In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, a Bush administration official memorably explained to New York Times reporter Ron Suskind, “when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality … we'll act again … We're history's actors … and you … will be left to … study what we do.” This comment was taken both as the administration's assessment of the intellectual left, and as a window into Bush's executive philosophy. Then many believed then that a different President – a liberal or progressive President – would renounce such unilateralism. But these arguments didn't evidence the peculiarity of George W. Bush's Machtpolitik. Rather, they draw on a deep and relatively unnoticed tradition in US political history and government, of the ever more aggressive executive expansion of presidential powers. That expansion has come through the ambitions, machinations, and moxie of individual Presidents – some of them impressively gifted leaders. It has also come through the active and passive consent of citizens, Congress, and the Supreme Court. The President has come to symbolize both our democratic process and our national power: citizens see him simultaneously as democracy's heart and its avenging sword. That trust, trained into US citizens from our earliest days in school, reinforced by popular culture and by the media, makes citizens want to give the President more power, regardless of the Constitutional checks and balances we also learn to treasure as schoolchildren. Over time, this accumulating consent to ever-increasing presidential power means that Presidents are free to act – even in ways that upset the Constitution's balance of power – and that citizens by and large approve, and those who don't are left studying what they did.

Drawing on recently established zine archives and oral-history interviews with former girl zine producers, as well as with zine librarians, archivists, and commentators, this essay explores the significance of the fact that dissident girls and young women developed an interest in what are now called “girl zines” through a number of different routes, with a range of different interests, and at different moments over the course of the last twenty-five years. Some were directly inspired by riot grrrl bands in the early 1990s. Others happened upon zines at alternative bookstores and info-shops and as part of their participation in the larger punk underground. Still others learned of them through popular magazines, college courses, and public and private libraries, or through quite varied friendship networks. The fact of this social, material, and temporal variability raises important questions about whether “girl zines” should be thought of as a unitary genre and, correlatively, about whether the girl zine explosion itself should be construed as a secondary effect of the riot grrrl phenomenon of the early 1990s. Building on recent critiques made by punks and zinesters of color of the now-dominant narrative about the history of riot grrrl and the role of zines within it, the essay traces how that narrative developed in the context of a backlash against feminism and how it led, ultimately, to the creation of the genre now known as “girl zines” and the founding of archives designed to ensure their preservation. Though both are seen as significant political achievements for feminism, by considering Mimi Thi Nguyen's recent claim that the dominant narrative and the genealogies it constructs tend to ignore the important but often differently motivated contributions of punks and zinesters of color, the essay explores the question of what it might mean to focus on the varied itineraries that girls pursued into the punk underground and on how those itineraries affected the zines they created for often quite distinct purposes. Ultimately, the essay asks how riot grrrl and girl zine-ing ought to be understood. That is, should they be construed as a singular event, as a coherent social movement, as a fractious discourse, as a complex set of social practices, as a political intervention, or as something else? In the end, the author argues that attending to the disagreements and contestations among girl punks and zinesters who constantly called each other out over their differences suggests that as a youthful cohort profoundly affected by the vast social and cultural change associated with what is now call neoliberalism, these young people were arguing among themselves and with the surrounding culture over how to craft new, more flexible forms of subjectivity and sociality adequate to the challenges of the twenty-first century.

It is easy to forget that interest in the intellectual history of the US South only fully emerged in the post-1960s years. Though there have been no outstanding southern philosophers or philosophers of the South to focus on, there have been plenty of talented literary and cultural critics and political and social thinkers, as well as historians, political scientists, and sociologists, whose work has significantly shaped the idea of the South and who thus deserve the interest of the intellectual historian. Works as varied as Clement Eaton's The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (1940) Rollin Osterweis's Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (1949), and William R. Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee (1961) were early examples of the effort to identify the intellectual and cultural issues central to the history of the region. By exploring the literary history of the South in the interwar years, what came to be called the Southern Renaissance, post-1945 literary historians such as Louis D. Rubin and Lewis Simpson undoubtedly also influenced those who tried to make sense of the life of the mind below the Mason–Dixon line.

In seventeenth-century North America, efforts at cultural accommodation through similarities in olfactory inclusive spiritual sensoriums helped to create cross-cultural concordance between Jesuit Fathers and Native Americans in New France, the St. Lawrence Valley, and the Pays d'en Haut. Jesuits engaged Native Americans towards Catholic conversion by using scentful tactics and sensory rhetoric. Jesuits increased their own respect for the olfactory during their North American encounters due to a siege mentality born of the Counter-Reformation and from a forcefully influential Native American respect for multisensory forms of environmental and spiritual literacy which included a heightened reverence for odors.

This essay traces Edward Soja's “geography of labor” in the Mississippi catfish industry. Our interdisciplinary analysis integrates the socioeconomic realities of the Mississippi delta with Steve Yarbrough's literary rendering of that place in his 1999 novel The Oxygen Man. We argue that Yarbrough's novel closely maps changes in Mississippi delta agribusiness and urges readers to reimagine spatial justice in a landscape infamous for racism and poverty.

This essay focusses on two music videos that filmmaker Alex Rivera directed in conjunction with the #Not1More campaign of the National Day Labor Organizing Network (NDLON). In creating these music videos, Rivera uses visual strategies to portray the “undocumented everyday,” which involves the documentation of the mundane details of existence, such as representation of the indispensability of undocumented Latina/o migrants to everyday economies in the United States.

This essay explores the interdisciplinary origins and historiography of early North American scholars approaching territoriality – political control of territory – from an indigenous perspective in their works. Using the Ndé (Apaches) as a case study, it reveals how adopting an interdisciplinary approach that addresses territoriality from multiple perspectives can further our understanding of cultural contestation across the continent and hemisphere by highlighting the ways indigenous peoples negotiated, resisted, and adapted to European conquest.

In the mid-1700s, when Denis Diderot wrote Les bijoux indiscrets, the French modern nation-state was being actively imagined through philosophical and revolutionary discourse as distinct from the monarchical and feudal structures of the ancien régime. At the core of the emerging, transformative vision of Enlightenment thought lay knowledge produced by colonial and enslaved peoples, symbolized in the black female body that is positioned in Diderot's novel as disruptive of and yet central to European social, economic, and cultural norms.

This article adds to the conversation surrounding what it means to be Latino/a within the United States by considering Loida Maritza Pérez's Geographies of Home. By focussing on the plight of Marina within the novel, one can begin to look at this Dominican-American as not just a madwoman and victim of diaspora, machismo, and class; instead, she is a character who questions archetypal iterations of Latino/a identity even as she reinforces national and transnational stereotypes. Such a close reading of Pérez's novel allows us to reconfigure ideas of race, displacement, and hyphenation in American society.

Lewis Hine's child-labour photographs are among the best-known social-documentary photographs ever taken, yet historians have neglected his photography of children working on the streets of America's cities. This paper explores the disputed symbolism of Hine's street-labour photographs. Far from simply depicting another appalling form of child labour, Hine's child street labourers, and the newsboys he photographed in particular, represented a range of ideas from masculinity and entrepreneurial spirit to the dangers of the new urban life and the apparent ignorance of immigrant parents. The symbolic newsboy was often far removed from the reality of child street labour, but he became an important figure in discourse surrounding the nature of childhood and the organization of public space in the United States of the early twentieth century. In exploring these subjects, this article takes on a neglected part of American history, yet an important one. Studying child street labourers reveals much about children, their choices, and the urban environment in the United States during the Progressive Era.

This article looks at the Homelands Exhibition in Rochester, New York which took place in the spring of 1920. Placing the craft objects on display, as well as their makers and their creative labor, into a larger constellation of local and national history, I focus on how the material culture of the show acted simultaneously as a stand-in and an extensions of their makers, to trouble the boundaries between author and reader, art and work, producer and spectator, the quotidian and the exceptional, and ultimately to question what it meant to be American at this particular moment in time.

Two competing strands of intellectual history, which arose from divergent interpretations of human nature, impacted the democratic tradition in the United States. This paper examines this divergence through a succinct comparison of Benjamin Franklin's and George Whitefield's teachings on human perfection. Whitefield's view of perfection is derived from Protestant Christianity and argues that man is called to constantly pursue a personal and earthly unattainable goal. Franklin sought to replace the religious view with one grounded upon enlightenment and sought to establish an earthly perfection, which aligned with his democratic ideal. This view of perfection was attainable to all through the education of the citizens of the new nation in a liberal tradition.

In recent years historians and scholars of religious studies have chronicled and debated the critical role that black and white liberal Protestants, Catholics, and Jews played in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. At every stage of the movement, mainline and traditional black churches proved vital. Less is known about the actions and reactions of conservative or moderate white believers. The churches that these fundamentalists and evangelicals belonged to would grow tremendously in the coming decades, eventually claiming roughly 26 percent of the American population. From the 1960s forward, conservative Protestants would also become key political players, helping to decide national elections. Their responses to the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, which intended to end discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin, and the heated debates that led up to the law reveal much about how conservative Christians related to the state and to a changing society. Responses to the bill ranged from resigned acceptance to racist denunciation. But believers were united in their antistatism and in their opposition to political and theological liberalism. This article examines how evangelicals and fundamentalists engaged in politics and understood race and racism in personal terms. It also analyzes the religious dimensions of modern American conservatism.

This article examines the debates around anarchist restriction that shaped the eventual passage of the Immigration Act of 1903 and argues that domestically oriented conceptions of national security are both challenged and constituted by transnational and international processes and currents. While discussions of transnational immigration control became important features of both scholarly discourse and popular debate in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2001, these discussions were not new. Similar debates about immigration policy, security, and civil liberties shaped discussions between the mid-1880s and early 1900s, when an unprecedented wave of attacks against heads of state fed rumors of wide-ranging conspiracies, and reports of anarchist outrages in cities far and wide spread fear. Anarchist exclusion was far more than an example of a rising nativist tide raising all boats and excluding a widening spectrum of undesirable aliens. Such measures set the foundation for restriction based on political beliefs and associations that, over subsequent decades, would become critical to suppressing political dissent. Consequently, understanding how the fear of anarchist violence helped shape the contours of the domestic and diplomatic debates over anarchist restriction is critical as these old questions of transnational immigration control reemerge.

Commonly regarded as one of the pioneers of motion-picture technology, Eadweard Muybridge carried out several photographic studies of animal and human movement in the late nineteenth century. One of Muybridge's lesser-known commissions was an album of interior photographs that he created in 1880 for his friends Kate and Robert Johnson. This article offers a close reading of this album and argues that it has more in common with Muybridge's motion studies than historians have previously recognized. Far from being a commercial outlier, the album offered Muybridge an opportunity to experiment with the technological and cultural possibilities of photography in a new way. Through ghosts, mirrors, and other forms of representational excess, these images make visible Muybridge's handiwork as a photographer and the intellectual complexity of his collaboration with Kate and Robert Johnson.

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.