What happens when parents tell their ostensible daughters to dress as boys? This essay reconsiders the trope of cross-dressing through two antebellum stories, “Theresa: A Haytien Tale” (1827) and “Lucy Nelson; or the Boy-Girl” (1831), that include this plot point. By imagining unconventional approaches to teaching girlhood, the stories explore what shapes each character’s gender attachments. In “Lucy Nelson,” the titular character’s gender identity emerges through a struggle between the child’s own tastes for masculine-coded behaviors and the parents’ efforts to impose normative femininity, whereas “Theresa” represents a mother and her children who resist colonial violence by reconfiguring their gender roles. Read together, these disparate stories emphasize the families’ influence on gender expression and reveal that these different texts treated efforts either to deny or to affirm the children’s identities as care. The stories thus evoke debates – over how to care for children who fall outside gender norms – that remain with us two hundred years later.

Historians of the Cold War and the nuclear age have largely overlooked the existence of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs), while films, comics, novels, and television programmes that tackled the challenging imaginary, yet all-too-possible, wastes of a post-nuclear landscape have been abundantly analysed. As cultural products and tools through which to imagine other worlds, TTRPGs offer powerful insights into how, where, and why certain groups thought about the spectre of the nuclear age and how they dealt with this threat by gaming within make-believe postapocalyptic worlds. This article draws together several threads in its analysis of the American-designed and -produced Twilight: 2000 TTRPG’s historical significance. Through analysing Twilight: 2000 as a case study of how a TTRPG functions as a specific nuclear-cultural object in its own right, the article also locates this game as a part of a wider-reaching dystopian fantasy rooted in the massive everyday reality of atomic annihilation. Likewise, the game, its mechanics, setting, and artwork are analysed here as part of a distinctive Cold War culture that permitted participants to derive pleasure and affirmation from fictional “adventures” in the postapocalyptic environment.

Frank Samperi is a neglected twentieth-century American poet who produced a large body of poetry. Affiliated closely with Objectivist poetics through the mentorship of Louis Zukofsky, Samperi’s work is significantly influenced by the Catholic writings of Aquinas and Dante. With a commitment to linguistic self-reflexivity, an ethics of otherness, and a resistance to abstraction and identity thinking, Samperi’s work enhances and expands our understanding of the key traits of Objectivist poetics, often regarded as relying heavily on Judaic ideas and philosophies. As an Italian American Catholic, his poetry also demonstrates an immigrant’s compromise with Americanization, but an equally clear alignment with the emerging American poetic counterculture in the 1960s.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was seemingly everywhere by the end of 2024, and the 2024 US presidential election was the first American national election to be conducted wholly in an AI era. Nevertheless, relatively little is known about how effectively generative AI contributes to learning about politics. This study explores that question in the context of research on subnational US politics. Based on a novel methodology that combines the analysis of AI-generated profiles on several US states with interviews with state-level experts, this article identifies and analyses a prevalent national bias in the state-level content produced by generative AI. This bias is both a consequence of and a contributor to the problem of the nationalization of American politics, which itself undermines the principles of federalism that undergird Madisonian democracy in the United States.

In this paper I examine what I call an Afrogothic aesthetic inherited from Black occult traditions, the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude movement. I argue that it is useful to read Afrogothicism through the lens of Black spirituality and the blues instead of the legacy of slavery through which it has generally been studied, as this evokes Richard Hurd’s argument of Gothicism partaking of the “terrible sublime.” Ultimately, I argue that the avant-garde American poetry movements of the 1950s develop out of this Afrogothic poetic aesthetic that begins with Black poets and novelists.

This paper traces the way(s) Republican political leaders have infused a right-wing populist ideology at the heart of Republican Party programs over thirty years. It does so through analysis of the institutional supports and historical factions that have shaped the evolution of the Republican Party over the last century. A change in coalition forces that control the Republican Party has encouraged the emergence of a Republican Party that holds, among other things, that some radical political actions (such as the 6 January insurrection) are legitimate, while other radical political action (such as the George Floyd protests) is not. For many Republicans in the newly dominant Trump coalition, some seemingly anti-state action is in fact legitimate when undertaken in defense of a “true” US Constitution, while other action, even when clearly legal, is inherently a threat to the “true” US Constitution.

This article explores a new generation of Caribbean writers in the early twenty-first century who wrestle with self-representations, when the model-minority myth and strategies such as wealth accumulation and property acquisition became the only forms of resistance to urban displacement possible, once the equity structures that were hard won by the civil rights movement were dismantled. Specifically, I explore the affordance of the romance novel genre in Olga Dies Dreaming (2022) and Neruda on the Park (2022) to discuss this dilemma between confrontational struggle and assimilation. Ultimately, this article illustrates a shift in Latinx literature toward historically commercial genres that have become key cultural spaces to discuss pressing contemporary political themes.

This article explores the role of race in discussions of women and aging in the early twentieth century. It first examines the uses of whiteness in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s problematic defense of older women, and then compares it with works by Harlem educator Elise McDougald. It investigates McDougald’s use of different life stages to disrupt anti-Black representations that stand in stark contrast to Gilman’s project. The article incorporates history and theories of aging, gender, and race, as well as literary analysis, to evaluate the long-standing and under-theorized importance of race in constructs of age and aging.

This article examines an overlooked period of CIA history: the directorship of William Raborn. While previous scholarship points to Raborn being a lacklustre DCI, little substantial discussion has been held on the reasons why he struggled so much. This article proposes that Raborn's problems were due to his inability to assimilate to the agency's organizational culture, with his willingness to supply “intelligence to please” and his lack of worldliness being key. Subsequently, Raborn's tenure damaged both the reputation and the efficacy of the CIA during the mid-1960s, and led to increasing presidential neglect and enhanced scrutiny of their operations.

Recent scholarly interest in Lillian Smith and her controversial best-selling novel Strange Fruit (1944) has ignored the importance of the magazine she edited with her partner Paula Snelling, South Today (1936–45). After considering Smith and Snelling's cultivation of an ideal southern literature through their book reviews, this article reads the short stories Smith published in South Today, which functioned as early drafts of Strange Fruit. Tracing the significance of the magazine's readers, I argue that the process of editing a magazine shaped the structure and style of Smith's novel, considering what literary magazines can tell us about southern identity.

Cody Marrs's concept of “transbellum literature” has urged critics to reconsider the position of the Civil War that neatly divides literary history into “antebellum” and “postbellum.” Marrs's idea encourages us to see both continuity and discontinuity between the postbellum and antebellum periods. Taking as a main subject of inquiry Herman Melville's “Lee in the Capitol” in Battle-Pieces, one of the poems written from the perspective of the South, I would like to inquire into what the South as a geographical and political entity meant to Melville after the Civil War. In this poem, Melville gets inside Robert E. Lee's inner psyche, ventriloquizing his suppressed emotions. By ventriloquizing Lee, Melville can be seen as doing violence to the alterity of the South in ways that conflict with his representation of others in his antebellum fiction. This essay interrogates how the Civil War changed Melville's approach to representing alterity by focussing on the presence of the South as a geographical other in Battle-Pieces. At the heart of this perceived change lies his concern with representing community rather than individuals. However, Melville ultimately finds himself othered from the southern individuals, thereby demonstrating less discontinuity than continuity in terms of his ethics of alterity.

Black Power and existentialism were mutually reinforcing movements in the late 1960s. Stokely Carmichael used French existentialism to shape some Black Power principles, which demonstrated existentialism's continued relevance to racial equality. Existentialism reinforced values, such as moral purpose and self-definition, which supported positive appraisals of Black Power revolt on campuses. Carmichael's adoption of French existentialism illuminates transnational influences on Black Power dating to the 1940s, as well as how important French existentialist texts amplified Black perspectives. The meeting of French existentialism and Black Power assisted increased representation of Black perspectives on campuses, and popular awareness that representation was as important as desegregation to equality.

Since the 1990s, the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians (PLAGAL) has positioned sexual minorities and fetuses as alike in struggle. The lesbian, gay, and bisexual members of this relatively small organization argued that tolerance and inclusivity of their positionality were strategically beneficial to both the gay rights and antiabortion movements. Ultimately, PLAGAL failed to convince many of the “legitimacy” of their campaigns, and was repeatedly expelled from both right-to-life rallies and Pride marches. This notwithstanding, PLAGAL organizing reveals much about (the limits of) identity politics and the relationship of different social and political movements in this turbulent decade.

The Christian cartoonist E. J. Pace (1880–1946) began his career during the fundamentalist–modernist controversy of the 1920s. Pace often reacted against liberal evangelicalism, or modernism, in his cartoons, and Islam appeared alongside it on several occasions. This article discusses for the first time Pace's Islam-inspired cartoons. It explores the socioreligious contexts of their creation and the theological reasons why Pace used them as a tool with which to attack modernism and its perceived threat to America's souls. Pace may have cartooned Islam to bolster fundamentalist evangelicalism, but his cartoons also create moments of unintended unity that remain culturally relevant today.

This essay uses BBS Productions’ Drive, He Said (1971) to consider how New Hollywood cinema and a cluster of campus revolt films contributed to activist critiques of American sport during the Vietnam era. Drive, He Said conceptualized a “pukey jock,” an athlete who was ambivalent about sport's stereotypical embodiment of establishmentarian values. In doing so, it created a template for the emergence of a new kind of politicized athlete that emerged in the 1970s.

While the bulk of the study of the burgeoning movement to (re)name streets for Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) has predominantly been centered on the creation of a new geography of commemoration honoring the leader's legacy and philosophy, little work has explicitly addressed the spatial motivations undergirding Black communities’ insistence on quickening the pace of such a process. This study strives to bring this point further by proposing to analyze the growing phenomenon of street naming for King in terms of Black communities’ relentless determination to challenge and reformulate the long-established practices shaping the MLK toponymic streetscape, especially in the southern part of the United States. On a deeper level, the paper reveals that Black communities and leaders use the spatial commemoration of King as a conduit for the acquisition of a more equitable share of and control over the urban landscape with their white counterparts. The politics of street naming thus lays bare the history and legacy of racial segregation in the South, the unfinished journey of the march for socio-spatial justice, and the rising power of Black communities.

This paper examines the ways the Colonies in the American streaming service Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale utilize western myth to reimagine the American West as an entirely female space. Relying on popular understandings of the significance of the mythic West, traditional conceptions of the West as masculine, and the narrative function of the western, it argues that the Colonies offer regeneration and renewal for the women whose agency has been stripped in the hypergendered oppressive nation of Gilead. By reinstilling a sense of power and freedom in the women sent there, the Colonies operate much like the West of the imagination, allowing these women to escape the confines of Gilead and the chance to both return to their authentic selves and foresee a better world.

This article scrutinizes public contestations over Black history during 1963's Emancipation Centennial. Specifically, it investigates how the Kennedy administration censored the historian John Hope Franklin's drafts for the chief commemorative effort Freedom to the Free, a history of civil rights since 1863. Reflecting the hubris of mid-twentieth-century racial liberalism, these edits excised white supremacy from American history, instead celebrating a confining definition of racial progress that prioritized Black equalization, adjustment, and incorporation into a deracialized liberal nationhood. The censoring of Franklin's dissident Americanism therefore highlights how racial liberalism simultaneously promoted and suppressed Black history, historians, and public figures more generally.

During the 1930s and 1940s, a group of right-wing intellectuals, sparked by the New Deal, mounted a sustained critique of American democracy and inherited democratic principles. Believing that the progressive democratization of the state had resulted in a decadent, inefficient and morally coarse society, they attacked democracy as the root cause of the nation's problems. Examining the reactionary conservative, libertarian and fascist critiques of democracy, this article suggests that each borrowed ideas from the other, and that their beliefs in autocratic rule or a broadly countermajoritarian politics have not been adequately studied by scholars.

This article examines the rhizomatic approach to political organizing developed by the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA). AAPA, founded in 1968 in Berkeley, CA, is an organization of historical significance, having introduced the term “Asian American” to signify a new political identity and developed the first pan-Asian nationwide social movement. Yet the scholarly treatment of AAPA has been rather cursory. This article is one of the the most extensively researched studies of AAPA. In three parts, it examines AAPA's (a) rhizomatic approach to political organizing, (b) model of collective leadership, and (c) community-centered pedagogy. First, the article conceptualizes AAPA's rhizomatic mode, which fostered the decentralized, interconnected participation of many people. AAPA prioritized a participatory model that also created space for women to have influence. Second, examining AAPA's activities shows an approach to community-based organizing that affirmed the knowledge produced by ordinary people gained through their lived experiences. Third, the article explores the importance of relationship building and rhizomatic networks in AAPA's growth across the nation. While not exclusive of vertical structures, AAPA's focus on egalitarian, collaborative organizing infused the national movement and helped to make collective leadership a hallmark of the broader Asian American movement.