This essay considers how place matters in Zadie Smith's most recent novel, On Beauty (2005). I focus on the ways the presence of Haitian immigrants in her fictional “Wellington” reflect an urge to make meaning out of social relations in the city that inspired the novel. I argue that even her most clichéd Haitian characters should not be read as casual insertions that merely introduce dramatic irony. More than any of the local details, Haitians authenticate Smith's imagined geography. They establish both the (historical) time and place (or context) of her novel and enable On Beauty to illuminate important features of contemporary urban inequality, complex black diasporan relations, and the ironies of America's celebrated post-racial society. I conclude that – although many of her Haitian characters are stereotypical and her representation of Boston is partial – imaginative ethnographies such as Smith's challenge scholarly claims to privileged readings of the city.

John Sayles's Lone Star (1996) is the embodiment of a “frontier” film; he himself has described it as “a story about borders” (West, “An Interview with John Sayles,” 14). The film's genre, its locale, its incorporation of history, ethnicity, generations, and sexual proscriptions, and even its use of pans to cut across time all cohere around this perspective. Nor, as I will indicate, is this concern with borders new to Sayles's art; Lone Star, which taps a number of motifs and conventions familiar to American culture, bringing together a multitude of meanings of boundaries and margins and frontiers, intensifies a theme that exists in every one of his films.

Most criticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Novel The Marble Faun has focussed on its many images of domestic containment, its supposed argument in favor of Christian idealism, as well as Hawthorne's apparent “castration” of the American sculptor Kenyon – just another in a long list of the author's male protagonists who succumb to a mixture of self-doubt (Dimmesdale, in The Scarlet Letter), narcissism (Coverdale, in The Blithedale Romance), and the allure of the chaste virgin (Holgrave, in The House of the Seven Gables). This essay, however, argues that Miriam, the novel's chief female protagonist, actually completes a complicated “liberation” from the proscriptions (as Hawthorne envisioned them) of her gender, enacted by her embrace of multiple, ancient, and organic symbols. Through a simultaneous analysis of the American music icons Madonna and Lady Gaga, we find that Hawthorne engages a complex set of ideational forces – misogyny, Catholicism, and female eros – as Miriam emerges, like these famous pop stars, as an independent artist, a position that not one of the author's male protagomists is able to attain. In this sense, Miriam may be reconsidered Hawthorne's internationalized Hester, or, more aptly, his mature Pearl.

This essay explores the responses of conservative political activists to the Nixon administration's policy of “peace with honor” in Vietnam. Conservatives sought to influence the administration by acceptance of Vietnamization, a policy they interpreted as affording a more conventional prosecution of the war, and by pushing for increased aerial bombardment of North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Divisions over the efficacy of détente derailed a unified conservative position on Vietnam and forced reassessments of the legitimacy of Nixon's promise of “peace with honor.” While highlighting the basic premises of conservative foreign policy during the late 1960s, this essay explores the means by which conservative leaders attempted to forge consensus regarding the Vietnam War and the impact of increased political power on the conservative movement's foreign-policy priorities.

American fraternities have long engaged in hazing, subjecting their prospective members to curious and painful ordeals. Many fraternities also appear to incorporate planned failure within their inductions: near-impossible tasks where failure is punished with hazing. This paper provides evidence for the widespread use of planned failure in fraternities, describing its application in a modern hazing fraternity and presenting evidence of planned failure in other fraternities using interviews and decades of scholarly and non-scholarly accounts of hazing. Discussion is focussed on possible explanations for the existence and persistence of this ostensibly core feature of fraternity inductions.

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.

Andrew Carnegie, as he never tired of informing his readers and audiences, was an avowed and fervent admirer of the British railway engineer turned evolutionary cosmic philosopher, Herbert Spencer. Carnegie frequently addressed Spencer as “ My Dear Master,” entitled one chapter of his Autobiography “ Herbert Spencer and His Disciple,” and liked to say that Spencer had had an even greater influence on him than either Burns or Shakespeare. Certainly in Carnegie, Spencer had one of his warmest American friends and a generous admirer, and the two men remained in close contact from the time of their first meeting sometime during the early 1880s until Spencer's death in 1903. An examination of their friendship yields some valuable insights into the reception of Spencer's ideas by the outstanding — if atypical — spokesman of the American business class during the Gilded Age. It reveals Carnegie's much-vaunted evolutionism to have been instinctive rather than intellectual, derived not from study and uncertainty but from innate optimism and heuristic observation. Again, despite Spencer's promotion by some historians as the patron saint of industrial capitalism, his writings and his relationship with Carnegie indicate that Spencer was highly critical of American competitive mores, monopolistic practices and pervasive materialism.

As any parent or pet-owner knows, play seems to be a natural part of life. Dogs and cats wrestle, chase their tails, and scamper in races; monkeys, fish, and birds dance; children make toys out of any nearby prop. Play is older than man and seems to be one of the inevitable characteristics that evolution has built into all beings above the level of the most basic species. Both quiet play and active play – leisure and recreation – have a therapeutic effect that make creatures seek them. Play is ubiquitous psychologists say, because fun is essential in order to do the serious things of life – work, survive, reproduce, and live in social groups. Why then does it jar our sensibilities to think of Puritans playing and having fun? Why is it necessary to remind people – to persuade them against their instinctive reaction – that the religious settlers of colonial New England sought relaxation and pleasure in their lives? Many societies past and present have reputations for restrictive views of the pursuit of pleasure, but few peoples conjure up as strong an image of asceticism as the Puritans do.

We have learned recently from the work of a number of historians that the process of national mobilisation and the erection of unprecedented controls over industry during World War I offered to important groups of American liberals models for permanent collectivist reform and institutional renewal. The ease with which such controls were dismantled ought not to obscure the remarkable attraction they appeared to have in 1917 and 1918. It is clear that agencies such as the War Industries Board, the Railroad Administration, the War Labor Board, the Inquiry, and the National Board for Historical Service attracted not only the wartime enthusiasm of intellectuals; these agencies were seen to contain potential for peacetime use.

In this forum, seven established scholars of the US South, working from a variety of institutional and intellectual bases, discuss the latest developments in southern studies, connecting them to broader trends within American studies and in their own home disciplines, particularly literature, cultural studies, and history. Critically engaging with recent work in the New Southern Studies, the participants consider the importance – or otherwise – of recent theoretical, especially transnational and interdisciplinary, moves within the field of southern studies. In the process, the contributions, individually and collectively, offer a provocative assessment of what has been really innovative and of lasting significance in the field over the past decade. Equally important, the essays contemplate the topics, time frames and analytical techniques that might drive important research in both southern and American studies in the future.

The Hague Academy of International Law was founded in 1923 with funds from the Carnegie Endowment, and soon established itself as one of the premier institutes in its field. However, after the Second World War the Carnegie was joined by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in a coordinated programme to modernize the institution and increase its international influence. The Foundations, contributing to the broad goals of US foreign policy, were keen to make use of this Dutch institution to build an “epistemic community” among the elites of the newly-decolonizing Third World. The academy thereby became an important normative institution involved in a broad strategy to ensure a smooth transition from a colonial to a postcolonial world order. This article traces the evolution of the academy and the consequences of its intersection with large-scale US philanthropy.

They talked until three, from biology to organized religion, and when Amory crept shivering into bed it was with his mind aglow…

(Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise)

Readers familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald's early work might recall that in those years just before the Scopes trial he wrote of Victorians who “shuddered when they found what Mr. Darwin was about”; or that he joined in the fashionable comic attacks on people who could not accept their “most animal existence,” describing one such character as “a hairless ape with two dozen tricks.” But few would guess the extent to which his interest in evolutionary biology shaped his work. He was particularly concerned with three interrelated biological problems: (1) the question of eugenics as a possible solution to civilization's many ills, (2) the linked principles of accident and heredity (as he understood these through the lens of Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic law), and (3) the revolutionary theory of sexual selection that Darwin had presented in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). As I hope to show in the following pages, his concern with these issues underlies such well-known features in the Fitzgerald landscape as his insecurity in the “social hierarchy” (his sense of its “terrifying fluidity”), his emphasis on the element of time, his interest in “the musk of money,” his interest in Spengler and the naturalists, and his negative portraiture of male violence. The principles of eugenics, accidental heredity, and sexual selection flow together as the prevailing undercurrent in most of Fitzgerald's work before and after The Great Gatsby, producing more anxiety than love from the tangled courtships of characters he deemed both beautiful and damned.

Undergraduates from three Texas universities were given free rein to draw and write about their experiences with the state's Campus Carry law. Through analyzing the personal stories, rationalizations, poems, and drawings the students produced, we offer insight into how they view the law and how it has impacted their sense of security. What emerges is a complex picture, revealing that students hold inconsistent – or even contradictory – beliefs in the dichotomy of being either for or against guns on campus. This essay complements existing research on the Campus Carry debate by uncovering the ambivalence that quantitative approaches alone may not capture.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, American cinema played a major role in transforming what George Fredrickson has called “the black image in the white mind.” This transformation began with the invention of cinema and climaxed with The Birth of a Nation, a film whose appeal derived not from its content, but rather from D. W. Griffith's ability to seize on this content to provoke an intense emotional response in his viewers. This essay begins by examining some of the first images of African Americans captured on camera. It then turns to Griffith's innovations in the one- and two-reelers he made at the Biograph Company. Finally, and on the occasion of the film's hundredth anniversary, the essay provides a detailed analysis of how Griffith achieved his effect in The Birth of a Nation. What the essay shows, ultimately, is that whereas the earliest depictions of African Americans relied on audience foreknowledge, the arrival of American narrative cinema led Griffith to create new kinds of black characters. Griffith's use of the close-up, the point of view, the shot/reverse-shot pattern, and parallel editing enabled him to convince his audiences of a “black menace” that threatened white America.

How are we to situate a movie in history? By now there must be few practitioners of American Studies who would not acknowledge that the products of Hollywood provide a rich seam waiting to be mined by social and cultural historians. As in most mining projects, the difficulty lies in developing the equipment needed to extract the ore. To treat film as a source of cultural history is by no means as simple as that old-fashioned literary approach by which an author's biography could be interwoven with a summary political or social history. The cinema has no author whose individuality can be used to gloss over the absence of method in such a procedure. Or rather, any movie has such a plethora of authors that the attempt to establish evidence of authorial intent is bound to fail, as auteurist criticism has repeatedly demonstrated. The “authors” of an entertainment commodity are not simply its director, writer, producer and studio head of production. They include front office personnel, New York executives and the advertising staff, distributors and theatre managers who “author” the product at the point of its sale to the public. In any case, the historian concerned with popular rather than elite culture is at least as interested in reception as in production, and his or her sphere of interest must extend beyond the limits of the text and its intended meaning to a concern with context and with how the movie was received and understood by its primary audience.

My first steady job, if one leaves out four years of wartime soldiering, began at Manchester University in 1949. It was a lectureship in American Studies and followed a two-year Commonwealth (Harkness) fellowship at Yale, also in American Studies, under the benevolent guidance of Ralph Gabriel. I have been in the same line ever since. The invitation to review what has happened to me and other Americanists in Britain during that long span carries the risk of self-regarding anecdotage. To reach the point of looking forward mainly to looking backward would be dismal. Yet Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was an exercise not in nostalgia but in prophecy; and while much of this essay takes the form of reminiscence I hope it may seem relevant to colleagues younger than myself.

Addressing the opening night rally of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) Convention on 31 August 1967, the executive director William F. Pepper informed the several thousand delegates that:

Historians may well count your presence here as the most significant gathering of Americans since the founding of our nation. Never before have so many Americans, from so many different living conditions, come from so many diverse sections of the land to dedicate themselves to the rebuilding, indeed to the reclamation of their government and their destinies.

Pepper concluded his remarks by declaring that “it may well be that what you begin here may ultimately result in a new social, economic and political system in the United States.” Outside the auditorium a bongo group was chanting “Kill Whitey.” The convention was one of the most ambitious attempts to forge a broad political alliance of antiwar organisations, New Left insurgents and the radical wing of the civil rights movement in 1960s America. It was planned by the NCNP, a co-ordinating organisation that hoped for a fundamental reconstitution of the American socio-economic and political order. Scholars have largely ignored the NCNP, and although the 1967 convention makes brief appearances in the literature it is generally portrayed as a farcical horror show. However, the motives behind, events of, and reaction to the convention reveals much about “the movement” in late sixties America.

My husband was a slave of de Sloans and didn't get to see me as often as he wanted to, and of course, as de housemaid then, dere was times I couldn't meet him, clandestine like he want me. Us had some grief over dat, but he got a pass twice a week from his marster, Marse Tommie Sloan, to come to see me…Sam was a field hand and drive de wagon way to Charleston once a year wid cotton, and always bring back something pretty for me.George P. Rawick, The American Slave : A Composite Autobiography, Vol. 2, Part 1 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972), 300.

Historians have found it difficult to assess the extent and nature of slave cross-plantation marriages (that is, where husband and wife lived on different slaveholdings). This is largely because white sources give no basis for estimating their scale or character. Estate papers and business records often list slaves belonging to a particular owner, but such lists give no indication of spouses and other relatives of those slaves who might belong to neighbours. Similarly, except for scattered comments on visiting privileges given to certain slaves, or references to the possible advantages and inconveniences of allowing slaves to marry off the plantation, owners took little interest in the vigour of such unions.

In his second annual message to the Congress on 2 December 1851, President Millard Fillmore defended his administration's enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. Although “lawless and violent mobs” had resisted federal officers trying to enforce the statute, he happily noted that resistance was sporadic and ineffectual:

I congratulate you and the country upon the general acquiescence in these measures of peace which has been exhibited in all parts of the Republic … [T]he spirit of reconciliation which has been manifested in regard to them [the 1850 compromise measures] in all parts of the country has removed doubts and uncertainties in the minds of thousands of good men concerning the duration of our popular institutions and given renewed assurance that our liberty and our Union may subsist together for the benefit of this and succceding generations.

Fillmore also received support from both the Democrats and Whigs; at their national conventions in 1852 they pledged to honor the Compromise of 1850 and earnestly hoped that sectional differences would wane.