Utilizing the work of two cartoonists who produced for newspapers outside the central establishment of the yellow press, this essay argues for the critical role of political cartoonists in shaping viewers' expectations of US involvement in the Spanish-American War of 1898. It features seventeen cartoons, arranged carefully to reflect the shifting political climate, in order to demonstrate the narrative frameworks, image selections, and paradigm shifts in their representations of war and empire. Their cartoons were emblematic of how artists nationwide harnessed typographies of gender, race, and sexuality to create compelling justifications for and against policies of war and colonial acquisition.

The eleven-week dispute at the Amsterdam News in Harlem was the first time in US history that black workers were successful in a labour dispute with black management. Some contemporaries argued that the event represented a triumph for the class-inspired activism of the left, an interpretation in line with the historiography of the long civil rights movement. This article argues that the dispute actually demonstrated the challenges inherent in pursuing labour-based protest strategies. Success was achieved by a concentrated group of workers who used their collective power and propitious geographical and social standing to harness the support of a cross-section of leadership groups. This moment of apparent unity concealed enduring divides over interracial activism, not only between nationalist groups and the radical left but also within mainstream groups like the NAACP. Temporary success could be achieved when workers like the Amsterdam News staff managed to bridge these divides. Supporters, however, proved unable to avoid the subsequent dismissal of union instigators by the newspaper's new owners. More broadly, the problems of coordinating activism to target the different groups who controlled black employment continued to bedevil subsequent protests during the transformative era of the New Deal.

In the spring of 1942, the Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company was gearing up for the most productive three years in its history. With the United States at war, the demand for transport ships would soon propel the Chester-based shipyard to a position of unmatched prominence in the industry – a remarkable development for a concern that was originally conceived as a support subsidiary for its parent, the Sun Oil Company. Twenty-six years earlier, Joseph N. Pew, the younger of two brothers who oversaw the fortunes of Sun Oil, had suggested the creation of a shipyard to build tankers needed to carry the products of Sun's Marcus Hook (Pa.) refinery. He and his older brother J. Howard acquired the old Merchant's Shipyard, hired cousin John G. Pew as president, and began building tankers.

By the end of 1943, Sun Ship boasted 35,000 employees, approximately half of whom were black. More than one third of the black employees worked in the company's No. 4 facility, a yard intended by the Pews to be staffed completely by black workers. Yard No. 4 presented blacks with another instance of a recurring dilemma: should they postpone the goal of full integration for the sake of economic improvement, or should they forgo the opportunity to improve their vocational expertise and economic condition for the ultimate goal of total equality in a fully integrated society? Such a goal seemed, on the eve of the Second World War, nearly as remote as it had been at the close of the Civil War. Jim Crow ruled throughout the South. The North lacked Jim Crow laws, but discrimination and segregation were the norm rather than the exception. “What have Negroes to fight for?” A. Philip Randolph demanded in 1942. “If you haven't got democracy yourself, how can you carry it to somebody else?”

An interpretation of frontier texts must respond to the demand by Gesa Mackenthun and other scholars that “empire be added to the study of American culture.” As written by authors like Frederick Jackson Turner, who placed themselves on the colonizing side of the frontier, these texts described the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” where European immigrants became “Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race.” Here was forged a “composite nationality for the American people.” Such texts with their understanding of the “Indian frontier ” as a “consolidating agent in our history” which developed “the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman,” helped to construct the American identity as the “imperial self” with its implicitly patriarchal, Eurocentric, and colonial assumptions. Describing the frontier as a “military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression,” such texts failed to acknowledge the aggressive acts that seized the land from its original inhabitants.

In March and April of 2008, emo youth in Mexican and Latin American metropoles were vulnerable to violent, physical attacks, which the world witnessed, aghast, via YouTube. Journalists, pundits, and cultural commentators around the globe wondered, first, how to define “emo”; second, how to explain its presence in Mexico and Latin America; and third, whence such a violent reaction? This essay tackles those questions, and tries to think through emo to something more than the post-NAFTA angst to which it has been commonly ascribed in the US and Mexican media. Tracing a route from US Chicano punk and new wave, to Mexico's self-proclaimed emo youth, to Myriam Gurba's short fiction featuring southern California's Chicana dyke-punk communities, I ask how emo travels, and how these highly self-conscious and very public performances of affect speak to the intersections of race and gender in twenty-first-century Latin@ and Latin American youth culture.

The Cold War in the late 1940s blunted attempts by the Truman administration to extend the scope of government in areas such as health care and civil rights. In California, the combined weakness of the Democratic Party in electoral politics and the importance of fellow travelers and communists in state liberal politics made the problem of how to advance the left at a time of heightened Cold War tensions particularly acute. Yet by the early 1960s a new generation of liberal politicians had gained political power in the Golden State and was constructing a greatly expanded welfare system as a way of cementing their hold on power. In this article I argue that the New Politics of the 1970s, shaped nationally by Vietnam and by the social upheavals of the 1960s over questions of race, gender, sexuality, and economic rights, possessed particular power in California because many activists drew on the longer-term experiences of a liberal politics receptive to earlier anti-Cold War struggles. A desire to use political involvement as a form of social networking had given California a strong Popular Front, and in some respects the power of new liberalism was an offspring of those earlier battles.

This article argues that the imagery that American policymakers deployed to represent poverty as a social problem in the United States in the 1960s was rooted in the conceptual vocabulary that had emerged to describe “underdevelopment” in Third World in the years after 1945. Relying upon a close reading of still and moving images produced and distributed under the auspices of the American state in the mid-1960s – including the Academy Award®-winning documentary, A Year Towards Tomorrow – this article explores the ways influential American liberals represented poverty as an explicitly global social problem demanding the intervention of middle-class “agents of change.” This moment in the history of poverty fighting marks the origins of the concept of “global poverty.”

While Niedecker's “life by water” is the subject of many of her poems, reflecting the experience of living on the flood-prone island of Black Hawk, Wisconsin, the water imagery that saturates many of her poems also becomes a way of reflecting upon time as it is experienced, of consciousness as process, of subjectivity as something pulled along by a temporal stream. The poetics of temporal flow suggests Niedecker's interest in exploring forms of experience that fall outside conscious attention and that point to her affinity with the modernist philosopher of time, Henri Bergson, whose Creative Evolution she read in 1955. This paper examines some of the short, concise poems Niedecker wrote in the 1950s, together with the later, looser-limbed poems such as “Paean to Place” where she turns away from the objectivist principles of com pression in order to produce fluid, malleable poems commensurate with the flow of experience.

In the parlance of the time he was known as a “sick comedian.” He was also called a junkie, a hipster, a satirist, a shaman, a free-speech martyr, “a disease of America,” “a nightclub Cassandra,” and a prophet. But Lenny Bruce, the caustic comedian who gained a following in the late 1950s and early 1960s, called himself something else: a deviate. “All my humor is based on destruction and despair,” he said. “If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing on the breadline.”

It was fate's infallible sense of the ironic which induced Andrew Lang to contact William Dean Howells as a potential contributor to the newly founded Longman's Magazine in October 1882. Ironic, that is, in the light of later events, for the two men barely knew one another at the time, Howells having been introduced to Lang two months previously, at one of Edmund Gosse's celebrated Sunday parties. Had Lang waited for Howells to show his colours, he would, no doubt, have refrained from hauling this Trojan horse into the Longman camp. Indeed, Howells's notorious disparagement of Dickens and Thackeray appeared that same year, in the Century Magazine for November 1882. All but a nonentity to the British public before, the American author thereby achieved fame, almost overnight, as the powerful vindicator of the new American prose and a merciless denunciator of the established British novelists.

“What is an American?” asked the French émigré Hector St. John Crèvecoeur in 1782. In so doing, Crèvecoeur posed one of the fundamental questions of the revolutionary era. When the colonists overthrew imperial authority; declared independence; formed an independent confederation of states; and waged war for its existence; they created a new nation and a new nationality. To be sure, colonists and Britons alike had long used the term “American,” none the less, a complete sense of American national identity was largely inchoate before the American Revolution. Before the Revolution, most Americans identified more with their individual colonies than with an abstract geographic concept like “America.” While the Revolution did not completely supplant regional loyalties, it introduced a new, compelling loyalty: to the United States of America. The Revolution forced Americans to choose between loyalty to Britain or the United States. Ultimately, the majority opted for the United States. Those who did, helped define what it meant to be American by their words and actions. The purpose of this article is to examine the development of loyalty to the United States and the development of an American national identity among one group of Americans: sailors imprisoned in Britain during the Revolution.

Compassionate conservatism was declared to be the governing philosophy of George W. Bush's administration. Yet among commentators it has rarely been taken seriously in its own terms as a theory. What this article aims at showing is that compassionate conservatism is not merely an empty political slogan; instead, when the nature of conservatives' compassion is properly understood, it can be seen to be a concept of great significance to conservatism. Conservatives use an understanding of compassion as a “tough-minded,” rather than a “soft-hearted,” moral virtue to challenge the fundamental precepts of competing social philosophies. In doing so, they construct a paternalistic and inegalitarian doctrine that justifies the authority of the “compassionate” regulating the lives of those who are the subjects of their compassion.

It is a given that the United States has been an important global power, yet it may be of at least equal significance that the nation has been an only faltering planetary power. Global is social – it implies the social relations that extend over the globe. In contrast, planetary is physical, indicating the physical planet itself. Far more historical studies have focussed on the former than on the latter; examining the history of the United States within planetary terms is only beginning to be done. One long tradition of human engagement with the whole Earth is the practice of circumnavigation, going around the world. This essay examines American circumnavigators’ accounts ecocritically, in terms of their consciousness of the natural world, in order to explain that the United States came to the tradition of going around the world belatedly and not always beneficially.

In August 1962 the American novelist Mary McCarthy surprised everyone by extolling the virtues of William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959), thereby raising the public profile of both the novel and novelist. The occasion was an Edinburgh conference on writing and censorship organized by the publisher John Calder, and attended by literary luminaries such as Norman Mailer and Henry Miller. For McCarthy the virtue of Naked Lunch was its timeliness, the way it appeared “sort of speeded up like jet travel”; “it has that somewhat supersonic quality.” Addressing the conference audience, Burroughs went a step further, heralding a new epoch of space writing: I feel that a new mythology is now possible in the space age and that we can again have heroes and villains, with respect to the planet, and in closing I would say that the future of writing is in space and not in time.

In 1785 physician-politician David Ramsay of Charleston published The History of the Revolution of South Carolina. Contemporaries praised it highly. Four years later Ramsay produced a more ambitious work, The History of the American Revolution. It established his reputation both in America and abroad as the new nation's leading historian. Thus in a few short years Ramsay went from a locally prominent physician and State legislator to an important national cultural and literary figure. The American reading public found his approach to history to its tastes. He expressed a set of ideas about American history in general and the Revolution in particular that were common currency in the United States. But he expressed them for the first time in well-reasoned and documented historical narrative: in volumes that were suitably pro-American, yet judicious in their treatment of Britain, that made a strong case for American uniqueness while maintaining the ideal of the United States as a model for the world.

Ramsay's histories alone would attract our interest as the first and most influential historical analysis of the American Revolution and the ratification of the Federal Constitution. But Ramsay's writings and his career as physician and politician are also significant because they launch us upon a journey into the mind of one of the new nation's most articulate spokesmen on historical, political, and medical issues. There is, to be sure, little in the general pattern of his life to distinguish him from a number of his contemporaries among the professions and political figures of second rank. Ramsay seldom formulated original ideas. His importance was not simply, or even primarily, that of a political or historical philosopher or medical innovator.

This article examines Australian responses to the imposition of stringent national origins quotas in the United States during the 1920s. Following the introduction of the American quota system, many Australians worried that large numbers of undesirable southern and eastern European migrants would make their way toward Australian ports. Widespread calls for preemptive restrictions forced the Australian government to finally implement a range of measures designed to limit immigration from Italy, Greece, Albania, Yugoslavia, and Malta. More broadly, this article argues that American quotas often inadvertently engendered a wide range of indirect and unintentional consequences around the world that scholars of migration and American foreign relations might explore in greater depth. It concludes by suggesting some opportunities for individual and collaborative research into the international effects of the United States’ notorious national origins quota system.