It is easy to forget that interest in the intellectual history of the US South only fully emerged in the post-1960s years. Though there have been no outstanding southern philosophers or philosophers of the South to focus on, there have been plenty of talented literary and cultural critics and political and social thinkers, as well as historians, political scientists, and sociologists, whose work has significantly shaped the idea of the South and who thus deserve the interest of the intellectual historian. Works as varied as Clement Eaton's The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (1940) Rollin Osterweis's Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (1949), and William R. Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee (1961) were early examples of the effort to identify the intellectual and cultural issues central to the history of the region. By exploring the literary history of the South in the interwar years, what came to be called the Southern Renaissance, post-1945 literary historians such as Louis D. Rubin and Lewis Simpson undoubtedly also influenced those who tried to make sense of the life of the mind below the Mason–Dixon line.

This essay explores the interdisciplinary origins and historiography of early North American scholars approaching territoriality – political control of territory – from an indigenous perspective in their works. Using the Ndé (Apaches) as a case study, it reveals how adopting an interdisciplinary approach that addresses territoriality from multiple perspectives can further our understanding of cultural contestation across the continent and hemisphere by highlighting the ways indigenous peoples negotiated, resisted, and adapted to European conquest.

This article looks at the Homelands Exhibition in Rochester, New York which took place in the spring of 1920. Placing the craft objects on display, as well as their makers and their creative labor, into a larger constellation of local and national history, I focus on how the material culture of the show acted simultaneously as a stand-in and an extensions of their makers, to trouble the boundaries between author and reader, art and work, producer and spectator, the quotidian and the exceptional, and ultimately to question what it meant to be American at this particular moment in time.

In recent years historians and scholars of religious studies have chronicled and debated the critical role that black and white liberal Protestants, Catholics, and Jews played in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. At every stage of the movement, mainline and traditional black churches proved vital. Less is known about the actions and reactions of conservative or moderate white believers. The churches that these fundamentalists and evangelicals belonged to would grow tremendously in the coming decades, eventually claiming roughly 26 percent of the American population. From the 1960s forward, conservative Protestants would also become key political players, helping to decide national elections. Their responses to the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, which intended to end discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin, and the heated debates that led up to the law reveal much about how conservative Christians related to the state and to a changing society. Responses to the bill ranged from resigned acceptance to racist denunciation. But believers were united in their antistatism and in their opposition to political and theological liberalism. This article examines how evangelicals and fundamentalists engaged in politics and understood race and racism in personal terms. It also analyzes the religious dimensions of modern American conservatism.

The display of a “family crest” to signal family identity is prevalent in the contemporary United States. However, during the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, many American commentators perceived the widespread use of heraldry by the high bourgeoisie as at best a mark of social pretension and at worst a symptom of an un-American predilection for aristocracy. Over the course of a century, heraldic entrepreneurs sought to broaden the market for family crests, and in doing so Americanized heraldic practice. The early projects of Albert Welles, Frank Allaben and Frances M. Smith linked heraldry with new approaches to genealogical research and encouraged its use by a broad cross section of American society. In the late twentieth century, entrepreneur Gary Halbert sold millions of heraldic mementos that epitomized the modern commodification of history and identity. The result of a century of marketing is an American heraldry that is both more accessible than its European antecedents and less closely tied to verifiable genealogical relationships.

During the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), stories of dangerous bandits, rebels, dictators, and Indians defined Mexico for US audiences. Most scholars assume that these narratives reinforce the conventional rhetoric of Latin savagery that justifies US imperialism, but this essay reveals an array of writers who told such stories to undermine state power and contest military intervention. Three of the era's best-known leftist journalists, John Kenneth Turner, John Reed, and Katherine Anne Porter, craft a discourse of activism to help the US public imagine themselves as participants in a new hemispheric democracy. These writers posit moral bonds between the US and Mexico that exceed the expansionist interests of politicians and industrialists. Their vision was embodied in the trope of the foreign correspondent, an American who could physically enter Mexican territory, witness the crimes and heroisms of the revolution, and relay the voices of the Mexicans whose lives were at stake in the conflict. Turner, Reed, and Porter hope that journalists can inspire democratic fraternity between the US and Mexican peoples. They also set the terms and conventions utilized by radical humanitarian journalists for decades to come.

This article utilizes recent developments in postsouthern theory to explore Appalachian literature and culture. Analyzing novels by Ron Rash, Terry Roberts, and Charles Frazier, I argue that Appalachian literature will likely follow a trajectory similar to the one identified by scholars in southern literature more broadly. Despite the seeming persistence of historicity among leading Appalachian writers, I anticipate that the homogenization of the region will increasingly lead writers either to commodify outdated notions of Appalachian exceptionalism or to rely upon an ironic, parodic relationship with past Appalachian literary narratives.

As is evident in their popularity and uses in television and film, power ballads have been prized for their emotional intensity. That intensity results from the ways in which the songs transform aspects of sentimentality developed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century repertoires, particularly parlor songs and torch songs. Power ballads energize sentimental topics and affects with rapturous feelings of uplift. Instead of concentrating on individual emotions like earlier sentimental songs do, power ballads create charged clouds of mixed emotions that produce feelings of euphoria. The emotional adrenaline rushes in power ballads are characteristic of larger experiences in popular culture in which emotions are to be grand, indiscriminate, and immediate.

This article explores conceptual writing and the linked concept of boredom in the work of Kenneth Goldsmith. Specifically, the article examines Goldsmith's claims about boredom and uncreativity; suggesting that Goldsmith's work furthers our understanding both of the materiality of language and of the “function of language,” situating Goldsmith's work within the context of a “gift economy,” and, most centrally, proposing Goldsmith's poetics as “durational” rather than “spatial.” The argument then develops this reading via an extended discussion of the role of boredom in Goldsmith's volume Day.

This article looks at Eleanor Roosevelt's role within the intense debate on nuclear fallout as it developed in the US in the early 1950s. In particular, the article analyzes Mrs. Roosevelt's position on nuclear weapons, deterrence, and disarmament; her condemnation of nuclear testing; and her role as both a public intellectual and a mass educator who helped people to understand the real consequences of nuclear fallout. Here, Mrs. Roosevelt emerges as an active voice that, by defending freedom of speech, also contributed to popularizing the issue of nuclear fallout and making American citizens aware of the urgency of a ban on nuclear testing.

This essay analyzes The 9/11 Report, exploring its connection between the defense of the nation and the defense of the humanities. Comparing American civic engagement with the work of literary criticism, the report argues that America's “most important failure” before 9/11 “was one of imagination.” Significantly, each of its four major recommendations for improving future intelligence work parallels a specific literary-critical skill. Grounding these skills in the work of the humanities classroom, The 9/11 Report concludes that America's global power requires the imagination and the ethics central to a liberal arts education.

This article examines the concept of authenticity in American politics through its construction and representation in fictional election campaigns in film and television. This article will posit The Candidate (1972), Tanner '88 (1988), Wag the Dog (1997) and The West Wing (1999–2006) as crucial sites of popular cultural critique of this aspect of the electoral process: The Candidate as a damning critique of television's influence, Tanner '88 as a satirical take on campaign films in the Reagan era, Wag the Dog as a savage indictment of spin-doctoring during Clinton's presidency, and The West Wing's attempt to rescue the process through the construction of an “authentic” political candidate. This involves close textual analysis of the four examples identified, examining the contrasting visual styles, strategies and tones. The textual discussions will not take place in isolation, however: this article will chart the simultaneous developments in real-world electoral politics, with particular focus on the influence of the media in the election campaigns contemporaneous with the fictional examples discussed. The article charts a shift in the representation of political authenticity, from a cynical attitude towards its possibility in the 1970s, to an uncomplicated reversion to traditional markers of this elusive concept in the 2000s.