In this paper I examine P. T. Barnum's attempt to bring the first “sacred white elephant” to America, and his subsequent “white elephant war” with rival showman Adam Forepaugh, through the lens of Afro-Asian comparative racialization. I look at several accounts of white elephants that describe their skin color in terms of the US's Black/white race dichotomy and ask why this animal was a popular figure for examining the US's shifting attitude toward race and transpacific imperialism in the late nineteenth century. By reading the “white elephant war” through a comparative framework, I argue that the heterogeneous histories of both African American and Asian racialization inhered and intersected in this specific instance of racial comparison, while tracking the overlaps and oversights that this analysis reveals.

Through adopting a history-of-emotions framework, this article explores romantic love within Black enslaved communities of the antebellum and early postbellum South. Whilst several historians have already explored the emotion of love in enslaved emotional communities, there is a growing understanding by scholars of the history of emotions that emotions, including love, are not always adequately historicized, and have perhaps been taken at face or written value. In some contrast to previous historical scholarship, this article argues that the love, as expressed and experienced within Black enslaved communities, was complex, contentious, and far from monolithic.

Every artist has their last works, but not all are “late works,” as theorized by Edward Said. By revisiting George Oppen’s late poems, I challenge established preconceptions about late-life creativity that have typically emphasized social withdrawal, despair, and finality in his work. Emphasis placed on lateness, I argue, obscures material conditions of textual production, particularly coauthoring literary activities. The Oppens work together to shape a social poetics and model of authoring beyond the normative ideals of self-reliance, especially with Primitive, published when Alzheimer’s disease had all but prevented George from working. The poems and archival evidence of Mary Oppen's editorial work describe the couple's journey through illness and the work's posthumous reinvention as a stylistic artefact.

An overlooked advertisement, entitled “An Incident at the South” (1849), calls attention to Ellen Craft's Spanish masquerade during her 1848 escape from American slavery. The author underscores her masculine costume, feigning disability, running to sea, and “a darkness of complexion that betokened Spanish extraction.” Despite contemporary criticism, the advertisement asserts Spanish-ness in the production history of Ellen's escape; thus the essay considers a reinterpretation of Ellen's transnational masquerades by reexamining the advertisement (1849) and in relation to her portrait (1850) and slave narrative (1860). Of emphasis is a history of hemisphere conflict – over land, at the borderlands, and at sea – during Anglo-American expansion, Spanish/Mexican displacement, and antebellum enslavement. Ellen's story is also contextualized with rising literary traditions of the mid-nineteenth century.

After the June 1967 Middle East war, liberal Zionism in the United States was transformed from an assumption into an embattled claim. From the 1940s to the 1960s, most Americans had assumed that liberalism and Zionism went together naturally. Only under pressure of criticism did liberal Zionists emerge as a self-aware faction within American Zionism. Starting in 1967, among the first to question the assumption of liberal Zionism were progressive Protestants, and fissures around Zionism among American progressives appeared in interreligious dialogue between Reform Jews and liberal white Protestants. Rabbi Balfour Brickner, a leading liberal Reform rabbi and a key interlocutor for such Protestants, stood in the thick of this dialogue, and his negotiation of liberal Zionism's passage from assumption to claim reveals that transformation vividly.

This article explores the formation of a “showmen's culture” among circus employees in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, a cultural identity which had the effect of diffusing labor conflicts in this developing industry. The showmen's culture created an affective bond between employees of all levels, from manual laborers, to middle managers, to company owners. This article links cultural history and labor history and provides an example of how workers outside traditional manual-labor industries coped with the challenges of industrialization, and how proprietors used the same cultural identity to their own advantage.

The article introduces the approach of a critical ability history by analyzing Progressive Era diet advice. It shows how calorie counting reframed health as an ability resulting from individuals’ responsible self-conduct. At that time, novel understandings of bodies and health, techniques of measuring them, and hopes of improving them in the name of eugenics and industrial capitalism suggested that bodies and health were malleable and that it was the duty of individual citizens to care for and shape them. As such, health as ability became a terrain of exclusion as well as of struggles for citizenship recognition.

This article considers how the archive, particularly material produced by children, destabilizes the boundaries between the domestic and the foreign, citizenship and empire. Through its analysis of a wave of educational reform in the United States during the 1930s, which encouraged global citizenship among the young, it demonstrates how children not typically associated with global citizenship – those from both rural and working-class backgrounds – engaged with the imperial messages embedded in global education of the period.

This paper offers close textual readings of poems from James Weldon Johnson's 1927 collection, God's Trombones, uncovering in Johnson's language resonant clues to his thought. In contrast to his disaffected novel The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912), Johnson's sermon–poems, through reengagement with the folkways of traditional African American worship, forge out a more potent creative space. As hybrid works, they diminish the gap between text and speech, and demand careful and lively ways of reading. My argument situates Johnson's practice in the contexts of sound recording, ragtime, and programmes for African American uplift at the turn of the century.

In the shadow of the Cuban Revolution, American Baptist preacher Billy Graham and US President John F. Kennedy barnstormed South America through overlapping tours in 1961 and 1962. Kennedy's presidency has often been presented as an intermission in the drama of evangelical political power, but grassroots activism provides new angles for analysis at the intersection of the US and Latin America. While claiming an apolitical stance, Graham worked alongside the US State Department, planting spiritual seeds on the tilled ground of foreign policy. Graham – and Protestant leaders orbiting him – curated acts of violence, painting a picture of persecution for a watching public. This narrative employed violence to draw lines of worldwide spiritual affiliation and political obligation. US evangelicals placed themselves as custodians of America's most sacred values at home and abroad, responsible for upholding democratic values, including religious tolerance, the rule of law, and anticommunism. Graham's tactics created an entangled relationship with Kennedy, where Graham arose as a metaphorical matador, fighting for persecuted Christians. Here, American evangelicals could flex their growing political muscle, while operating as an imagined religious minority community. Narratives, discourses, and representations of violence circulated transnationally and acquired differing meanings depending on the political interests of those mobilizing them.

This article explores the visual representation of gossip, rumourmongering, storytelling, and other analogues of oral exchange in mid twentieth-century small-town American visual narrative. I herein examine two key visual artists of the interwar period – photographer Ben Shahn and painter Norman Rockwell – and their place within the small-town narrative form, as well as Life magazine and its institutional small-town preoccupations. Considering Shahn's photographic work conducted as part of the Farm Security Administration to Rockwell's culturally dominant scenes of idyllic small-town life, I argue that both emphasize gossip's narratability despite their drastically different provenance. Opposing Shahn's scenes of Depression-era poverty with Rockwell's homogeneous vignettes of rural life, it will be concluded that gossip and oral exchange remained a vital narrative constituent for artists of the small town during the mid-twentieth century, and that its narrative significance cannot be overstated.

In 1910, a meat boycott spread through the United States. Tens of thousands of people pledged not to eat meat for thirty days to demand lower prices and protest the practices of the Meat Trust. The movement, though its outcomes were limited, was supported by consumer organizations, labor unions, lawmakers, suffragists, and women's clubs. It thus intersected with struggles that were at the heart of the Progressive Era's reform movements. This article will explore how various organizations (labor unions, the Socialist Party, suffragists, the National Consumers League) used, or did not use, this event to further their own goals. It will argue that food protests constitute a site from which to analyze particular transformations of the protest landscape of the time, such as the rise of consumer politics; it will also show that as transversal spaces of mobilization, food protests should be studied through the significance of their object. Food, as a meeting point between the individual body and society, can epitomize the blurring of the lines between private and public that characterized Progressive reform movements.

This article details a cutting-edge Knowledge Exchange initiative which advanced the ongoing partnership between the University of Hull and HMP Hull, and stemmed from the annual BAAS conference, held in Hull in April 2022. The purpose of the article is to explore the value of critiquing US culture in a nonacademic setting and the extent to which a prison reading group presents a productive opportunity for so doing. Our research analyses the reception of a number of texts discussed in an American-themed book club hosted in HMP Hull, with a particular focus upon the responses of prison learners to the literary works of gang-member-turned-best-selling-author Luis J. Rodriguez.

Sumner Welles occupies a queer place in American history. Despite his prominence, his reputation among diplomatic historians has been overshadowed by the sex scandal that occasioned his demise. Conversely, he has attracted cursory attention from scholars of the history of sexuality. This article examines that historiographic dialectic. By analyzing literature about Welles, conducting a close reading of sources that catalogued Welles's sexuality, and applying an intersectional lens to the scandal that ended his career, this article seeks to redress historiographic misunderstandings and omissions about Welles. Additionally, this article explores ethical questions historians must contend with when analyzing historical queer figures.

This article examines Leonard Freed's 1980 Police Work, a photobook that documents the activities of the New York City Police Department from 1973 to 1979. It contextualizes the photobook within this liminal decade after the fullness of the civil rights movement and before the rise of austerity politics. The photobook, I argue, produces a visual repertoire of policing that resolves the crisis of legitimacy faced by the NYPD during this decade, remaking the meaning of the police in the public imaginary from an agent of state warfare into an institution of state welfare. Far from simply creating photographs of policing as community care, Police Work engages in a process by which police violence is visually recoded as police benevolence. The visual politics of the family are central to this process by which we are made not to see police brutality, even when it is placed vividly on display. Ultimately, I show how, even as the camera moves between public and private, Police Work produces an ideology of separate spheres in which the expansion of policing can find its rationalization. Ultimately, this article reveals Police Work as a site through which to examine the intimate, yet often disavowed, entanglements between the domestic and the carceral.

This article unpacks the music of the Townsend Plan, an ambitious Depression-era pension proposal, and the overlooked, yet deeply influential, national movement of its supporters, which aimed to simultaneously eradicate old-age poverty and revive the national economy. As well as providing a musical account of the media strategies, political tactics, and institutional culture of Townsendism, this article charts how different demographics of US society also mobilized popular music in arguments for or against pensions in the 1930s and 1940s. In the process, the article highlights some of the rich discourse about welfare, health, and aging in the mid-twentieth-century USA.

This article explores the development of behavioral modification programs inside penitentiaries during the 1960s and 1970s, with a focus upon how such tactics were used to crush dissent and silence incarcerated people who challenged the prison regime. First, it explores how psychology became an influential force in the operation of many penitentiaries from the 1950s. Second, it considers the role that psychologists and psychiatrists played in developing brainwashing techniques to punish those prison activists who sought to expose the dehumanizing and brutal treatment of incarcerated people. Finally, it uses the example of the behavioral modification unit at Marion Federal Penitentiary to show how the federal government was complicit in the use of psychological torture to silence prisoners’ complaints.