One of the darkest aspects of U.S. history and culture is encapsulated in crime perpetrated by law enforcement officials. In fact, police abuse of power has long been a footnote in analyses of governments' monopoly on legitimated violence. The history of modern policing itself indicates long-standing concern with excessive, sometimes brutal, control over citizens by law enforcement agents. Such concerns have been articulated variously over time by the public, academics, the press, and within law enforcement ranks. Much of this concern turns on perception, for police malfeasance is notoriously shrouded behind a “blue wall,” well-meaning law enforcement officials are genuinely interested in public perceptions of their services, and news of police malpractice flares selectively and variously across time.

Thomas Dewey, the progressive Republican governor of New York from 1942 to 1954 famously “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory” in the presidential election of 1948. It was an election that everyone, with the possible exception of Harry S. Truman, had expected Dewey to win. Truman, like much of the historiography, credited his victory to the farm vote, and this was undoubtedly an important factor, but it is clear that without the votes of African Americans Truman could not have won. This piece will examine why Dewey lost, surveying his record on civil rights as governor (arguably the best in the nation) and his abject failure to convert, indeed, to even attempt to convert, this record into African American votes in 1948. This failure is made more curious by the fact that he was constantly being warned by African American Republicans and his closest confidante about the pivotal nature of the African American vote. Yet Dewey, a notoriously lethargic campaigner, would ignore their admonishments.

No one did more to sanctify and enshrine the image of Abraham Lincoln than Walt Whitman. The poet never met the president, but he embraced his image and claimed him as his own. In his “Death of Abraham Lincoln” speech, delivered on numerous occasions during the last 20 years of his life, Whitman involved himself in the cultural work of national definition, of posterity and legacy. He helped bridge the gap between complex personal history and official public memory. In service to the larger, national idea of union, democracy and selfless Americanism, Whitman's Lincoln, when compared to, for example Herndon's Life of Lincoln (1889), razed the contours of ambiguity and established the exemplary image of the “Martyr Chief.” The connection is both apt and ironic. What Whitman did for Lincoln in the aftermath of his death, others would do for the poet. Since Whitman's death in 1892, the poet's life and ideas have often been radically simplified; on other occasions his words have been recontextualized and appropriated to support a variety of different causes, concerns and ideologies. A driving factor in this process has been that, like Lincoln, Whitman's name carries with it a certain legitimacy. To evoke the approval of Whitman is to learn of the authority of an ideal, more perfect, America. And where Lincoln's name is inseparable from the American Civil War, Whitman has become most strongly associated with the metropolitan idea of New York, and Brooklyn in particular.

The critical appraisal of the 1950s organised society is well established in such now-classic texts such as David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), C. Wright Mills's White Collar (1951) and William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956). These works exposed the group-orientated, “other-directed” corporate personality, motivated by an extreme desire to belong, as a precarious foundation for individual security. If not considered from an explicitly masculine perspective, the emasculating connotations of this model of occupational identity were nevertheless evident in Mills's conception of the white-collar “little man,” Riesman's definition of the “limp” and “exceptionally sensitive” other-directed personality and Whyte's characterisation of the organisation man as the unobtrusive “man in the middle.” Collectively, the depiction of white-collar masculinity in these texts helped create the context for the stereotypical perception of 1950s business enterprise as a breeding ground for conformity and troubled male identity. Less appreciated, however, is the business community's response to this critical appraisal.

In February 1941, thirty male San Quentin prisoners petitioned Governor Culbert Levy Olson of California (the state's first Democrat governor in the twentieth century) to stop the execution of Eithel Leta Juanita Spinelli, “a merciless gang leader called the Duchess,” who had been convicted, along with her common-law husband and another male accomplice, of the murder of nineteen-year-old Robert Sherrard. All three defendants were sentenced to die in the gas chamber. Former San Quentin warden, Clinton T. Duffy, remembered Spinelli as “the coldest, hardest character, male or female” that he had “ever known,” and utterly lacking in “feminine appeal.” Thus the presentation of a jailhouse petition to save her from the gas chamber rather perplexed him, and he remained firm in his belief that the majority of San Quentin's inmates were unconcerned by the impending execution. Nonetheless, the petitioners argued that Spinelli should not be executed and offered to take her place either in the death chamber, or to serve out her life term in the event of a commutation of sentence. According to Duffy, the prisoners asserted “that Mrs. Spinelli's execution would be repulsive to the people of California; that no woman in her right mind could commit the crime charged to her; that the execution of a woman would hurt California in the eyes of the world; that both the law and the will of the people were against the execution; that Mrs. Spinelli, as the mother of three children, should have special consideration; that California's proud record of never having executed a woman should not be spoiled”.

“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.

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” Toni Morrison, Beloved.

Freud's psychoanalytic theories of fear of castration and penis-envy transformed woman into not-man, thus defining her as “other” and “lacking.” His studies also gave a sexual component to relationships among women, marking them as potentially lesbian and hence deviant. Medical men of Victorian England and America consciously or unconsciously helped to justify gender roles and women's seclusion in the domestic on the grounds that their specific physiology made them slaves of their reproductive system. As women's ovaries presumably controlled their lives and their behavior, genitals determined social roles, and doctors urged mothers to remind their daughters that any deviation from their “natural” and legitimate functions as wives and mothers could ruin their health forever. The cult of True Womanhood conveniently idealized maternity and defined the virtues of obedience, piety, and passivity as essentially feminine, while it condemned the desire for an education or the practice of birth control as unnatural and dangerous to women and to the whole of society. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, hysteria became the most fashionable of the so-called “female maladies” among middle- and upper-class women, a fact that illustrates how physicians failed to dissociate scientific evidence from social views of the period. Victorian psychologists and gynecologists mimicked contemporary male attitudes, which sanctioned the doctrine of separate spheres, while affectionate bonds between women were regarded with suspicion, as they could lead to homosexuality.

In 1964 US Surgeon General Luther L. Terry published a report on smoking and health which concluded that “Cigarette smoking is a health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States to warrant appropriate remedial action.” Publication of this report marked the beginning of contemporary governmental efforts to control smoking. Over the next 40 years a range of legislative and regulatory action at all levels of government sought to restrict an activity that had become widely identified as the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. Warning labels were required on cigarette packages, restrictions placed on advertising, controls introduced on the sale of cigarettes, lists of additives in cigarettes submitted to the federal government, excise taxes increased, and restrictions introduced on smoking in public places. Efforts to assert some control over the content of cigarettes, however, were unsuccessful. Exemptions for tobacco products can be found in virtually all federal consumer safety laws.

In November 1954, Eugene “Gene” Hood, a former executive of North Carolina's Cone Mills, wrote an unsolicited letter to Wesley Critz George, Emeritus Professor of Histology and Embryology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Hood was writing in his capacity as de facto leader of an enclave of hard-line segregationists, based in North Carolina's Piedmont region. Six months had passed since the Supreme Court's Brown decision had effectively rendered segregation unconstitutional, and Hood and his colleagues were becoming increasingly agitated by the lack of an organised, coherent response to the Court's edict in the Tar Heel State. The Piedmont segregationists, a disparate group of lawyers and businessmen, refused to be cast as pariahs in the wake of Brown. Rather, they believed that a sizeable majority of white North Carolinians shared their views on the continued segregation of the races, and, moreover, that a significant number of them would be willing to join a crusade for all-out resistance to federally mandated desegregation. The group's overarching problem was one of trying to devise a strategy that would harness that pro-segregation opinion for maximum effect. On 22 November, after another round of discussions between the group members provided no satisfactory answers, Hood decided that it was time to seek an external stimulus. “I am convinced that we need a state-wide organization,” he wrote to George, “and I am wondering if you and your associates would consider doing something along that line.”

Shortly after 7 o'clock on the morning of 20 April 1962, Louis and Dorothy Boyd arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. The journey from their native New Orleans had taken forty-three hours. With the Boyds were their eight children, five girls and three boys aged between three and twelve years old. Between them the family carried their entire worldly possessions in three cardboard boxes and an old foot locker.

If one forgets the past, he will not be prepared for the future.

The Militia of Montana

YES! TODAY JUST AS YESTERDAY.

The Michigan Militia

When the militia movement emerged in the United States during the mid 1990s its members were widely seen as simply the latest practitioners of what Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics.” There was much comfort to be had in this characterization. It fitted the militia movement into a long-standing model for understanding right-wing extremism in American life, one in which the principal characteristics of such extremism were readily understood: conspiratorial, Manichean, absolutist – if not apocalyptic – and, of course, paranoid. The problem with this approach, though, is that it tends to discourage any examination of mainstream culture's role in the creation or sustaining of those defined as extremists. It downplays the extent to which the pool of ideological resources employed by the extreme right exists not just on the margins of American life, but also in the very fabric of the American ideology. Little attempt is made to explore the extent to which the ideas and beliefs of these “extremists” are related to, and are drawn from, key periods in US history: from the American Revolution, the period of the constitutional settlement or the settling of the American West, for example. Yet such ideas and beliefs are absolutely central to how groups like the militias see themselves and the world around them.

Popular perceptions of Edna St. Vincent Millay do not generally see her as a poet interested in so-called “domestic poetry.” On the contrary, Millay is most commonly described as the female embodiment of the rebellious spirit that marked the 1920s, the “New Woman” of early twentieth-century feminism. Until the late 1970s, the subject of domesticity seemed incompatible with the celebrated images of Millay's “progressiveness,” “rebelliousness,” or “originality.” But then again, by the 1970s Millay was no longer seen as particularly rebellious or original, and the fact that she had also contributed to the tradition of domestic poetry was not to her advantage. Domesticity may have been an important issue for second-wave feminists, but it was discussed rather selectively and, outside feminist circles, Millay was hardly ever mentioned by literary critics. The taint of “traditionalism” did not help Millay's cause, and the poet's lifelong exploration of sexuality, femininity and gender stereotypes was somehow not enough to generate sophisticated critical analyses. Since Millay seemed to be a largely traditional poet and a “politically incorrect” feminist model, second-wave feminists preferred to focus on other figures, classified as more modern and more overtly subversive. Scholarly recognition of Millay's significance within the canon of modern American poetry did not really begin until the 1990s.

“How much longer,” Edith Wharton lamented in a July 1919 letter to Barrett Wendell, “are we going to think it necessary to be ‘American’ before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?” She was having her publishers send him her most recent book, French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), a collection of essays written in large part to instruct her compatriots in the ways of an exemplary civilization. Wharton's complaint found its way into her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence, which she began working on soon after French Ways was published; though in this instance it was voiced from a different quarter and had potentially radical implications.

On 30 December 1963, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) executive committee approved Bob Moses' proposal for a summer voter registration project involving hundreds of white volunteers. Initially intended to highlight the brutality inherent in Mississippi's culture and to register large numbers of disfranchised black voters, the plans expanded to include more long term and holistic methods of addressing civil rights that encompassed what SNCC and its sister organizations in Mississippi called “educational and social” programmes. As freedom schools co-ordinator Liz Fusco asserted, this represented an acceptance that what could be done in Mississippi, could be deeper, more fundamental, more far-reaching, more revolutionary than voter registration alone … [It was] a decision to enter into every phase of the lives of the people of Mississippi … a decision to set the people free for politics in the only way that people really can become free, and that is totally. Freedom schools were central to SNCC's programme. Both institutions emphasized that knowledge of one's culture was crucial to the individual. In the case of the freedom schools, students would be encouraged to think freely and develop their own ideas about a free society. Charles Cobb, who conceived the idea of the freedom schools, envisaged the schools to be places “where the students could freely ask questions about all those things, political as well as academic, which troubled and excited them.”

Online diaries are at once thoroughly familiar and intensely new. Their publication on the Internet may be seen as upholding a long tradition in self-representational writing even as information technology modifies the forms and functions of such texts. Studying online diaries from a literary standpoint may therefore shed light on the development of new forms of writing, and contribute to assessing the extent of this transformation and its meaning. At the same time, viewing online diaries as primary sources may afford insight into the mores of ordinary people in contemporary America. Focusing on anonymous American diarists makes it possible to explore how this contemporary social practice reflects the transformations of the heartland in present-day America, how ordinary women and men, average Americans, make sense of their society and can be seen as representative of American culture, while at the same time engaging in the most personal kind of writing.

Between September 1964 and April 1971, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a domestic covert action program named COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE. This counterintelligence program endeavored to discredit, disrupt, and vitiate the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist vigilante organizations. While historians are quite familiar with the FBI's efforts to nurture anticommunism and to discredit civil rights and leftist movements, the FBI's role in discrediting KKK groups in the American South during the late 1960s has not been systematically assessed. This article provides an analysis of the first aspect of this three-pronged attack. It describes how the FBI secretly coordinated efforts to discredit Klan organizations before local Southern communities that continued to tolerate vigilante violence. Intelligence information on Klan activities, provided discretely by the FBI to liberal Southern journalists, politicians and other molders of public opinion, helped those white Southerners who were opposed to Ku Klux Klan activity to transform their private dismay into public rebuke and criminal prosecutions. The article also analyzes corresponding COINTELPRO operations that discredited Ku Klux Klan leaders before rank-and-file Klan members. FBI agents and their clandestine informants circulated discrediting information about KKK leaders among rank and file Klan members, inculcating disillusionment among Klansmen and prompting resignations from Klan organizations.

Considered by many to be the most American part of America, the Midwest occupies a unique place in the national psyche, and its residents have been called the archetypal or quintessential Americans. The region is – and was – anything but homogenous, and any adequate treatment of it needs to take into account its many variations, complexities, and paradoxes. Any search for the essential character of the region soon founders on recognition of its cultural diversity. Yet, acknowledgment of the hazards of advancing broad generalizations about a region extending from Ohio to the Dakotas and ranging as far south as Missouri should not bar us from inquiring into the qualities and characteristics of its people. Despite the contradictions and complexities attaching to the region, the Midwest possesses a distinctive cultural identity, joining its constituent elements in an unstable and constantly changing, but nevertheless recognizable, pattern.

Excavation at Night (1908), George Bellows' second painting of the construction work undertaken for Pennsylvania Street Station, offers a dramatic depiction of the site that took up two full New York city-blocks. Bellows' decision to paint a nocturnal scene is vital to both the dramatic effect of the painting and its capacity to make an assertion about the ways in which the excavation could be perceived. In Electrifying America, David Nye suggests that the coming of electricity created the possibility of a new form of visual rhetoric. By making it possible to illuminate specific areas of the nocturnal city, electric light facilitated the privileging and deprivileging of certain spaces. By illuminating, and thus privileging, particular areas of the canvas, Bellows implements a similar rhetoric in Excavation at Night. Thus, illuminated by powerful electric lights, the snow covered far wall of the excavation and the row of buildings above it are placed in contrast, and possibly in opposition, with the man silhouetted by the light of the bonfire near the bottom edge of the canvas. The dramatic force of Bellows' “bravura” style raises the stakes in this contrast or opposition between the small-scale human activity around the fire and the large urban story of the excavation. In this article I intend to theorise Bellows' handling of smallness as an “anecdotal mode,” to suggest that “anecdote” may function both negatively and positively, and to show that this mode becomes particularly problematic when it is applied to city scenes.

The HBO television series The Sopranos, produced by David Chase, achieved unprecedented critical acclaim and quickly established itself on both sides of the Atlantic as cult viewing. The fourth series, shown in the UK on Channel 4 in spring 2003, had already attracted record audiences in America and received 13 Emmy Award nominations. Not surprisingly, The Sopranos has generated several web sites and a considerable amount of literature, ranging from the usual spin-offs of television series, cds, scripts, collected reviews, and a number of more academic studies ranging from cultural studies through to explorations of the psychological aspects of the programme. At least one MA has been written dealing with the portrayal of psychotherapy in this series and in films. This is not as remarkable as it might seem given that therapy is central to the whole story. The main character, Tony Soprano (played by James Gandolfini), is the head of an Italian–American family living in New Jersey. However, like his name itself, “family” has a double meaning. Tony is also the head of a Mafia-style gang of mobsters, operating a “waste management company” and night club (The Bada Bing!). The two roles of family head are explored when Tony talks (or “sings”) to a psychiatrist (in addition to his gang-land counsellors) as a result of his anxiety attacks and depression. Thus, Tony Soprano, mobster, is presented as a troubled family man – troubled by his relationships with his wife, daughter, and son, and their futures, but also troubled by business rivalries and problems that arise from the nature of his “work” and colleagues. As one commentator writes, Tony is the subject of “profound moral ambiguity” and it is his struggle to come to terms with this that makes it possible for viewers to identify with him. It is also the focus of his sessions with the therapist, Dr Melfi (played by Lorraine Bracco).

Early histories of the civil rights movement that appeared prior to the 1980s were primarily biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr. Collectively, these works helped to create the familiar “Montgomery to Memphis” narrative framework for understanding the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. This narrative begins with King's rise to leadership during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, and ends with his 1968 assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. Since the 1980s, a number of studies examining the civil rights movement at local and state levels have questioned the usefulness and accuracy of the King-centric Montgomery to Memphis narrative as the sole way of understanding the civil rights movement. These studies have made it clear that civil rights struggles already existed in many of the communities where King and the organization of which he was president, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), ran civil rights campaigns in the 1960s. Moreover, those struggles continued long after King and the SCLC had left those communities. Civil rights activism also thrived in many places that King and the SCLC never visited. As a result of these local and state studies, historians have increasingly framed the civil rights movement within the context of a much longer, ongoing struggle for black freedom and equality, unfolding throughout the twentieth century at local, state and national levels. More recently, a number of books have sought to place the civil rights movement within the larger context of international relations. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott next year, the event that launched King's movement leadership, it seems an appropriate point to return to the existing literature on King and to assess what has already been done, as well as to point to the gaps that still need to be filled, in what remains important field of study.