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Reviews

Review: HOTCUS Work-in-Progress Meeting 2019

Review: HOTCUS Work-in-Progress Meeting 2019, University of Oxford, 17 October 2019. At the second annual work-in-progress session, two developing articles were discussed: Liam O’Brien’s (University of Cork) paper, ‘Winning Back the Peace: The George H.W. Bush Administration and the Creation of Operation Southern Watch, 1992’ and Dr. Meghan Hunt’s (University of Edinburgh) piece, ‘”He was shot because America would not give up on racism”: Martin Luther King Jr. and the African American civil rights movement in British schools.’ Like last year’s event, papers were circulated before the session so attendees had time to read and develop comments for each paper. The goal of this session was to foster a supportive environment and to provide feedback which would aid the authors in the publication of their articles: this goal was met. There was an element of ‘article by committee’ which is often helpful to postgraduates and early career researchers who perhaps […]

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Book Review: ‘Who Rules the World?’, by Noam Chomsky

Many current American studies graduates were born around the time of the September 11 terrorist attacks and have grown up during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, two of the most controversial and polarising global events of the twenty-first century. The popularity of US foreign policy courses in American studies departments across the UK is therefore unsurprising. After all, students (and young people generally) tend to want to understand how the world around them works, and learning about the international behaviour of the most influential global player is in this respect a good place to start. Students’ motivations for enrolling often entail a desire to engage critically with US foreign policy in a deeper and more meaningful way than how it is often presented in the mainstream media and in political discourse.

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Book Review: ‘Hattiesburg, An American City in Black and White’ by William Sturkey

It is recollections such as Mr Conner’s that interlace the narrative of Hattiesburg – An American City in Black and White. William Sturkey, Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has steadfastly dissected archives and recordings to bring alive the history of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a Deep Dixie South lumber town, inviting the reader in through a page-time continuum. The skilful use of recorded interviews gives his narration a personal note, leading an alternating discourse through the experience of Hattiesburg’s white and black residents. Sturkey emphasizes the South’s survival being crucially tied to the growing number of African Americans settling in. The Hattiesburgers were exceptional citizens whose civil rights were severely and unlawfully abused and abandoned. Sturkey notes how the black residents of Mobile Street were examples of fortitude and perseverance, and how their “civil rights movement revolutionized race […] through countless of acts of individual resistance.” (295) Even when discussing the white experience, Sturkey’s emphasis remains on the inequality and brutality as directed toward the black residents of the lumber town, where the realities of the black and white citizens of Hattiesburg could not have been more passionately different and where “every component of Jim Crow was reinforced by the threat of violence.” (85) Not even the smallest racial oppression imposed upon Hattiesburg’s black citizens is left out; such as the recollection of Osceola McCarty, who at a young age of twelve had to “trade the pencils and paper of a student for the iron and washboard of a laundress” (83) as the young girl’s help home was needed more than her education. The weaning and waning of the city become more tangible as Sturkey entwines the history with memories of one black family in particular – the Smiths.

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Book Review: Critical Lives, ‘Herman Melville’ by Kevin J. Hayes

Herman Melville by Kevin J. Hayes provides a readable, entertaining, and informative account of Melville’s life and esteemed contribution to American letters. Hayes expertly captures many of the major moments of Melville’s life in an exciting, satisfying manner, arguing that Melville’s entire literary career and, indeed, his life, contributed to the making of his 1851 masterwork, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. Based on this one monumental novel, Melville’s place in the canon of American literature is secured, despite the fact that, as Hayes makes clear, Melville ‘had slipped into obscurity by the start of the twentieth century’.

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Review of ANZASA Conference 2019: Community, Conflict and the “Meaning of America” 14-16th July, University of Auckland

For their biennial conference, the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association (ANZASA) encouraged those in attendance to engage with Perry Miller’s intellectual endeavour to define “the meaning of America.” Using Miller’s seminal work, An Errand into the Wilderness, as a launching pad, a thoughtful offering of keynote speakers, plenaries and panels emphasised the ongoing relevance of community, conflict, and the meaning of America in present-day research. 

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Conference Review: The Biennial Symposium in American History – In Pursuit of Law and Order: American Governance in Historical Perspective, Queen Mary University of London, 21 June 2019

The Biennial Symposium in American History at Queen Mary, University of London, hoped to shed some light on the contemporary moment by illustrating that state actors have a long history of using the law and political governance for nefarious purposes.

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Conference Review: The 17th International Willa Cather Seminar, Winchester, Virginia, 17th-21st June 2019

Arriving at Shenandoah University for the 17th International Willa Cather Seminar, scholars were greeted by the incongruous sounds of revving Harley-Davidson motorbikes and bagpipes. For one week in June, the small town of Winchester, Virginia, played host not only to the Willa Cather Foundation’s biennial seminar, but also to the Virginia Piping and Drumming School’s summer meet and the 2019 HOG (‘Harley Owners’ Group’) Rally. While that meant that accommodation choices in town were limited, the celebratory atmosphere befitted the fact that, for the Cather group, this conference was something of a homecoming.

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Visualising the Americas: Kent’s Third Annual Americanist Symposium, Keynote Addresses

What happens when you attempt to condense thousands of words, and years of research, into a single image? This was the challenge put to attendees of the Kent Americanists Symposium in June 2019 – to find and share the single image through which an entire wider discussion could be accessed.

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Symposium Panel Review: ‘Visualising the Americas: Kent’s Third Annual Americanist Symposium’, The University of Kent, Keynes College, Monday 3rd June, 2019.

From pre-colonised American Indian art to contemporary graffiti murals, the Americas have a rich and varied visual history. This one-day symposium, co-organised by three PhD candidates at the University of Kent – Ellie Armon Azoulay, Sarah Smeed, and Megan King – invited panellists and speakers to focus on one particular image or object as a catalyst for exploring larger themes, trends and figures.

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Conference Review: ‘Women’s Transatlantic Prison Activism since 1960,’ the Rothermere American Institute, the University of Oxford, June 7, 2019.

This day-long conference explored a range of topics related to women’s incarceration, such as the often-overlooked history of women’s organising efforts within prison and especially art, print, and visual culture as forms of activism.

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