Recent research on the far right has remained surprisingly silent on the question of capitalism. This article takes another approach. It suggests that we must understand the far right emerging out of the economic: out of the dynamics of capitalism itself. It does so through an intellectual portrait of the financial journalist Peter Brimelow, one of the most influential proponents of far-right nativist politics and a self-described “godfather of the Alt Right.” It follows his passage from financial journalist to anti-immigrant firebrand through his encounters with neoliberal luminaries Peter Bauer, Julian Simon, and Milton Friedman. Rather than for an ethnostate, I argue Brimelow is best seen as making the case for an “ethno-economy,” with immigration determined by a racialized hierarchy of human capital.

This article examines the constructions of Black “degeneracy” through which white Americans rationalized Jim Crow terror. Ruminations on African Americans’ supposed downward trajectory, I argue, drew relational meaning from a range of colonial discourses. Claims that African Americans were deteriorating outside the bonds of enslavement were articulated within wider transnational imperialist discourses circulating in this period that imagined that the world's savage peoples were destined to recede in the march of civilization. Here, I examine white Americans’ narratives of African American degeneration through two other imagined hemispheric encounters between white civilization and savagery. In the article's first half, I consider images of Haiti employed in cultural and political texts to signify the durability of innate Black savagery and the apocalyptic potential of Black freedom. In the second half, I consider discourses of Black degeneration in freedom alongside the genocidal construction of the “vanishing Indian.” I focus on two memorial projects: the 1931 monument to the Faithful Slave erected in Harpers Ferry and the never-completed National American Indian Memorial, for which ground was broken in 1913 at Fort Wadsworth.

During World War II, Germany and the United States fought it out on the battlefields, but once the Allies were victorious, American attention quickly turned to the playing fields. Despite recent enmity, in the spirit of amity GIs quickly started recreational games with German youngsters. This seemingly natural development was at odds with both American expectations of the Germans and vice versa. Reeducation of Germany, and especially its Nazi-indoctrinated youth, was viewed as essential to peace, and the army, through sports, became perhaps unlikely early reeducators. This article outlines sports’ inherent Americanness, this impromptu playing, and its relationship to the formal army program of youth activities.

From the beginning of King Leopold II's endeavours to secure the Congo Free State (CFS) as his personal domain, through to the legitimization of his rule at the Berlin Conference in 1884–85, the United States has played an important role in the tragic history of the CFS. This article seeks to explore the complex relationship between humanitarianism and race in the story of the American connection with the CFS and subsequent Congo reform movement. It will unpack the role of key individuals involved and their relationship with American humanitarians in the reform movement, arguing that while pursuing reform in the CFS, American humanitarians established close relationships and collaborated with notable racists who shared their beliefs on race and colonialism. By examining these alliances, it becomes evident that their efforts for reform were entangled with individuals who contradicted the supposed humanitarian goals. This article will also examine the reception of this activism in the African American press, showing that the response to the reform campaign was ambivalent at best, with questions raised as to why key African American activists involved in the movement focussed their efforts abroad in the era of Jim Crow in the US.

Historians have treated the counterculture largely as a white phenomenon and drawn sharp boundaries between its escapism and the political engagement of the Black freedom struggle. A look at the counterculture's origins and growth in the late 1950s and the 1960s reveals that the counterculture intersected with Black culture in many ways. White beats, hipsters, and hippies generally admired the civil rights movement's support for equality and nonviolence, but sometimes scoffed at its effort to gain integration into American society. Hippies considered themselves outsiders from society and imagined that they shared affinity with Black Americans. Blacks’ responses to the counterculture ranged from contempt to curiosity to embrace. Some Blacks despised the hippies’ lifestyle and political apathy, but others considered the counterculture an important challenge to “the System.” American culture, style, literature, and music were all affected by the counterculture's experimentalism. The counterculture changed white culture, Black culture, and American culture. Drawing boundaries between cultural forms proves less instructive than focussing on the connections between them.