This article examines the development of two distinct theories of American internationalism in the 1990s – the political humanitarianism of the liberal hawks and the unipolarism of the neoconservatives – and the fundamentally different and opposing grounds on which these two groups supported the 2003 Iraq War. The liberal hawks, however, failed almost completely to examine the motivations of the neoconservative architects of the “war on terror.” Instead, they imposed their own normative schema on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and campaigned for them as wars of liberation. Their almost total failure to engage with the intellectual origins of the war led them to accept uncritically the idealistic rhetoric of the President and to assume that the Bush administration and the neoconservatives were motivated by the same idealism and world view as they were themselves. This led them to dismiss critics of the war as opponents of liberal values. As the situation in Iraq worsened, they continued to view the war as a moral endeavour – just one that had gone wrong, as opposed to a war fought for strategic reasons in which nation building was never a priority.

This article discusses constructions and representations of motherhood in Russell Banks's The Darling and Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document. It argues that the theme of motherhood has a long, if often overlooked, presence in American literature, and that the two novelists use the figure of the mother in order to engage with the themes of empathy and community. The novels participate in familiar postmodernist practices, such as multiple, fragmented viewpoints and narratives, unreliable narrators, non-chronological storytelling and the mingling of fact and fiction. However, they do not wholeheartedly embrace two key postmodern issues: irony and loss of affect. Instead, they seek to move away from some of the postmodern novel's more excessive decathecting tendencies, and they achieve that through their representations of mothers who, in not acquiescing to society's norms, challenge gender roles and cultural assumptions. The two fictional mothers under discussion share a past as Weather Underground activists, and in giving voice to them and refusing to demonize them as “bad” mothers, their creators also seek to expose other American narratives that reinforce dominant ideology and suppress the margins.

Models – economic, mathematical, toys, manikins – are ubiquitous. This article probes one model, the Stettheimer doll's house, in order to understand all models better. The Stettheimers, three wealthy unmarried sisters living in New York in the early the twentieth century, attracted a remarkable melange of Camp artists and writers, identified by Arthur Danto as “the American Bloomsbury.” The Stettheimers were involved in many of New York's happenings, including the Harlem Renaissance and the innovative stage productions of Gertrude Stein. Androgyny, excess, racial mixing and theatricality flourished in the Stettheimer milieu. Carrie Stettheimer's doll's house, now housed in the Museum of the City of New York, captured this life. I consider this model for two related purposes. First, and more narrowly, I document the various effects this eccentric doll's house had on the artistic production of those in its vicinity, most notably on the novels of her sister Ettie and on the paintings both of her sister Florine and Marcel Duchamp. Second, I use the evidence of the doll's house's affect to discuss the agency of models in general.

“Opioid Storytelling: Rehabilitating a White Disability Nationalism” argues that stories of the opioid crisis disseminate an emerging white disability nationalism that functions to morph and reconsolidate the “machinery of whiteness” around an affectively charged disability politics. Through a close reading of HBO's 2017 documentary Warning: This Drug May Kill You, directed by Perri Peltz, as well as Beth Macy's New York Times best book of 2018, Dopesick, this essay contends that opioid storytelling redeploys a panic about lost agency and increased vulnerabilities into a melancholic reinvestment in a fantasy ideal of white immunity nationalism. Opioid storytelling's “relapsed” whiteness, which invokes a long history of fears about racial degeneration, restores whiteness's category crisis by presenting middle-class whites as abled disableds, or dopesick addicts, in contrast to an unredeemable noncompliant blackness, and, in doing so, resolves the contradictions within conservative neoliberal discourses between sympathetic addicts and a simultaneous insistence on individual accountability and family values. Opioid storytelling reveals not only a contemporary morphing of a complex history of race and public health, but offers new identifications for “fragile” white subjects to reinvest in intractable hierarchies of white supremacism, while simultaneously thinking of themselves as liberal antiracists.

The period of Reconstruction in the South was marred by frequent outbreaks of racial violence and South Carolina undoubtedly achieved a certain notoriety in this respect. Yet this phenomenon of recurring violence – even in its best known manifestation, the Ku Klux Klan – has not really received much intensive study from either the ‘revisionist’ school of Reconstruction historians or any local historians of the South. There is still a great deal of uncertainty about the questions of why the Ku Klux Klan came into existence in the Southern states, and who organized and participated in its vigilante activities. These questions can be easily posed but, largely because of the lack of source materials which bear directly upon them, they have proved to be extremely difficult to answer satisfactorily.

Towards the end of his life, Langston Hughes wrote an article about Harlem during the 1920s. In his narration, he paused fondly over memories of Sugar Hill. At 409 Edgecombe, the address of the ‘tallest apartment house’ on the hill, lived Walter and Gladys White, who gave frequent parties for their friends; Aaron and Alta Douglas, who ‘ always had a bottle of ginger ale in the ice box for those who brought along refreshments’ Elmer Anderson Carter, who succeeded Charles S. Johnson to the editorship of Opportunity; and actor Ivan Sharpe and his wife Evie. Just below the hill, in the Dunbar Apartments, lived W. E. B. Du Bois as well as E. Simms Campbell, the cartoonist. Nearby was Dan Burley, a black journalist and a boogie-woogie piano player. Hughes recalled the excitement of those days: ‘Artists and writers were always running into each other on Sugar Hill and talking over their problems and wondering how they could get’ fellowships and grants from benevolent organizations. One evening, Hughes and six of his compatriots gathered in the Aaron Douglas apartment and decided to start a literary magazine,‘the better to express ourselves freely and independently – without interference from old heads, white or Negro.’ From that initial discussion at 409 Edgecombe came Fire in its one and only issue of November 1926. Two years later, some of the same persons began another literary magazine, this time called Harlem.

Bernie Madoff perpetrated a Ponzi scheme on a scale that was gargantuan even compared with the outrageously destructive Enron and Worldcom debacles. A major aspect of the Madoff story is his rise as a specifically American Jewish type, who self-consciously exploited stereotypes to inspire trust and confidence in his counsel. Styling himself as a benefactor and protector of Jews as individuals and institutional Jewish interests, and possibly in the guise of the Jewish historical trope of shtadlan (intercessor), he was willing to threaten the well-being of all those enmeshed in his empire. The license granted to Madoff stemmed in part from the extent to which he appeared to diverge from earlier Jewish financial titans, such as Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, in that he epitomized an absolute “insider” – as opposed to an “outsider” or marginal figure. In reality he had none of the supposedly humane virtues attributed to Jewish crooks, at least in the realm of popular culture.

Richard Hakluyt, writing in 1588, was referring to the Elizabethan poor whose ranks were newly enlarged by the economic and social upheavals of the sixteenth century. His rationale for government-sponsored colonization has hardly been improved upon in the subsequent four hundred years and examples of its application can be found over much of the globe, from Acadians in Louisiana to convicts in Australia. Two hundred and forty years after Hakluyt, the American Colonization Society was founded in Washington, D.C., to encourage the emigration of American free blacks to Africa.

An era of space explorations and an era of expanded civil rights for racial minorities and women began simultaneously in the United States. But such important social changes are very rarely discussed in relation to each other. Four recent books on how the US astronaut program finally opened to women and minorities in 1978 address a key part of this connection, without discussing the struggles that compelled the ending of traditional race and gender exclusions. This essay examines the organizational and political dynamics of how civil rights in employment came to the US civilian space program in the decades after 1970.

The former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O'Neill, has observed “I hate to say it about such an agreeable man, but it was sinful that Ronald Reagan ever became President.…I've known every president since Harry Truman and there's no question in my mind that [Reagan] was the worst.” This is a severe indictment by a highly qualified observer. Nevertheless it is an opinion that will be challenged here. It will be argued in this article that far from being the “worst” of recent presidents Ronald Reagan, despite his failings, was more effective in office than most who have held the position in the last fifty years. However, as a preliminary to our analysis it may be useful to summarize the apparently formidable case against Reagan.

Can cultural change be explained as a function of discourse? A discourse is any language territory, whether a mode of thinking, talking or writing, which presupposes shared assumptions between its producer and consumer. This means that the relationship between language and ideology is dependent upon the nature of a particular discourse. This paper offers comments on this question with reference to the formation of the post-bellum American business culture and its ideology by examining the written works of one of its leading exponents, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Working from the assumption that this business culture was serving the interests of a new ruling group at the expense of subordinate Populist-Producer ones, does an evaluation of the business-man's discourse reveal how it helped create that ideological domination? Both Hayden White and Michel Foucault have claimed that culture can be explored by reference to the primary figurative modes of discourse, particularly the tropes of metonymy and synecdoche. Basic to this rhetorical approach to cultural formation is its assumption that ideology is a function of discourse, even though White, the most devoted practitioner of the theory of the poetic foundation of cultural practices, recognises Foucault's insight that discourse resides in the world and is bound up with property ownership, power and the imposition of force. Assuming that power is embedded in a dominant social formation, business spokesmen like Carnegie, working to maintain the authority of a particular class, did so through a range of discursive cultural practices that contended with others for dominance. In the Gramscian model of cultural change Andrew Carnegie was an organic intellectual in as much as he functioned according to the interests of the new fundamental class of the wealthy industrial bourgeoisie.

This paper begins by juxtaposing contemporary discourses on Harlem and the Lower East Side, arguing that the processes of iconization of these two neighborhoods have been very different. Whereas the iconicity of Harlem has always been shot through with ambivalence, the Lower East Side has come to signify a relatively unambivalent sacred space for US Jewry. The second part of the essay then traces the representations of Harlem and the Lower East Side back to early twentieth-century African American and Jewish American novels, claiming that critically analyzing the theme of ambivalence in these texts – and, more specifically, how ambivalence manifests itself differently within each literary tradition – is key to understanding not only why Harlem and the Lower East Side have undergone parallel but divergent processes of iconization, but also the way Jews and blacks have been positioned and have attempted to position themselves in relation to dominant white US society.

Maps, recent cultural geographers are fond of reminding us, are products of the specific ideology from which they are written. A proper reading of a map, one that attends to it as a cultural product, can discover – even deconstruct – the ideological and cultural assumptions upon which its act of mapping is grounded. For Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove, the metaphor of the map provides a crucially important analytic tool for disentangling the ways in which systems of power may be seen to work within – and through – a text. They note that, under the influence of post-structuralist theory, it has become commonplace to think of a text as a “discursive ‘terrain’ across which ‘sites’ of power may be ‘mapped’.” Clearly, then, cartographic metaphors are useful in discussing literary texts in that they can accommodate an examination of both the overt and covert operations of those texts in their representations of the cultural and ideological landscape from which they are produced. Indeed, to map the world is to make that world readable, to make it familiar; but, like any text – or, in the particular case of this essay, Gary Snyder's poetic sequence Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) – a map does more than simply describe a discursive terrain. Such descriptions also enact the conditions of their cultural production.

This article considers the photographic portraits of children reprinted in The Crisis’s “Children's Numbers” and the Brownies’ Book. While the magazines use these images to further their uplift agenda, they also present a sophisticated commentary on the photographic form. The publications present an understanding of the camera as an instrument for interpreting and shaping reality rather than as a truth-telling device. By suggesting parallels between the photographic image and the idea of the child, and exposing the conventions and distortions that produce both, the magazines challenge claims of authenticity and transparency which had helped to naturalize the oppression of black people.

Shortly after the end of World War II, on 11 December 1945, James Webb Young, Chairman of the Advertising Council and Director of the J. Walter Thompson Company, spoke to the annual meeting of the American Association of Advertising Agencies at the Continental Hotel in Chicago. The title of his speech was, “What Advertising Learned From the War,” and in it Young talked about an immediate post-war period that was, by most accounts, an exuberant time for an America flushed by a victory that finally marked it as a true global power. The American government proclaimed it, the American people believed it, and American business stood ready to sell it through an advertising industry that itself had come of age during, and because of, the war.

Shortly after 7 o'clock on the morning of 20 April 1962, Louis and Dorothy Boyd arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. The journey from their native New Orleans had taken forty-three hours. With the Boyds were their eight children, five girls and three boys aged between three and twelve years old. Between them the family carried their entire worldly possessions in three cardboard boxes and an old foot locker.

George Washington died much as he lived, stoic, dignified, controlled to the very end. True to form, his last moments, much like his life, saw him surrounded by slaves. At daybreak on the day he died – Saturday, 14 December 1799 – Caroline, a housemaid, bustled into his room to make a fire. Three other slaves fetched the physicians, who ministered to the dying General. Washington's body servant, twenty-four-year-old Christopher, otherwise known as Christopher Sheels, attended his master throughout the long day of his last illness. Indeed, in the afternoon Washington motioned Christopher to take a seat by his bedside as he had been standing throughout his vigil. At the moment of death, blacks outnumbered whites in the room. Caroline, Charlotte, a seamstress, and Molly, a domestic, were all standing near the door, and Christopher was by the bed, while only three whites – Dr. James Craik, his primary physician and old friend; Tobias Lear, his secretary; and Martha Washington, his wife – were present. At Martha's behest, Christopher aroused Lear from his grief by asking him to take care of the General's keys and other personal items which the body servant had taken out of the dead man's pockets. On the day after Washington's death, Frank Lee, the family's mulatto butler, Christopher, and Marcus, another house servant, received new shoes so that they would look presentable at the funeral.

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” Toni Morrison, Beloved.

Freud's psychoanalytic theories of fear of castration and penis-envy transformed woman into not-man, thus defining her as “other” and “lacking.” His studies also gave a sexual component to relationships among women, marking them as potentially lesbian and hence deviant. Medical men of Victorian England and America consciously or unconsciously helped to justify gender roles and women's seclusion in the domestic on the grounds that their specific physiology made them slaves of their reproductive system. As women's ovaries presumably controlled their lives and their behavior, genitals determined social roles, and doctors urged mothers to remind their daughters that any deviation from their “natural” and legitimate functions as wives and mothers could ruin their health forever. The cult of True Womanhood conveniently idealized maternity and defined the virtues of obedience, piety, and passivity as essentially feminine, while it condemned the desire for an education or the practice of birth control as unnatural and dangerous to women and to the whole of society. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, hysteria became the most fashionable of the so-called “female maladies” among middle- and upper-class women, a fact that illustrates how physicians failed to dissociate scientific evidence from social views of the period. Victorian psychologists and gynecologists mimicked contemporary male attitudes, which sanctioned the doctrine of separate spheres, while affectionate bonds between women were regarded with suspicion, as they could lead to homosexuality.

Between 1997 and 2007, Don DeLillo published three novels concerned with loss and mourning. Two of these, Underworld (1997) and Falling Man (2007), revolve around unique historical events in which the question of American exceptionality is foregrounded, and both relate this question of exceptionality to the experience of loss. This essay argues that while DeLillo accepts the historical specificity of the events of 9/11, his novel Falling Man is wary of any claim to their exceptionality. It argues further that while Falling Man and Underworld both contain moving explorations of the vicissitudes of loss, Falling Man is more concerned with the loss of loss, the end of mourning, an idea which illuminates the novel's arresting juxtaposition of Søren Kierkegaard and T. S. Eliot. As the three novels appeared, DeLillo seemed increasingly concerned to explore the overcoming of grief, the loss of loss, in the context of female subjectivity, and to trace the failure to overcome it to the masculine psyche, and I draw upon the work of Julia Kristeva in order to address this. The pattern is at its starkest in The Body Artist (2001), with which the essay briefly concludes. We begin by looking at Underworld, where loss seems to be the presiding masculine emotion.