Drawing primarily on archival material such as plantation records, this article places the figure of the plantation overseer at the centre of the drama of the American Revolution in the southern colonies. Occupying a contested liminal space within colonial society, between rich and poor, and between the free and the unfree, the overseer was not necessarily the ne'er-do-well of conventional stereotype. This “Predatory War,” however, tested the overseer's loyalties and sense of duty to the fullest extent. Understanding his role in the conflict offers a significant insight into the experience of a plantation society at war. In particular the overseer was caught in the tension between elite and yeomanry, between the conflicting calls of loyalism and the cause of the Patriots. Perhaps most significantly of all he stood at the forefront of the defence of race slavery during the tumult of civil conflict.

This article examines the rise of the Nation of Islam (NOI) within America's penal system during the late 1950s and the 1960s. In doing so, it explores the reasons for the NOI's appeal among African American prisoners, its contribution to the politicization of those prisoners, the responses of penal, state and federal authorities to the proliferation of prison mosques, and the way in which imprisoned Black Muslims' campaign for freedom of religious expression established the legal groundwork for the prisoners' rights movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s. This research presents the prison as a locus of black protest and the African American prisoner as an important, but largely overlooked, actor within the black freedom struggle. It calls upon historians to recognize the importance of the prison as both a site and a symbol of black resistance during the post-World War II period.

The defeat of the Dyer anti-lynching bill in 1922 was a turning point in relations between black Americans and the Republican Party. Little is understood, however, about the role played in the debates by President Warren Harding. This article contends that Harding's conflicted views on presidential leadership caused him to badly mishandle the bill. The President's inability to choose between a restrained and consensual “Whig” approach and a more active “stewardship” role on a wide range of issues resulted in an erratic and ultimately unsustainable style of leadership. The Dyer bill's failure was affected by this dilemma as the hopes of black and white reformers were alternately raised and dashed by Harding's apparent indecisiveness. Black resentment at the bill's ultimate defeat was thus heightened still further, with severe consequences for the Republican Party's long-term electoral relationship with black voters.

This article considers whether the novel Banjo's sailors and vagabonds, described by James Smethurst as proponents of “a transnational proletarian blackness,” provide a Harlem Renaissance-era alternative to Monica L. Miller's Harlem-centred notion of “subversive dandyism.” Indeed, author Claude McKay – a Jamaican who spent much of the 1920s and 1930s abroad before taking American citizenship in 1940 – has come increasingly to be regarded, as by the novelist Caryl Phillips, as one among numerous twentieth-century “writers for whom the national label is unhelpful if we wish to see the full nature of their achievement.” McKay declared that “a patriot loves not his nation, but the spiritual meannesses of his life of which he has created a frontier wall to hide the beauty of other horizons.” This article addresses Banjo's representation of sartorial self-fashioning as part of this critique of narrowly national identities.

In this essay, I rethink place in terms of the traumatic experience of lynching through Angelina Weld Grimké's “Blackness” and “Goldie,” which fictionalize Mary Turner's 1918 lynching in Georgia. Grimké's stories, I argue, place racial tensions within an American landscape and challenge the potential erasure that often occurs by viewing landscape only through white experience. “Blackness” and “Goldie,” as examples of black nature writing, exhume the memory of lynching and reveal the constructiveness of nature. By analyzing the racialized construction of a southern landscape, I contend that racial terror impacts the meaning of nature and argue that place can be reconstituted in the mind through memories associated with it. Even though Grimké relocates “Blackness” in the North, the protagonist cannot escape traumatic memories of lynching. Instead, his memories of racial violence stay in “place” and begin to affect Reed, his law partner from the North, as well as the reader. Thus this essay reveals how racial trauma transforms the meaning of nature and reinvents place, and through the protagonists' traumatic memories of the trees and hanging black bodies, the southern landscape “creaks,” voicing black oppression that threatens to engulf both white and black.

This paper seeks to accomplish three things. First, it contextualizes Ralph Waldo Emerson's political thought by demonstrating that, despite his rhetoric to the contrary and the dominant interpretation within Emersonian scholarship, his political ideas had an intellectual genealogy rooted both in his local New England context and in the broader American culture. Second, it argues that principles and tensions from the Federalist Party lingered long after the demise of the organized group, especially in response to the perceived excesses and extremes of Jacksonian America, and can even be found within a thinker as egalitarian and democratic as Emerson. And finally, the article explores how the ironies of these two previous points flesh out the paradoxical and dynamic nature of America's democratic tradition. By engaging the ironies and paradoxes within Emerson's political thought in microcosm, I argue, one gets a better view of the larger issues at stake within the broader culture.

This article surveys recent literature in both history and political science associated with an international and diplomatic approach to the American founding. It assesses Drew McCoy's claim that this approach, as represented by David Hendrickson's Peace Pact (2003), “may well mark an important paradigm shift in early American history.” An international approach to the Constitution may mean interpreting the document either as primarily a diplomatic treaty in its own right, or as primarily influenced in its design and adoption by diplomatic and international concerns. Several significant new studies have been published since McCoy's review, both building on and revising Hendrickson's work, but his “unionist paradigm” has had less impact on historians of the Constitution and of founding than on historians of the later early republic. David Golove and Daniel Hulsebosch in 2011 reprised an internationalist approach to the Constitution by arguing that fealty to international treaties and desire for recognition structured Federalists' approach to domestic politics. This article suggests a synthesis that would reintegrate the internationalist approach with recent domestically focussed historiography. Building on the insights of internationalist scholarship, it posits the Constitution as fundamentally oriented around sanctity of contract as a scalable principle, spanning individual, state, and international spheres.

The recent historiography of American labour in the First World War pays special attention to the idea of industrial democracy. The federal government, historians argue in various ways, played a major role in defining that term and affecting how trade unionists, employers and all kinds of industrial and political reformers fought over and applied their own definitions of industrial democracy. In this article I look at one case study of wartime federal intervention in labour relations, between the Commercial Telegraphers' Union of America (CTUA) and the Western Union Telegraph Company. During the war both parties were subject to intervention from the National War Labor Board, the main federal arbitration agency, and then, after nationalization of the telegraphs, the federal Telegraph and Telephone Administration. The experience of the CTUA is more or less at odds with recent general accounts of First World War labour. In this article I argue that this experience points towards a change of emphasis regarding federal-style industrial democracy, placing greater stress on its role in leading directly to the non and antiunion industrial policies practised by many employers in the 1920s, in addition to its encouragement of trade union growth in wartime.

This article examines the attitudes of leading policymakers in the United States toward the Spanish Empire in Cuba during the Ten Years' War (1868–78). It suggests that while many in the US objected to Spanish imperial practices, concerns about trade alongside ideological predispositions regarding nonintervention and race led the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, under the direction of Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, to develop a series of policies that in effect supported colonialism in Cuba while attempting to ensure that the US would benefit from any change in rule there. The article argues that despite an apparent desire for the US to remain neutral during the conflict, the Grant administration in fact formulated its responses based on a narrow conception of Spanish colonial control that demonstrated an increasing sense of moral superiority over both colonizer and colonized.

In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, US forces seized millions of documents, thousands of audio and video tapes, and hard drives and digital devices from Saddam Hussein's government ministries and other sites. In war, the seizure of enemy documents for military advantage is permissible under the laws of armed conflict. Following their capture, the materials have undergone a process of analysis, triage, exploitation, dissemination, politicization, more analysis, scholarly investigation, and postwar diplomacy. An analysis of these events reveals the scope and nature of US exploitation of enemy documents and media in the Iraq War, the limits of the laws of armed conflict regarding their custody and use, and the complications surrounding their repatriation to Iraq.

Despite much talk of a culture war, scholars continue to argue over whether the American public is divided on cultural and social issues. Some of the most prominent work in this area, such as Fiorina's Culture War?, has rejected the idea. However, this work has in turn been criticized for focussing only on the distribution of attitudes within the American public and ignoring the possibility that the culture war may also be driven by the increasing strength with which sections of the population hold their opinions. This paper tests the strength, or saliency, hypothesis using individual-level over-time data and nonlinear regression. It finds (1) that there was a steady and significant increase in concern about traditional moral issues between the early 1980s and 2000, but (2) that the over-time increase was driven by an upward and equal shift in the importance attached to traditional moral issues by Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, evangelicals and non-evangelicals, and frequent and infrequent worshippers alike. While the first finding offers support for the saliency hypothesis and the culture war thesis, the second challenges the idea that Americans are engaged in a war over culture. Both findings enhance but also complicate our theoretical understanding of the culture war, and have important real-world consequences for American politics.

Recirculating the assertion of magazine historian Frank Luther Mott, subsequent generations of scholars maintained that Godey's Lady's Magazine eschewed content treating the social, political, and economic issues of the day. This article challenges that nearly universal reading of Godey's by arguing for the importance of a close reading of the “match plates” commissioned by Godey for his magazine. Appearing between 1840 and 1860, these plates, many engraved from pendant paintings created expressly for Godey, draw on the popularity of stage melodrama, dramatic tableau, and tableaux vivants to enact a performative morality addressing major social, economic, and political issues. Early match plates contrast virtue and vice, capitalizing on the enormous popularity of William Hogarth's engraving series Industry and Idleness. Match plates appear also in the popular fashion plates of the magazine – echoing the city mystery novels, plays, and prints first popularized by Eugene Sue – in Christmas for the Rich/Christmas for the Poor and Dress the Maker/Dress the Wearer. By 1860, even the magazine's “useful” contents, such as the pattern work prized by Godey's readers, echo the popularity of match plates: hence Fruit for Working/Flowers for Working. Closer attention to Godey's engravings calls for a reassessment of Mott's assertion.