Through significant and underscored omission, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflict, through the way writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence – one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness.Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 6.

Two men wolf-whistle at Baby Doll during the play of the same name: both of these men are positioned in the shadows. We see the one, Silva Vacarro, skulking around the dilapidated Plantation house in ghostly pursuit of Baby Doll, and the other as an anonymous male on Tiger Tail Road, part of a group of “White an’ black mixed.” Both of these men represent an encroaching dark threat to the sexual and property rights of Archie Lee. It is no coincidence that Silva's forced intrusion into Archie's house is mirrored by the sexual trespassing of the anonymous whistler, and Archie himself challenges the invisible agitator: “trespass across my property... [and] I'll blast... [you]... out of the Bayou with a shotgun... Nobody's gonna insult no woman of mine!!” (BD, 74). Neither Archie nor Baby Doll can see the identity of the invisible menacing man, and so the threat from the shadows is communicated through implicit rather than explicit dialogue. Interestingly, these shadows, hovering amidst the domestic and sexual spaces, allegorize a deeper instability permeating Southern discourse: that of the blurring of racial identities and the threat of miscegenation.

From the 1880s until the early 1930s the US federal government adopted a formal policy of intolerance towards Native American cultures and religions, stemming primarily from the belief that traditional religio-cultural practices – especially dances – distracted Native Americans from crop-tending and stock-rearing, and also constituted “outmoded” reminders of a “savage” past seen as incompatible with the responsibilities of US citizenship. Some cultural practices were banned outright, while others were actively discouraged or denigrated as “oldtime.” Yet Native American cultural expression did not die – in large part because Native communities employed varied methods to resist the bans. This article examines the ways in which pro-dancing communities utilized the language of US citizenship and made appeals to the Constitution, private property rights and US patriotism in their bid to ensure the survival of their dances and ceremonies. It also examines support for the dance bans by Native individuals, and the increasingly complex and evolving cultural identities in reservation communities in the early twentieth century.

Much has been made of Olive Higgins Prouty's character Stella Dallas, who appeared first in serial form in 1922 followed by a best-selling novel in 1923. Like other Prouty novels, Stella Dallas was adapted into film only two years later in 1925 and again in 1937. Directed by King Vidor and starring Barbara Stanwyck, the 1937 adaptation garnered Oscar nominations for Stanwyck, inspired a long-running radio show, and attracted much scholarly attention. In this essay, I argue that the story of Prouty's titular character can be in large part attributed to its overarching narrative of mother love as sacrifice. Yet this narrative includes a subtext of interclass female collusion that drives the plot and has mass appeal. Stella and Helen collude to exploit their class differences both as women and as maternal figures in the making and maintenance of the early twentieth-century status quo of motherhood and of womanhood, but also of interclass white female relations.

In nothing is the difference between the Presidency today and in the nineteenth century more clearly symbolised than in the matter of accessibility. Today the President is closely guarded both for reasons of security and to save him from unreasonable calls on his time, and what is unreasonable is defined pretty strictly. For example, Mr. Walter Hickel, when he was Secretary of the Interior, found it impossible to get an interview with President Nixon on a matter he thought important. He took the desperate step of leaking his views to the press, and was dismissed for his pains.

Such an episode was inconceivable in the nineteenth century. Everyone knows the story of the reception at the White House on New Year's Day, 1863. So many people called to shake hands with Abraham Lincoln on that day, as was their right, that when he went upstairs to sign the Emancipation Proclamation he could hardly hold the pen steady. And everyone also knows the story of the riotous installation of Andrew Jackson in 1829.

It was then considered highly un-republican, indeed dangerously aristocratic, for a President to seclude himself; and Jackson, whose predecessor, John Quincy Adams, and successor, Martin Van Buren, were both ferociously criticised for their airs and graces (Adams's crime was that he had installed a billiards table in the White House) was particularly careful to give no cause for offence.

This introduction both models how one might read race, blackness, activism and Shakespeare and contextualizes the many “Shakespeares” that might be at work in the essays in this cluster, which emerge from the Shakespeare Association of America seminar Shakespeare and Black America. It suggests that scholars in this Shakespearean subfield have political, pedagogical and personal investments that both overlap with and diverge from Shakespeare study as traditionally understood. It addresses some of the complexities of performing, teaching and reading Shakespeare not as an agent of cultural dominion, but as part of resistance and activism in black America.

Shortly after Julian West awakened to Edward Bellamy's utopian Boston of the year 2000, he was given his first look at the city by his host, Dr. Leete. West nearly fainted at the “ prodigious thing which had befallen me.” Still in a daze, he was asked by Dr. Leete what surprised him most about the new Boston. “ I really think,” West responded, “ that the complete absence of chimneys and their smoke is the detail that first impressed me.” The city, as Bellamy went on to describe it, was an affair of fine buildings set in “ inclosures.” There were “ large open squares filled with trees, among which statues glistened and fountains flashed.” Julian West could see the Charles River, a “ blue ribbon winding away to the sunset,” and to the east was the harbor, “ not one of its green islets missing.” West's initial notice of the absence of smokestacks, coupled with Bellamy's first (and almost his only) physical description of the city, pointed up one of the most striking facts about Boston in the year 2000. The new city was park-like, even pastoral, in character. The entire apparatus of industrialism was kept sedulously out of sight, and the landscape, both physical and social, had come to look quite pre-industrial.

Drawing primarily on archival material such as plantation records, this article places the figure of the plantation overseer at the centre of the drama of the American Revolution in the southern colonies. Occupying a contested liminal space within colonial society, between rich and poor, and between the free and the unfree, the overseer was not necessarily the ne'er-do-well of conventional stereotype. This “Predatory War,” however, tested the overseer's loyalties and sense of duty to the fullest extent. Understanding his role in the conflict offers a significant insight into the experience of a plantation society at war. In particular the overseer was caught in the tension between elite and yeomanry, between the conflicting calls of loyalism and the cause of the Patriots. Perhaps most significantly of all he stood at the forefront of the defence of race slavery during the tumult of civil conflict.

This article argues that Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest is best understood in the context of the consolidation and expansion of the US state following the First World War and the Russian Revolution. It also argues that Hammett's novel constitutes a highly significant articulation of theoretical debates about the nature of political authority and state power in the modern era and speaks about the transition of one state formation to another. Insofar as Red Harvest explores the way in which the state's coercive and ethical character are bound up together, this article argues that Hammett's novel draws upon an understanding of political authority and state power primarily derived from Gramsci, via Marx. Gramsci insists that control cannot be maintained through force alone (and his conception of hegemony, in turn, suggests a power bloc that can become fragmented and disunited in a war of position). In the same way, Red Harvest traces the transformation of the “economic-corporate” state into the expanded or “ethical” State but crucially any ethical dimension, as Gramsci notes, is always beholden to the needs of the capitalist economy. As such, the apparently arbitrary bloodshed in the novel is conceived as a relatively minor realignment in the ranks of the capitalist classes – certainly less serious than the miners' strike that prefigures the novel. What makes this realignment significant is that it calls attention to the state both as repressive and as a site of conflict and compromise. Here, the work performed by the Continental Op and by the crime novel in general – simultaneously buttressing and, to some extent, contesting the power of the state – needs to be understood as part of the process by which the state is consistently enacting hegemony (albeit protected by the armour of coercion). The article concludes by pointing out that while Gramsci is perhaps too willing to dwell upon the state's expanded reach, Red Harvest is more interested in examining possible “cracks and fissures” in the state formation, even if the critique it ultimately offers goes nowhere and yields nothing.

American missionary movements in the nineteenth century contributed to the increasing numbers of foreign students in the United States. Many of those foreign students came from non-western societies where American missionaries were active. The missionaries encouraged and helped young natives of other lands to come to the United States for Christian education with the belief that American education was a vital process for training indigenous leaders for Christianity. Missionaries of different denominations tended to recommend students to the educational institutions they were affiliated with. For instance, Methodist missionaries directed the students to educational institutions of the Methodist Church; the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, and the Catholics, and other denominations did likewise.William Wheeler, Henry King, and Alexander Davidson, eds., The Foreign Student in America (New York: Association Press, 1925), 270. They hoped that the students, upon completion of their studies, would go back to their homelands to assume leadership in spreading Christianity.

On the face of it, the move to classify any particular cultural period might seem such a slippery, arbitrary undertaking that the result would almost inevitably appear excessively homogenizing or otherwise misleading. The first use of the term “Enlightenment” in the English-speaking world was not until 1865, for example, while the notion of literary Romanticism as a discrete historical phenomenon did not emerge until the later part of the nineteenth century, long after Wordsworth and Coleridge had died.1 The more sceptical wing of microhistorians and new historicists would say this merely exemplifies the categorical distance and difference between particular situations and the subsequent rationalizations imposed forcibly upon them. A counterargument, however, might suggest it is only through retrospective mapping of this kind that what Arjun Appadurai calls the “isomorphic” qualities running through particular eras can be brought to light.2 Works or phenomena apparently quite diffuse and unrelated can be brought together in illuminating constellations, thereby suggesting ways in which structural patterns of certain kinds, ideological as well as economic, have helped to shape, if not altogether determine, cultural narratives at particular junctures in history. Fredric Jameson's 1984 essay “Periodizing the 60s,” for instance, rigorously eschewed both the anecdotal indulgence and the sentimental forms of nostalgia which have accumulated persistently around that decade through its insistence that history “is necessity, that the 60s had to happen the way it did, and that its opportunities and failures were inextricably intertwined, marked by the objective constraints and openings of a determinate historical situation.

This paper examines the work and lives of black female activist intellectuals in the years before the formation of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC) in 1896. Looking deeper at arguments originally made by Maria Stewart concerning the denial of black women's ambitions and limiting potential in their working lives, the analysis employs the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, in particular his notion of the intellectual, to help reflect on the centrality of these black women in the development of an early counterhegemonic movement.

Every historian addressing himself to the study of American slavery immediately confronts the paucity of sources. Significant documents written by slaves or former slaves are sufficiently scarce and difficult to work with that the slaves' view of slavery, in spite of recent publications, is still an underdeveloped area. In the almost fifteen years since Stanley Elkins stirred up swells of controversy by contending that slaves were characterized by a docile, childlike, ‘ Sambo ’ personality, historians have begun to employ concepts developed by psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists and to examine previously neglected sources such as slave autobiographies and recollections. But even these attempts stop far short of a radical departure from approaches traditionally employed by American historians. Although slave songs have been of interest for decades, with some recent exceptions, they have yielded few significant or surprising insights.

In the twenty-five years before 1850, southern writers of regional literature and ex-slave autobiographers constructed a narrative of United States slavery that was mutually contradictory and yet mutually influential. That process involved a dynamic hybridization of genres in which authors contested meanings of slavery, arriving at opposing conclusions. They nevertheless focussed on family and the South's distinctive culture. This article explores the dialectic of that argument and contends that white regionalists created a plantation-paternalist romance to which African American ex-slaves responded with depictions of slavery's cruelty and immorality. However, by the 1840s, ex-slaves had domesticated their narratives in part to sell their works in a literary marketplace in which their adversaries’ sentimental fiction sold well. Scholars have not examined white southern literature and ex-slave autobiography in comparative context, and this article shows how both labored to construct a peculiar institution in readers’ imagination. Southern regionalists supplied the elements of a pro-slavery argument and ex-slave autobiographers infused their narratives with abolitionist rhetoric at a time in which stories Americans told about themselves became increasingly important in the national political crisis over slavery extension and fugitive slaves. It was on that discursive ground that the debates of the 1850s were carried forth.

Thomas Dewey, the progressive Republican governor of New York from 1942 to 1954 famously “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory” in the presidential election of 1948. It was an election that everyone, with the possible exception of Harry S. Truman, had expected Dewey to win. Truman, like much of the historiography, credited his victory to the farm vote, and this was undoubtedly an important factor, but it is clear that without the votes of African Americans Truman could not have won. This piece will examine why Dewey lost, surveying his record on civil rights as governor (arguably the best in the nation) and his abject failure to convert, indeed, to even attempt to convert, this record into African American votes in 1948. This failure is made more curious by the fact that he was constantly being warned by African American Republicans and his closest confidante about the pivotal nature of the African American vote. Yet Dewey, a notoriously lethargic campaigner, would ignore their admonishments.

The AIDS crisis in the US in the 1980s radically transformed the relationship between sexual minorities and capitalism. Opportunistic infections given free rein in human bodies by HIV rendered employees visible to employers and to health care providers as an economic risk, and set the stage for battles between health capitalists, politicians, and AIDS activists over access to health care. Health capitalism in 1980s America was both an arena of integration of queer Americans into mainstream society and also a political cul-de-sac, blunting the radical possibilities of sexual politics that were alive in the years before the AIDS crisis. In this article I focus on activist groups, primarily ACT UP, Gay Men's Health Crisis, National Gay Rights Advocates, and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and the liberal politicians who led legislative battles at federal and state level to force the health care system to respond to AIDS. In shifting our gaze from the Reagan administration and the religious right as the primary foils to AIDS activism, we can gain new insights into the direction of liberal politics in an era of supposed conservative ascendancy. An understanding of how AIDS activists and their allies negotiated questions of health access suggests that health care activism was in part a marker of class privilege, as gay activists and liberal Democrats openly embraced a medical model for sexual minorities that lifted them above the stigma of a public welfare system and integrated them further into heteronormative capitalism.

On 30 December 1963, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) executive committee approved Bob Moses' proposal for a summer voter registration project involving hundreds of white volunteers. Initially intended to highlight the brutality inherent in Mississippi's culture and to register large numbers of disfranchised black voters, the plans expanded to include more long term and holistic methods of addressing civil rights that encompassed what SNCC and its sister organizations in Mississippi called “educational and social” programmes. As freedom schools co-ordinator Liz Fusco asserted, this represented an acceptance that what could be done in Mississippi, could be deeper, more fundamental, more far-reaching, more revolutionary than voter registration alone … [It was] a decision to enter into every phase of the lives of the people of Mississippi … a decision to set the people free for politics in the only way that people really can become free, and that is totally. Freedom schools were central to SNCC's programme. Both institutions emphasized that knowledge of one's culture was crucial to the individual. In the case of the freedom schools, students would be encouraged to think freely and develop their own ideas about a free society. Charles Cobb, who conceived the idea of the freedom schools, envisaged the schools to be places “where the students could freely ask questions about all those things, political as well as academic, which troubled and excited them.”

More than sixty-five years after the Amalgamated Meat Cutters called off its strike in February 1922, the memory of defeat remained vivid in the minds of packinghouse workers who struggled through that long, desperate winter. Stephan Janko remembered reporting for work at Armour and Company after it became clear that the cause was lost. “When we went back inside of that plant it wasn't like men. It was more like a bunch of poor dogs that had been whipped for forgettin' who the master was.” A skilled butcher, Janko found himself at the mercy of a vengeful foreman who forced him to cart scraps at unskilled wages while a scab performed his job. “I never wanted to hear the word ‘union’ again in my life,” he recalled, “and I never wanted to stick my neck out for nothing. Just wanted to work and take home my pay.”

Depictions of deathbed scenes are commonplace within mid-nineteenth-century United States literary culture, particularly sentimental fiction. They serve a variety of ideological and aesthetic functions and have rightly received a good deal of critical attention. One aspect of their significance and broad impact that has not yet been included within revisionist assessments of the aesthetic and political strategies of sentimentalism provides the primary focus here. The stylized representational modes that characterize the dying of many characters in literary texts, magazine illustrations, paintings and other cultural productions were appropriated by nineteenth-century spiritualists to perform farewells between spirits and the living within the many seances that proliferated on both sides of the Atlantic from the late 1840s onward. The conventional structure of such partings, predicated on the imminent death of at least one of the participants, focused on an exemplary death in which tearful goodbyes and final words were significant features. Yet when spiritualists appropriated the formulae of such scenes it was within a set of practices that explicitly denied the fact of death at all. Since for spiritualists death was a chimera, the adoption of the symbolism of the deathbed scene as a model for how to facilitate different kinds of departure – not always those that took place between the soon to be dead and those they leave behind – took the rhetoric and practices of dying and transformed them into a new form of performance.

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.