He was born in 1893 in the New York brownstone house near Washington Square where he lived all his adult life, a member of Edith Wharton's settled, circumscribed world of ordered privilege whose affluent, well-travelled, and sophisticated men and women traced their lineage back to the Founding Fathers and their principles to the American Revolution. His father was an artist who served as Consul General to Italy, and Armstrong was brought up in a milieu which took for granted the fact that there existed a world outside the United States. He died in 1973, as the United States finally withdrew from the Vietnam War, a conflict which deeply distressed him and shattered the foreign policy elite and its controlling consensus, whose creation had been a major part of his life's work. In an obituary notice Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., described him as “a New York gentleman of a vanishing school,” who “treated every one, old or young, famous or unknown, with the same generous courtesy and concern.”

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.”

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.

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.

This article examines the place of the past in Charles Sheeler's photographs and paintings made in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, around 1917, in New York City during the 1920s, and in the short film of New York, Manhatta (1921), which he made with the photographer Paul Strand. It situates these works in the context of the scholarship on Sheeler and on the art of New York in the early twentieth century, in particular that of the Ashcan School and of visual representation which attends to the architectural fabric of the city in preference to depicting its inhabitants. The article argues that although the scholarship has identified Sheeler's interest in making connections with the American past, it has not recognized the fraught nature of that relationship. By looking at the Doylestown and New York pictures, the analysis demonstrates how the problematic status of the past for Sheeler appears in these works as hauntings and absences.

Don Lee reworked his eight magazine stories to varying degrees, arranged the sequence of the stories in a specific order, and published a short-story cycle in 2001. Significantly, the writer changed the ethnic identity of some characters from white American to Asian American. He also added and highlighted Asian American themes and issues. In short, Lee made an “Asian American” short-story cycle par excellence by coloring his stories yellow. This essay examines Lee's rewriting and arrangement of his magazine stories for an Asian American short-story cycle. It first compares the differences between the magazine and cycle versions of the stories. It goes on to examine totalizing devices such as the common setting, recurrent places, connective characters, and unifying themes. Lastly, it elucidates the arrangement of the eight stories and significance of the title story in the cycle. It ultimately argues that Don Lee retrofitted his magazine stories extensively and meticulously for a short-story cycle in order to portray the diverse aspects of post-immigrant Asian America at the turn of the century from his positionality as a third-generation Korean American.

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.

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.

The curious case of So This Is Africa (Columbia, 1933) shows that both Hollywood's in-house censors and state and local censors took seriously cinematic violations of racial and sexual norms. This spoof of “jungle” films exploited audience interest in a cycle of fictional and nonfictional depictions of “primitive” life. These films claimed partial exemption from taboos against sexual and racial boundary-crossing, and usually showed unclothed “native” women. But So This Is Africa went further. However farcical, its suggestions of adultery, interracial sex, homosexuality, and even bestiality raised an unusually large storm among the censors. Cut by one-third, the film still outraged many and helped precipitate the industry's creation of the Production Code Administration, designed to police the screen more tightly.

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.

It is customary to associate Jonathan Edwards with the town of Northampton. That he was born in East Windsor (Conn.), was graduated from Yale College in New Haven, served a Presbyterian church in New York City, wrote his great treatises – A Careful and Strict Enquiry into … Freedom of Will (1754) and The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin (1758) – in Stockbridge (Mass.), and died as president of the College of New Jersey in Princeton does not mitigate the local association. For it was in Northampton where Edwards came of age theologically. He served as its minister from 1729 to 1750, following his grandfather Solomon Stoddard, who had served the same parish for the preceding sixty years. As with the one, so with the other: Northampton was Stoddard and it was also Edwards, a dynasty holding sway for over eighty years and commanding the religious spirit up and down the length of the Connecticut Valley.

Professor Erik Erikson was more than justified in 1950 when he asserted that the work he produced on childhood and society was one concerning historicprocesses. He began by documenting certain childhood experiences which he took to be universal, and he continued by urging upon his readers speculative extrapolations that might be seen to apply to society as a whole. Erikson suggested that human beings progressed normally through a chronology of eight ages, the first of which, experienced by infants, involved a psychological dichotomy reflecting the infant's feelings of what he called “basic trust vs. basic mistrust” of the exterior world. Essentially, this early experience, as described by Erikson, was one of tension between a sense of cogency, continuity, and sustenance in the outside world, and an opposite sense that the outer world was unfaithful in its appearances and liable to aberrations in the expected order of things. This antithetical reality, he supposed, was replayed in the wider social institutions of adult life. Experiences of a positive cast, such as basic trust, were so elemental and psychologically crucial that they “bore a special relation to one of the basic elements of society,” and were, thus, re-lived by individuals through the vehicle of some contemporary institution. The past essential crisis, consequently, was eternally present, and historical developments in institutions, to a certain extent, were replays of elemental childhood experiences.

We all well know that American Studies offers a particularly fascinating and complex example of the difficulties and challenges involved in an interdisciplinary and area studies approach. There may, indeed, be an element of chance in the fact that this touches so sharply on the links that can be established between literature and other studies (literature and sociology, literature and history): the chance that literature was somehow in there from the beginning, in the early days of the subject, and has still held its place in the area-studies map. So, when Henry Nash Smith asked us once if American Studies could develop a method, he looked for his answer in the intervening ground between literary criticism and sociology; and though he found it hard to arrive at his desired method, he suggested that it would lie in some form of cultural anthropology. The divisions between the various disciplines–above all, the varying roles they allowed to consciousness in their interpretation of society and culture–seemed to him to pose profound problems. So, he said, a new method would have to come piecemeal, through a kind of principled opportunism; but he did assume that we could want to turn to works of literature, and the complex interactions between a writer and his environment that constitute a whole literary career, as an important centre of the study, a significant expression of the culture. The problems in fact are large, since in liberal-democratic society literature performs some of the most complex contours of art that have ever existed. But that very fact is part of the interest of the problem and, while Professor Smith's approach raises certain difficulties, on some of which the first part of the present argument turns, I am happy to take the issue raised–that literature can be seen as a social manifestation, that as a creative manifestation it does uniquely reveal central aspects of a culture–as a very important one.

In 1865, when Americans asked, “ What shall be done about the freed Negro? ” few of them realized that the question was a fragment of a larger one, “ What shall be done to define and secure the rights of all Americans? ” For despite its regional variations, slavery had a more coherent legal identity than freedom. There were as many different standards of citizenship as there were state and local laws regulating the ownership of property, personal mobility, the criminal code, family relationships, and court procedures. Travel from one state to another could considerably alter a person's legal standing. Even in the one state there was no unitary concept of citizenship and many Americans knew a kind of freedom which would not serve the freed slave well as a model. Married women were severely restricted in their contractual capacity and hence in their freedom to earn a living or own and dispose of property. In some states they had few custodial rights over their children and in others none. They were limited in their access to judicial remedies by laws and customs which prevented them bringing suit in some instances, restricted their right to testify, prohibited their service on juries, and even “ protected ” them from answering for some crimes for which the law held their husbands responsible. Free Negroes in the ante-bellum North, paupers of all races in all states, and Chinese settlers on the West Coast could all have furnished examples of the way in which discriminatory state legislative classifications deprived them of rights. The states operated a sliding scale of citizenship rights which routinely placed some and potentially could place all Americans at a considerable distance from what Republicans argued in 1866 were the rights of all.