The Transatlantic Impact of civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome”
“We Shall Overcome” bridges the civil rights movements in the United States and Northern Ireland, says Glen Whitcroft, but does this overlook the diversity in Northern Ireland protest history?
Continue ReadingReview of the 1st Americas Postgraduate Conference at the UCL Institute of the Americas
Nik Kyriacou reviews the 1st Americas Postgraduate conference at UCL’s Institute of the Americas in our first conference review double header.
Continue ReadingHaiti’s “horrid civil war”: The 1791 Haitian Revolution and its Legacy in America
Following the success of the American colonies in gaining their independence from Britain, an endeavour in which he had played no small part, Thomas Jefferson hoped that people of other nations would follow his countrymen down the road to political revolution. But the black republic of Haiti and its citizens became a national nightmare at this foundational moment of American history, and in many ways have retained that identity for over two hundred years.
Continue ReadingR&B entertainers didn’t take too long to get involved in the civil rights movement
Glen Whitcroft re-evaluates the financial and musical legacy of some of America’s most beloved and commercially successful African American entertainers, such as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Nina Simone.
Continue ReadingGod and the Revolution: Christianity, the South, and the Communist Party of the USA
In an article written for the Financial Times in October 2013, the journalist Robert Wright claimed that “[o]rganised labour has never taken hold in the American South, where unions are viewed with suspicion”. He quoted Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who argued that this was reinforced by Southern religion.[1] This perception also permeates much of the historiography of the region.[2] There is clearly some valid evidence for this interpretation, including Irving Bernstein’s belief that, since mill owners’ paid ministers’ salaries, religion could be used to tamp down labour activism.[3] As the Nobel Prize-winning American author Sinclair Lewis wrote during the Depression: employers controlled “the whole human train, down to the clerical caboose”.[4] Nevertheless, I believe that a more nuanced examination is required. Religion in the American South was, after all, remarkably varied.[5] With that in mind, this article looks at what may appear […]
Continue ReadingReview (Part Two) of IAAS Annual Conference
The design and implementation of a runaway artificial intelligence was a concern felt by many of the panellists. An AI that proved particularly threatening was one that may be built upon the incorporation of human minds into a computer network. The potential for an omnipresent surveillance filtered into an important term used at the conference – ‘hive mind’.
Continue ReadingMay Day and the future of workers’ internationalism
The conference “Workers of all lands unite? Working class nationalism and internationalism until 1945,” (University of Nottingham) highlighted how workers, now more than ever, need an international movement, one that can tackle the issues raised by a globalized system of production. (Review by co-organisers and labour scholars Lorenzo Costaguta and Steven Parfitt)
Continue ReadingThe Presidential Juggler: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rhetorical Flexibility, and Autofabrication
On 12 April 1945, the 32nd President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt died after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. To mark the 70th anniversary of FDR’s death, Sara Polak examines his rhetorical flexibility and reflects on how this attribute has contributed to his enduring legacy.
Continue ReadingRound-up of our ‘Women in America’ blog series for Women’s History Month
Our “Women in America” blog series for Women’s History Month 2015 is now drawing to an end. We would like to thank the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) and the Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW) who joined us in putting together this diverse and exciting blog series that ran for five weeks in total and included 16 posts. Here we have collected and summarised all of those posts.
Continue ReadingImagining a Female President: Commander in Chief and the unfinished business of presidential fiction
In the sixth SHAW post Gregory Frame considers the recent fictional depiction of a female US president in Commander in Chief and asks whether this television series gives us clues as to why there has yet to be a woman elected into the Oval Office.
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