In a profile of Frank Sinatra published in 1955, in the midst of the star's second defining career ascent, Time magazine declared, “His new success spreads like a Hoboken cargo net across almost every area of showbusiness.”1 Time's use of Sinatra's urban industrial background to describe his extraordinary success is typical of the commentary surrounding the star in the 1950s which cast him as a working-class interloper and betrayed the problematic class dynamics frequently denied by post-war America's dominant culture. Sinatra's non-conformist behaviour, aggressive ambition, extreme experiences of success and failure, and the screen characters through which he portrayed alienation and disenfranchisement combined with this type of unsubtle critique in the development of Sinatra's conspicuous working-class star identity.

This article explores African American armed resistance during the 1917 East St. Louis race riot in the context of black migration and ghetto formation. In particular it considers the significance of the development of the black urban community, composed of an emerging working class and a dynamic, militant and increasingly influential middle class. It was that community which came under attack by white mobs in 1917, and this work illuminates the infrastructure of resistance in the city, showing how African Americans drew upon the resources of the nascent ghetto and older traditions of self-defence to protect their homes and families.

Nathaniel Hawthorne claims, in his brief preface to “The May-pole of Merry Mount,” that “the facts, recorded on the grave pages of our New England annalists, have wrought themselves, almost spontaneously,” into a “philosophical romance” and “a sort of allegory.” He later refers to these “true” and “authentic passages from history” as “a poet's tale.” Yet to anyone familiar with the sources available to Hawthorne,1 nothing is more striking than how much authentic history he has left out – most notably Thomas Morton himself, whose version of what transpired at his fur-trading post on Massachusetts Bay (New English Canaan) is indeed a tale told by a poet, albeit a minor one. What do we know about the man who put up the maypole that so outraged his pious neighbors? Who was Thomas Morton and why were the Puritans so offended by him? If his maypole symbolized the festive culture of Merry Old England, Morton epitomized its spirit. No wonder he was a persona non grata among the Puritans of New England, although Falstaff would have welcomed him to the Boar's Head Tavern. Like many a man of the Elizabethan Renaissance, he was enamored of classical learning and the New World; three times he abandoned London's Bankside to seek his fortune in Massachusetts Bay, at the risk of his life.

This article examines the construction of gender and race in the television series The Shield (FX 2002–). The article argues that while The Shield seems to offer an ostensibly progressive vision of a multi-cultural society in which race and gender represent no barrier to the possession of legitimate authority, the series premises the possibility of such access to power on the continuing possession of “real” power by a paternalistic white, male figure, thus presenting a regressive conservative vision of gender and race relations in contemporary US society.

In the summer of 1965 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) toured possible locations for a campaign that would highlight the problems African Americans faced in Northern cities.1 Chicago was chosen, primarily due to the presence of an effective local movement.