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Of the History of Pennsylvania, Part. 2: Pennsylvania Now

This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies I came to Clearfield by a rare route, though in truth no route is common. My fiancée Christy and I were living in California, five miles from the Mexican border, when she was accepted into a Physician Assistant Studies programme at a small university on short notice. So in May 2018, my eyes on the road and hers on the pages of an anatomy textbook, we drove northeast for five days straight, through the central desert of California, the fragile pine forests of northern Arizona, the Martian strangeness of southeastern Utah, through the flimsy freeway towns of Rifle and Silt under the hard peaks of the Colorado Rockies and through deluging storms in Nebraska and Iowa, through Illinois and Indiana and Ohio, into the ridge-and-valley maple and pine forests of central Pennsylvania, a landscape neither […]

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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 bears our tool-marks quite so clearly. Following the Last Glacial Maximum, twenty thousand years ago, the globe warmed rapidly, and the Wisconsin ice sheet receded northwards. Millions of square miles of ancient glacier melted away. The Beringia land bridge, which had served as refugium for many mammal species during the ice age, was consumed by rising seas. The Americas were orphaned once more. The Tazewell, the Cary, and the Valders ice retreated, inland glacial seas disjoined, and the modern Great Lakes took their places. Mile by mile, the area that would become the northern states of America was exposed. Pennsylvania […]

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The Alt Right: Trump and Terrorism in the Digital Age (Part One)

In November 2016, former real-estate millionaire and reality television personality Donald J. Trump was announced as the 45th President of the United States. During the Presidential campaign, Trump faced off against Hillary Clinton, the intended Democrat successor to Barack Obama. However, Trump usurped Clinton after an unexpected surge of support came from what Clinton termed “…the basket of deplorables—the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it” [1]. In acknowledging, and denouncing, the emerging Alternate Right – Clinton unknowingly bolstered their campaigns in support of Trump, as scholar Niko Heikkilä writes: “Rather than serve as a nail in the ideology’s coffin, Clinton’s speech instead catapulted the Alt-Right from obscurity into the national spotlight and its supporters could not have been more thrilled” [2]. Only a year later, in August of 2017, it became clear that Trump’s Presidency had legitimised the growing faction of ‘deplorables’; the Unite the Right rally in […]

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