This article analyzes Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer (2008), John Wells's Company Men (2011), and Lynn Nottage's Sweat (2015) to limn the place of manufacturing labor in recent US cultural memory. Timelines that focus on labor forms (i.e. “postindustrial”) often reproduce elements of the persistent US mythologizing of industrial labor's virtues. Nottage's and Rivera's works puncture this ideological figuration by showing the dangers and precarity of industrial work, while Company Men presents industrial labor as a means for masculine, moral renewal. I compare these takes on economic restructuring across the last several decades to scrutinize a crucial element of American self-mythologizing.

This state-level study emphasizes the influence of local administration on welfare provision, even amidst a huge national New Deal effort. It interrogates John Steinbeck's allegation in “Starvation under the Orange Trees” that migrant children died avoidable deaths in Depression-era California because of discriminatory policies and apathetic officials. Steinbeck's reportage was a political vehicle for his own ends rather than accurate social history. But with hospital care being reserved for local residents and racialized inferior food rations provided to Mexican American children, California's Depression-era welfare system favoured white Californian children over those it categorized as “others,” with potentially deadly consequences.

This article explores the effect of Doom Town, a civil defense experiment conducted at Nevada Test Site in March 1953 and May 1955, on American attitudes toward the atom. Initially conceived by the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) as a means to progress knowledge and understanding of how to survive nuclear attack, the creation and destruction of two “Survival Towns” in the Nevadan desert instead accelerated national anxieties. My article looks at how local and national media negatively framed the two experiments, and how the public responded, with two specific images of Doom Town undermining public confidence in the atom: the ruined city (or homegrown Hiroshima) and the projected death of the American nuclear family.

Since early 2020, pundits and commentators have scrutinized the history of past pandemics for answers to a series of questions shaped by COVID-19: what strategies have worked in the past to stem the spread of contagion? How long do epidemics typically last? Are vaccines an effective “magic bullet” against infectious diseases? The coronavirus crisis spawned comparisons to diseases as epidemiologically diverse as influenza, the Black Death, cholera, HIV/AIDS, and polio, as people excavated the records of past pandemics to try to make sense of the worst public-health disaster for over a century.1 Policy proscriptions emerged quickly from these historical analogies. Many public-health experts pointed to the trajectories of epidemics like the 1918–19 influenza outbreak and SARS to convey the gravity of what would happen if political leaders did not quickly and decisively issue stay-at-home-orders, close schools, and mandate social distancing.2

This article traces the approach of moderate southern Senators toward domestic hunger and welfare in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Often overlooked in scholarly accounts, these Senators formed a significant minority of the southern delegation. Their behavior demonstrates both the continued possibilities of a more inclusive southern politics after the mid-1960s and the importance of moderate southerners to the Food Stamp Program's major expansion in the years after 1964. At the same time, however, these politicians opposed guaranteed-income schemes and endorsed “workfare” measures promoted by more conservative southerners that conditioned aid on participation in low-wage employment.

What does it mean to teach American studies in UK higher education? We teach “American” content in our classes, modules, and degree programmes, but do we also conduct our teaching in ways specific to American studies? Lee Shulman describes a “signature pedagogy” as “the forms of instruction that leap to mind when we first think about the preparation of members of particular professions,” encompassing both the types of teaching we conduct in our classrooms and the assumptions and values that underpin that practice. Initial conversations about the concept of a signature pedagogy for American studies in the UK were held in a session organized by Lydia Plath on behalf of the Teaching American Studies Network at the Digital BAAS Conference in 2021, in the midst of a global pandemic that required all of us to reflect on our teaching practice. Building on that earlier conversation, this exchange was conducted between February and July 2022. The discussion explores American studies pedagogical approaches through the assumptions, beliefs, and values that underpin our teaching; the challenges of multi- and interdisciplinarity; and questions of identity, inclusion, and national context.

When Afro-Puerto Rican outfielder Roberto Clemente debuted with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1955, baseball writers identified him as another in a long line of Black stars remaking the game. When he died at the end of 1972, they remembered him as something else: a great Latin athlete. Clemente had traveled from Black to brown. Most historians trace the emergence of a panethnic Latinx identity to a post-civil rights convergence of social movements, federal agencies, and ethnic media organizations. But baseball had, by then, already introduced millions of fans to the concept of three mutually exclusive racial categories: Black, white, and brown. The national pastime led a shift from the Black/white binary of integration to the Black/brown binary of an uncritical multiculturalism that served, above all, the interests of white capital and management.

This article traces the changing terrain of the food stamp program in the pivotal decade of the 1970s. In 1969, President Richard Nixon promised to put an end to hunger in America, “for all time.” However, in the fifteen years following this announcement, policymakers erected boundaries around the scope of public food welfare programs. In this article, the author highlights key continuities between earlier, modest attempts at program reform under Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter and the later Reagan-era assault on welfare spending of the early 1980s.

The subjects of these two books basically belonged to the same generation. Philip Rahv (1908–73) and Michael Gold (1894–1967) shared origins in the Jewish lower class, and rose to literary prominence during the Great Depression. But from the perspective of posterity, what especially links their names is the notion of “proletarian literature.” In novels and short stories, in sketches and poetry, in drama and reportage, the writers who generally accepted this label repudiated the genteel tradition that had crested in the late Victorian era. To be sure, that decorous era of belles lettres had always been contested. It had its outliers – most famously Mark Twain. The list of those who troubled the taste of the era also included, among younger writers, the barely housebroken Theodore Dreiser and Jack London.