Book Review: Constructing Presidential Legacy: How We Remember the American President by eds. Michael Patrick Cullinane and Sylvia Ellis
From presidential farewell addresses to depictions of presidents in film, advertising and literature, Michael P. Cullinane and Sylvia Ellis’s edited volume Constructing Presidential Legacyoffers a valuable addition to the growing body of literature concerning American presidential legacies.
Continue ReadingFrom Exceptionalism to Transnationalism: Change and Continuity in American Studies
While traditional disciplines such as social science and history continue to provide American Studies with methods and insights that have proved vital for its development, it is today much more dynamic and versatile than what one might have expected of a field that, as J. C. Rowe observes, has long suffered from an “embattled institutional situation.”
Continue ReadingReview: ‘Content Stinks!’: The Forms, Materials, and Institutions of American Periodicals
Review: ‘Content Stinks!’: The Forms, Materials, and Institutions of American Periodicals, University of Nottingham, 21 September 2018 “Content Stinks”: this symposium’s title issued a provocation to the field of American periodical studies. The co-organisers, Graham Thompson and Matthew Pethers of the University of Nottingham, called on participants to intervene in recent debates which have occupied literary critics responding to Bruno Latour’s assertion that ’Context stinks! It’s a way of stopping the description when you are too tired or lazy to go on.’ Whether it be Franco Moretti’s ‘distance reading’, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’ ‘surface reading’ or what Rita Felski calls ‘postcritical reading’, literary theorists have increasingly devoted themselves to detailing new reading practices which take aim at the assumptions of “critique” and a perceived New Historicist focus on literary texts as singular windows onto a period’s ideological context. This symposium asked whether closer attention to the particular challenges posed by […]
Continue Reading1919: the Boston Molasses Flood and the Year of Violence and Disillusion
This year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the Boston Molasses Flood, arguably one of the strangest disasters in American history. Twenty-one people died, 150 were injured, and homes and buildings were destroyed. In the midst of the after-math of World War I, Calvin Coolidge assumed the role of Governor of Massachusetts, and in doing so he inherited the responsibility of Boston, a city that was in the midst of social and economic crisis. The Molasses Flood only served to heighten feelings of unease, with some of Boston’s leading figures and its media looking to place blame, with anarchists and communists heading the list of potential suspects. Ultimately, the Molasses Flood was a preamble for a year of upheaval in Boston that would see widespread violence, acts of terrorism, and a historic police strike. This article looks briefly at the events of that fateful day on January 2, 1919 and its impact.
Continue ReadingOur Latest Longest War: Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan
Aaron O’Connell is a veteran of the Afghanistan war — the aptly dubbed ‘latest longest’ one for the United States — where he served as Special Assistant to General David Petraeus. The book’s title evokes both the spectre of America’s other endless war, that in Vietnam, as well as the pervasiveness of war in American political and cultural life. This is only the most recent of America’s ill-advised and destructive campaigns abroad, and it will not be the last. Yet while the war in Afghanistan occupies a place of particular importance in the litany of American wars, both because of its duration and its temporal location as a marker of the pre- and post-9/11 grand strategy of the United States, it is being fought at increasing distance from American consciousness. Indeed, one well-known political commentator recently remarked that America is no longer at war today, having apparently forgotten that this […]
Continue ReadingBAAS PGR Conference Review 2018
Conference Review: BAAS PGR Conference 2018, Northumbria University, 3 November 2018 www.pgrbaasnorthumbria2018.wordpress.com @pgrbaas2018 | #pgrbaas18 Reflecting on the fiftieth anniversary of 1968, this year’s BAAS PGR conference surveyed a panorama of the antecedents and legacies of the tumultuous year. The overarching theme of the event centred on ‘America’s Urgent and Great Problems’, a phrase taken from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech while visiting Newcastle upon Tyne shortly before his death. With George Washington and Hilary Clinton having family roots in Tyne & Wear, and radicals such as Frederick Douglass and King having visited the region, Newcastle made an ideal setting for American Studies scholars to discuss and debate their research. To begin the day, Dr. James West (University of Northumbria) delivered his USSO keynote address, giving valuable insight into the 1968 presidential ambitions of Black candidate and comedian Dick Gregory (West’s keynote is available as a podcast here and a review […]
Continue ReadingConference Review: ‘The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies’, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Institut für England- und Amerikastudien, November 29 – December 1, 2018
in the province of American Cultural Studies, the (re)turn to aesthetics is indeed more recent and takes a far more political perspective than seen in the ‘return’ of aesthetics within the more philological and less politically oriented quarters of the MLA since the late 1990s. The former is animated by the utopian desire that conference host Johannes Voelz (Frankfurt) described as a central characteristic of American Studies as practiced under the auspices of the American Studies Association. As speaker Lee Edelman (Tufts University) put it, what was at stake in the Frankfurt conference was really the ‘the progressive return of the aesthetic’.
Continue ReadingMore on War by Martin Van Creveld
“You may not be interested in war, but war may be interested in you.” (p.1) How many of us want to read about war? Does it remind us all of pain, loss, blood and misery? Martin Van Creveld’s newest book, “More on War”, is not a story of these things. He uses examples drawn from military history to explain what war is and add More to what we already know on this difficult subject.
Continue ReadingAfter Katrina: Race, Neoliberalism, and the End of the American Century
Over the last decade, Anna Hartnell has unofficially established herself as the UK’s leading academic on Hurricane Katrina. Her credentials include organizing a paired set of conferences in New Orleans and London on Katrina-related affairs, maintaining a Katrina-oriented blog, and writing multiple articles on visual/cinematic “Katrina texts”. Sadly, her full book-length study of Katrina falls short of its full potential.
Continue ReadingEnlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and States in Modern America
Ronit Y. Stahl’s new book, Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America, brings an important new perspective to the study of religious progress and acceptance in the United States. Focusing on the American military chaplaincy and its role in legitimating different faith groups domestically and internationally, Stahl highlights the influence of the military complex in shaping society and social norms.
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