In South of Freedom (1952), Carl Rowan frames his travels through an investigation of the US South in terms of his doubts about cultural change, his safety, and whites’ and blacks’ willingness to participate in racial reform, among other things. His skepticism about improvements in race relations and his critique of the country's inadequate progress toward such goals inform his examination of various states of freedom and unfreedom existing in the United States. Rowan's narrative and specific descriptions of his and others’ mobility operate as instances of counter-storytelling that incorporate such skepticism and critique. Ultimately, his theorizing of modes of resistance to institutionalized racism through individual action serves as a model for understanding African American travel writing and mobility more generally.

Commemorations of the burning of Atlanta and Columbia reveal the relationship of form and content in Confederate memory. Atlanta monuments announced civic rejuvenation to national audiences, particularly tourists. Columbia ruins lamented the fracture of local elites' political dominance. The divergent cultures informed Margaret Mitchell's fabrication of Lost Cause myth in Gone with the Wind (1936) and Elizabeth Boatwright Coker's excavation of Lost Cause legend in La Belle (1959). The decline of monuments and ruins contributed to the transformation of the Lost Cause into a different configuration of Confederate memory during the decade of the Civil War centennial.

African Americans and Korean Americans have addressed Black–Korean encounters and responded to each other predominantly in their favorite genres: in films and rap music for African Americans and in novels and poems for Korean Americans. A case in point is the intertextuality between Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker. A comparative study of the two demonstrates that they are seminal texts of African American–Korean American dialogue and discourse for mutual understanding and harmonious relationships between the two races in the USA. This paper reads the African American film and the Korean American fiction as dialogic responses to the well-publicized strife between Korean American merchants and their African American customers in the late 1980s and early 1990s and as windows into a larger question of African American–Korean American relations and racialization in US culture. This study ultimately argues that the dialogue between Spike Lee's film and Chang-rae Lee's novel moves towards a possibility of cross-racial identification and interethnic coalition building.

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.

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.

This article examines sculptor James Turrell's late 1960s Art & Technology residency at Garrett Corporation, an aerospace and defense subcontractor based in Los Angeles. It considers Turrell's early life, his participation in the residency through the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and his and collaborators’ subsequent production, to show that artists could interact with the Cold War military–industrial complex in ways that surpassed mere protest or complicity. Despite his political beliefs, Turrell's participation in the project embedded his sculptural practice in the Cold War political economy of the American state in ways that should expand scholarly definition and study of what constitutes foreign-policy practice and doctrine.

This article examines the construction, the development and the denouement of the Museum of Safety in New York during the early twentieth century. Through a detailed assessment of the institution's own bulletin, newspapers and accompanying literature, the manner in which the museum served its visitors, promoted its cause and failed to secure its own future will be examined. The significance of this institution has been overlooked despite the way its role and responsibilities in exhibiting safety devices and procedures to industry, workers and the public reflect important trends within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society. The Museum of Safety also emerged as the effects of capitalism, immigration and industrialization began to be addressed. Examining the history of this “lost museum” will, therefore, reveal how responsibility, awareness and modernity were encountered in New York.

In the first year following Hurricane Katrina and the breaking of the New Orleans levees, the New Orleans-based Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of eighty-two workers from South and Central America who were stranded in the city. By 2008, the consequences of the regional reliance on slavecatchers began attracting global attention, most notably in the case of the eighty-nine Indian workers at Signal International's Pasacagoula, Mississippi shipyard. This essay explores the invocation of the American civil rights movement in contemporary transcultural dramas and the fact that another “universal” movement has been marching alongside new protesters, and demonstrates that the Free Trade movement in the US has been not only the cause of many current civil rights struggles, but also the beneficiary of the older struggle's very definition of its “cause.” New laborers in the Deep South – Latin Americans and Asians – find themselves not just homeless, but placeless post-Katrina. Black Americans who were shipped out of the city in 2005 to provide a “cleansed” urban area open to new demographics now find themselves in permanent exile, as placeless as their replacements.

The concluding words of Erna Brodber's The Rainmaker's Mistake, a novel prompted in part by the two-hundredth anniversary of the 1807 Act to Abolish the Slave Trade in Britain's Caribbean Colonies, affirm its engagement with history and historiography, emphasizing the need for Caribbean writers of the twenty-first century to search the past – uncover its traumas, its mysteries, and its treasures – in order to make sense of the present and project a future “in the free.” Brodber's work, of course, is part of a much larger and longer conversation among Caribbean novelists about what it means “to search and to reproduce and to cultivate,” literally and metaphorically. To explore the implications of this conversation, my essay focusses on this various and vexed cultural work as performed in three key Caribbean novels: E. L. Joseph's Warner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole, published in 1838, the year that “full freedom” was granted by the British Parliament to the enslaved population of the British West Indies after a four-year apprenticeship period; Paule Marshall's 1969 The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, produced during a period of independence for many Anglo-Caribbean nations, including her parents' native Barbados in 1968; and, finally, Brodber's 2007 “Afrofuturistic” novel The Rainmaker's Mistake.

Before his execution in 1859, the radical abolitionist John Brown wrote a series of prison letters that – along with his death itself – helped to cement the abolitionist aesthetic of emancipatory martyrdom. This article charts the adaptation of that aesthetic in antilynching protest literature during the decades that followed. It reveals Brown's own presence in antilynching speeches, sermons, articles, and fiction, and the endurance of the emancipatory martyr symbol that he helped to inaugurate. Between the 1880s and the 1920s, black and white writers imagined lynching's ritual violence as a crucifixion and drew upon the John Brown aesthetic of emancipatory martyrdom, including Frederick Douglass, Stephen Graham, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, black Baptist ministers, and black educators and journalists. Fusing martyrdom and messianism, these antilynching writers made the black Christ of their texts an avenging liberatory angel. The testamentary body of this messianic martyr figure marks the nation for violent retribution. Turning the black Christ into a Brown-like prophetic sign of God's vengeful judgment, antilynching writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries warned of disaster, demanded a change of course, challenged white southern notions of redemption, and insisted that African Americans must reemancipate themselves and redeem the nation.

This essay adopts an innovative interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of Disney's representations of the American founding in television and movie productions as secondary works; that is, as works of historical interpretation. “The Liberty Story” (1957), Johnny Tremain (1957) and The Swamp Fox (1959–60) are analysed in the context of contemporaraneous historiographical trends. The essay demonstrates that despite certain flaws and weaknesses, Disney's representations sometimes presented innovative themes and insightful interpretations, which at the height of the Cold War influenced popular understanding of the American founding and the society that it produced.

The Scopes trial has long been interpreted through claims about science and religion and about individual rights and liberties. This article recovers a different debate about the trial's political history that emerged in the later 1920s and resonated down the twentieth century. Here the trial figured as a fraught national circus, which raised difficult questions about the relationship between media spectacle and cultural conflict in the United States. The trial's circus dynamics intensified the conflicts it staged without ever actually resolving them; this trap was then perceived and negotiated in different ways by contemporary liberals, conservatives, socialists, and far-right activists.

In the last two weeks of March 1959, the jazz bassist Charlie Mingus and the beat poet Kenneth Patchen performed on stage together at the Living Theatre in New York City. Mingus and his band improvised to jazz themes at the back, while Patchen read simultaneously from his poetry at the front. This article examines in detail both Patchen's and Mingus's work with jazz/poetry fusion art and positions these collaborations within the context of the wider movement. It explores the artistic relationship between Mingus and Patchen and examines and contextualizes these performances within the jazz aesthetic.