This latest volume of JAS begins with Andrew Kettler's article “‘Ravishing Odors of Paradise’: Jesuits, Olfaction, and Seventeenth-Century North America,” in which he traces the Jesuit determination to effect Native American conversion to Catholicism by using scentful tactics and sensory rhetoric. A collaborative and interdisciplinary tour de force, “The Catfish Industry and Spatial Justice in the Mississippi Delta: Steve Yarbrough's The Oxygen Man,” authored by Annette Trefzer, Kathryn McKee, Kirstin Dellinger and Jeffrey Jackson, investigates Edward Soja's “geography of labor” in the Mississippi catfish industry. Turning to the politics and poetics of image production, Oenone Kubie's “Reading Lewis Hine's Photography of Child Street Labour, 1906–1918” rectifies a glaring omission in current historiography by examining Lewis Hine's rarely discussed photography of city-based children.
Zara Dinnen's “Understanding the Funny Military Music Video” analyzes the ways in which this popular contemporary phenomenon functions as “insistent expressions of a popular, militarized, everyday culture.” Returning readers to the antebellum US South, “Nat Turner after 9/11: Kyle Baker's Nat Turner,” authored by Tim Bruno, pioneeringly examines the impact of September 11 on the contemporary afterlife of revolutionary freedom fighter Nathaniel Turner. Kara Kvaran's “‘You're All Doomed!’ A Socioeconomic Analysis of Slasher Films” provides readers with a socioeconomic explanation for the popularity of the US slasher film genre. Christopher Young's “Memory by Consensus: Remembering the American Revolutionary War in Chicago” addresses the representation and reimagining of this seminal moment in US history in two public works of art erected in the city of Chicago.
Ann Bliss's “Visiting on the Air: Radio Homemakers and the Professionalization of Domesticity” sheds powerful light on the community that existed between early twentieth-century women radio broadcasters or “radio homemakers” in the American Mid-west and their listeners. In “State of the Union: The Play, the Film, and the Progress of the Isolationist Bogey,” David Grant examines the importance of Cold War political culture in the filmic adaptation of the play State of the Union. In “The Struggle to Fashion the NRA Code: The Triumph of Studio Power in 1933 Hollywood,” Harvey Cohen provides an in-depth treatment of the National Recovery Administration's code of practice for the film industry. Kristofer Allerfeldt's “Murderous Mumbo-Jumbo: The Significance of Fraternity to Three Criminal Organizations in Late Nineteenth-Century America” offers a direct challenge to the absence of any scholarship addressing the importance of fraternity in criminal organizations. Finally, Simon Cooper's “Handmade by Poverty: Worker Correspondence, Objectivist Poetics and the Pathos of the Readymade” movingly and incisively traces the practice of worker correspondence as a “form of readymade, a consciously avant-gardist collision of politics and ‘high’ culture.”
On the reviews side, the print section opens with a roundtable devoted to Jace Weaver's The Red Atlantic, one of the most recent contributions to Atlanticist scholarship indebted to and deeply engaged with Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). It is followed by reviews of four books that consider urban and suburban space in interdisciplinary ways. The online section leads with a roundtable on Martin Halliwell's Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1945–1970, followed by reviews of four books that consider the place of minority subjects (Jewish, Caribbean, Muslim) in twentieth-century and contemporary America.
