One of the most curiously overlooked publishing phenomena of the 1950s was the appearance of the comic book Mad in October 1952 which “burst forth full blown from nowhere on an unsuspecting comic book reading public” into the midst of the domestic Cold War. In 1959 Newsweek observed that “Mad each month sticks a sharp-pronged fork into some part of the social anatomy” while Gloria Steinem recalled: “There was a spirit of satire and irreverence in Mad that was very important, and it was the only place you could find it in the '50s.” And even Marshall McLuhan considered Mad worthy of mention in his influential study, Understanding Media. Noting its “sudden eminence,” he attributed this to its “ludicrous and cool replay of the forms of the hot media of photo, radio, and film.” Surprisingly, very little attention has been paid towards Mad beyond its own retrospective publications, one book, and several short articles. This is unfortunate since the comic provides a sharply satiric, yet extremely perceptive insight into many aspects of Cold War America during the 1950s. Furthermore, as I shall argue, those who wrote and drew for Mad formed an alternative New York intellectual circle to that which is commonly written about. Mad's critique of America was far more effective and devastating than their better-known counterparts and consequently, Mad deserves credit as one of the sources of the counterculture of the 1960s.

In Ghosts, the second part of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, a private eye called Blue is hired by a certain White to shadow a man called Black. Black lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn; Blue moves into an equally small apartment just across the street from Black. He is alarmed to discover that Black spends most of his time at his desk by the window, writing in a notebook with a red fountain-pen. In the evenings Black reads, and through his binoculars Blue can just make out the title of Black's book: Walden, by Henry David Thoreau.

Accordingly Blue obtains his own copy of Walden – a 1942 edition published, by coincidence, by one Walter J. Black – thinking it might help him solve the mystery of his assignment. But, like almost every reader of Walden, from Emerson to Stanley Cavell to Auster himself, Blue finds reading this book is “not a simple business”:

Whole chapters go by, and when he comes to the end of them he realizes that he has not retained a thing. Why would anyone want to go off and live alone in the woods? What's all this about planting beans and not drinking coffee or eating meat? Why all these interminable descriptions of birds? Blue thought that he was going to get a story, or at least something like a story, but this is no more than blather, an endless harangue about nothing at all.

The next day Blue tries the book again, and finally comes across a sentence he can understand: “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.” Blue realizes that “the trick is to go slowly, more slowly than he has ever gone with the words before.” Nevertheless, he still finds the whole business excruciatingly painful, and curses Black for torturing him in this way. “What he does not know,” the anonymous narrator remarks, “is that were he to find the patience to read the book in the spirit in which it asks to be read, his entire life would begin to change, and little by little he would come to a full understanding of his situation – that is to say, of Black, of White, of the case, of everything that concerns him.” Instead, Blue throws the book aside in disgust and goes out for a walk, not realizing “that this is the beginning of the end.”

During the 1950s and 1960s, conservative intellectuals in the United States described African decolonization and the civil rights movement as symptoms of a global threat to white, Western civilization. In the most influential conservative journal of the period, National Review, writers such as William F. Buckley grouped these events together as dangerous contributors to civilizational decline. In the crucible of transnational black revolt, some conservative intellectuals embraced scientific racism in the 1960s. These often-ignored features of conservative intellectual thought provided space for white supremacist ideals to continue to ferment on the American right into the twenty-first century.

The early political activities of the New York Intellectuals, during the 1930s and World War II, form part of the canon of twentieth century American intellectual history. Their involvement in the American Communist movement, their crucial decision to renounce Stalinism, their brief adherence to Trotskyism, and their eventual disillusionment with Communism, are all well documented. Similarly, a great deal is known about them in the 1950s, especially about the role they played in the “Cultural Cold War” as America's leading anti-Communist intellectuals, helping to launch and run such organizations as the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), and CCF's American affiliate, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF). Comparatively little, however, has been written about them in the period immediately after World War II, the second half of the 1940s. Accounts of their political evolution usually break off some time about 1945 and resume in 1949, only months before the founding of the CCF. The aim of the present study is to fill this gap in our knowledge, first by examining in some detail the history of Europe-America Groups (EAG), a political organization created by a group of New York Intellectuals during the late 1940s, second by analyzing Mary McCarthy's 1949 novel The Oasis, which contains a fictional portrayal of EAG and constitutes a revealing fictional record of the Intellectuals’ political position at this date, and third by tracing the organizational origins of the ACCF and CCF.

Before he took over the management of the Economist in 1860, Walter Bagehot had not had much occasion to notice the United States, at any rate in his published writings. During the 1850s he had been too taken up with banking, and literary criticism, and expounding the value of stupidity in politics. To be sure, in 1859 he decided that the time had come to discredit the American example. The English were becoming disquietingly interested in democracy, a system as to which he had all the usual mid-Victorian doubts and a few extra. So he told the world, through the National Review (which struggling Unitarian quarterly he edited) that the vulgar American voters sent only vulgar men to Congress: “ men of refinement shrink from the House of Representatives as from a parish vestry ”; and that America was too unlike England to be a safe model. Then, just as he became editor of the Economist, the secession crisis and the Civil War erupted. It was incumbent on him to pronounce on these events, and it would have been most uncharacteristic of this sunny, self-confident man to shirk such a responsibility.

Funny military music videos are popular videos featuring soldiers dancing to chart hits, usually parodying other Internet music video memes. This article is interested in the conditions of seeing these videos, of their being seen, in specific relation to their military-ness and their American-ness – US soldiers, on a US military base in occupied territory, dancing to US pop music, circulating on US social media sites, watched by a US public. This article claims that as insistent expressions of a popular, militarized, everyday culture, funny military music videos are exemplary assemblages of the visual conditions of the American military imaginary.

Edith Wharton's ghost stories have usually been seen as skilful appropriations of the Gothic that allowed her, in Kathy Fedorko's words, to dramatise “the conflict between male and female selves in a ‘dialogue with the unconscious.’” They are also vehicles through which she expresses not only her indebtedness to her precursors in the Gothic mode, such as the Brontës, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Louis Stevenson and Sheridan Le Fanu, but also her independence from them. In this article we shall argue that some of Wharton's ghost stories contain a further dimension, beyond allusion, where they shift into a parodic and humorous strain that enables her to engage self-reflexively with the Gothic tradition. Here we define parody as a literary mode that, whilst engaging with a target text or genre, exhibits a keen sense of the comic, an acute awareness of intertextuality and an engagement with the idea of metafiction. This is a deliberately generous and inclusive definition that differs, for example, from some postmodern definitions of parody which (perhaps in an attempt to elevate its cultural function) minimise or excise the importance of comedy as an aspect of parody. We would suggest, furthermore, that it differs from travesty, pastiche and satire in that travesty reduces the target text to something ludicrous, pastiche “works by imitation rather than direct transformation” and satire does not necessarily engage with precursive texts.

In February 1912 Theodore Roosevelt sought the Republican nomination for president on a radical platform of reform that had a devotion to the Constitution as its central plank. Such an analysis differs from the standard historical explanation for Roosevelt's challenge to the incumbent Republican president, William Howard Taft, which argues that, bored with private life after his return from big game hunting in Africa in 1910 and consumed by an obsessive pursuit of presidential power, he ran to seek revenge on the successor who had failed to live up to the mentor's hopes. By initiating anti-trust suits against US Steel and International Harvester, which Roosevelt had examined when president but had not filed suit against, and by letting the Republican Party be dominated by regulars rather than Progressives, Taft had earned Roosevelt's unyielding enmity; Roosevelt's response was to seek the presidency.1 This article argues that far more important than any personal motivation, however, was Roosevelt's conviction that the issue at stake in 1912 was in essence a crusade for constitutionalism.

Throughout Roosevelt's long career constitutional issues played a primary role in formulating his political views. This was particularly true of the period after he left the presidency in 1909 when his interpretation of the Constitution was used as a means to advance various political ends. The debate about the Constitution, one which had become deep rooted in the national psyche by the close of the first decade of the twentieth century, and the judiciary's role in its interpretation was central to Roosevelt's political philosophy.

In an 1899 essay Mark Twain wrote,

It would not be possible for a humane and intelligent person to invent a rational excuse for slavery; yet you will remember that in the early days of the emancipation agitation in the North the agitators got but small help or countenance from any one. Argue and plead and pray as they might, they could not break the universal stillness that reigned, from pulpit and press all the way down to the bottom of society – the clammy stillness created and maintained by the lie of silent assertion – the silent assertion … that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop.

In her 1986 book All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, Maya Angelou reflected on the meaning of identity among the people of the African diaspora. A rich and highly reflective memoir, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes recounted the author's experiences, relationships, and quest for a sense of individual and collective belonging throughout the African diaspora. At the core of Angelou's quest for individual and collective identity lay Africa, a continent whose geography and history loomed large in her very personal story, and in her efforts to create a sense of “kinship” among people of African descent throughout the world. Starting with Maya Angelou's All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, this essay considers the significance of “Africa” as a geographical site, political space, and constantly reimagined history in the formation of black identity in the travel writings of black diaspora authors since the 1980s. I compare Angelou's work with that of the Hawaiian-born President of the United States Barack Obama, whose Dreams from My Father (1995) offered personal self-reflections and critiques of the African diaspora from a Pacific world perspective. In Obama's rendering of African diasporic identity, Africa has become “an idea more than an actual place.” Half a decade later, and half a world away, the Caribbean-born Afro-Britain Caryl Phillips published The Atlantic Sound (2000), an account of African diasporic identity that moved between understanding, compassion, and a harsh belief that Africa cannot take on the role of a psychologist's couch, that “Africa cannot cure.” These three memoirs offer insight into the complex and highly contested nature of identity throughout the African diaspora, and present very personalized reflections on the geography, politics, and history of Africa as a source of identity and diasporic belonging. Taken together, these three personal narratives represent a challenge to the utility of a transnational black identity that Paul Gilroy suggested in his landmark book The Black Atlantic.

The third season of the HBO series True Blood, set in fictional Bon Temps, Louisiana, aired in a mediascape shaped by coverage of the BP oil spill that wreaked economic and ecological havoc on the US Gulf South during the summer of 2010. A retrospective examination of the series in this context, and against the grain of critical consensus labeling it mere escapism, demonstrates that taking True Blood seriously can yield compelling insights into the US Gulf South as a site in which convergences of the global and the local, of reality and representation, and of energy and cultural production result in the formation of a hybrid: energy/culture. Analysis of the storyline featuring the Vampire King of Mississippi shows how True Blood extends the long-standing cultural practice of making vampires screens for projecting collective desires and anxieties. Through a “camp aesthetic” that weaves into the Vampire King's maniacal pursuit of blood in various forms dire warnings about excessive consumption and environmental apocalypse, True Blood offers fictional ways to make meaning of the actual conditions and consequences of energy production and consumption brought to the surface with great urgency by the BP oil spill.

The longevity of the lyric belies persisting difficulties in terms of its definition and categorization, particularly given the form's evolution in the face of philosophical, sociopolitical and cultural transformations. In Claudia Rankine's Citizen, the lyric is powerfully refashioned in response to the historical and contemporary tribulations of being a black citizen in America. Rankine's keen awareness of how linguistic injury caused by microaggressions registers in the body leads her to an adoption and adaptation of the lyric form, with Citizen aptly subtitled “An American Lyric.” Citizen is an urgent and timely book that sustains America's conversation on race and racial injustice on a level of national grief, even as Rankine brings it to the level of personal intimacy by asking, “How do you make a body accountable for its language, its positioning?” I contend that Citizen is a work that extends the lyric's possibilities through creating a hybrid text containing lyric essays, photography, public art and video scripts, which are juxtaposed for intertextual and polyphonic effects. I argue that Rankine uses lyric hybridity to create a poetics of racial trauma that meditates on the effects of racial injustice as it manifests in the bodies of traumatized individuals. Lyric hybridity appears crucial to Rankine's project, since it allows for complex subjectivity and intimate address amidst a clarity of language that enables the reader to perceive how we easily we fail one another in our daily pursuit of relationality, community and citizenship.

Envisioning Harlem's future served as a particularly vivid means of addressing the dilemmas posed by the prospect of desegregation. Should black peoplehood – in part a legacy of oppression and racialization – persist in a post-segregation era? This article calls for greater attention to be paid to the visions of future existence that animated, and were animated by, the black freedom struggles of the 1960s. It explores contrasting architectural reimaginings of Harlem and argues that ideas about existing black places and the nature of their built environment were important factors in shaping commitments to, and idealizations of, both integrationist and black nationalist futures.

When Abraham Minis, merchant and tavern keeper, of Savannah, Georgia sat down to draw up his last will and testament he faced a heart-wrenching dilemma: how would he successfully provide for all of his eight children and also ensure that his beloved wife Abigail would have enough to live out the rest of her days in widowhood in comfort? Three years later, in spring 1757, Abraham died. When his will was read, there were thankfully no surprises for Abigail and their children – Abraham had followed Low Country custom regarding the division of family wealth. He gave his three sons his horses and mares and left five daughters all of his black cattle. It was Abigail, he explained, who was to inherit “all the rest of my Estate both real and personal” to be “enjoyed by her” so that she would be able to “maintain educate and bring up our children.” He sealed his love, approval, and trust in his wife's abilities to meet this request by nominating her his sole executrix. Any help that she might need when settling the affairs of his estate, he observed, would be provided by his loyal friends Joseph Phillips and Benjamin Sheftall, who would assist and advise her.

When President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in August 1996, it brought to an end the much vilified sixty-one-year-old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) programme. Although few mourned the passing of AFDCper se many liberals were alarmed by the nature of the changes. AFDC had effectively been a cash maintenance programme for poor single-parent families with the costs shared between federal and state governments. The PRWORA repealed AFDC and some smaller related programmes, with Washington giving its former share of funding to the states in the form of a new block grant, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). The existing entitlement nature of AFDC was ended with the states given new discretion in determining TANF eligibility. Overall considerable responsibility for the implementation of welfare policy was devolved to the states. The bill, however, did set a maximum time limit for individual receipt of federal TANF funds. After two years, welfare recipients must engage in a recognized work effort to continue to receive help, with a total five-year limit on TANF money. Opposition to these measures was overwhelmed by the demand for significant reform of the welfare system. Previously this demand had been thwarted through a combination of Washington gridlock and the limited scale of those changes which were enacted. In 1996, however, the dam holding back reform was breached at the high tide of anti-welfare sentiment. The despair this provoked among liberals should perhaps have caused them to reflect on their part in blocking previous attempts at an overhaul of AFDC. In particular, the elder statespersons of liberalism might regret their role in helping defeat President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan (FAP).