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.

Influential American studies scholars of the mid-twentieth century, such as R. W. B. Lewis, Henry Nash Smith, and Leslie A. Fiedler, focussed attention on a mythic American character, the frontiersman who penetrates the wilderness. These critics provided analyses of figures such as Daniel Boone and his fictional counterpart, Natty Bumppo, and discussed the power the romanticized western frontier had over the American imagination. Their observations were accurate, as far as they went. However, these critics did not acknowledge the many narratives in which a female character conquers the frontier. The assumption seemed to be that the literary female figure belonged in the parlor with her sewing basket and not in the forest with her weapon. Unfortunately, this incomplete assessment of the frontier adventure genre is still in evidence today. In this essay, I work towards the development of a more complete understanding of the American frontier story and point out that, even in the iconic John Filson/John Trumbull Boone tale, we find a mini-narrative involving a female hero who triumphs over the “savage” forces of the wilderness. This female figure became a cultural archetype, and similar versions of her story were repeated in countless captivity and western adventure anthologies, almanacs, and the like for the next seventy years. The popularity of this frontier narrative featuring a strong, violent female figure suggests that readers were accepting of the idea of an active, aggressive woman, at least while she was contending with chaotic forces in the wilderness. The popularity of this kind of narrative also undercuts the traditional gender paradigm (the nurturing passive female versus the active aggressive male) too often imposed by scholars on antebellum American letters and culture.

From the moment of its publication in 1922, Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt was widely hailed as a text that harnessed the tactics of literary realism to the ambitions of social science. Over the years, in fact, critics have consistently linked Lewis's dissection of a crass, puerile, and materialistic white-collar culture to a conception of the novel as barely fictionalized ethnography – a conceit that has scripted the author as the twentieth century's foremost “cartographer” of American business life. Taking this fact as its starting point, this essay shows how Lewis's efforts to create an ethnographic record of modern business life ultimately encoded an even deeper commentary on the peculiar role that industrial–commercial development played in shaping the ways white-collar Americans thought about, valued, and pursued traces of their putative “heritage.” Rather than simply depict industrial–commercial society's destruction of the past, I argue, Babbitt instead labored to create a necessary genealogy for this regime: one that provided the nation's new, forward-lurching order with the kind of temporal coherence and historical context that its own ascendance seemed most directly to expunge. In making such an argument, this essay seeks to query a long-standing presumption within public memory studies that for years has construed the idea(l)s of historical recovery and the operations of commercial capitalism as fundamentally, if not inherently, incompatible. Balefully derided for mass-producing and mass-marketing a commodified pastness, dismissed as tools for replacing authentic history with ersatz heritage, modern development practices have stood for the vast majority of critics as proof of Americans' fundamental disconnection from their common and authentic history. Seeking to complicate this view, this essay shows instead how Babbitt can be read as a powerful counterexample to such logic – one that casts modernization less as an adversary than as an adjunct to prevailing modes of public recollection.

This essay takes a history-of-ideas approach to place American medicine and psychiatry within the context of the Cold War. Rather than focus on physical science and technology (as is often the case in studies of science and the Cold War), the essay shifts attention to the human sciences in order to consider the ways in which medical and psychiatric research was caught up in concerns over national defence. Various arguments have proposed that US research involving human subjects between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s contravened the Nuremberg Code, which was established in 1948 to formalize the ethical boundaries of medical research and prevent any repeat of the human experimentation widely practised in Nazi concentration camps. The essay focusses, particularly, on two phases of the Cold War: the medical and genetic testing linked to the dropping of the atom bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the psychological tests (often referred to as “psyops”) beginning in the World War II years but developing rapidly during the Korean War. The aim of the essay is to link a phenomenological approach to the Cold War – in which the figures of the “zero” and “cipher” frequently arose – with a discussion of the interrelationship between US national defence issues and American medical research.

This article argues that Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest is best understood in the context of the consolidation and expansion of the US state following the First World War and the Russian Revolution. It also argues that Hammett's novel constitutes a highly significant articulation of theoretical debates about the nature of political authority and state power in the modern era and speaks about the transition of one state formation to another. Insofar as Red Harvest explores the way in which the state's coercive and ethical character are bound up together, this article argues that Hammett's novel draws upon an understanding of political authority and state power primarily derived from Gramsci, via Marx. Gramsci insists that control cannot be maintained through force alone (and his conception of hegemony, in turn, suggests a power bloc that can become fragmented and disunited in a war of position). In the same way, Red Harvest traces the transformation of the “economic-corporate” state into the expanded or “ethical” State but crucially any ethical dimension, as Gramsci notes, is always beholden to the needs of the capitalist economy. As such, the apparently arbitrary bloodshed in the novel is conceived as a relatively minor realignment in the ranks of the capitalist classes – certainly less serious than the miners' strike that prefigures the novel. What makes this realignment significant is that it calls attention to the state both as repressive and as a site of conflict and compromise. Here, the work performed by the Continental Op and by the crime novel in general – simultaneously buttressing and, to some extent, contesting the power of the state – needs to be understood as part of the process by which the state is consistently enacting hegemony (albeit protected by the armour of coercion). The article concludes by pointing out that while Gramsci is perhaps too willing to dwell upon the state's expanded reach, Red Harvest is more interested in examining possible “cracks and fissures” in the state formation, even if the critique it ultimately offers goes nowhere and yields nothing.

This article examines forty years of historical writing on the Black Panther Party (BPP), arguing that this historiography has now reached maturity. It evaluates key publications on the BPP, splitting the historiography into three periods. The first phase, the article asserts, was dominated by accounts written by participants and observers of the BPP in action. These offered insight into the personalities of the BPP leadership but included relatively little on other BPP members. They were supplemented by a collection of friendly academic studies, a number of which emphasized the role of the FBI in precipitating the BPP's decline. The article identifies the 1994 publication of Hugh Pearson's biographical study of Huey P. Newton as the beginning of a second phase. Pearson's work, which built on a collection of accounts written by observers and right-wing writers during the first phase, precipitated an outpouring of new studies that opposed its conclusions. These works overwhelmingly focussed on individual BPP chapters and the experiences of the BPP rank and file; they were generally friendly towards the party and often appraised the BPP's actions through the 1970s. A second wave of participant accounts also emerged in this period which offered a more personal interpretation of the BPP's decline. A third period emerged in the early 2000s that abandoned the obsession with Pearson's study and focussed instead on the BPP's contribution to African American and American culture beyond its political program and violent image. The article reveals the paradox at the heart of the local approach, one which recent studies addressed in their focus on the BPP's Oakland chapter and their return to a tight chronological approach that focussed on the BPP's peak years. It concludes by noting the remaining omissions in the BPP's historical record and anticipating further studies.

The focus of this article is The End of a Primitive, the novel that marks Chester Himes's transition from a writer of protest to one of crime fiction. Drawing on archival research carried out in the United States, I advance two arguments. Firstly, the story told in the autobiographical Primitive is, in part, that behind Himes's leaving America for Paris in 1953. The novel, I argue, inaugurates a writing of exile that is continued in Himes's crime fiction, a writing through which, because of his literal and figurative distance from America, Himes came to feel more strongly his sense of national – that is, American – identity. Secondly, in Primitive Himes presents the reader with a formal breakdown of sorts, one that “clears the way” for the crime fiction (which, my archival research shows, Himes had begun writing before Primitive was finished). This breakdown – of the protest novel conceived in generic terms – also predicts the trajectory of Himes's hard-boiled crime novels. By signalling the generic exhaustion of protest fiction through the failure of “good” form, Primitive, as the end point of Himes's more generic protest writing, also anticipates the movement of the crime stories towards formal or generic dissolution, an indication, I suggest, of Himes's late belief that literature was in general an ineffective catalyst of social–political change.

By any criteria, Evangelical Christians constitute a significant segment of the American population, but they have always been a difficult audience for the American film industry to target, because many Evangelicals view themselves as ideologically opposed to Hollywood – a fraught relationship often referred to as the “Culture Wars.” This essay uses the recent hit Fireproof (2008) to examine the complex relationship between Hollywood, Evangelical audiences and independent Christian film producers.

The influx of Vietnamese refugees, “boat people,” and immigrants into the United States after April 1975 has led to the establishment of a significant Vietnamese-American community. There is a body of literature written for children and young adults that creates and delineates this new community within the topography of a welcoming and immigrant-friendly USA. This paper will examine the meanings and implications of the appellation “Vietnamese-American” as defined within a body of nonfiction children's literature. It will highlight how these texts negotiate questions related to refugee status, immigration, identity and belonging, contributing in many instances to a bland re-creation of a formerly oppressed but now coherent and increasingly prosperous and Americanized people. The children's literature plays an important role in defining the relatively new community to itself and to mainstream America. In its dissemination of truisms about Confucian heritages and stereotypes of “model minorities” the literature reveals as much about American ideological desires as it does about “the new Americans.”