Book Review: State of Recovery: The Quest to Restore American Security after 9/11 by Barry Scott Zellen
The terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11th 2001 was a watershed moment in national security in the United States. For the first time since Pearl Harbour, US homeland defences had been penetrated by enemy combatants and casualties had been suffered.
Continue ReadingBook Review: American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron edited by Branka Arsić
Sharon Cameron’s critical output has slowed since her emergence as a major voice on American literature in the 1980s, but, as this beguiling and suggestive volume of essays shows, her influence continues to grow as it informs the most innovative approaches to the subject in the twenty-first century.
Continue ReadingBook Review: American History through Hollywood Film: From the Revolution to the 1960s by Melvyn Stokes
As a scholar of film and television rather than history, I have often been uncomfortable with the ways in which moving images are treated by historians, as either uncomplicated windows into the past or a means to demonstrate the historical ignorance of Hollywood filmmakers.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War by John Pinheiro
The primary argument of Missionaries of Republicanism is that the religious history of the Mexican-American War is the story of how anti-Catholicism emerged as being integral to nineteenth-century American identity as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant republic.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Richard Wright in a Post-Racial Imaginary edited by William Dow, Alice Craven and Yoko Nakamura
The collection is a long-awaited product of a 2008 Conference at the American University of Paris, one of many events held to mark Richard Wright’s birth centennial, and, much like the Paris conference itself, argues for Wright’s increased relevancy in an increasingly transnational and seemingly post-racial culture.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Rational Southerner: Black Mobilization, Republican Growth, and the Partisan Transformation of the American South by M. V. Hood III, Quentin Kidd, and Irwin L. Morris
One of the most intriguing questions in modern American political history is the process by which the Republican Party mutated from the party of bi-racial progressive alliances to that of white conservatism. Precisely how and why this process took place has been the subject of much scholarly debate since the middle of the twentieth century.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Myth of Emptiness and the New American Literature of Place by Wendy Harding
Coinciding with the summer 2014 issue of Granta entitled ‘American Wild’, and the news in October that the term ‘anthropocene’ might soon be officially adopted as the name of our epoch, the publication of Harding’s monograph could not be more prescient.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Embodying Masculinities: Towards a History of the Male Body in U.S. Culture and Literature edited by Josep M. Armengol
It is a tricky thing, in a culture that still clings to the vestiges of a patriarchal structure, to make a legitimate case for the study of those who – knowingly or not – benefit most from such a power structure.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Kennedy: A Cultural History of an American Icon by Mark White
The theme of the duality of Kennedy’s image is illustrated most effectively by two seemingly contradictory elements. The conflicting depiction of Kennedy as both a sex symbol and a family man is thoroughly examined by White.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture by Jeff Wilson
Mindful America is a superb study by Jeff Wilson, scholar of American religion, that situates the practice of mindfulness within the lineage of American religious movements. What makes this movement unique, of course, is the central focus on the traditionally Buddhist practice of mindfulness.
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