Women's traditional place on the American frontier has been as invisible helpmate or at best as some shadowy figure who appeared occasionally when describing pioneer homes and lifestyles. Until recently, historians followed the individualistic and linear progression of Frederick Jackson Turner westward across the continent and found no need to discuss the activities of both sexes. Euro-American men were fully capable of explaining the frontier, both as authors and as subjects. But the American frontier is no longer one-dimensional. Increasing numbers of female historians have insisted on not only placing women in the midst of established pioneering ventures, but have widened western horizons to discuss different pioneers and new economic and social roles for women of all ethnic and racial groups. Women's place on the frontier has now become so central that it is impossible to make any sense of new settlement patterns without examining the experiences of both men and women and their relationships to each other.

Whereas in 1915 Theodore Roosevelt could proclaim with great conviction that there was no room in the United States for hyphenated Americans, today it is common for Americans to identify precisely as hyphenated Americans, proud of their ethnic heritage. And whilst in 2015 the debate on undocumented immigration is perceived to have reached crisis point, the US continues to project itself as a “nation of immigrants.” These reversals and contradictions in American political discourse are scrutinized here in a historical survey of the Americanization movement of a hundred years ago and the concept of the “nation of immigrants” that originated with John F. Kennedy in the Cold War sixty years later. In the analysis of primary and key historiographical sources on twentieth-century American immigration, a change from ethnic shame to ethnic pride is tracked down, revealing both the long-term effects of Americanization as a programme of social engineering and the ongoing ideological work that the “nation of immigrants” slogan performs for American national identity.

On the morning of 16 March 1968, the men of Charlie Company, 11th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, US Army, entered the village of Son My, on the coast of Central Vietnam. The company was led by Captain Ernest Medina. In charge of the company's 1st Platoon was Lieutenant William Calley. The company encountered no enemy forces, no opposing fire of any kind. Its only casualty was self-inflicted. Nevertheless, by early afternoon, over 400 villagers lay dead. Those killed were – almost exclusively – either women, old men or small children. For many of the women, rape had preceded death. Other victims had been tortured and mutilated, then killed. Much of the killing, though not all, had occurred in the collection of hamlets known by the Americans as My Lai 4 and had been conducted by 1st Platoon.

This article maps the rise and dissemination of Yellow Peril fears in the United States between about 1980 and 1993 and seeks to explain them. Anti-communism had been an animating force in Ronald Reagan's career, but shortly after he left office an opinion poll revealed that Japan had replaced the Soviet Union as the greatest perceived threat to the US. While economic anxieties contributed to the resurgence of Yellow Peril sentiments, this article emphasizes the vital parts played by other phenomena, notably Reagan's economic policies, partisan politics, a media war, and the ending of the Cold War. The Yellow Peril scare was widely criticized, and by the early 1990s the controversy had invaded popular culture. Ronald Reagan is frequently applauded for restoring American self-confidence after the “malaise” of the Carter years, but the apprehensions discussed here suggest that he enjoyed only limited success in this respect.

In the United States the movement to build public asylums for the insane began in the early nineteenth century. Demographic changes, a growing sensitivity to social and medical problems, a surge of philanthropic giving by elite groups, and knowledge of significant medical and psychiatric developments in France and England all combined to give rise to a movement to establish both general and mental hospitals. Shocked by the conditions of insane persons in family attics, county poorhouses, and local jails, state after state assumed the burden of providing free or low-cost institutionalization for this afflicted class. Expensive large asylums began appearing in the rural heartlands of the more prosperous states before the Civil War, reflecting the popular view that insanity was a disease, requiring segregation from society and long-term medical care. Previously only deviants who had broken criminal or poor laws were likely to be deprived of their liberty. Under the new system the state reached out to a larger, less deviant and non-criminal population, whose boundaries were not well-defined. Given the increasing health and welfare needs of an industrializing society, and the lack of alternative solutions for the mentally disabled, it was inevitable that the asylum populations would continue to expand.

Ever since it was first staged in May 1992, Mamet's Oleanna seems, on both sides of the Atlantic, to have been perceived, publicised and reviewed almost exclusively as a manifestation of backlash sexual politics — that is, as a work characterised by outrage and hostility towards the agenda of contemporary feminism. Although the play entered the public arena too late to be addressed in Susan Faludi's 1992 study Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, its attitudes have typically been read as symptomatic of the same aggrieved and aggressive masculinity which Faludi diagnoses in such exemplary texts as Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990). The play also lends itself with deceptive ease to a comparison with one of Faludi's most alarming paradigms of backlash popular culture, the Hollywood blockbuster Fatal Attraction. Both narratives depict a fundamentally decent man, loyal to wife and family, who becomes the target of and is almost destroyed by the machinations of a vengeful single woman. In both cases the action culminates in an explosive physical assault on the offending female character. And, in performance, the violence of both denouements releases and apparently sanctions a similar surge of vicarious male aggression. Howls of “Kick her ass!” and “Kill the bitch!” were a regular occurrence at screenings of Fatal Attraction, and audience reaction to Oleanna has often followed the same pattern: Elaine Showalter reports a male acquaintance saying “I nearly climbed up on the stage to kick the shit out of the little bitch myself.”

Beloved is a self-conscious examination of the possibilities and limitations of the story-making process, both for the individual and for the community. Because slavery is a highly emotive subject and because historical narratives of slavery are so controversial, the exercise is a particularly potent one. The basic problem of the novel concerns the need to transform facts of unspeakable horror into a life-giving story, for the individual, for the black community, and for the nation. It is a problem which encourages compulsive repetition and avoidance; hence the stories of slavery proliferate. On the individual level the stories are shaped by the points of view of a variety of characters; on a wider level, by the demands of different types of utterance and by the structuring power of different kinds of historical perspectives and linguistic formulations, including, most significantly, generic forms. This profusion of storytelling makes the statement at the end of the novel, that “this is not a story to pass on” exceedingly problematic, for there is no single referent for the pronoun “this”, and the article “ a ” seems singularly inappropriate in view of this profusion.

Between September 1964 and April 1971, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a domestic covert action program named COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE. This counterintelligence program endeavored to discredit, disrupt, and vitiate the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist vigilante organizations. While historians are quite familiar with the FBI's efforts to nurture anticommunism and to discredit civil rights and leftist movements, the FBI's role in discrediting KKK groups in the American South during the late 1960s has not been systematically assessed. This article provides an analysis of the first aspect of this three-pronged attack. It describes how the FBI secretly coordinated efforts to discredit Klan organizations before local Southern communities that continued to tolerate vigilante violence. Intelligence information on Klan activities, provided discretely by the FBI to liberal Southern journalists, politicians and other molders of public opinion, helped those white Southerners who were opposed to Ku Klux Klan activity to transform their private dismay into public rebuke and criminal prosecutions. The article also analyzes corresponding COINTELPRO operations that discredited Ku Klux Klan leaders before rank-and-file Klan members. FBI agents and their clandestine informants circulated discrediting information about KKK leaders among rank and file Klan members, inculcating disillusionment among Klansmen and prompting resignations from Klan organizations.

In recent years historians have emphasized the centrality of women to religious life, especially among the older Protestant denominations in the northeastern section of the United States. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women and girls were usually the majority of attenders at prayer meetings and Sunday services, made up the bulk of converts at revivals and provided the greatest number of candidates for church membership. They were also great fund raisers not only for their own congregations, but for a network of inter-denominational missionary agencies which sprang up during the first two decades of the nineteenth century and helped to impress a more evangelical character upon American society. As Nancy Cott has argued, ministers may have seen this work as part of woman's appropriate and subordinate “sphere,” but for the women themselves “evangelical religion nourished the formation of a female community that served…as both a resource and a resort outside the family.”

Why did large numbers of Northerners vote for the Democrats on the eve of the Civil War? This is a question which the most recent studies of Northern ante-bellum politics leave unanswered. Professor Formisano's pains-taking study of Michigan's party politics amply shows the eclectic character of the Republicans' appeal. Republicans combined a stern mixture of moral purpose and narrow puritanism with a powerful critique of the South. Republicanism emerges from Professor Foner's influential study as a species of stalwart, visionary parochialism quite irresistible to the northern electorate. It represented the self-satisfied affirmation that the proper maintenance of existing Protestant and entrepreneurial values in the socially harmonious North was essential to America's future growth. It also rested upon a belief in the need to resist Southern attempts to push slavery into the western territories. This belief stemmed from a defensive, slightly paranoid interpretation of the operation of federal politics. Congress and the federal administration in Democratic hands were, according to the Republicans, the merest tools of “ the Dominant Class in the Republic, ” the Southern slaveowners. Thus high faith in free society and deep fear of Southern expansion co-existed uneasily together. Republicans, in Eric Foner's view, articulated an ideology which merged together an over-arching notion of the good society (a basically non-class society, in which the ladder of status was short and its ascent easy, and in which the fundamental interests of labourers, farmers and small entrepreneurs were identical) with an immediate call to political action.

If we only considered how near and intimate is the subject of the study of the self, we might suppose that of all studies it would be the most easy. And since it carries us back to the object of our most lively affections, we might think it would be most agreeable, and that we should proceed to it by natural impulse. Yet it is precisely the contrary.

This article focusses on the concept of cultural pluralism in the North American folk music revival of the 1960s. Building on the excellent work of earlier folk revival scholars, the article looks in greater depth at the “vision of diversity” promoted by the folk revival in North America – at the ways in which this vision was constructed, at the reasons for its maintenance and at its ultimate decline and on the consequences of this for anglophone Canadian and American musicians and enthusiasts alike.

The politics of the last quarter century in the United States cannot be fully understood without reference to cultural–religious issues such as abortion, prayer in the state schools, school curriculum including sex education and teaching the biblical account of creation, gay rights, gun control, the death penalty, and the proper roles of men and women. Cultural–religious conservatives defend traditional values such as patriarchy and sexual abstinence for the unmarried, while cultural–religious liberals challenge them. For example, the opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) objected, not to its guarantee of formal legal equality which was uncontroversial, but rather to it potentially changing gender roles. While the New Deal party system had been founded on a conflict between economic liberalism and economic conservatism, recent contemporary US politics also contains an explicit cultural–religious dimension. Although they have not replaced the older economic issues associated with the New Deal party system, cultural–religious issues coexist with them and have transformed the contemporary US political agenda by disrupting older coalitions and creating new coalitions and cleavages.

J. Edgar Hoover directed the Bureau of Investigation (BI), later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, from 1924 until his death in 1972. His autocratic style of management, self-mythologising habits, reactionary political opinions and accumulation of secret files on real, imagined and potential opponents have been widely documented. The views and methods he advocated have been variously attributed to values he absorbed as he grew up and to certain peculiarities of his personality. Most biographers trace his rapid rise to prominence in the BI to his aptitude for investigating alien enemies during World War I, and radicals during the subsequent Red Scare. He was centrally involved in the government's response to the alleged threat of Bolshevism in America, and, although he later denied it, he co-ordinated the notorious Palmer raids of January 1920, in which thousands of aliens were rounded up and several hundred were deported.

The early reactions by American intellectuals to the psychoanalytic ideas of Sigmund Freud offer an interesting case study in the ‘Americanization’ of ‘foreign’ ideas. While the heyday of Freudian influence on the lay intelligentsia came after the World War—probably in the 1920s—and the maximum penetration of specialized disciplines by Freudian concepts came after 1930, already by 1917 identifiable and influential groups of thinkers had discovered Freudian ideas, and had reacted to them. The reaction sometimes took the form of outright rejection, but more often that of some form of assimilation, some attempt to use Freudian doctrine in support of a pre-existing ideology, or even to recast present doctrine in the light of Freud's theories. These early reactions foreshadowed the kinds of polemical and ideological utility which psychoanalysis would have on a larger scale after 1920; these first adaptations and reworkings of Freudian ideas prefigured such latter accommodations of Freud to America as Neo-Freudianism and ‘adjustment psychology’. Psychoanalysis quickly became an accepted polemical tool in literary and political debate. To neoromantic radicals it offered a new method of personal salvation by sloughing off skins of civilized repression. On a more complex level of thought, it became one element in the construction of a positivist and determinist system of psychology. At the same time, and sometimes by the same men, it was used—and radically revised—in the ideological endeavour to assimilate deterministic psychology to the persistent optimistic, activist moral code, which many scholars were anxious to harmonize with their new science.

This article examines how the foreclosure crisis has been represented in a range of narrative genres: the reportage of Paul Reyes's Exiles in Eden: Life among the Ruins of Florida's Great Recession (2010), Michael Moore's documentary film Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), and Paul Auster's novel Sunset Park (2010).These narratives attempt to contextualize the human beings caught in the center of the subprime mortgage storm, but in the process each of them runs up against an opacity or obscurity, a crisis of representation. The article argues that underlying the financial crisis is an inability to recognize and comprehend deeply embedded structures of inequality, a failure common to both the financial system and the wider culture. Drawing on recent accounts of the techniques of credit scoring and mortgage securitization in the disciplines of business history, accounting, financial management, and human geography, the article concludes that subprime mortgage lending involved social relations of supremacy and subordination, as well as representational strategies which identified individuals solely in terms of credit risk, while failing to grasp the conditions of poverty and disadvantage which constituted them as a class.

The economy of time, and our obligation to spend every hour for some useful end, are what few minds properly realize. Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841)

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (1854)

In his seminal 1967 essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” E. P. Thompson codified the theory that modern life, characterized by capitalism and industry, would not be possible without the regulating, organizing, and disciplining power of the clock. The theory of clock time's importance to modernity, first proposed by Georg Simmel around the turn of the twentieth century and later adopted by Lewis Mumford, became conventional wisdom among social and economic historians writing after Thompson's brilliant exposition. The introduction of mechanical clocks into factories in England, Thompson argues, resulted in a “restructuring of working habits” and a concomitant change in the “inward notation of time” that led individuals to accept the industrial revolution's basic premises of quantifiable wage labor and systematic production. According to Thompson's successors, historians such as David Landes, the relationship between clocks and other forms of modernization has been recursive; advances in technology have made it possible to measure time more accurately, and this greater accuracy has in turn facilitated greater productivity, more efficient transportation networks (think of railroad timetables), and the punctuality so important to modern business. Moreover, political theorists have argued that the ubiquitous experience of precisely measured time has been fundamental to linking individuals into self-consciously modern national groups, “imagined communities” in Benedict Anderson's terms, moving forward together through a shared historical simultaneity. The result of temporal modernization, this very diverse group of thinkers agrees, has been a world made over both economically and politically to suit the clockwork rationality of the capitalist market.

Archives are power-laden spaces. For Foucault, the archive is “the first law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.” In this way, the archive is not merely a neutral repository. It is a system governed by those who have the power to choose what gets archived and therefore produce meaning through that discursive formation.