The Colonial New England town has always intrigued American historians but, paradoxically, few historians until recently have placed the colonial town under a microscope and studied it in detail. Most, instead, like George Bancroft and Herbert Baxter Adams, simply heaped accolades upon it. Even the Progressive historians, writing in an age of scientific history and seeking to debunk the myth of town meeting democracy, still did not apply a close scrutiny to the actual sources but instead also talked in generalities. The only real exceptions to this pattern and the only persons to delve deeply into local sources were Charles Andrews in his River Towns of Connecticut and G. E. Howard in his Introduction to the Local Constitutional History of the United States, both published in 1889. The next serious professional local study did not appear until 1961. In the intervening seventy-two years hundreds of local histories were written, but by antiquarians who frequently wrote with intelligence and felicity but seldom asked the significant questions that a professional historian would. Indeed, to be involved in local history implied, to people living in this time period, that a person was an antiquarian and not a true historian. However, since 1961 a number of historians have attempted to put the New England town under a microscope and ascertain some specifics to replace the generalities.

Film has been an integral part of the propaganda war fought between the United States and North Korea over the past decade. The international controversy surrounding the Hollywood comedy The Interview in 2014 vividly demonstrated this and, in the process, drew attention to hidden dimensions of the US state security–entertainment complex in the early twenty-first century. Using the emails leaked courtesy of the Sony hack of late 2014, this article explores the Interview affair in detail, on the one hand revealing the close links between Sony executives and US foreign-policy advisers and on the other explaining the difficulties studios face when trying to balance commercial and political imperatives in a global market.

When the prophetic seer was asked whether this boy [Narcissus] would live to a ripe old age, he replied: ‘Yes, if he does not come to know himself.’

Unwittingly, he [Narcissus] desired himself, and was himself the object of his own approval, at once seeking and sought … But he could not lay hold upon himself … Poor foolish boy, why vainly grasp at the fleeting image that eludes you?

For knowledge comes slowly, and when it comes, it is often at great personal expense.

There is more than one specter haunting Paul Auster's Ghosts. The novel is, indeed, riddled with specters (puns intended): Auster, as writer, haunts a text where reader and critic alike hopelessly strive to catch an equally elusive meaning. I intend to show, in this paper, how Auster, following a lineage going back to the metafiction writers of the late 1960s, passing by others loosely grouped under the term “post-structuralists,” more importantly heralds a new era, and manages to present, in one novel, a full-fledged allegory of how postmodern writing and reading can successfully negotiate the new challenges presented by the dawning virtual age, focusing on the twin concepts of the mirror and the double and the resulting spectral image(s) produced.

In 1887, T. Thomas Fortune published an editorial, “The Negro's Peculiar Work,” in the black newspaper the New York Freeman, wherein he reflected on a recent keynote speech delivered by Reverend J. C. Price on 3 January in Columbia, South Carolina, to commemorate Emancipation Day. Price, a member of the Zion Wesley Institute of the AME Zion Church, hailed from North Carolina and his denomination considered him to be “the most popular and eloquent Negro of the present generation.” On the occasion meant to reflect on the meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation (which went into effect on 1 January 1863) for present-day African Americans, Price turned his gaze away from the US towards Africa. In his speech “The American Negro, His Future, and His Peculiar Work” Price declared that African Americans had a duty to redeem Africans and help them take back their continent from the Europeans who had partitioned it in 1884–85. He railed,

Across the twentieth century, black South Africans often drew inspiration from African American progress. This transatlantic history informed the global antiapartheid struggle, animated by international human rights norms, of Martin Luther King Jr., his fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner the South African leader Albert Luthuli, and the African American tennis star Arthur Ashe. While tracing the travels of African Americans and Africans “going South,” this article centers Africa and Africans, thereby redressing gaps in black Atlantic and African diaspora scholarship.

With how little cooperation of the societies after all is the past remembered – At first history had no muse – but a kind fate watched over her – some garrulous old man with tenacious memory told it to his child.

Henry David Thoreau,

Journals (1842)

In 1823, something of the bittersweet occurred in Cranston, Rhode Island: an aged revolutionary war veteran returned to his hometown after a prolonged exile in England. Hopeful about reuniting with his family and community after an absence of nearly fifty years, the old soldier was surprised and disappointed to learn that his property had been sold, his family had moved west, and few among the remaining villagers even remembered who he was. Such is the story of one Israel Potter. An adventurous fellow, he had fought at the battle near Bunker Hill, had met Benjamin Franklin, and, after being captured by the British, had roamed England after the war, continually poverty-stricken, while searching for a passage back to America. Once returned to Cranston, he applied for a federal pension for his wartime services. In all probability, Potter never received any financial compensation, but he left a narrative of his life, reminding his readers that at one point in the republic's history, he did matter.

The conduct of Sir William Johnson at the treaty of Fort Stanwix was regarded unfavourably by contemporaries and has been strongly criticized by historians. There is little to choose between the Board of Trade report of April 1769 and the view of Professor Billington, who holds that the Superintendent ‘mercilessly fleeced the Indians who trusted him as their protector’ while concluding ‘one of the worst treaties in the history of Anglo-Indian relationships’. There was ample cause for bewilderment and anger. Johnson had obtained a boundary line which deviated in three major particulars from that which he had been instructed to secure. This act of disobedience was a consequence of the need of land speculators to gain control of regions forbidden to them by royal instructions but vital to their financial hopes. Johnson, in his own right a great landlord and speculator, sacrificed his public duties to private gain, even though this involved the betrayal of innocent Indians.

In 1951, the CIA secretly funded the creation of an ostensibly private group of US citizens called the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME). Pro-Arab and anti-Zionist in orientation, AFME was repeatedly attacked by pro-Israel groups before seeing its links to the CIA exposed by investigative journalists in 1967. Drawing on recent scholarship about “state–private networks” and the cultural history of US–Middle East relations, this article examines the origins of AFME, its characteristic values and relations with the CIA, and the reasons for the decline of its influence vis-à-vis the emergent “Israel lobby.”

For decades now, Oscar Wilde has been celebrated in academic and popular circles as a transgressor of gender boundaries and a devotee of the woman's world and an “appreciative inheritor of women's culture.” What has been underappreciated, however, is that Wilde also acted as an advocate of gender binaries in ways that significantly challenge this reputation. This article argues that Wilde's writings reveal a traditionalist critique of American gender politics that reflects his concern over the management of cultural institutions and values, and the increasingly precarious place of men within them. Rather than locating these anxieties in Britain, Wilde displaced them onto the United States, a country whose cultural institutions he had become intimate with during a year-long lecture tour in the early 1880s. By exposing and problematizing Wilde's response to the late nineteenth-century crisis in masculinity and his disappointment at the failure of American men to take their place in society as arbiters of taste, this article underscores the need for a nuanced reassessment of Wildean gender politics. At stake here are fundamental questions about how a transgressive politics sits alongside traditionalism, and how a conservative gender bias in transatlantic fin de siècle culture operated even in the period's progressive circles.

When Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past was released in November 1947 it was seen by the trade press as an efficient example of an RLO medium-budget thriller. The Hollywood Reporter called it “action-packed and suspenseful” and “solidly entertaining,” suggesting “a profitable box office pay-off.” Film Daily headlined the film's “strong box office possibilities”. Yet, even allowing for this moderate enthusiasm, Variety was surprised to find Out of the Past placed as high as seventh in the listing of the top ten money-making films in the United States for the month of December. This set it just below such films as Hope and Crosby's Road to Rio and the John Garfield boxing movie directed by Robert Rossen, Body and Soul.

This article pertains to the recent upsurge of interest in the politics of Thomas Pynchon. It considers Pynchon as an author very much of the 1960s counterculture, and explores the countercultural values and ideals expressed in Gravity's Rainbow, with particular emphasis on revealing the novel's attitude to the Black Panther Party. Close textual analysis suggests Pynchon's essential respect for Huey P. Newton's concept of revolutionary suicide, and his contempt for Marxist dialectical materialism, two core elements of Panther political theory. Drawing on an analogy between the BPP and Pynchon's Schwarzkommando, an assessment is made of the novel's perspective on the part played by various factors – including the Panthers’ aggressive militancy, the rise of Eldridge Cleaver through the leadership, and the subtle influence of a logic of power influenced by scientific rationalism – in bringing about the disintegration of the Panther organization by the early 1970s. Given the similarities between the paths taken by the BPP and the wider counterculture in the late 1960s, the article considers Pynchon's commentary on the Panthers to be part of a cautionary tale for future revolutionaries fighting similar forms of oppression.

This article explores the role of Ebony magazine as a key staging ground for competing political and ideological debates over Martin Luther King Jr's legacy, and the struggle for a national holiday in his name. In doing so, it provides an important case study into the contestations between what Houston Baker has described as “black critical memory” and “black conservative nostalgia.” In response to attempts by Ronald Reagan and other politicians to reimagine King as an advocate for color-blind conservatism, Ebony’s senior editor, Lerone Bennett Jr., sought to situate King's legacy within a radical “living history” of black America. However, the magazine's broader coverage of the King holiday movement betrayed underlying tensions within its discussion of King's legacy, and fed into the magazine's role as an inadvertent frame for color-blind ideologies during the 1980s.

Why is it that some photographs have a power of epic concentration, condensing larger moments in history into one iconic image? This piece about the photography of 9/11 addresses this question. Its focus is on one photograph in particular, Richard Drew's image of the Falling Man. Central to the argument is the awareness of a paradox: to explore something quintessentially photographic – the force of images that give them iconic power – using a medium for reflection and communication that is inherently non-photographic: i.e. language. The author aims at accounting for the fascination of Drew's image, in a struggle to find words to describe its impact. To that end he looks at how others – the photographer himself, and other creative minds, in essay form, fiction or graphic novels – have translated their fascination into language that may help us account for the way this image continues to haunt us.

It was fate's infallible sense of the ironic which induced Andrew Lang to contact William Dean Howells as a potential contributor to the newly founded Longman's Magazine in October 1882. Ironic, that is, in the light of later events, for the two men barely knew one another at the time, Howells having been introduced to Lang two months previously, at one of Edmund Gosse's celebrated Sunday parties. Had Lang waited for Howells to show his colours, he would, no doubt, have refrained from hauling this Trojan horse into the Longman camp. Indeed, Howells's notorious disparagement of Dickens and Thackeray appeared that same year, in the Century Magazine for November 1882. All but a nonentity to the British public before, the American author thereby achieved fame, almost overnight, as the powerful vindicator of the new American prose and a merciless denunciator of the established British novelists.

“What is an American?” asked the French émigré Hector St. John Crèvecoeur in 1782. In so doing, Crèvecoeur posed one of the fundamental questions of the revolutionary era. When the colonists overthrew imperial authority; declared independence; formed an independent confederation of states; and waged war for its existence; they created a new nation and a new nationality. To be sure, colonists and Britons alike had long used the term “American,” none the less, a complete sense of American national identity was largely inchoate before the American Revolution. Before the Revolution, most Americans identified more with their individual colonies than with an abstract geographic concept like “America.” While the Revolution did not completely supplant regional loyalties, it introduced a new, compelling loyalty: to the United States of America. The Revolution forced Americans to choose between loyalty to Britain or the United States. Ultimately, the majority opted for the United States. Those who did, helped define what it meant to be American by their words and actions. The purpose of this article is to examine the development of loyalty to the United States and the development of an American national identity among one group of Americans: sailors imprisoned in Britain during the Revolution.

An interpretation of frontier texts must respond to the demand by Gesa Mackenthun and other scholars that “empire be added to the study of American culture.” As written by authors like Frederick Jackson Turner, who placed themselves on the colonizing side of the frontier, these texts described the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” where European immigrants became “Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race.” Here was forged a “composite nationality for the American people.” Such texts with their understanding of the “Indian frontier ” as a “consolidating agent in our history” which developed “the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman,” helped to construct the American identity as the “imperial self” with its implicitly patriarchal, Eurocentric, and colonial assumptions. Describing the frontier as a “military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression,” such texts failed to acknowledge the aggressive acts that seized the land from its original inhabitants.

Utilizing the work of two cartoonists who produced for newspapers outside the central establishment of the yellow press, this essay argues for the critical role of political cartoonists in shaping viewers' expectations of US involvement in the Spanish-American War of 1898. It features seventeen cartoons, arranged carefully to reflect the shifting political climate, in order to demonstrate the narrative frameworks, image selections, and paradigm shifts in their representations of war and empire. Their cartoons were emblematic of how artists nationwide harnessed typographies of gender, race, and sexuality to create compelling justifications for and against policies of war and colonial acquisition.

A major characteristic of the social and spatial morphology of urban areas in advanced capitalist societies is the residential segregation of different socioeconomic, life style, and ethnic groups. The basic rationale for this segregation is common to most societies, as is its production via the operation of housing markets. In addition, however, each country has its own particular characteristics which accentuate the general processes. One such characteristic in the United States is the nature of the local government system in most States.

The aim of this paper is to identify die main features of that system as they apply to the geography of residential separation. The discussion is set within die context of the general processes of American local government and indicates how these have encouraged segregation. The paper then turns to a discussion of the use of the courts and die Fourteendi Amendment to challenge the amalgam of housing market and local government processes, and evaluates the likely outcome of the series of challenges.