Oven in Ruby and the Greek koine hestia or communal hearth critiques the historical Founding Fathers' insistence on their new nation's analogical relationship with the ancient republics. And in their densely allusive rewritings of slavery, the Civil War and its aftermath, Beloved and Jazz expose the dependence of the “Old South” on classical pastoral tradition. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in her most recent novel – Love (2003) – Morrison further develops the transformative engagement with America's Graeco-Roman inheritance that characterizes all of her previous fiction.2

United States foreign-policymakers have enthusiastically backed policies of promoting democracy abroad. But do the American people support these plans? Evidence from polls reveals that while people generally like the idea of exporting freedom, they do not view it as a top priority. Other concepts such as political and economic security are valued more by the American public. Backing for democracy promotion also seems to be waning in recent years. I examine these issues and offer possible reasons for this “gap” in response to democracy promotion among American people. I also explain the implications of these findings for America's foreign policy, including the types of government the US appears to support in the wake of military operations. I conclude with an examination of why the policy of democracy promotion has not been more popular with the American people, evaluating competing arguments that the policy is flawed, as opposed to simply a case of poor public relations.

Region, home and transnational migration are explored in terms of the transcultural complexities that reverberate through Iranian American Gina Nahai's Sunday's Silence. Nahai grapples with stereotypes that attach to the Holiness churches in the east Tennessee region of Appalachia. This essay argues that the novel's politics rest on the intersubjectivity of strangers as bound into a metaphysics of desire. It is through this paradigm that Nahai writes against the reductive association of “minority” literature with discrete “national” models and through which she explores the local and the regional in a culturally complex narrative about the crisis of alterity.

The civilized and genteel tone of art critic Adeline Adams captures a fading historical and cultural moment that she recovers in this memory of American beaux-arts sculpture, fitfully described in a contemporary exhibition brochure as employing “the classical or Renaissance figural type, stripped of idealization and infused with baroque exuberance in composition,” and “combined with a purely nineteenth-century insistence on accuracy in surface detail.” Despite this sculptural syncretism, Adams's assessment evokes the high civic and didactic role that American public sculpture played toward the end of the nineteenth century, and her memory is even more poignant given the fact that Daniel Chester French, born in 1850, would be dead within two years of her commentary. A modest and contemporary survey of his sculpture thus might help us understand the totalizing effect that the City Beautiful Movement held for a short time in terms of aesthetic urban planning. French ranked among Frederick Law Olmstead, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and other architects and artists “to influence the heart, mind, and purse of the citizen,” as William H. Wilson simply puts it. Confronted by industry, urbanization, and immigrants, those harried and long-time residents of Adeline Adams's American urbs were reminded as they rounded street corners and ascended the steps of civic institutions that a kind of classical beauty and simplicity still existed, and that a small corps of artists and urban planners wanted to keep it that way.

Commentators noted the role of the religious right in the re-election of President George W. Bush in 2004. This essay suggests that such assessments are ahistorical and flawed, and illustrates the ways in which evangelical Protestantism has shaped American political life. Examples of the intersection of religion and politics include Jefferson's election in 1800, John Brown's trial and execution, Abraham Lincoln's Civil War leadership and William Jennings Bryan's radical democratic politics. The essay concludes by arguing that if American-studies teaching and research marginalizes religion it fails to comprehend a vital component of American society and culture.

In early twentieth-century Los Angeles, Anglo-American women writers documented the emergence of a metropolis. Perceptions of race, ethnicity and culture became embedded in the struggle to depict and interpret a new urbanism. In capturing the changing cityscape, women writers constructed Sonoratown, the old Mexican Quarter of Los Angeles, as a place in the social imagination. This article examines representations of Sonoratown and its Mexican inhabitants in two anthologies. Women writers, many of whom moved in civic and reform-minded circles, rendered Sonoratown ambiguously: as a “picturesque” place to be preserved and yet a space earmarked for renewal, Sonoratown became entwined with the drive for social reform, assimilation and urban development.

Aside from William Faulkner it is difficult to think of a white twentieth-century American writer who has negotiated the issue of race in as sustained, unflinching and intelligent a fashion as Russell Banks. Whilst the impulse to produce novels on the grand scale shows little sign of diminishing, authors opting to place race at the very centre of their great American fictions remain relatively rare. With a couple of notable exceptions, most of the major works produced by white American authors over the past decade – whether by elder statesmen such as Updike, DeLillo or Pynchon or younger writers such as Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace – appear to quarantine the topic.

In the last two weeks of March 1959, the jazz bassist Charlie Mingus and the beat poet Kenneth Patchen performed on stage together at the Living Theatre in New York City. Mingus and his band improvised to jazz themes at the back, while Patchen read simultaneously from his poetry at the front. This article examines in detail both Patchen's and Mingus's work with jazz/poetry fusion art and positions these collaborations within the context of the wider movement. It explores the artistic relationship between Mingus and Patchen and examines and contextualizes these performances within the jazz aesthetic.

Against a historiography that too often considers domestic policy apart from foreign policy, this essay suggests connections based on two cultural/political archetypes, the cowboy and the welfare queen, which were or are simultaneously gendered and racialized. The cowboy as a symbol of white male individualism has represented worthy American manhood; the welfare queen has stood for a despised black womanhood. Behind the image of the cowboy stands the workings of empire; behind the portrait of the welfare queen lies the punishment of poor women, often African American or Latina, for their motherhood, sexuality, and lack of dependence on husbands. The problem with the welfare queen is that she parlayed her dependence on the state into independence from men and employment (that is, work as commonly understood.) Like the enemies without, who would make the nation dependent through withholding a vital resource – oil – and require disciplining through “cowboy diplomacy,” welfare dependents have become the primitive other, politically assaulted, responsible for national decline, who need taming through cowboy social policy. Drawing upon newspaper accounts, blogs, speeches, and iconographic representations, this essay traces the ways that modern Presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush II, deployed these icons to push independence as a national virtue in spite of their apparently different political positions. The languages of independence and dependence provided an easy vocabulary for policymaking that aspires to moral heights, leading to a performativity that traps those who utter the tropes of their predecessors into policy grooves not necessarily of their own choosing.

“Memory mapping,” including “rememory” (as stirringly pioneered by Toni Morrison), has become crucial within the humanities. Beginning with 1950s Nevada, the present article seeks deeper rememories of the American West, then critiques more recent history. Included are responses by Native Americans, Samuel Clemens recording the goldrush era, and interpretation of McCarthyism in light of the author's family's eviction from the US. Nevada was a nuclear testing ground. “Robot” aircraft have lately been deployed from the Nellis base in delivery of Hellfire missiles in Iraq. Overall, this layering of (often violent) history is shown to support a “poetics” of cultural memory.

This essay explores the questionable potency of satire in the light of Richard Nixon's political rehabilitation. Following a discussion of satirical treatments from the 1940s to the 1980s by, among others, the cartoonists Herbert Block (‘Herblock’) and Garry Trudeau, the comedians Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, and writers including Philip Roth and Robert Coover, I examine one work extensively – Kurt Vonnegut's Jailbird (1979) – as a disquisition on satiric impotence, setting that novel in the context of the comedic firepower that had been directed at Nixon since the dawn of his political career and which, in the end, could not prevent his rehabilitation.

With emancipation a fait accompli by 1865, one might ask why Kentucky-born Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835–1907), former Confederate soldier, son of a border state slaveholder, began painting slaves then. Noble had known the “peculiar institution” at first hand, albeit from a privileged position within the master class. As a result, his choice to embark upon a career as a painter using historical incidents from slavery makes for an interesting study. Were the paintings a way of atoning for his Confederate culpability, a rebel pounding his sword into a paintbrush to appease the conquering North? Or was he capitalizing on his unique geographic perspective as a scion of slave-trafficking Frankfort, Kentucky, soon to head a prestigious art school in Cincinnati, the city where so many runaways first tasted freedom? Between 1865 and 1869 Noble exhibited in northern cities a total of eight paintings with African American subjects. Two of these, The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis (1865, repainted ca. 1870) and Margaret Garner (1867), featured mixed-race women, or mulattos, as they had come to be called. From a young female up for auction, to the famous fugitive Margaret Garner, his portrayals show a transformation taking place within perceptions of biracial women in post-emancipation America. Opinions about mulattos surfaced in a range of theoretical discussions, from the scientific to the political, as strategists North and South envisioned evolving social policy.

This article explores the contradiction between the ingrained belief that justice should be “blind” and the filmic tradition of positioning woman as spectacle. Recognizing that a law film does not offer a direct translation of material reality, it explores how these representations of the law work with and against popular understandings of femininity – and feminism. The article offers a reading of selected screen adaptations of real legal entanglements to show how a focus on appearance marks a woman's trial (and subsequent filming of it), before focusing on the case of Barbara Graham, immortalized in the award-winning film I Want to Live!

An era of space explorations and an era of expanded civil rights for racial minorities and women began simultaneously in the United States. But such important social changes are very rarely discussed in relation to each other. Four recent books on how the US astronaut program finally opened to women and minorities in 1978 address a key part of this connection, without discussing the struggles that compelled the ending of traditional race and gender exclusions. This essay examines the organizational and political dynamics of how civil rights in employment came to the US civilian space program in the decades after 1970.