Call for Panel Reviewers-BAAS 2023

Calling all reviewers! USSO are looking for panel reviewers for the BAAS 2023 Annual Conference. Have your eyes on an exciting panel or initiative? If so, help spotlight ground-breaking work in our American Studies community by offering our online journal a reflection on your conference experience! USSO particularly welcomes first-time… Continue reading

Book Review: A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border Across Indigenous Lands by Benjamin Hoy

Author Benjamin Hoy successfully supports his three arguments and provides a foundational understanding of the racialised history of North American border control policies and their impact on Indigenous communities. Since the movement of people in the Americas is a prominent topic in today’s policy debates, this book offers an indispensable description of how current immigration policies were first developed to control the mobility of these Indigenous populations along with the formerly enslaved and Asia-Pacific immigrants. Continue reading

Eyes on Events-An Evening with Mrs Terrell and Friends

https://youtu.be/czGijmoy_S4 In this week’s episode of Eyes on Events, we interviewed Dr Marie Molloy (Manchester Metropolitan University) and the award-winning creative producer, historian, and theatre-maker Pamela Roberts about an outreach screening of the play ‘An Evening With Mrs Terrell and Friends.’ Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) was a celebrated Black women… Continue reading

M3GAN and ChatGPT– A Critique of Contemporary AI?

In an interview about OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Matt Murray from the Wall Street Journal asks Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella ‘do we need to learn math anymore? Why learn math?’[i] The New York Times article ‘Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach’, retells the story of a teacher catching… Continue reading

Book Hour with Dr. Kevin Waite, the author of West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire

  The next U.S. Studies Online Book Hour will take place 17th March 2023, at 4pm GMT with Dr. Kevin Waite, who will talk with us about his first – and award-winning – book, West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (The University of North Carolina Press,… Continue reading

Of the History of Pennsylvania, Part. 1: Pennsylvania Past

This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies Whatever discoveries are made in the future that complicate what we know of human antiquity, the “New World” will always be new. No anthropoid species existed in the Americas before Homo sapiens. No land mass… Continue reading

‘Malign Living Structures’: Functions of the Survey Image in “Soil Erosion – A National Menace” (1934)

This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies The land survey photograph, as represented by the first two pictures here, is a category of image that circulated widely in scientific journals and official publications during the 1930s. Severe droughts and dust storms between… Continue reading

Greetings from Amarillo: Stephen Shore’s postcard play

This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies Greetings from Amarillo – “Tall in Texas” (1971) is a set of ten 3½x5½-inch postcards made by the American photographer Stephen Shore. Each card shows a landscape image of Amarillo’s built spaces: the sunned faces… Continue reading

‘Maysville? That’s a white town’: “The Harder They Fall” and Blackness in the Western Landscape

This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies The popularity of the Western as a genre solidified the frontier mythology as one of the building myths of the American nation and its cultural iconography. However, the Western carries sinister implications in its ‘good… Continue reading