The Best of 2015, and What’s Next for U.S. Studies Online in 2016
To kickstart 2016 the editors choose their favourite posts from 2015, and discuss what’s Next for U.S. Studies Online in 2016.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Jimmy Carter and the Middle East: The Politics of Presidential Diplomacy by Daniel Strieff
There is no final evaluation of diplomacy, only a continued reimagining in the face of expanded information. In this spirit, Daniel Strieff’s Jimmy Carter and the Middle East: The Politics of Presidential Diplomacy mines a presidency almost forty years old for reclamation.
Continue ReadingReview: ‘Collaboration in America and Collaborative Work in American Studies’
Co-organised by postgraduates at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, the conference charted the range of collaborative practices that are emerging in American Studies, whilst also recognising the wider responsibilities of researchers to work beyond traditional academic spaces and foster partnerships with educational, cultural and public bodies.
Continue ReadingBook Review: American Fiction in Transition: Observer-Hero Narrative, the 1990s, and Postmodernism by Adam Kelly
American Fiction in Transition focuses on four novels from the ‘long 1990s’ – Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000); Paul Auster’s Leviathan (1992); Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993); E. L. Doctorow’s The Waterworks (1994) – that are emblematic of what Kelly convincingly argues is a significant contemporary literary genre: the observer-hero narrative.
Continue ReadingBook Review: A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars by Andrew Hartman
Are the culture wars truly a thing of the past? After decades of divisive arguments, has a consensus been reached over cultural and social norms in the United States?
Continue ReadingBook Review: Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis: Challenging Our Infatuation with Numbers by Michael Mack
Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis is, very consciously, a timely book. The crisis of the title is the political climate in which higher education in the arts and humanities currently finds itself. In the face of demands to demonstrate its economic contribution, arts education and research has been encouraged to make sometimes questionable claims for its ‘impact,’ its transferable values, or, in the event that its economic worth is not so readily visible, to make equally grandiose statements in support of its ethical or philanthropic mission.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Radicals In America: The U. S. Left Since The Second World War By Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps
With the apparent urgency of recent radical activities in the United States, including Black Lives Matter and the Occupy movement, the publication of Radicals in America by Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps arrives at an opportune time.
Continue ReadingReview: ‘Keywords: Nineteenth-Century American Studies in the Twenty-First Century’
Over the summer, researchers were invited to respond to a keyword—or suggest their own—that they felt was pertinent to studying nineteenth century America in the twenty first century. From this, eight keyword panels were formed: ‘Capital’, ‘Crisis’, ‘Development’, ‘Network’, ‘Sensation’, ‘Territory’, ‘Time’, and ‘World’.
Continue ReadingBook Review: West of the American Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 by Claudio Saunt
Throughout November 2015, U.S. Studies Online will be publishing a series of posts to mark Native American Heritage Month. In this post, Michael Griggs reviews West of the American Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 by Claudio Saunt.
This book’s greatest strength is that it challenges the reader to open their minds to the larger struggle for the greater American continent. 1776 was a year of great civil war between the British Colonies and their motherland; however, equally important was the struggle of the Native American and First Nations people against the ever-expanding and exploring Europeans.