Historians have undertaken a number of specific investigations concerning the social, economic and geographic backgrounds, as well as their motives for emigrating, of those men and women who emigrated from England to Massachusetts, Virginia and Barbados during the course of the seventeenth century. While they have discussed the origins of the South Carolina charter, described the social and political status of the eight proprietors, dissected the Fundamental Constitutions, and examined the means by which the successful settlement of 1670 was organized, historians have neglected to explore the social backgrounds of those men who emigrated directly from England to South Carolina during the colony's initial decades of settlement. In contrast, not only the political but also the social and economic backgrounds of the Barbadian planters who colonized South Carolina have been the subject of a number of historical studies.

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.

The poems of George Oppen continue to occupy a marginal place in most literary histories, even though his work encapsulates some of the major shifts in American writing between high modernism and contemporary Language poetry. In part this marginalization is due to the habit of tying Oppen to Louis Zukofsky's shortlived “Objectivist” tendency of the thirties. Oppen did indeed publish his first collection, Discrete Series, in 1934, and with a strong endorsement from Ezra Pound (“I salute a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man's sensibility and which has not been got out of any other man's books”). Yet after this propitious start Oppen fell silent for twenty-five years, jettisoning poetry for politics. He and his wife Mary were members of the Communist Party between 1936 and 1941, their activities eventually attracting close scrutiny from the FBI. In 1949, Oppen and his family opted for political exile in Mexico to avoid harrassment. They would not return until 1958; only then did Oppen begin writing poetry again, initiating a sequence of major volumes, from The Materials (1962) to Primitive (1978).

When I was thirteen years old, my father took me to Gettysburg. It is my first recollection of my father’s growing passion for studying the history of the Civil War, which, I was only to realize long after his death, was his way of grappling with the unresolved horrors of his own experience as a battlefield medic. By escaping into the minutiae of a past and – at a distance – more heroic war, he had been probing his feelings about a war that he suspected (like Paul Fussell in Wartime, and Farley Mowat in And No Birds Sang) was dominated by ‘‘chickenshit’’ and pointless death. He was past sixty before he told me how terrified he had been, and how he had never stopped thinking and dreaming about what he had seen.

What we need, it seems to me, is a global sense of local, a global sense of place.

Public regulation of broadcasting in the United States effectively began during the First World War. The history of such regulation, from its beginning to the present, is essentially a catalogue of governmental attempts to keep pace with extremely rapid technological and commercial developments. Thus the regulation of broadcasting should be viewed more as a series of empirical adjustments to changing circumstances and conditions than as expressing a coherent philosophy or theory of administration. But, in their attempts to deal pragmatically with abuses in the broadcasting industry, regulators found themselves evolving principles and standards which served to define and clarify the relationship between the government and the broadcasting interests. The purpose of this paper is to examine this relationship and to account for the gulf which has developed between the ‘ theory ’ and the practice of broadcast regulation.

Claims for Shakespearean universality often position Shakespeare's works as resonating with all people across all time. But how far can one take such a claim? A 2013 sketch on Comedy Central's Key & Peele, entitled “Othello Tis My Shite!”, uses satire precisely in order to challenge assertions of Shakespearean universality. I argue that the sketch – which follows two Renaissance Moors, Lashawnio and Martinzion, who attend Shakespeare's Othello – suggests that Shakespeare may find the limits of speaking for “all people” when depicting black masculinity. Yet the sketch's twist ending helpfully proposes the transformative potential in Shakespeare for more effective, authentic representation.

The idea of a “new world order,” of an opportunity to remake a broken world into a more liberal and democratic place, was very much in the air in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some historians were encouraged to look at earlier periods with this concept in mind, and this essay is the result of one such attempt. The whole idea of an attempt to build a new world order has a very positive ring about it. At the least it seems to assume a plan, and an active personality or two behind the plan; it also assumes a global reach. If these are in any sense requirements, the United States during the interwar period fulfilled them only partially and erratically. Certainly, if one looks for the strong, general pattern in American foreign policy during this period, the culmination of many smaller plans and patterns, one can be found: the drive to convince the world to adopt policies leading to an international economy characterised by free trade, convertible currencies and open markets, and along with that, the drive to convince countries to disarm. All American administrations from 1919 to 1939 would have agreed with these policy imperatives. But what is undeniable is that they varied in their emphases, in the efforts which US governments themselves made to get these policies accepted. Only Woodrow Wilson had a plan, and only he sought to involve the US Government permanently in this process, to the extent of tying it down to future responsibilities: all others preferred, when feasible, merely to give indicative guidance.

It is the contention of Clement Greenberg that the development of modern painting can be seen as a self-critical process whereby this art entrenches itself more firmly in its area of competence. The area of competence of each art, according to Greenberg, coincides with all that is unique to the nature of its medium. Each art form, then, has an essence (albeit one which is only revealed over time) and the constitutive limitations peculiar to painting are considered by Greenberg to be “the shape of the support, the properties of pigment” and above all “the flat surface.” At first sight such a formalist perspective appears to have the advantage of being able to offer an overall picture of the development of modern painting, a unified narrative leading from Manet to American abstract artists of Greenberg's own time, such as Jules Olitski. I shall be arguing here, however, that a clear gestalt is provided by Greenberg's theory only at the cost of eliminating consideration of meaning in art. My point is not that Greenberg gives too much attention to form and not enough to content, and that therefore we merely need to balance the scales. Simply to supplement Greenberg's discussion of the formal aspects of artworks with a consideration of their content would be to accept implicitly the strong division between these two aspects which he makes. It is that very separation which I am contesting: I do not believe that it is possible to make worthwhile statements about form whilst considering it, as Greenberg does, in a vacuum.

This paper and the one that follows it were originally prepared for the 1968 Conference of the British Association for American Studies at Cambridge. They are companion pieces, and each was designed to outline initially an interdisciplinary approach to literary study and sociology, and then to follow this with an analysis of Stephen Crane's Maggie which does not make any claim necessarily to have achieved fulfilment of the precepts set out in the preface.

This article sheds light on the stormy few months that James Schlesinger was CIA director. Schlesinger ranks as the least popular director in CIA history; indeed, he had to install a CCTV camera opposite his official portrait at Langley headquarters because of concerns it would be vandalized by disgruntled staff. Conventional wisdom dictates that he was disliked because he commissioned the “Family Jewels,” the notorious list of CIA dirty tricks which, when leaked in the mid-1970s, led to unprecedented public scrutiny of the agency. Using interviews with retired intelligence officers, spy memoirs, and recently declassified records, including Schlesinger's private papers, this article argues that the hatred went much deeper. A Nixon loyalist, Schlesinger was unpopular because he challenged the culture of the CIA and attempted to make the agency more of an obedient instrument of presidential power and policy. The so-called “Schlesinger Purge” – the controversial decision to fire nearly 7 percent of the CIA's workforce, especially from the Directorate of Operations – underscored this cultural attack. The speed and brutality of the change programme resulted in organizational miasma, leaving staff demoralized and with no means to fight back. The article also examines the consequences of the dislike toward him.

During the first half of the nineteenth century many Americans began to promote the visual arts as a means of defining and fostering national identity. One highly significant consequence of this new aesthetic was the rise of a native genre art which depicted uniquely “American” customs and characters. Focussing upon and interpreting the daily world of average citizens in an emphatically optimistic and ideal manner, these works of art celebrated the virtue, vigor, simplicity, resourcefulness and republicanism of American society. They tended chiefly to represent rural American activities – maple sugaring, quilting frolics, scenes of harvest and the like – and to rely upon a standard cast of characters – the farmer, the housewife, the peddler, the trapper, for example – each of whom exemplified a particular trait or traits that seemed distinctly “American.”

The publication of David Treuer's (Ojibwe) Native American Fiction: A User's Manual (2006) initiated something of a controversy within Native American Literary Studies. Interpreted as an assault on the political and cultural meaning of tribal fiction, the collection has been critiqued by those who argue that indigenous specificity is reflected by a distinct, and specific, Native American literary aesthetic. In this interview Treuer clarifies his position, explains his dual concern for Ojibwe traditions and tribal fiction, and discusses the genesis of his novels Little (1995), The Hiawatha (1999), and The Translation of Dr Apelles (2007).

Perry Miller was one of the most famous and distinguished American intellectual historians, in the estimation of his contemporaries and the evaluations of more recent scholars. Although his death provided some detractors with an opportunity to question his findings without fear of riposte, more recent studies confirm the relevance of his work to those historians seeking answers today to the questions which he addressed. This is especially true in the Puritan period, where his massive encapsulation of The New England Mind is a routine point of departure for new enquiries.

Historians have on the whole ignored the ideas of the segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s. They assume, apparently, that racism – which historians have studied from every conceivable angle – is enough to explain how and why people fought to preserve a racist institution in a specific time and place. The civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s did not make that assumption: they attacked specific and concrete institutions, hoping that the “hearts and minds” of southern racists might give up their racism after the institutions were destroyed. Segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s, in turn, tried to defend those institutions, not just politically, but culturally and intellectually as well. A full understanding of the destruction of those institutions requires an understanding of the way they were defended. Racism, after all, existed long before the specific legal forms of segregation and disfranchisement were created – and shows every sign of outliving them. Historians who ignore the cultural and intellectual defenses of those specific forms miss a crucial historical question: why did segregationist arguments ultimately fail to inspire the southern white population to defend those forms of racism successfully ?

In his role as a promoter of scientific exploration of North America, Thomas Jefferson shared with Jedidiah Morse, considered by many to be the father of American geography, the patriotic desire to counteract misinformation furnished by “imperfect and erroneous sketches” describing the continent's geography by European writers. Yet his interest in the science of geography was also motivated by a concern with America's self-image in the realm of international politics, learning, and commerce. In the summer of 1802 Jefferson was prompted to send an exploring party to North America's westernmost territories in response to reading Voyages from Montreal, Alexander Mackenzie's account of his voyages across the continent to its northwest coast. At the end of his narrative, the Scottish explorer had encouraged Britain's control of a region that, if certain natural obstacles were overcome, might supply fur and fish to “the markets of the four quarters of the globe,” and proposed a line of fortified posts to be established to maintain the British Empire's presence from Lake Winnipeg to the Pacific. Jefferson understood that such action would obstruct America's westward expansion, block Russian advances from Alaska, and thus make possible a British dominion linking two great oceans. Edward Thornton, the British minister to the United States, would later observe that Mackenzie's discoveries had provoked the American President, who in 1803 was also the president of the American Philosophical Society, to concretize his dream “to set on foot an expedition entirely of a scientific nature for exploring the Western continent of America,” and that he was, furthermore, “ambitious in his character of a man of letters and science, of distinguishing his Presidency by a discovery” of a route to the Pacific Ocean by way of the Missouri, “now the only one left to his enterprise, the Northern Communication having been so ably explored and ascertained by Sir Alexander Mackenzie's journeys.

Asked by an interviewer about the starting-point for his stories, Raymond Carver once commented:

I never start with an idea. I always see something. I start with an image, a cigarette being put out in a jar of mustard, for instance, or the remains, the wreckage of a dinner left on the table. Pop cans in the fireplace, that sort of thing. And a feeling goes with that. And that feeling seems to transport me back to that particular time and place, and the ambiance of the time. But it is the image, and the emotion that goes with that image – that's what's important.

If Carver was interested in moving from the image into narrative, his stories have had a tendency to inspire their readers to translate them back into images. This was initially a critical tendency, as parallels were frequently drawn between Carver's stories and the paintings of Edward Hopper, and the paintings and sculptures of Photo Realists such as Duane Hanson, Richard Estes and Ralph Goings. But it was not only critics who looked to draw connections. In 1989, for example, Jo Ann Callis used a selection of Carver's poems to accompany her photographs in an exhibition catalogue, Objects of Reverie, while Bob Adelman has produced a book of photographs purporting to represent Carver Country.

In the 2010s, Hillary Clinton emerged as a central character not only in American political life but also in its imagined political scenarios. This article considers the centrality of Clinton as a model for women's legal and political empowerment in CBS drama The Good Wife (2009–16), arguing that the show's generic blend of the television procedural with melodrama and soap is key to both its normative portrayal of women in the corporate workplace and its positioning of Clinton as an aspirational figure for white liberal feminists. A similar tension is also central to Clinton's bid for the presidency in 2016, and this article dissects the ways in which Clinton's anticipated victory has provided a powerful but ultimately misleading “feminist” fantasy for many television shows of the last decade. A final section concludes this article with a brief analysis of The Good Wife's 2017 spin-off The Good Fight, to argue that this show pivots from a fantasy of women's empowerment to a much more interesting dystopic picture, tapping into the surrealism of the present moment to convey the difficulty of women's aspiration under a Trump administration in ways that more directly, if still imperfectly, tackle the failings of liberal feminism to account for racial and economic difference.

The United States Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson falls into that category of unfortunate opinions which have few defenders. Its only supporters currently are those who affirm their belief in and advocate the merits of legally-enforced racial segregation as state social policy. This support, however, is bereft of intellectual substance and is correctly ignored or dismissed by most scholars. Reputable students of the court have without exception been unremittingly hostile to the opinion of the court, because of the presumed socially deleterious ramifications of the judgement. Furthermore, the opinion of Mr Justice Brown has been criticized for logical and legal shortcomings and has been labelled by one scholar as being an exercise in ‘conservative sociological jurisprudence’.3 It is the purpose of this paper to suggest that Brown's judgement has been misrepresented. Despite the fact that the decision gave a constitutional imprimatur to racial segregation, the logic of the opinion owes more to a philosophy of judicial restraint and respect for precedent than to a belief in conservative sociology or racial superiority. The court was in Plessy merely affirming its understanding that the Louisiana statute under review was consonant with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and was not commenting on the merits of racial segregation as governmental policy.