Research

The Forgotten LGBT Pioneers of 1956

In this post to mark LGBT History Month, Dr Simon Hall (University of Leeds) – author of 1956: The World in Revolt (London: Faber and Faber, 2016) – discusses the origins of an obscure magazine, Ladder – the official monthly publication of the pioneering lesbian organisation, the Daughters of Bilitis, which sought to promote “the integration of the homosexual in society”, embracing the politics of ‘respectability’ as a way to advance the cause, and to press the claims, of gay and lesbian Americans. The publication of Ladder’s first issue in October 1956, argues Hall, was a quietly subversive act of a truly revolutionary year.

Idealist or not? Hamlet 2.0: New Hampshire election results

The Primaries in New Hampshire ended with victories for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The former closed with a clear lead of 22 points over Hillary Clinton, while Trump left behind the uncertain John Kasich, with a 20% advantage. U.S. Studies Online and the Italian Association for North American Studies postgraduate group (www.ceraunavoltalamerica.it) present a summary of key developments and reflections following the latest events in the race to the White House.

Feel the Bern, find the Cruz: Iowa election results

On the 1st of February, the American electoral machine was officially set in motion with caucuses in Iowa.

Both the Cruz victory and the Sanders’s arguable success are indicators of a polarization inside the American electorate, characterized by anti-politics and anti-establishment trends.

Review: American Historical Association Annual Meeting

The AHA Presidential Address by Vicki L. Ruiz (University of California, Irvine) entitled, ‘Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900-1930’, challenged the dominant historiographical genealogy of Latina feminism, which typically focuses on seventeenth-century Mexican women poets and then jumps to the 1970s Chicana movement. Instead, Ruiz explored the work of two key early-twentieth-century Latina labour activists: Puerto Rican Luisa Capetillo and Guatemalan Luisa Moreno (born Rosa López Rodríguez).

Listening to Rosa Parks

If all of us who are students of the black freedom struggle listen to rather than simply about Rosa Parks, writes Say Burgin, we stand to gain a much more profound understanding of racial justice, of why Parks would be a staunch supporter of Black Lives Matter today, and of why she told a group of Spelman students in 1985, ‘don’t give up and don’t say the movement is dead.’

Review: IAAS Postgraduate Conference, ‘E Pluribus Unum: Out of Many, One’

One of the first panels of the morning, ‘Form and Function’, was quick to establish a material basis for the theme. All speakers were concerned in some way with the (in)stability of artistic media, especially the ways in which seemingly divergent forms might converge.

Film Review: Trumbo (2015)

It would be naïve to expect a biopic to comprehensively cover the competing interests, shifting alliances and distinct beliefs among those blacklisted, greylisted, or progressive Hollywood more broadly. However, Trumbo comes to conclusions about courage and cowardice without context and, as such, its oversights are worth exploring. Part of the problem is that Trumbo seems uncomfortable with Dalton’s politics. How else to explain a film with such a curious lack of interest in its protagonist’s beliefs beyond that in the sanctity of the First Amendment?

Review: ‘American Into Periodical Studies’, The First Network of American Periodical Studies Symposium

The Network of American Periodical Studies (NAPS) was recently formed by Sue Currell and Victoria Bazin, and aims to bring together scholars working on American periodicals from any historical period. Hosted by the Eccles’ Centre for American Studies at the British Library—and supported by the British Association for American Studies, Northumbria University, and the University of Sussex—‘American into Periodical Studies’ constituted the inaugural NAPS symposium.

The Indentured Atlantic: Bound Servitude and the Literature of American Colonization (Part Three)

The tricky challenge that the Indentured Atlantic presents to scholars is to recover, as far as is possible, the reality of bound servitude while navigating and comprehending the multiple ways in which this reality was articulated, ignored, appropriated, and imagined as part of a diverse range of social, political, economic and racial agendas. The eight dialectical categories and concepts I have broadly sketched out in these posts – singing, ventriloquizing, captivities, slaveries, falling, rising, life-writing, and forgetting – offer one chart for my ongoing research, and perhaps for that of others. But they can surely be joined by others. The Indentured Atlantic, hopefully, will flow on.

The Indentured Atlantic: Bound Servitude and the Literature of American Colonization (Part Two)

In concluding the first post in this three-part series I asked how scholars can begin to address the challenge of recovering the transient and elusive oral culture of colonial-era indentured servants. One answer, perhaps, lies in dedicating greater attention to the conceptual rubric of singing, as a mode of communal vocalization that can be connected to the distinctively cohesive and mobile culture of circum-Atlantic performance delineated by theatre scholars such as Joseph Roach, Peter Reed and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon.