Book Hour with David Watson’s Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction
The next U.S. Studies Online Book Hour will take place 28th April 2023, at 4pm GMT/12pm EST with Dr. David Riddle Watson and his first monograph, Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan Crime Files Series, 2021). Dr. Watson teaches at Central Carolina Community College. He completed his Ph.D. in 2019 from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His work focuses on the intersection between rhetoric, literature, and real-world events. He is currently working on his second monograph Surveillance Noir, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. Truth to Post-Truth traces the networks of thought about what is real and what is not from the Vietnam War through the end of the Cold War and the rise of the “post-truth” moment of our present day. The book is a philosophical journey through post-truth America. Furthermore, the book examines questions of truth and relativism, turning to detectives, both […]
Continue ReadingBook 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, 2021) Dr. Waite is a political historian of the 19th-century United States with a focus on slavery, imperialism and the American West. He received his PhD in 2016 from University of Pennsylvania, and currently holds a position as the Associate Professor of Modern American History in the Department of History at the University of Durham. Dr. Waite will, firstly, speak of his award-winning first book, West of Slavery, in which he explores how American Southerner slaveholders extended their political dominion across the American West in the mid-19th century, and in the process triggered series of events that, ultimately, hastened the coming of […]
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 1934 and 1936 culminated in what has been described as the worst drought in American history and the designation of 1,194 counties as emergency drought areas by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. [i] Pictures were included, for example, in the article, ‘Soil Erosion – A National Menace’ (1934), prepared by Hugh Hammond Bennett as chief of the Soil Erosion Service in the United States Department of the Interior and published in The Scientific Monthly. [ii] These were campaigning photographs, included for their ability to function as warnings—to shock audiences into recognising the scale of land degradation in a rural […]
Continue ReadingGreetings 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 of public buildings, yawning intersections with motorists passing through. A saturated Texas sky crowns the streets and makes the metal frames of the cars glint. Shot using a Leica 35mm camera, the photographs are flattened by a grainy, almost thick, technicolour, which renders space as untraversable patterns of block and line. On the plain, off-white verso, information has been given and withheld. Sparse text includes Shore’s name, a box with the words ‘PLACE STAMP HERE’ stacked inside it, and details of the printing company, ‘Dexter Press, Inc’. But the postcards identify their unusual subjects with only their street addresses. Why […]
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 guys vs bad guys’ code. The danger of keeping the Western alive without revision lies in the frontier myth’s binary, civilization/savagery, that excused the violence towards cultural Others in the name of expansion and progress of the (white) United States and white exceptionalism. This binary is mirrored in the earliest forms of Western literature as well as the first cinematographic Westerns, in which the villains are often Native Americans, who are considered ‘savage’, barely human, to justify their demise at the hands of the white heroes.[i] Through their Otherness, the frontier myth defined Native Americans as part of the territory, […]
Continue ReadingThe Changing face of black masculinity in American Horror Cinema
This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Lanscapes in American Studies The representation of blackness and black masculinity within American horror films has been a multifaceted and complicated journey that has reflected societal changes. However, the 1960s changed this narrative when, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, George A. Romero released Night of the Living Dead. For the first time, horror audiences were presented with an African American protagonist (played by Duane Jones) who is heroic, intelligent and does not conform to the traditions of an angry black man. However, there are still racist undertones present in the film, most notably in its climactic scene. Despite the director denying any intention for his work to offer a commentary on race,[i] it unconsciously reflects the turbulence of the time and is of enduring relevance to this day. The film ends with Ben’s death at the […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: Familial Fitness: Disability, Adoption, and Family in Modern America by Sandra M. Sufian
The University of Chicago Press, £28 Sandra M. Sufian’s Familial Fitness examines the complex role of disability and divergence in US adoption practices from the Progressive Era to the end of the 20th century, trying to “understand past structures and forces that enabled or impeded the integration of children labelled disabled”.[i] In doing so, she incorporates an extensive archive that reveals the changing policies, practices, and attitudes toward the adoptability of children labelled disabled. By tracing which children were deemed eligible to enter the adoption system, she also reveals how social perceptions of disability reflected in adoption practices and ultimately resulted in drastically different material implications. In her analysis of the path from exclusion to the partial inclusion of children labelled disabled in the adoption process, she highlights the role of risk assessment. While risk minimization has always played a decisive role, it is particularly informative how risk was related […]
Continue ReadingJeffrey Geiger on the 2019-20 BAAS Founders’ Research Award
I am grateful to have been recipient of a BAAS Founders’ Award – the support has been invaluable to my research into the early uses of amateur colour film. The BAAS Founders’ Award provides UK scholars with financial assistance for research travel and invited conference presentations, and more recently has been broadened to include research conducted remotely, boosting inclusivity and encouraging reduction of carbon footprints. This particular grant allowed me to undertake further extended archival research on the project ‘Kodachrome Travels: Colour and the “American Pacific” Imagination’. This project focuses on colour films made across Oceania by American amateur filmmakers, beginning in 1935 when Kodachrome stock was first marketed. During the years just before the Second World War, vast increases in tourism on the seas coincided with profound transitions in the Pacific region, with European colonial networks still entrenched and US expansionism soon to exert its greatest impact. The locales […]
Continue ReadingSarah Barnsley on the 2019-20 BAAS Founders’ Research Travel Award
I’ve been a BAAS member for a long time now, but hadn’t thought about applying for an award before, thinking I was probably too long past PhD completion to be eligible for one (I got my PhD in 2006). I experienced a debilitating illness over 2018/19 and while I’d rather not have, obviously, one upshot was the treatment was so effective that when I recovered I had a new sense of vigour I’d not experienced before. So when one of the BAAS newsletters landed in my inbox, and mentioned the Founders’ Research Travel Award, I thought Why not at least look into it? I had a research visit I needed to make and was pleasantly surprised to see that the award was open to any researcher, regardless of career stage. So then I thought: why not at least apply? These particular awards provide financial assistance to scholars in the UK […]
Continue ReadingEyes on Events: Milly Mulcahey & Kate Heffner, Kent Americanist Symposium 2022
The next episode in our series Eyes On Events, this week we are interviewing Milly Mulcahey and Kate Heffner about the upcoming Kent Americanist Symposium. You can now grab your free ticket for the Americanist Conference, supported by CHASE and the University of Kent – Curating and Resisting Americana – online and hybrid, on the 19th and 20th of May. This is a truly international, interdisciplinary conference and a celebration of early-years researchers, with panels from video games to environmental activism and Indigenous history and culture. This is a fantastic opportunity to network and collaborate with fellow scholars across and beyond the CHASE consortium, support fellow early-years researchers, and pose your research questions to established academics, Indigenous activists and heritage professionals. Day One – 19th May – Online – Hear new perspectives and explore hidden voices on the themes of climate, art and activism: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/330595679577 A perspective-changing keynote panel – Ending Erasure: Deconstructing the Colonial Mythology of the Americas – with Indigenous historical […]
Continue Reading