At the close of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985), a novel which exploits the conventions of slave narrative to dramatize gendered rather than racial oppressions, a set of “Historical Notes,” the partial transcript of a lecture in 2195 by Professor Pieixoto, the editor of the text, provides a wicked satire on academic commodification. Professor Pieixoto, a major scholar from Cambridge, who is slumming it at the University of Denay, Nunavit, is introduced obsequiously by the fawning Professor Maryann Crescent Moon, and proceeds to patronize his chairperson, his audience and his eponymous subject, demonstrating that patriarchal prejudice remains almost unchanged over the centuries. Pieixoto analyses the technology of the tapes on which a story was recorded, considers the possibility of forgery, earnestly discusses the possibility of using musical traces as dating devices, attempts to trace the history of the house where the tapes were found and offers a great deal of information about each of the two men who might have been the handmaid's master, but discovers absolutely nothing about the handmaid herself: not her name, not her origins, not even whether she escaped from bondage. Pieixoto is sharing the conference podium with Professor Sieglinda Van Buren from the Department of Military History at the University of San Antonio, Republic of Texas. Clearly, despite the presence at the conference of women professors and ethnic minority speakers (Professor Johnny Running Dog, for example), not much has changed, and the supposed admission of women and minorities to the academic mainstream is merely a smokescreen for their continued domination.

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.”

While it is not the practise of the Journal of American Studies to have editorials, this issue marks an exception. We celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS), the academic organization which sponsors the Journal, and whose members receive the Journal as one of the benefits of membership. Most practitioners of American studies in the United Kingdom belong to the BAAS, giving it a truly interdisciplinary membership united by interest in the United States as a site of academic study. Members are drawn principally from the ranks of historians, litterateurs, political scientists and analysts of popular culture, along with some geographers, sociologists and economists. Its annual conference draws participants from many nations and at all levels of the academic hierarchy.

In his long critical essay entitled simply “Hawthorne” (published in 1879), Henry James narrates the story of his own coming to know Hawthorne's most famous work of fiction, The Scarlet Letter. Speaking in an impersonal third person, James, “who was a child at the time,” explains that he

remembers dimly the sensation that book produced, and the little shudder with which people alluded to it, as if a peculiar horror were mixed in its attractions. He was too young to read it himself, but its title, upon which he fixed his eyes as the book lay upon the table, had a mysterious charm. … Of course it was difficult to explain to a child the significance of poor Hester Prynne's blood-coloured A. But the mystery was at last partly dispelled by his being taken to see a collection of pictures (the annual exhibition of the National Academy), where he encountered a representation of a pale, handsome woman, in a quaint black dress and white coif, holding between her knees an elfish-looking little girl, fantastically dressed and crowned with flowers. Embroidered on the woman's breast was a great crimson A, over which the child's fingers, as she glanced strangely out of the picture, were maliciously playing. I was told that this was Hester Prynne and little Pearl, and that when I grew older I might read their interesting history.

The years following the Second World War, according to the Norwegian scholar Sigmund Skard, witnessed the “Rediscovery of America,” as European academics belatedly turned their attention to the United States at a time when its pre-eminent global role could not be ignored. In Britain some believed that the awakening was already under way, the Principal of what became Exeter University having described 1941 as the year of the British “discovery of America.” The jarring realization that the very survival of Britain depended on a close alliance with the American giant had precipitated not only frenetic governmental activity but also intense interest in the United States throughout the media. Perhaps the “discovery” or “rediscovery” of America in British consciousness cannot be dated with exact precision, but the years from the war to the mid-1960s may fairly be called the “take-off period” for the academic study of American history in Britain. This essay briefly considers the role of some of the participants in this endeavour.

In 1875, a year from the upcoming centennial celebrations, Frederick Douglass commemorated the African American presence in the nation's revolutionary past and Reconstruction present. “If … any man should ask me what colored people have to do with the Fourth of July, my answer is ready,” he proclaimed to a black audience in Washington, DC. “Colored people have had something to do with almost everything of vital importance in the life and progress of this great country” from its beginnings in 1776 to its greatest test in 1861 and beyond. Douglass drew upon the Revolution's legacies of liberty and democracy, urging his listeners to meet the challenge of incorporating themselves into the nation's citizenry despite sustained white resistance. Albeit a tall order, he placed this agenda in a broader perspective: “The fathers of this Republic … had their trial ninety-nine years ago. The colored citizens of this Republic are about to have their trial now.” The moment was full of possibilities: African Americans, he emphasized, faced comparable obstacles and hardships much like the founders themselves. Implied too within Douglass's invocation of the revolutionaries was the potential heroism and accomplishments of which African Americans were similarly capable, just as they had proven in the past.

Marcus Cunliffe (1922–1990) was incontestably an important figure in American studies. In the early part of his academic career he helped to found the subject area in Britain, and he was later both awarded professorial appointments at the Universities of Manchester and Sussex and elected to the chairmanship of the British Association for American Studies, from which positions he served as a personal inspiration and professional mentor to several “generations” of UK American studies academics. Those who knew him and worked with him were invariably struck by his tall good looks, charisma and charm – characteristics that no doubt also contributed to his successful career, in Britain and in the United States, first as a visiting scholar, and later, during his final years, as the occupant of an endowed chair at George Washington University in Washington, DC. As the correspondence in his papers attest, he was held in high – and warm – regard by many of the leading US historians of his heyday. More might be said about his charm here because it also permeates his writing and persists there as a kind of afterglow, and not only for those who encountered him in person – but this essay is a critical reconsideration of his published work that, though appreciative, at least aspires towards objectivity.

Maps, recent cultural geographers are fond of reminding us, are products of the specific ideology from which they are written. A proper reading of a map, one that attends to it as a cultural product, can discover – even deconstruct – the ideological and cultural assumptions upon which its act of mapping is grounded. For Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove, the metaphor of the map provides a crucially important analytic tool for disentangling the ways in which systems of power may be seen to work within – and through – a text. They note that, under the influence of post-structuralist theory, it has become commonplace to think of a text as a “discursive ‘terrain’ across which ‘sites’ of power may be ‘mapped’.” Clearly, then, cartographic metaphors are useful in discussing literary texts in that they can accommodate an examination of both the overt and covert operations of those texts in their representations of the cultural and ideological landscape from which they are produced. Indeed, to map the world is to make that world readable, to make it familiar; but, like any text – or, in the particular case of this essay, Gary Snyder's poetic sequence Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) – a map does more than simply describe a discursive terrain. Such descriptions also enact the conditions of their cultural production.

October 12. – The Discovery. – It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

The economy of time, and our obligation to spend every hour for some useful end, are what few minds properly realize. Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841)

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (1854)

In his seminal 1967 essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” E. P. Thompson codified the theory that modern life, characterized by capitalism and industry, would not be possible without the regulating, organizing, and disciplining power of the clock. The theory of clock time's importance to modernity, first proposed by Georg Simmel around the turn of the twentieth century and later adopted by Lewis Mumford, became conventional wisdom among social and economic historians writing after Thompson's brilliant exposition. The introduction of mechanical clocks into factories in England, Thompson argues, resulted in a “restructuring of working habits” and a concomitant change in the “inward notation of time” that led individuals to accept the industrial revolution's basic premises of quantifiable wage labor and systematic production. According to Thompson's successors, historians such as David Landes, the relationship between clocks and other forms of modernization has been recursive; advances in technology have made it possible to measure time more accurately, and this greater accuracy has in turn facilitated greater productivity, more efficient transportation networks (think of railroad timetables), and the punctuality so important to modern business. Moreover, political theorists have argued that the ubiquitous experience of precisely measured time has been fundamental to linking individuals into self-consciously modern national groups, “imagined communities” in Benedict Anderson's terms, moving forward together through a shared historical simultaneity. The result of temporal modernization, this very diverse group of thinkers agrees, has been a world made over both economically and politically to suit the clockwork rationality of the capitalist market.

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.

When Abraham Minis, merchant and tavern keeper, of Savannah, Georgia sat down to draw up his last will and testament he faced a heart-wrenching dilemma: how would he successfully provide for all of his eight children and also ensure that his beloved wife Abigail would have enough to live out the rest of her days in widowhood in comfort? Three years later, in spring 1757, Abraham died. When his will was read, there were thankfully no surprises for Abigail and their children – Abraham had followed Low Country custom regarding the division of family wealth. He gave his three sons his horses and mares and left five daughters all of his black cattle. It was Abigail, he explained, who was to inherit “all the rest of my Estate both real and personal” to be “enjoyed by her” so that she would be able to “maintain educate and bring up our children.” He sealed his love, approval, and trust in his wife's abilities to meet this request by nominating her his sole executrix. Any help that she might need when settling the affairs of his estate, he observed, would be provided by his loyal friends Joseph Phillips and Benjamin Sheftall, who would assist and advise her.

If Minerva offered me an option, I would say give me continuity. I am tired of scraps. I do not wish to be a literary or intellectual chiffonier. Away with this Jew's rag-bag of ends and tufts of brocade, velvet and cloth-of-gold; let me spin some yards or miles of helpful twine, a clew to lead to one kingly truth, a cord to bind wholesome and belonging facts.

Biographers commonly describe Calvin Coolidge as having had a sound, comfortable, supportive upbringing. Fuess writes, for example, that Coolidge's early life was “simple, wholesome and unfurtive.” White and McCoy point out that the Coolidges were “aristocrats” and that Calvin was “a young prince” who was “brought up in as much luxury as could be expected in Plymouth township.”. However, a close analysis suggests strongly that the childhood years of Calvin Coolidge were marked by great sadness and dislocation. He was an extraordinarily shy boy who had few friends and often was lonely. His father, John Coolidge, was frequently absent from the household, either because of his service in the Vermont state legislature or his various business activities. As Lynch and Kilmartin point out, a father who is physically or emotionally missing from his son's life leaves scars on the boy's psychological development.

George Washington died much as he lived, stoic, dignified, controlled to the very end. True to form, his last moments, much like his life, saw him surrounded by slaves. At daybreak on the day he died – Saturday, 14 December 1799 – Caroline, a housemaid, bustled into his room to make a fire. Three other slaves fetched the physicians, who ministered to the dying General. Washington's body servant, twenty-four-year-old Christopher, otherwise known as Christopher Sheels, attended his master throughout the long day of his last illness. Indeed, in the afternoon Washington motioned Christopher to take a seat by his bedside as he had been standing throughout his vigil. At the moment of death, blacks outnumbered whites in the room. Caroline, Charlotte, a seamstress, and Molly, a domestic, were all standing near the door, and Christopher was by the bed, while only three whites – Dr. James Craik, his primary physician and old friend; Tobias Lear, his secretary; and Martha Washington, his wife – were present. At Martha's behest, Christopher aroused Lear from his grief by asking him to take care of the General's keys and other personal items which the body servant had taken out of the dead man's pockets. On the day after Washington's death, Frank Lee, the family's mulatto butler, Christopher, and Marcus, another house servant, received new shoes so that they would look presentable at the funeral.

Observed from a distance, the prevalence of ethnic stereotyping in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century cartooning in the United States is disturbing. All one can see, initially, is that turn-of-the-century readers seemed to enjoy seeing blacks, Native Americans, and non-Anglo immigrants reduced to simplistic caricatures and made to say and do outrageously stupid things. The Distorted Image, the Balch Institute's exposé on the evils of ethnic caricature, agrees with this assessment, suggesting that “the strips from the early years of this century [the twentieth] are inevitably suffused with crude, even gross stereotypes” in which blacks and ethnic immigrants are “maligned and mistreated with blithe insouciance.” However, a closer inspection of particular characters, mediums, and creators, reveals that there was greater complexity to these “crude” images – a rich history, in fact, of shifting meanings and uses. There were, of course, some blatantly racist depictions of ethnic minorities in cartoons and comic strips during this period, but there was also a complex spectrum of ethnic characters who played out shifting comedic and social roles. By properly contextualizing some of these cartoons – considering how meanings and uses changed according to where the cartoons appeared, who created them, and who read them – many images that initially seem just like more entries in a long line of gross stereotypes begin to reveal layered, ambivalent, and even sympathetic codings.

The Tortilla Curtain (1995), a novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle, juxtaposes the existence of southern California's affluent whites and non-white underclass by relating the stories of two couples whose lives become irrevocably entangled following a fateful automobile accident. The period flavour derives from racial tensions that culminated in the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and the passage, two years later, of Proposition 187, a package of prohibitive measures to curb the influx of “undocumented” immigrants from Mexico. Delaney Mossbacher, the book's main character, is a freelance nature writer with orthodox liberal views – a caricatured Sierra Club member. He contributes a monthly, Annie Dillard-esque nature column (“Pilgrim at Topanga Creek”) to an outdoor magazine. He lives in an upscale hilltop community designed in impeccable Spanish mission style – the product of white flight – apparently safe from the Mexican hordes that have broken through the border (the brittle “tortilla curtain” of the novel's title) and are overrunning the flatlands.

Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003, £18.95). Pp. 248. ISBN 0 8223 3206.

Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, £12.95). Pp. 322. ISBN 0 674 01118 X.

Tetsuden Kashima, Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003, $35.00). Pp. 336. ISBN 0 295 98299 3.

Gerald Early, This Is Where I Came in: Black America in the 1960s (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, Abraham Lincoln Lecture Series, 2003, £11. 50). Pp. 144. ISBN 0 80302 1823 0.

Deborah Davis Jackson, Our Elders Lived It: American Indian Identity in the City (DeKalb, IL: University of Northern Illinois Press, 2002, $20.00). Pp. 191. ISBN 0 87580 591 4.

Yen Le Espiritu, Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003, $21.95). Pp. 271. ISBN 0 520 23527 4.

Elizabeth Boosahda, Arab-American Faces and Voices: The Origins of an Immigrant Community (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2003, £18.95). Pp. 288. ISBN 0 292 70919 6.

John Kerry, patrician Massachusetts liberal, war hero, and yet dissident from the Vietnam era, vies for the 2004 presidency against George Bush, White House dynastic Republican, self-nominated caring conservative, and yet hard-edged ideologue. Notwithstanding Kerry's Catholicism, or his Jewish family line, both candidates hold sway as heirs to WASP cultural style bolstered by considerable personal fortunes. Howard Dean, New York MD and former Vermont governor, and like Kerry and Bush a Yale graduate, storms the early polls by his activist left-liberal agenda and Internet fundraising. John Edwards, North Carolina senator, personal injuries lawyer, and up-from-the-ranks millionaire, his father a textile factory worker and his mother a postal office employee, conducts a widely agreed good race for the Democratic Party nomination before joining the ticket as would-be Vice President. Had multiculturalism led to any shift of paradigm in connection with canonical whiteness? Or, to put matters more plainly, were not the front-runners once again executive white men, whatever their respective merits or social origins?