This article traces the approach of moderate southern Senators toward domestic hunger and welfare in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Often overlooked in scholarly accounts, these Senators formed a significant minority of the southern delegation. Their behavior demonstrates both the continued possibilities of a more inclusive southern politics after the mid-1960s and the importance of moderate southerners to the Food Stamp Program's major expansion in the years after 1964. At the same time, however, these politicians opposed guaranteed-income schemes and endorsed “workfare” measures promoted by more conservative southerners that conditioned aid on participation in low-wage employment.

The subjects of these two books basically belonged to the same generation. Philip Rahv (1908–73) and Michael Gold (1894–1967) shared origins in the Jewish lower class, and rose to literary prominence during the Great Depression. But from the perspective of posterity, what especially links their names is the notion of “proletarian literature.” In novels and short stories, in sketches and poetry, in drama and reportage, the writers who generally accepted this label repudiated the genteel tradition that had crested in the late Victorian era. To be sure, that decorous era of belles lettres had always been contested. It had its outliers – most famously Mark Twain. The list of those who troubled the taste of the era also included, among younger writers, the barely housebroken Theodore Dreiser and Jack London.

This state-level study emphasizes the influence of local administration on welfare provision, even amidst a huge national New Deal effort. It interrogates John Steinbeck's allegation in “Starvation under the Orange Trees” that migrant children died avoidable deaths in Depression-era California because of discriminatory policies and apathetic officials. Steinbeck's reportage was a political vehicle for his own ends rather than accurate social history. But with hospital care being reserved for local residents and racialized inferior food rations provided to Mexican American children, California's Depression-era welfare system favoured white Californian children over those it categorized as “others,” with potentially deadly consequences.

Sumner Welles occupies a queer place in American history. Despite his prominence, his reputation among diplomatic historians has been overshadowed by the sex scandal that occasioned his demise. Conversely, he has attracted cursory attention from scholars of the history of sexuality. This article examines that historiographic dialectic. By analyzing literature about Welles, conducting a close reading of sources that catalogued Welles's sexuality, and applying an intersectional lens to the scandal that ended his career, this article seeks to redress historiographic misunderstandings and omissions about Welles. Additionally, this article explores ethical questions historians must contend with when analyzing historical queer figures.

This article explores the visual representation of gossip, rumourmongering, storytelling, and other analogues of oral exchange in mid twentieth-century small-town American visual narrative. I herein examine two key visual artists of the interwar period – photographer Ben Shahn and painter Norman Rockwell – and their place within the small-town narrative form, as well as Life magazine and its institutional small-town preoccupations. Considering Shahn's photographic work conducted as part of the Farm Security Administration to Rockwell's culturally dominant scenes of idyllic small-town life, I argue that both emphasize gossip's narratability despite their drastically different provenance. Opposing Shahn's scenes of Depression-era poverty with Rockwell's homogeneous vignettes of rural life, it will be concluded that gossip and oral exchange remained a vital narrative constituent for artists of the small town during the mid-twentieth century, and that its narrative significance cannot be overstated.

Although the Vatican pragmatically accepted the establishment of segregated Catholic institutions in the Jim Crow South during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, its condemnation of Nazi and fascist racism and espousal of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ rejected racial distinctions. This article argues that Rome's postwar transnational interest in countering international communism and appealing to the global South also encouraged its support for racial equality, integration and the civil rights movement, and denial of religious legitimacy to segregationists. Yet Catholic desegregation in the South was largely token and one-sided, and closed many black institutions.

In September 1991 Walt Disney's legal representatives in Israel sued prolific Israeli cartoonist Dudu Geva for using the figure of Donald Duck without permission. The case, which worked its way to the Israeli Supreme Court, sparked a broader conversation in Israel about the place of American cultural icons and idioms in Israeli life. While existing treatments emphasize Jewish Israeli optimism with American influence on their lives, the article demonstrates that some Jewish Israelis had a conflicted relationship with American hegemony, even as their state enjoyed unparalleled privilege under American patronage.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the modern safety bicycle and the cultures that surrounded it were global in scale. In tracing the use and adoption of the bicycle in the South, this article reveals the ways in which the everyday experiences of local culture intersected with the world. It argues that the subjectivity of riding a bicycle transformed the ways in which white southerners experienced, thought of, and imagined their region. The article contributes to two shifts in southern studies and the historiography of the New South. It brings recent discussions of the South in the world to the level of the everyday by tracing the experiences of a new technological mobility and its social and cultural worlds. In demonstrating the ways white southerners took up cycling culture, it also integrates the region into the global trends of mass culture that move beyond histories of popular culture in the New South focussed mostly on the region's relationship to the nation.

This article posits that the emergency shelter system which emerged in the 1970s, first as an informal network of local and faith-based assistance and then institutionalized by the late 1980s, was Washington, DC's third ghetto. Defining this “new,” visible homelessness in the context of the third ghetto exposes its points of convergence with the second ghetto in the increasing use of welfare hotels. This study revisits Arnold Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto to examine housing precarity and racial subordination in Washington, DC's first and second ghettos. Additionally, I argue that acknowledging the resilience of the black female heads of household (FHHs) living in the public housing of the 1970s and 1980s in the second ghetto and examining homeless families living in welfare hotels in connection with neoliberal policies and practices in homeless assistance service provision during the 1980s are essential to understanding the making of the third ghetto in Washington, DC.

Examining archival footage and documents about the cultural work of silent film during the 1910s and 1920s, this essay reveals the complicity of film with the work of organized Americanization at both federal and industrial levels. Specifically, it argues that early American cinema is complicit with and critical of Americanization, as it negotiates multiple new immigrant concerns. Joining the recent work of film and immigration historians, it argues that just as Americanization did not produce compliant citizens overnight, silent film as a new and powerful medium of persuasion could influence the new American viewers’ transformation only in part. Of particular interest is the use of film in industrial and educational contexts – which sometimes overlapped – purporting to both “educate” and Americanize the new immigrants to the US. It asks, what cultural work did silent film do for Americanization, the active and sometimes coercive campaign aiming to make new immigrants into good Americans? The films I read as case studies later in this essay – industrial, educational, and nontheatrical films such as An American in the Making (1913), The Making of an American (1920), and others – illustrate the potential of silent film both as mimesis (or representation of ideology) and as ideology.

This paper argues that Brown's sleepwalkers in Edgar Huntly offer us an early figuration for the problems inherent in the phenomenon we now refer to as “populism.” Both populism and sleepwalking function through paradoxical and incongruent forms of expression that appear incoherent. The most prominent explanations that account for this paradoxical form of expression rely on an analysis of the breakdown of discourse. However, this paper argues that the incongruous form of expression is rooted in the reconfiguration of the social arrangements that enable Clithero and Edgar to advance socially but also places them in proximity to social crises. The contradictions of this position of social mobility are the source of the contradictions of the expression of sleepwalking. In depicting a world that makes social identity precarious, Brown offers us an explanation for how such paradoxical modes of expression are rooted in unstable resolutions of post-revolutionary society.

This article examines one of the earliest novels of the Trump era, Salman Rushdie's The Golden House (2017), as part of a literary corpus that felt compelled to respond to the derealization of political culture by producing fictions commensurate to the new “American reality.” Spanning the years from the first inauguration of Obama to the election of Trump, the novel depicts a nation that has “left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe,” a turn to fantasy that precedes the final irruption of a wealthy vulgarian who calls himself the Joker, and who subverts any previous sense of identity and of what is “real.” Drawing from the notion of national fantasy as argued by Lauren Berlant (1991), Jacqueline Rose (1996), and Donald Pease (2009), the article suggests that Rushdie's novel performs and invites a rare self-examination in the context of early literary responses to the rise of Trumpism.

Exploring sanitation in postwar Los Angeles, this article argues that as white voluntary groups formed task forces to clean up the city, they endangered Mexican and black Angelinos by endorsing solutions to urban welfare defined by antistatism and carceralism. I read these activities through the lens of white ignorance, whereby white Americans elaborated folk knowledge of successful urbanism on their own terrain and terms, which had no capacity to attend to other classes and races. I treat white ignorance not as a cognitive defect or proxy for innocence, but rather as a structural condition of postwar urban political economy.

The origin stories of Irish America have been core narratives within the “making-of-America” discourse of the nation's founding and development and were especially potent in the cementing, in the mid-twentieth century, of the idea of the US as “a nation of immigrants.” It is an idea that has done significant psychological as well as cultural and political work for white ethnics in the US, glossing important elements of whiteness as a racial formation, mystifying its oppressive qualities and its particularistic claims to identity and values. It has informed the complex ways in which Irish Americans have reconciled their identities in the present with prejudice and discrimination in the past. The story of “how the Irish became white” has been popularly glossed as an ethnic achievement, periodically reclaiming otherness, while eliding the politics of racial power and privilege. Today, as ethnonationalism surges through the mainstream of American politics and culture, unsettling the hegemony of liberal whiteness, Irishness has become a floating signifier of white anger and angst. Perhaps the story we need to tell now is not how the Irish became white but how white folks in the US have become Irish.

The article studies African American narratives of indigenous captivity from its emergence in the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Taking accounts by Briton Hammon, John Marrant, Henry Bibb, and James Beckwourth as examples, the essay charts the development of this body of writings, its distinction from white-authored narratives, and its contribution to North American autobiography. In so doing, the article argues that the black-authored texts strategically employed only certain elements of the Indian captivity narrative and that they blended these with aspects of other types of Western autobiography to claim black people's agency and discursive authority in white-dominated print culture.

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.

The Scopes trial has long been interpreted through claims about science and religion and about individual rights and liberties. This article recovers a different debate about the trial's political history that emerged in the later 1920s and resonated down the twentieth century. Here the trial figured as a fraught national circus, which raised difficult questions about the relationship between media spectacle and cultural conflict in the United States. The trial's circus dynamics intensified the conflicts it staged without ever actually resolving them; this trap was then perceived and negotiated in different ways by contemporary liberals, conservatives, socialists, and far-right activists.

Isaac Hayes provides a vital public figure through which scholars can analyze, evaluate, and more fully understand the comprehensive nature of the black freedom struggle as it progressed into the 1970s. Hayes merged the integrationist political objectives of mainstream civil rights organizations and leaders with the notions of racial pride, assertiveness, and autonomy that characterized the popular appeal of the black power movement. Hayes, through his “Black Moses” persona and LP of the same name, moved those freedom struggle promises and opportunities into the cultural realm, where he personified African American artistic self-determination. In doing so, he demonstrated that the contemporary conceptualization of black masculinity was not monolithic, as Hayes introduced and embodied an ideal that countered the prevailing notion of black manhood which pervaded popular culture and remains a central component of popular memory concerning black power. Most importantly, Isaac Hayes embodied a model of black masculinity that contradicted the prevailing “black macho” ideal. “Black Moses,” therefore, embodied the freedom of African Americans to move beyond contemporary racial classifications in a cultural capacity and presents scholars with an intriguing model through which to examine the evolution, possibilities, and accomplishments of the post-1960s American black freedom struggle.

This article shows how and why some free black families ended up living among the enslaved in the late antebellum era. Enslavers brought free people of colour into forms of informal quasi-slavery that differed little from enslavement despite their free legal status. Despite a lack of evidence, piecing together free blacks’ experiences through surviving sources reveals much about the porous boundary between slavery and freedom where enslavers manipulated marginality for financial gain. There was no sharp delineation between slavery and freedom but instead a continuum of oppression characterized by varying degrees of persecution and fragile freedoms.

This article examines how Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement with which he is often synonymous are taught in UK schools, as well as the consequences of that teaching for twenty-first-century understandings of Britain's racial past and present. The UK's King-centric approach to teaching the civil rights movement has much in common with that in the US, including an inattention to its transnational coordinates. However, these shared (mis)representations have different histories, are deployed to different ends, and have different consequences. In the UK, study of the African American freedom struggle often happens in the absence of, and almost as a surrogate for, engagement with the histories of Britain's own racial minorities and imperial past. In short, emphasis on the apparent singularity of US race relations and the achievements of the mid-twentieth-century African American freedom struggle facilitates cultural amnesia regarding the historic and continuing significance of race and racism in the UK. In light of the Windrush scandal and the damning 2018 Royal Historical Society report on “Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History,” this article argues both for better, more nuanced and more relevant teaching of King and the freedom struggle in British schools, and for much greater attention to black British history in its own right.