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 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.

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.

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.