After 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.
Continue ReadingReview: HOTCUS PG & ECR Conference 2018
Review: ‘Uses and Abuses of the American Past’, HOTCUS PG & ECR Conference, University of Nottingham, 20 October 2018 ‘Uses and Abuse of American Past’, held on 20 October this year, addressed a variety of contemporary issues. Like the BAAS conference on 1968, scheduled just two weeks later, this conference cast an eye to the theme of the ‘appropriation of history’. Conference themes often tend towards today’s politics, organising their thoughts around a present-day issue. It is not surprising, then, that scholars have absorbed, or seek to address, our supposed post-facts era. Smoothly organised by Mark Eastwood (University of Nottingham) and the HOTCUS (Historians of the Twentieth-Century United States) committee, the selection of this year’s theme struck a suitably contemplative note. Each paper, in its own way, sought to consider changing norms. Some, more specifically, hinted at the issue of distortion of history, reinforcing that it is, as we all […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Lives of Frederick Douglass by Robert S. Levine
The Lives of Frederick Douglass is a fascinating collage of images that recreate various facets of the life of Frederick Douglass. Robert Levine demonstrates insight in delving into the complexity of racialised identities and the changing contours of self-definition in a collection that spans the most popular of Douglass’s writings, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), as well as his lesser known My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), along with letters, articles, and speeches.
Continue ReadingReview: HOTCUS Inaugural Work-in-Progress Meeting
Review: HOTCUS Inaugural Work-in-Progress Meeting, University of Nottingham, 19 October 2018 At the inaugural HOTCUS work-in-progress meeting, two developing journal articles were discussed: Dr Miguel Hernandez’s (University of Exeter) paper, ‘”The Menace of Modern Immigration”: Nativism and Violence in the 1920s Ku Klux Klan’ and Dr Alex Bryne’s (University of Nottingham) ‘The Potential of Flight: Pan-Americanism and U.S. Aviation during the Progressive Era’. As is typical of such sessions, the papers were circulated in advance, and briefly introduced by the authors. The chair of the meeting, Mark Eastwood (University of Nottingham), explained that the impetus for trialling work-in-progress sessions came from HOTCUS members: ‘in particular those at an early career stage, who wanted a forum for sharing and developing their ideas and research beyond the confines of a conference paper.’ An advantage of this format, for the audience, was the chance to hear more about the inspiration and development of […]
Continue Reading‘[S]omething to feel about’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of The Last Slave
It is nearly a century since Zora Neale Hurston wrote Barracoon, an ethnography of Cudjo Lewis, the Alabama man believed to be the last living African enslaved in the United States. On May 8 Lewis’ story became widely available to the public for the first time. To mark this historic occasion, and to commemorate the life and works of Zora Neale Hurston – a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, African-American folklorist and ethnographer, and one of the most significant women writers of the twentieth century – USSO has commissioned a series of articles on any aspect of Hurston’s life, her art, her anthropology. This article is the second in the series.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Flame and Fortune in the American West
California is always burning, and if it is not burning, it is preparing for ‘the big one’ that will finally rupture the San Andreas fault, the tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and North American Plate.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America by Jennifer Brier, Jim Downs and Jennifer L. Morgan (eds.)
This expansive and ambitious collection sets out to ask what the American past looks like when race and sexuality are the ‘animating questions’ (3), addressing a persistent failure in scholarship to integrate concerns about race and sexuality. Essays here span almost four centuries of North American history, from same-sex desire on seventeenth-century slave plantations to the mass marches of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Continue ReadingConference Review: ‘Did Liberalism Fail in the United States after 1945?’
The overarching question the conference sought to address, ‘Did liberalism fail in the United States after 1945?’ was well chosen, and of particular relevance to our present historical moment. As attention on both sides of the Atlantic turns towards the upcoming American midterm elections, it is clear that research on contemporary American political history continues to be in high demand among scholars and the public alike.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The FBI in Latin America: The Ecuador Files by Marc Becker
While scholars have devoted considerable attention to CIA activities in Latin America during the Cold War, they have spent less time examining intelligence-gathering before 1947, when the CIA was created. Marc Becker, currently Professor of History at Truman State University and author of several books on Ecuador, argues in The FBI in Latin America that scholars need to study FBI operations in Latin America in the 1940s.
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