A combination of social and cultural changes account for the popularity of, and the narrative permutations of class and gender in, the cross-class romance films of the 1930s. The analysis is based on a sample of eighty-five cross-class romance films released in the 1929–39 period. The films deal with a dilemma evident in the choice of partners: between interests of wealth and social status and the value of romantic, disinterested love, an ideal which had spread throughout the class structure. Gender distinctions are reinforced by narratives in which the wealthy male is redeemed by the poor female so that he can perform the appropriate male gender roles. When the female is wealthy, the poor male insists on her economic dependence on him. Films with gold diggers reached a peak in the early 1930s and provided imaginary solutions to social anxieties about class and gender among both women and men.

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory” (Nothing Ever Dies, 4). Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, begins his 2016 treatise on war and memory with these words. In the deftly named Nothing Ever Dies, Nguyen identifies the excesses of war in general and most notably the excess of the war named the Vietnam War in the US and the American War in Vietnam. There was excessive violence on the battlefields, which ranged throughout Southeast Asia, exceeding the national borders identified by the naming of the war. The experience of war and the meaning of war also exceeded the official dates of the war, chronologized differently by different historical actors but nevertheless used to conveniently bound war in time. Disregarding these official dates, the perpetrators, survivors, and witnesses of war (Nguyen points out that one can belong to more than one of these categories simultaneously) carry with them the memories and violence of war. They relive and reinterpret the war, fighting it again a second time through memory and memorialization.

In 1825, Harriet Beecher Stowe's father, Lyman Beecher, gave a series of six sermons which helped to launch the temperance movement. In these sermons, published in 1826 and much reprinted thereafter, Beecher used the slave trade as a moral yardstick for the evils of intemperance. In doing so, he built on the moral outrage which brought an end to the legal importation of African slaves in 1808, and further criminalized the trade in 1820 when it was declared piracy. Beecher concluded that, morally reprehensible as the slave trade had been, intemperance was the greater evil, for it did greater damage to the individual soul, and cast a wider shadow of suffering. “We have heard of the horrors of the middle passage, the transportation of slaves, the chains, the darkness, the stench, the mortality and living madness of wo, and it is dreadful,” Beecher noted before counting the human cost of bondage to alcohol:

Yes, in this nation there is a middle passage of slavery, and darkness, and chains, and disease, and death. But it is a middle passage, not from Africa to America, but from time to eternity; and not of slaves whom death will release from suffering, but of those whose sufferings at death do but just begin. Could all the sighs of these captives be wafted on one breeze, it would be loud as thunder. Could all their tears be assembled, they would be like the sea.

Given the rhetorical power of the comparison between the evils of chattel slavery and the evils of alcohol dependency, it is hardly surprising that Lyman Beecher's daughter, writing some thirty years later, would build on her father's work, inverting, in Dred, the import of the comparison.

Gillis set down his tan cardboard extension case and wiped his black, shining brow. Then slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw: Negroes at every turn; up and down Lenox Avenue, up and down 135th Street; big lanky Negroes, short, squat Negroes; black ones, brown ones, yellow ones; men standing idle on the curb, women, bundle-laden, trudging reluctantly homeward, children rattle-trapping about the sidewalks; here and there a white face drifting along, but Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere. There was assuredly no doubt of his whereabouts. This was Negro Harlem.

This is the first sighting of Harlem for King Solomon Gillis, the protagonist of Rudolph Fisher's story “City of Refuge,” published in 1925 in Atlantic Monthly. Gillis has fled the South after killing a white man, and comes to Harlem, “with the aid of a prayer and an automobile” (3) to escape being lynched. His arrival sees him propelled into a carnivorous city of disorienting sounds, speed and subways until, like “Jonah emerging from the whale” (3), he is burped up into a sunny, calm and all-black Harlem. The spectacle of a public space peopled by “Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere,” seems to hold a utopian promise: “In Harlem, black was white. You had rights that could not be denied you; you had privileges, protected by law. And you had money. Everybody had money…The land of plenty was more than that now; it was also the city of refuge” (4). However, this vision of plenty and security ultimately proves chimerical for the naïve Southerner who fails to see beyond the surface effects of the urban scene. For Fisher, the turned around, “black is white” world of Harlem involves complex issues of racial agency and identification which are central to the narrative of modernity associated with the experience of migration to the North. In his work – and in that of Bruce Nugent and Nella Larsen, which also form the basis of this article – we find a recurrent focus on the urban scene of Harlem as a space of spectacular and spectacularised desire, and an understanding of racial identity as contingent and performative within this space.

From the early 1960s to the early 1990s, a range of concerns about “brainwashing” in youth reeducation programs obfuscated professional and political discourse, influencing key outcomes that shaped the development of the troubled-teen industry in the United States. The most significant historical developments related to this controversy involved three different youth programs. In response to accusations of “brainwashing,” program executives created elaborate counterarguments and public-relations campaigns. Instead of working to address inherent risks associated with therapeutic reeducation, the brainwashing label obscured the potential for harm and enabled an unethical teen program industry.

During the early twentieth century – when the United States was receiving an influx of non-English-speaking immigrants, and “standardization” was a dominant, yet polarizing, concept – having a single national language that unified Americans became a controversial topic in public discourse. In The Odyssey of a Nice Girl, Ruth Suckow, like many authors at the time, used immigrant language as a foil for midwestern speech to demonstrate its “standard” Americanness. But, as this essay will show, by using other regional American dialects in a similar manner, she questioned how “Americanness” was being understood and recognized during this period in the United States.

In this article, I read the television shows The Sopranos and Breaking Bad to explore how an illegitimate economy represents a legitimate one. I argue that what holds these shows together in some proto-generic organization is that money functions as both a criminal outside to capital and a structural assertion that capital has no outside. Thus I claim that capital is best represented by its own double, that legitimate enterprise is best represented by illegitimate enterprise, but that representation is only efficacious because ultimately there is no capitalist activity that, for the right price, cannot become legitimate. I suggest we might best see fiction itself as a kind of liquidity, one of the forms that circulating capital takes, and thus representation and the potential for accumulation become theoretical cognates.

It is a curiosity of modern scholarship that the only general work on antebellum Southern Romanticism is Rollin G. Osterweis' Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, which has been in print since 1949, is still read, and still –if only for want of a competitor –used. Yet much has changed in understanding of the social and intellectual history of the Old South, and even more of the phenomenon of Romanticism. These changes, natural enough over the span of two intellectual generations, have made many of that book's presumptions questionable; so a second look at the problem seems worthwhile, to clear the ground and to indicate fresh directions. For Osterweis wrote within the assumptions of the 1940s about the nature and shortcomings of Romanticism. He was guided by Irving Babbitt, who scorned Romanticism as a puling and exaggerated passion instigated by Rousseau, a disaster for rational men: at best silly, as with the jousts of antebellum Virginia; at worst dangerous, as with the secession convention of South Carolina. But Osterweis was Babbitt with a difference. While Babbitt and, more weightily, Ernst Cassirer had thought that Romanticism had led the world astray and it was still astray, with Hitler the avatar of Hegel as chilling evidence, Osterweis cheerily regarded Romanticism as a movement that had expired with the nineteenth century, a fossil safe to mock. To this perspective, largely adopted from Jacques Barzun's Romanticism and the Modern Ego (1943), Osterweis added the view of Arthur Lovejoy, who had insisted that Romanticism, while possessing a core notion of diversity and flux, should most safely be regarded as multiple: there were Romanticisms, not a Romanticism.

“I consider the war of attempted secession, 1860–1865, not as a struggle of two distinct and separate peoples,” wrote Whitman in Specimen Days and Collect, “but a conflict (often happening, and very fierce) between the passions and paradoxes of one and the same identity.” He interpreted the Civil War as a violent expression of the persistent conflict between democratic and broadly anti-democratic tendencies within the one “identity” of American republicanism; and he emphasized that this conflict was as much a subtle feature of social and political life in the North as it was in more blatant form the underlying cause of the war between North and South.

The ante-bellum years had seen the political life of the North dominated by Democrats against whom, in “The Eighteenth Presidency,” Whitman had directed some of his coarsest and most unforgiving (if unpublished) invective:

Office-holders, office-seekers, robbers, pimps, exclusives, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men,…deaf men, pimpled men, scarr'd inside with the vile disorder, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth.

Indian activists have recently complained about the pernicious attentions of white Indian ‘experts’, but they are likely to endure these attentions so long as their people retain a distinct cultural identity and national status. Unlike anthropologists and administrators, historians have not shaped the public policies applied to the native Americans, and so their expertise has seemed comparatively harmless. Yet having played a considerable part in misrepresenting the Indians, scholars have a duty to set the record straight with a minimum of unprofessional moralizing.

Lewis Hine's child-labour photographs are among the best-known social-documentary photographs ever taken, yet historians have neglected his photography of children working on the streets of America's cities. This paper explores the disputed symbolism of Hine's street-labour photographs. Far from simply depicting another appalling form of child labour, Hine's child street labourers, and the newsboys he photographed in particular, represented a range of ideas from masculinity and entrepreneurial spirit to the dangers of the new urban life and the apparent ignorance of immigrant parents. The symbolic newsboy was often far removed from the reality of child street labour, but he became an important figure in discourse surrounding the nature of childhood and the organization of public space in the United States of the early twentieth century. In exploring these subjects, this article takes on a neglected part of American history, yet an important one. Studying child street labourers reveals much about children, their choices, and the urban environment in the United States during the Progressive Era.

Since Thoreau's reputation today rests largely on his grasp of concrete reality – on his ability to suggest what he called the ‘hard bottom and rocks’ of that reality in his prose – the connexion between his works and the theories of the mystic Swedenborg does not receive much attention. In recent studies of Thoreau, when the Swedish mystic appears in die text, the mention is commonly brief and dismissive: Thoreau's imagination is often defined in contra-distinction to that of the ‘saint’ of the Transcendentalists. Answering a friend's enquiry in 1856, Thoreau himself admitted that he had not read Swedenborg, ‘except to a slight degree’, but he also stated that he had the highest regard for the mystic's ‘wonderful knowledge of our interior and spiritual life’. The ‘wonderful knowledge’ to which Thoreau here refers was revealed to Thoreau, and to his age, in the theory of ‘correspondence’ between the ‘interior and spiritual’ and the exterior, natural – or material – world. To be aware of that wisdom, Thoreau did not need to read much in Swedenborg's own works, since die theory of correspondence was ' thanks to a number of interpreters ' in the air of New England when Thoreau was developing as a writer.

African Americans and Korean Americans have addressed Black–Korean encounters and responded to each other predominantly in their favorite genres: in films and rap music for African Americans and in novels and poems for Korean Americans. A case in point is the intertextuality between Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker. A comparative study of the two demonstrates that they are seminal texts of African American–Korean American dialogue and discourse for mutual understanding and harmonious relationships between the two races in the USA. This paper reads the African American film and the Korean American fiction as dialogic responses to the well-publicized strife between Korean American merchants and their African American customers in the late 1980s and early 1990s and as windows into a larger question of African American–Korean American relations and racialization in US culture. This study ultimately argues that the dialogue between Spike Lee's film and Chang-rae Lee's novel moves towards a possibility of cross-racial identification and interethnic coalition building.

Half a century before Jacob Riis and Jane Addams groped for the conscience of the nation with their exposures of urban misery, a few determined citizens were already fighting the long battle to liberate the huddled wretches of the cities. In Boston some of the techniques of the later social agencies were anticipated as early as the 1830s by Joseph Tuckerman's Association of Delegates from the Benevolent Societies, but it was New York City which really pointed the way to the future. In the twenty years before the Civil War a number of bodies were founded in the city which in time became permanent welfare institutions. They were in large part the products of conditions similar to those which produced the scientific philanthropy, Social Gospel, settlement house and other social movements of the late nineteenth century, and, like those movements, they anticipated many of the attitudes of the social workers of the Progressive era. It would be a mistake to press the parallel between ante-bellum reform and social Progressivism too far, but the two phenomena shared some common characteristics. Like many Progressives, the urban reformers of the ante-bellum years tended to come from pious middle-class backgrounds, and a number of them began life as missionaries before being drawn into social work. They were a fact-finding generation, investigating social problems with an unprecedented thoroughness, energetically uncovering evidence and compiling statistics with which to open the eyes of an indifferent public. They were very conscious of the social chasm between the rich and the poor and they did what they could to bridge it.

Commemorations of the burning of Atlanta and Columbia reveal the relationship of form and content in Confederate memory. Atlanta monuments announced civic rejuvenation to national audiences, particularly tourists. Columbia ruins lamented the fracture of local elites' political dominance. The divergent cultures informed Margaret Mitchell's fabrication of Lost Cause myth in Gone with the Wind (1936) and Elizabeth Boatwright Coker's excavation of Lost Cause legend in La Belle (1959). The decline of monuments and ruins contributed to the transformation of the Lost Cause into a different configuration of Confederate memory during the decade of the Civil War centennial.