One of the most talked about moments of Ken Burns's television documentary The Civil War (1990) was the dramatic reading of Sullivan Ballou's letter to his wife, Sarah, in which the Union officer anticipates his own death in the First Battle of Bull Run. This moving conclusion to the series' first episode and the sensation it caused underscore the persistence of a gendered model of wartime literacy: the ideal war-text is an eyewitness account written by a man, and read by a woman at home. Women, the Ballou letter sequence suggests, are consumers, not producers of war-texts. As innovative as Burns's documentary was, however, the dramatization of a personal letter from the front has a long history. The first chapter of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), for example, climaxes with Marmee's recitation of a letter from Mr. March, absent at the war. “Very few letters,” the narrator tells us, “were written in those hard times that were not touching, especially those which fathers sent home.” Both Burns's original script for the Ballou segment and Alcott's earlier writing about the war reveal the artificiality of the normative model of literacy presented by The Civil War and Little Women; in order to maintain exclusively male control over the production of wartime texts, documentary and novel must repress or radically circumscribe female voices. Burns originally planned to have an actress, reading as Sarah Ballou, finish the letter, but decided against it; the effect of a woman reading would have been “so emotional [ctdot ] just too much” – as if even a female audience for the male wartime text can only be hinted at, not represented.

In the early years of the Cold War, as universities expelled scholars with ties to the Communist Party, it became an article of faith among conservatives that the only targets of an ideological purge were people like themselves. William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, the most important exponent of this view, argued that “academic freedom” was a “superstition” designed to promote liberal indoctrination. Buckley's work tweaked, and mainstreamed, claims that a subversive conspiracy had overtaken the nation's schools and colleges. The correspondence the book generated demonstrates how attacks on academic freedom, and claims of victimhood, mobilized the postwar right.

Contemporary US political and academic discourse is a site for constant irruption and circulation of encapsulated arguments to delegitimize social criticism. Strategies such as the “trope of the angry feminist” – which disparages the arguments of feminist academics and feminists in general as “angry” – perform, enact, and instantiate gendered power. Because we have not adequately theorized the discursive role of such tropes, we fail to recognize the limits of our conventional reading practices, so that our responses often reproduce the problem. Whether we claim that feminists are not angry, or are legitimately angry, or that some feminists have a right be angry (though, perhaps, not all), we are responding to the logic of the trope rather than challenging it. In Wahneema Lubiano's terms, we are being mugged by a metaphor. Reframing the problem begins by transforming the terms of reading; I propose for that purpose a critical toolkit that I call “feminist socioforensic discursive analysis.” Using this toolkit I analyze two discursive events. One – a response by “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger to the inauguration of a new doctoral program in feminist studies – demonstrates what is at stake in the relentless operation of this cultural training program. The other – in which law professor Patricia Williams recounts the editing of an article she wrote for a law review – demonstrates how conventional discursive practices defend and deny their deeply political uses of racialized and gendered power by calling on what Williams calls “an ideology of style rooted in a social text of neutrality.” This episode also demonstrates how feminists can anticipate these moves and turn them to our own advantage.

“How much longer,” Edith Wharton lamented in a July 1919 letter to Barrett Wendell, “are we going to think it necessary to be ‘American’ before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?” She was having her publishers send him her most recent book, French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), a collection of essays written in large part to instruct her compatriots in the ways of an exemplary civilization. Wharton's complaint found its way into her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence, which she began working on soon after French Ways was published; though in this instance it was voiced from a different quarter and had potentially radical implications.

At a recent conference of historians, one of the few participants with a literary background confessed that he was surprised to hear such frequent and confident reference to “facts.” His reaction reflects the fact that contemporary literary theorists have become as wary of speaking of facts, (without inverted commas) as avant-garde theologians are of adverting to “God.” Indeed to critical theorists, most historians seem theoretical dolts; unlike Molière's famous character, they don't even realize they are talking (bad) theory all the time. Moreover to a novelist such as Gore Vidal, historians seem pettifoggers and without an imaginative bone in their body. Whatever else they are confident of, novelists automatically assume that they can do justice to the past with more verve and authenticity than historians.

The first play I attended at my all-boys secondary school was Marlowe's Dr Faustus. The lower boys crammed in the gallery were not wholly engaged by grandiloquent Elizabethan cadences, nor by the laboriously unfolding plot. What stopped the whispering and fidgeting and then brought the house down was the scene in which Faustus, as reward for selling his soul, is allowed to kiss the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy. In this production the hell-bent Doctor had to make do with the prettiest boy in the school. Wild whoops, mating calls, indecent suggestions for further action rained down from the gallery. At the curtain call Helen again stole the show. Next morning, the Headmaster, a Scottish Presbyterian whose zeal for the Lord was second only to his zeal for rugby football, rebuked the school for the shameful scenes and prescribed a three-mile run to cool our ardour.

Bureaucrats, female or male, have never been popular, a fact which may, in part, explain neglect of their role by the growing band of students of women and politics. Theories of bureaucracy predict that this will be the least promising of settings for the empowerment of women. Max Weber's classic account depicts bureaucratic activity as a routinized and sterile process of technical determinations and rules of procedure. Some feminists argue that such modes of action epitomize the masculine. Each model portrays a rational, depersonalized, technocratic sphere of activity, hierarchical in structure, rule-bound both in what is done and how. In addition, the state itself has sometimes been presented as wholly oppressive to women, adding public power to private power to create a comprehensive system of male domination.

The Detroit electronic music (DEM) community is a group of urban residents who, since the 1980s, have used new technologies in music production as well as changing communications technologies to create a transnational arts community. This article is a result of ethnographic research of the DEM community conducted from 1999 to 2007 and is focussed on the city's biggest independent distribution company, Submerge. The phrase “electronic music” refers to both house and techno music. Techno music and house music are African American music genres created in Detroit and Chicago respectively during the early 1980s. Recent concerns in the field of American studies – transnationalism, community collaboration, issues of technology and global communication – can be seen in a group of urban residents who have been exploring similar issues, in some cases by necessity, for the past three decades. It is important for the study of American urban places to include a clear picture of heterogeneous urban populations in places of crisis. With a richer idea of what life is really like in cities in crisis, we can better plan, develop, and encourage urban revitalization.

This article explores the Beatles’ invasion of America as a moment of cultural globalization. Paying attention to the political economy underpinning the Beatles’ success, the international hybridity at the heart of their cultural work, and the diverse ways in which Americans interpreted the Beatles, the article argues that the band was a primary vector of pop culture's increasing globality in the 1960s. More broadly, the article argues that the Beatles’ trajectory reveals that cultural globalization cannot be understood as a process either of homogenization or of creolization. Rather, the Beatles represented an increasingly unified and commodified culture that simultaneously served to reproduce cultural differences when different social formations projected their own meanings onto the hybridized group. The article therefore provides new perspectives on the historical significance of the iconic band and on the intersections between global and domestic cultural history in the 1960s, as well as suggesting a new framework for thinking about both the history and the contradictions of cultural globalization.

American history has come a long way in the past quarter century. It was, after all, 1965 when Samuel Eliot Morison published his enormously successful and widely praised Oxford History of the American People – an 1,100-page work that relegated the women's suffrage amendment of the Constitution to half a sentence in a chapter entitled “Bootlegging and Other Sports,” and intimated that most blacks were pleased and contented as slaves. And this was an avant-garde position for Morison, commonly regarded as the preeminent American historian of his time: in earlier versions of the same text he had referred to blacks collectively as “Sambo,” as “childlike, improvident, humorous, prevaricating, and superstitious” creatures; when confined to slavery, he had stated flatly, blacks were “adequately fed, well cared for, and apparently happy.”

Two primary manifestations of the eugenics movement in America were the involuntary sterilization of certain classes of people, including the mentally ill and disabled and some types of criminals, and the “family study,” genealogical reports that traced criminal behavior, immorality, and mental problems throughout family trees to determine whether the characteristics are inheritable. Both family studies and sterilization proved to be important fodder for American literary authors, who made significant use of the rhetoric of family and propagation. Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road is particularly interesting to read with eugenics in mind, for the 1932 novel is intrinsically bound up with issues of breeding, heredity, and degeneration. Caldwell's text, which he characterized as literary realism, relies not only on the genre of family study in general but more particularly on a study conducted by Caldwell's father in 1928 and published two years later in the journal Eugenics; Ira Caldwell had attempted to rescue a poor white family from what he saw as the conditions of their ongoing degeneracy but was rejected completely by the family, leading to his renunciation of many of his social reform ideals in favor of sterilization programs. Erskine Caldwell drew heavily on his father's failed attempt at reform, and Tobacco Road ultimately argues for the sterilization of Georgia's poor whites, but with the pessimistic caveat that the problems of degeneracy and rural poverty have no final solution. Caldwell's manipulation of his audience, his observation of his father's eugenics experimentation, and his use of extended metaphors, both mechanical and agricultural, for family all create a deeply cynical novel that condemns America's economic modus operandi for the living conditions of the poor but also condemns those poor as being permanently beyond help. In the end, Caldwell argues that the poor – in both money and breeding – will be always with us and that we are doomed to witness the full horror of their degradation without the possibility of either relieving their plight or eradicating them.

This article is about the relationship between the culture of outdoors recreation and the development of progressive politics at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. It considers the significance of popular outdoors magazines for American culture and politics before focussing in particular on the way in which Caspar Whitney, as editor of Outing magazine, constructed a notion of sportsmanship modelled upon the idealized figure of Theodore Roosevelt – an exemplar, by his reckoning, of the patrician class, and the template for his vision of a progressive citizenship. It was through the notion of sportsmanship that Whitney defined a set of values that would become synonymous with the strain of progressivism known as the New Nationalism, out of which the tradition of reform liberalism emerged in the twentieth century.

This essay studies the emergence of the egghead as a figuration of intellectuals in Cold War American culture. The characteristics of the egghead accentuated his failed masculinity, queer sexuality, racialized identity, and fragile commitment to American ideals. The egghead functioned both to limit those for whom intelligence was culturally available and to malign those who attempted to advocate education and the expansion of intelligence as a vehicle for social change. Though this was often framed as a liberal political intervention, the climate of the Cold War and the attendant social inequalities in the United States in this period ensured that the popular use of the egghead label served chiefly to build up a virulently white, masculine liberalism.

For many post-1945 Americans, the title South Pacific does not describe a text so much as a process of remembering. For the cultural historian, it offers an account of production. It is the relationship of these that will be my subject. The pattern of the former will largely depend, of course, on the rememberer – something of a book perhaps, a play, a movie, a song, another song. The latter, albeit complicated, is traceable. It has a literary provenance in a 1947 collection of fictional narratives by James A. Michener entitled Tales of the South Pacific, variously described as short stories or a novel, but always noted as winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In translation to Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1949 Broadway classic, it adds another Pulitzer and a paperback fortune for the original honoree: to one of the most celebrated runs in the golden era of the American musical. It parlays that success into one of the first widely popular 33⅓ RPM long-playing records, memorialized in its dramatic connection by a cover photograph of Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza in the lead roles of U.S. Navy nurse Nellie Forbush and French planter Emile DeBecque. It then reappears as a 1958 movie musical spectacular, leading to another joyride of the Michener narrative on the best-seller lists, and to yet another best-selling LP, now in stereo, with the cover photo of the lovers, here Mitzi Gaynor and Rozzano Brazzi, resituated against a Hollywood backdrop of wide-screen tropical splendors. Along the way, it proliferates into endless road productions and revivals; television showings and VCR rentals; re-recordings and new recordings on LP, tape, and compact disk.

Toni Morrison's fiction, we have been repeatedly told, embodies features taken from jazz. Her books have a “jazzy prose style,” express a “jazz aesthetic,” or are “literary jazz.” Critics propose that jazz riffs can be found in her writing, and that she improvises in prose in a manner comparable to an improvising jazz musician. None of this seems to me to be true. To establish a relationship between music and prose fiction would be difficult under any circumstances. It is all the more difficult when the critics concerned show themselves to be unaware of the basic formal structures of jazz. The riff is foregrounded because it is the only feature of jazz that can be compared to prose (because both may include repetitions). It is a more serious objection that Rice, Small-McCarthy, Berrett, and others, including James A. Snead and Henry Louis Gates Jr., consistently ignore structure, harmony, and melody in favour of rhythm. The reason for this is that jazz rhythm can be traced back to its African origins, whereas structure, harmony, and melody require an engagement with European sources. Clearly, an ideology of authenticity is at work here. Yet a parallel argument is willing to relate Morrison's fiction to its European origins. For, if her novel Jazz is, as Rinaldo Walcott indicates, a rewriting of Scott Fitzgerald's version of the “Jazz Age,” then that rewriting or radical revision must occur by reference to a form – the novel – that originated in Europe and is (in the cited instance) a product of white America.

During the fifteen months from August 1834 to November 1835 nothing caused so much excitement in the American press, both pro-slavery and abolitionist, as the anti-slavery mission of the British reformer George Thompson. In the event, Thompson's visit ended in his escaping from a mob-ridden Boston on the New Brunswick packet. William Lloyd Garrison, no doubt secretly satisfied with the discredit reflected on his opponents by the mobs supporting them in this way, also consoled himself and the readers of the Liberator with the reflection that Thompson, ‘By his presence, and the power of his victorious eloquence, and the resistless energy of his movement…has shaken the land from side to side… At the mention of his name, republican tyrants stand aghast, and their knees smite violently against each other.’ In retrospect he appears wildly optimistic: it took another thirty years to free the Negro from ‘republican tyrants’, and even then the success was incomplete. It was achieved by methods Garrison abhorred, which certainly owed little directly to the efforts of Thompson. If his mission was of any importance it was so in the sense that it polarized opinion on slavery more sharply. He came to provide a useful focal point for the preconceived likes and dislikes of American citizens who could work themselves up to a new enthusiasm over the slavery issue by hating him as a ‘foreign incendiary’, or adulating him as the slaves' Lafayette. On the other hand, Thompson was only one of several possible focal points, and it is likely that even in 1834 it would have been easy to find some other individual to centre controversy around and produce exactly the same polarization effect if he had never set foot on American soil.

This essay explores the relationship between welfare, eugenics and documentary photography during the New Deal in order to explain how a set of government photographs taken by Arthur Rothstein in the Shenandoah became entwined in the rhetorical structure of eugenic ideology. The photographs discussed portray victims of forced sterilization before their incarceration, yet there is no evidence to show that the photographer was aware of, or complicit with, this fact. This essay responds to the questions this raises about the images: what historical and social contingencies were behind their production? What is the relationship between the photographer, the photographs, the New Deal and the subjects depicted? How did efforts to help America's poorest lead to their incarceration and sterilization? Why is the full picture impossible to see? And how do we read and understand them today?