Commenting on the flap over George W. Bush's visit to Bob Jones University during the 2000 primary election campaign, journalist Hendrik Hertzberg claimed that even staunch conservatives decried the South Carolina college's ban on inter-racial dating as “indefensible.” “This may seem unremarkable,” he noted, ”until one reflects how far it was from being the case a generation or two ago, when miscegenation was racism's trump card and even the most enlightened Americans, black and white, took it for granted that sexual fear was its unkillable heart.” Hertzberg seems unduly optimistic - violence against the bodies of racial “others’ continues to splatter across the American landscape, from the Rodney King beating to the Amadou Diallo shooting. The police rape of Abner Louima illuminates how power, not sexuality, informs such assaults.

This article examines 1960s student power debates at Tennessee universities. It makes three main arguments. First, student protests over in loco parentis restrictions fit into an emerging student demand for autonomy more broadly, even in a politically and culturally conservative state like Tennessee. Second, these student power debates complicate the 1960s movements declension narrative, since Tennessee student activism peaked in 1970. Third, though black and white students both demanded greater personal autonomy, continued racial inequities on and off Tennessee campuses rendered their experiences distinct.

If you went looking for traces of the Sauk village where Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak (or Black Sparrow Hawk) was born and which, in his refusal to give it up, became the ultimate cause of the Black Hawk War in 1832 – the last Indian war east of the Mississippi – you would not find much: a few smart allusions to the great Sauk warrior on storefront signs and other such promotion gestures over on Rock Island, Iowa, but no archeological evidence at the juncture of the Rock and Mississippi rivers to suggest that the village ever existed. And yet, according to Cecil Eby, by 1790 Saukenuk was “the most imposing town in the Northwest, Indian or white, with more than 100 wickeups (many extending 60 feet in length) and from April to October inhabited by some 3,000 Sauk.” There are, however, scattered verbal signs that might draw the archeologist or historian back and forth over other tableaux of potential Sauk geography, like Sac City in Sac County, Iowa, and Black Hawk County due West of Dubuque. Then there is Prairie du Sac and Sauk City on the Wisconsin River, Wisconsin, two historically vibrant sites which novelist August Derleth turned to good use in his saga of Wisconsin. But when it comes to dealing with a defeated people who also happen to belong to the red race, the names themselves often become signs of cultural obscurantism, if not commemorative oblivion. In list form the available nomenclature amuses: Sacs, Saukies (which the Indians themselves used), Sockeys, Socks, Sacques, Saucs, Sakis. This embarrassing take-your-pick liberality clearly enough sets forth a problem of transliteration; it also evokes the more complex issue of cultural translation tout court: us/them, inside/outside, center/periphery, hegemonic culture/minority culture, structure/chaos.

Over several decades of interviewing people and crafting their words into published works, Studs Terkel defined, expanded, and challenged the field of oral history. Terkel often described his methods as similar to those of a “prospector for gold” sifting through the statements of his subjects to create essays that reveal each person's “essence.” Drawing on his planning documents, interview transcripts, manuscripts and published texts, I trace Terkel's approach to oral history through two of his best-known works – Hard Times and “The Good War” – and through three stages: his planning and performance of interviews, his editing of the individual transcripts, and his construction of the completed text. I conclude by considering the implications of Terkel's unconventional approach to oral history and the ways in which his methodology may reflect his long history of involvement with progressive political movements. Terkel crafted his subject's narratives into texts I term “documentary memory”; he insisted that his works are subjective “memory books” but also employed a documentary rhetoric of objectivity. Terkel believed telling stories of the past to be a form of social action and he used his texts about the past to comment politically on his present – his “memory books” document earlier periods in American history relevant to the cultural moment in which he published.

There has been a tendency among historians of the Anglo-American connection to suggest that there was a fairly rigid dichotomy in English opinion about America in the first half of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, it is suggested, there were the Radicals, who, by tradition and in principle, favoured the United States and its institutions. This group - the Left of that period - comprised the excluded classes of society, the dissenters, the artisans and labourers, the Chartists and democrats, the utilitarians. Confronting them was the Establishment, opposed to innovation, and especially democratic innovation, embittered by memories of 1776 and 1812, and therefore thoroughly anti-American.

From 1815 until about 1840 Sir Walter Scott was America's favorite novelist and much the most important model for her own budding fictionalists – Irving, Cooper, Paulding, Simms, Kennedy, Hawthorne, and others. Yet although fairly accurate estimates of Scott's American sales and circulation have been available for several decades, our understanding of his impact on American fiction has made only modest advances since the 1930s. While echoes of the Waverley novels can be discovered everywhere in American Romantic fiction, usually the louder they sound the more they signal merely the borrower's failure of inspiration or nerve. Scott's example was most fruitful where it was comparatively unobtrusive – partly because the best writers were best able thoroughly to adapt Scott's European scenes, characters, and conflicts to American experience, but also because at its best Scott's influence was of the self-effacing kind that helped Cooper, Hawthorne, and their contemporaries find their own true bent as American writers.

On one occasion, however, Scott provoked a more revealing response by invading American home territory.

Following the example of Steven Marcus, we may point to a number of features or incidents in Dashiell Hammett's novels which seem to break sharply with previous conventions of the detective story. I do not refer to the important changes of direction brought about by the “hard-boiled” school and instanced by such matters as the professional detective, organized crime, dark urban streets and a spare, colloquial, “tough” style. Rather, I wish to concentrate on features which are unexpected even in the context of “toughguy” writing and which occur unexpectedly in order deliberately and provocatively to remind the reader, in the midst of an easily-identifiable style, of other styles and methods of enquiry into human behaviour and, ultimately, of another and very different world-view which must be placed against the world-view of the rest of the novel. By adopting this technique, Hammett succeeds in drawing attention not only to the limitations of his particular kind of popular fiction but also to ways in which these very limitations can be used. The aspects of Hammett's novels to which I began by referring are not separated stylistically from the rest of the novel. But they nonetheless suggest to the reader that the first-person narrator might have to be viewed in a context other than that in which he normally presents himself for the reader's judgement (and, frequently, approval).

During the past decade a new school of writing has become prominent in the United States: a new realism. In the new realist novels, poems and short stories the condition of mourning recurs as providing both a symbol of and a structure for identity in consumer culture. The theme of mourning is frequently, although not always, explored in the context of invoking and reconstructing in memory the fathers, brothers and sons who were lost in the war in Vietnam. Reciprocally, the operation of images and narratives of the War in these texts casts some light upon the emergence, concerns and form of the new realist writing. In particular, images of the War provide a lens through which some of the meanings attached to sexual differences in contemporary American culture come into focus — a culture of which one may ask, after Julia Kristeva: “What can ‘identity’, even ‘sexual identity’, mean in a new…space where the very notion of identity is challenged?” The formation of identity through the structure of mourning is explored extensively in two new realist novels about remembering Vietnam: Jayne Anne Phillips's Machine Dreams and Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country.

The interventions of anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock into 1870s popular illustrations created some surprising – and largely unintended – consequences. Not only did the man who defined modern American censorship goad into existence the radical free speech movement, but his manipulations of 1870s visual culture also heightened racial stereotyping in public print. His behind-the-scenes negotiations led illustrated newspaper editors to erase white sexuality, which they replaced with stories of interracial rape of white women by black men. In fostering both the rise of the free press movement and the selective racialization of visual culture, Comstock left an indelible mark on modern representation.

Richard Mather's promising pastoral career in England suddenly ended in 1634 with the wholesale suspensions inaugurated by Archbishop Laud. With no choice other than submission to the Church of England, Mather set sail for New England and, in so doing, joined a large scale folk migration that was to total over 15,000 people in the decade between 1630 and 1640. Encouraged by the early successes of the ‘ Great Migration ’ to New England, Mather took the birth of his son in 1639 as a sign and named him Increase ‘ on the Account of the great Increase of every sort, which God favoured the country with about the time of his nativity ’. A year after Increase's birth, Richard Mather's joy was once again chastened when there ensued a remigration to England such that, in Increase Mather's words, ‘ since the year 1640, more Persons have removed out of New England, than have gone thither ’. Leading in the removal from New England were nearly half of the highly trained ministers and university men who, in large measure, accounted for the uniqueness of the New England settlements.

This essay explores the interdisciplinary origins and historiography of early North American scholars approaching territoriality – political control of territory – from an indigenous perspective in their works. Using the Ndé (Apaches) as a case study, it reveals how adopting an interdisciplinary approach that addresses territoriality from multiple perspectives can further our understanding of cultural contestation across the continent and hemisphere by highlighting the ways indigenous peoples negotiated, resisted, and adapted to European conquest.

This article argues that in Bleeding Edge, Pynchon moves from an oppositional schema in which the world is divided into “elect” and “preterite” populations towards one that is concerned with implication and complicity. The article uses Michael Rothberg's The Implicated Subject (2019) as the basis for analysis, and notably his argument that to be implicated in wrongdoing often involves a kind of structural blindness towards suffering elsewhere. In the case of Bleeding Edge, the protagonist, Maxine Tarnow, is implicated in the violence committed in order to secure the hegemony of neoliberalism. The article describes Maxine's gradual recognition of her own blindness, and hence of her implication in the harms perpetrated in the name of neoliberalism. It begins by noting that her experience of neoliberalism is one of process and of immaterial exchange. The second part of the article argues that the introduction of Nicholas Windust shows how neoliberalism may be an experience of rupture or trauma for those outside the developed world. Finally, with the 9/11 attacks on New York, the same violence rebounds against its source; the attacks therefore act as the final stage in Maxine's increasing awareness of her own implication.

This article examines the relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Hollywood film industry from 1947 to 1959. Surprisingly, the CIA was almost entirely absent from American cinema screens during this period, and their public profile in other popular media, including television and the press, was virtually nonexistent. This conspicuous lacuna of publicity coincided with what some scholars have termed the “Golden Age” of US covert action – an era of increasing CIA intervention in Italy, Iran and Guatemala, to name only the most prominent examples. How was it that the CIA managed to maintain such a low public profile and in the process evade popular scrutiny and questions of accountability during such an active period of its history? Utilizing extensive archival research in film production files and the records of the CIA themselves, this article suggests that Hollywood filmmakers adhered to the CIA's policy of blanket secrecy for three interrelated reasons. First, it suggests that the predominance of the so-called “semidocumentary” approach to the cinematic representation of US intelligence agencies during this period encouraged filmmakers to seek government endorsement and liaison in order to establish the authenticity of their portrayals. Thus the CIA's refusal to cooperate with Hollywood during this period thwarted a number of attempts by filmmakers to bring an authentic semidocumentary vision of their activities to the silver screen. Second, up until the liberalization of American defamation law in the mid-1960s, Hollywood studio legal departments advised producers to avoid unendorsed representations of US government departments and officials through fear of legal reprisal. Finally, this article suggests that the film-industry censor – the Production Code Administration – was instrumental in reinforcing Hollywood's reliance upon government endorsement and cooperation. This latter point is exemplified by Joseph Mankiewicz's controversial adaptation of Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Overturning existing scholarship, which argues that CIA officer Edward Lansdale played a decisive role in transforming the screenplay of Greene's novel, this article suggests that Mankiewicz's alterations were made primarily to appease the Production Code Administration.

James E. Cronin, The World The Cold War Made. Order, Chaos and the Return of History (New York and London: Routledge, 1996, £15.99). Pp. 344. ISBN 0 0415 90821 3.

Richard M. Fried, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold War America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, £25.00). Pp. 220. ISBN 0 19 507020 8.

Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron. Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, £25.00). Pp. 554. ISBN 0 521 64044 x.

Michael Kort (ed.), The Columbia Guide to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, £32.00). Pp. 366. ISBN 0 231 10772 2.

Joseph M. Siracusa, Into the Dark House. American Diplomacy and the Ideological Origins of the Cold War (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 1998, $36.95 cloth, $14.95 paper). Pp. 288. ISBN 0 941690 81 4, 0 941690 80 6.

There was a time not so long ago when it seemed that there was nothing new to be written about the origins of the Cold War. The topic appeared to have become stale, with the same battles being refought, along familiar lines. Cold War studies have not abated, however, and indeed have been reinvigorated by a number of developments. The writer on American involvement in the Cold War now has to consider how to integrate Eastern bloc material into their work, and the developing theses of scholars from other Western nations, and from within the US to respond to the prevailing intellectual trend in much of academia to focus on ideology, culture and discourse.

In 1960, George Oppen and his wife Mary settled in New York City after a period of nine years of political exile in Mexico. Oppen was the author of a slim volume of poems entitled Discrete Series, published back in 1934 with a then highly desirable preface by Ezra Pound. Few of Oppen's contemporaries, however, would remember him now as a poet, and back in New York he was having to reckon with what he would term in a later interview “my rejection of poetry for twenty or twenty-five years.”. For only at the end of the fifties, at the very end of the period spent in Mexico, had Oppen begun to write again. Success would come to him later in the decade, with the award of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, but, for the time being, as Oppen observed of the rather similar case of Basil Bunting, he felt as if he had returned to poetry “as from the dead.”

“A disgrace to the State of Iowa”, moaned the Des Moines Register concerning the events that had transpired at Sioux City's Memorial Park Cemetery. On 28 August 1951, mourners had departed after paying their last respects to Sergeant First Class John Raymond Rice, an eleven-year veteran of the United States Army who had been killed in the Korean War, when cemetery officials halted the burial before the casket had entered the earth. Lots at Memorial Park, it turned out, had clauses in their contracts restricting burial to Caucasians, and Rice was Native American, a member of the Winnebago tribe. The insult enraged many Americans, including President Harry S. Truman, who soon arranged for the soldier's burial in Arlington National Cemetery.