HOTCUS Annual Postgraduate Conference: ‘Winning minds and hearts: constructing national identity in US history.’ Friday 9th September 2016, Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Keynote speaker: Dr Simon Hall (Senior Lecturer in American History, Leeds University) On 1 February 1943, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt asserted that ‘Americanism is a matter of the mind and the heart.’ Just a year after he approved the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, FDR’s statement about the inclusivity of American identity highlights one of the key questions scholars face when writing the history of the United States: what do we actually mean when we talk about US national identity? The distinction between what is and isn’t American has dominated the history of the twentieth century United States, from the Hollywood Blacklists of the 1950s and protests in the streets of Selma, Alabama in 1965, to clashes between construction workers and anti- Vietnam War protesters in New York City […]