This article is about the relationship between the culture of outdoors recreation and the development of progressive politics at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. It considers the significance of popular outdoors magazines for American culture and politics before focussing in particular on the way in which Caspar Whitney, as editor of Outing magazine, constructed a notion of sportsmanship modelled upon the idealized figure of Theodore Roosevelt – an exemplar, by his reckoning, of the patrician class, and the template for his vision of a progressive citizenship. It was through the notion of sportsmanship that Whitney defined a set of values that would become synonymous with the strain of progressivism known as the New Nationalism, out of which the tradition of reform liberalism emerged in the twentieth century.

This article examines representations of credit instruments in two popular antebellum fictions: Asa Greene's The Perils of Pearl Street and Charles Frederick Briggs's The Adventures of Harry Franco. Drawing on a range of business histories it describes the operation of promissory notes and bills of exchange in the cotton-for-credit system, focussing on the “principle of deferral” and the ways in which these instruments attempted to solve the problem of time in long-distance exchange. By establishing concrete connections between characters, times, and places, these fictions demystify the antebellum financial system, revealing an economy based on new forms of social interdependence.

This introduction both models how one might read race, blackness, activism and Shakespeare and contextualizes the many “Shakespeares” that might be at work in the essays in this cluster, which emerge from the Shakespeare Association of America seminar Shakespeare and Black America. It suggests that scholars in this Shakespearean subfield have political, pedagogical and personal investments that both overlap with and diverge from Shakespeare study as traditionally understood. It addresses some of the complexities of performing, teaching and reading Shakespeare not as an agent of cultural dominion, but as part of resistance and activism in black America.

This essay examines reactionary, countersubversive fictions produced in the context of two conspiracy theories in the United States: the Illuminati crisis (1798–1800) and Pizzagate (2016–17). The author suggests that both cases emblematize a pornotropic aesthetic, a racialized sadomasochism that recurs across United States culture. Building on the work of Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye, Jennifer Christine Nash, and others, this essay argues that observers should understand countersubversive political reaction as an aesthetic project, a pornotropic fantasy that distorts underlying conditions of racial subjection. In the context of a resurgent far right that describes its enemies as “cuckolds” and frequently deploys the tropes of highly racialized pornography, this essay suggests that we might find the deep origins of pornographic, reactionary paranoia in the eighteenth century. It suggests, moreover, that understanding and contesting the underlying conditions of racial subjection require that scholars consider the power of pornotropic, countersubversive aesthetics to bring pleasure, to move people, and to order the world.

In 1975, the New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape exhibition, organized by William Jenkins, at George Eastman House, changed the scope and aesthetics of American landscape photography. Ostensibly pared-back and banal, these black-and-white images formally presented the United States as a series of streets, suburban new builds, industrial sites and warehouses. None bigger than eleven inches by four or thirteen by thirteen, the photographs were also small and unassuming, refusing the grandness and potential sublimity of previous evocations of the US landscape. Rather than present the United States as a series of locations marked by regional and economic differences, photographers such as Robert Adams, Frank Gohlke, Lewis Baltz and Bernd and Hilla Becher now focussed on an increasing homogeneity across terrains, terrains often indeterminable in terms of actual locations, and, more often than not, eerily devoid of human presence. In Neil Campbell's words, the images were “unemotional, flat and appeared everyday, aspiring to ‘neutrality’ with a ‘disembodied eye.’” The New Topographics – according to such readings – differed from earlier depictions of the United States, moving away from the documentary focus on agrarian poverty and urban slums as seen during the Depression, as well as the humanist vision of postwar photographers such as Robert Frank. As William Jenkins put it in the original introduction to the exhibition, New Topographics was a study more “anthropological than critical,” one that would recentre everyday lived experience – not as a collection of individualized narratives, but as a cultural landscape marked by commercial interests above all.

Ed Ruscha's photobooks create a deliberate type of low-key provocation the artist has referred to as a type of “Huh?” – a presentation of the American landscape in a book format that makes it very difficult to locate unambiguous cues for meaning or clear affect in the photographs. This essay lays out an extended reading of the notion of “distance” as uniting these photobooks in their physicality, in the ways in which the postwar industrial landscape of Los Angeles is presented to the viewer obliquely, and in the cooled manner of affect that was so influential for later artists.

The Civil War marked a revolution in the use of visual culture, during which imagery became a soldier's tool. Engagement with imagery presented both an opportunity and a dilemma, forcing some soldier-artists to abandon existing artistic conventions, whilst others fortified them, in search of ways to represent both the war's violence and tedium. The visual idealization of war jarred uncomfortably with the depiction of the conflict's realities. The creation of a diverse grassroots archive ran parallel to the mainstream narrative, examination of which offers new insight into how some soldiers visualized the war in opposition to themes exhibited in popular culture.

This article describes the intellectual collaboration and friendship between Charles Eliot Norton and E. L. Godkin as they established one of the most influential American journals of the late nineteenth century, The Nation. Their friendship provides a fascinating case study of an important strain of American political thought at the pivotal moment in its transition from the antebellum to the postbellum eras. In their different ways, Norton and Godkin struggled to reconcile the communal ideal of enlightened self-government with the ideal of liberal individualism, and, at the same time, the promise of egalitarian democracy with the realities of state power and machine politics. No sudden reversal or abrupt change of principle marked their political outlook. Instead there was a gradual loss of confidence in the powerful vision that brought all their contradictory commitments brilliantly together, and made it seem as though all that was best in the old order might be retained undiminished in the new.

Djanet Sears's Harlem Duet reimagines Shakespeare's Othello by weaving together three stories about Othello and his first wife, Billie, across three distinct time periods: the Civil War era, the Harlem Renaissance, and the present day. This essay centers on the scenes set in the Harlem Renaissance, a timeline that appears to unfold out of chronological order. By disrupting the linear progression of time, Sears transforms the theater into a platform that amplifies the stories of the oppressed through the dramatization of the ongoing, persistent cycle of oppression.

This article examines 1960s student power debates at Tennessee universities. It makes three main arguments. First, student protests over in loco parentis restrictions fit into an emerging student demand for autonomy more broadly, even in a politically and culturally conservative state like Tennessee. Second, these student power debates complicate the 1960s movements declension narrative, since Tennessee student activism peaked in 1970. Third, though black and white students both demanded greater personal autonomy, continued racial inequities on and off Tennessee campuses rendered their experiences distinct.

This essay investigates how Elizabeth Nunez's Prospero's Daughter (2006) and Terry McMillan's How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996) engage with Shakespeare. By taking a middlebrow approach that emphasizes readers’ use of and pleasure in Shakespeare and that aims to cultivate an inclusive multiracial readership, Nunez and McMillan show that black readers can lay claim to a Shakespeare that they participate in (re)defining. While Nunez's novel frames Shakespeare's political uses within pleasurable genres of contemporary popular fiction, McMillan suggests that she and her readers can remake Shakespeare, the name of her heroine's love interest, into a figure associated with pleasure.

In the early years of the Cold War, as universities expelled scholars with ties to the Communist Party, it became an article of faith among conservatives that the only targets of an ideological purge were people like themselves. William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, the most important exponent of this view, argued that “academic freedom” was a “superstition” designed to promote liberal indoctrination. Buckley's work tweaked, and mainstreamed, claims that a subversive conspiracy had overtaken the nation's schools and colleges. The correspondence the book generated demonstrates how attacks on academic freedom, and claims of victimhood, mobilized the postwar right.

Because late nineteenth-century American sport was connected to both immigrant assimilation and cultural prestige, this essay first describes Boston amateur athletics during the later nineteenth century. Ireland-born poet/lecturer/newspaper editor John Boyle O'Reilly (1844–90) provides an important example of social and intellectual class mobility from the perspective of an immigrant writer. We observe through O'Reilly's sporting experiences and literary career how the development of upper-class amateur athletics in Boston and the popularity of boxing among its Irish working classes gave him exceptional influence among both groups. His history of boxing, Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport (1888), is examined in detail as a key statement on pugilism, masculinity, and American citizenship fame. This view of Boston's intellectual and physical cultures, observed from the standpoint of O'Reilly, a talented writer and a sort of literary counterpart of famed pugilist John L. Sullivan (his friend, occasional sparring partner, and fellow celebrity among the Irish American community), sheds light on newly available pathways to social mobility made possible by simultaneous engagement with literary and athletic cultures.

In his photobook American Night (2003), the photographer Paul Graham evokes the passage of a walker who draws the outline of a composite and dialectic map of the American city. This article will examine how the book's structure and its division into zones is symptomatic of the explosion of the city and of its spatial, social and racial inequalities. These zones are also spaces of invisibility and visibility, of over-/perfect/under-exposure, illuminating the social/racial contrasts that underpin the urban environment and the mechanisms of their perpetuation. In this sense, American Night ultimately exposes the biopolitical struggle that underscores the American city.

The demise of America's state mental hospital system, or “deinstitutionalization,” has received much attention from sociologists and historians of medicine. Less understood is the manner in which the public experienced and came to terms with it. Using elements of folklore and horror studies, I will examine how popular films accommodated audiences to institutional decline and confirmed popular antistatist pessimism. The Exorcist (1973), One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Halloween (1978), and When a Stranger Calls (1979) helped weave a tapestry of distrust. By endorsing popular conceptions of institutional failure and presenting mythical narratives of individualist triumph, these films helped pave a path towards the conservative Reagan era to come.

This article compares the ways Michael Herr in Dispatches (1977) and Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger in Restrepo (2010) represent American soldiers in the context of military professionalization following the establishment of the AVF. These works are seminal landmarks of the grunt's-eye-view genre, but they produce the average soldier's subjectivity and identity very differently and, in turn, foster different relationships between their American audiences and this figure. Herr, I argue, represents the “grunts” of Vietnam as we all while Restrepo’s directors portray the Army platoon in Afghanistan as a collective who?. I show how the subtle aesthetic changes to documenting the average infantryman reflect and enforce the logics of professionalization as well as the intensifying distance between the American public and those who fight America's wars.

In this essay, I explore how the contemporary black female artists Carrie Mae Weems and Claudia Rankine work with photography and text to develop what I call, after the famous 1975 American landscape photography exhibition, a new, anticolonial, topographics. Connecting the geographical and anatomical meanings of the word “topography,” I approach their works via the phenomenology of Sara Ahmed and Frantz Fanon, tracing how the two artists decentre and throw into relief what Ahmed terms “whiteness as orientation.” Enacting an affective, visual politics of discomfort and disorientation, Weems and Rankine, this essay contends, open new terrain from which to encounter the American landscape in visual, corporeal, and phenomenological terms.

This article considers the photographic portraits of children reprinted in The Crisis’s “Children's Numbers” and the Brownies’ Book. While the magazines use these images to further their uplift agenda, they also present a sophisticated commentary on the photographic form. The publications present an understanding of the camera as an instrument for interpreting and shaping reality rather than as a truth-telling device. By suggesting parallels between the photographic image and the idea of the child, and exposing the conventions and distortions that produce both, the magazines challenge claims of authenticity and transparency which had helped to naturalize the oppression of black people.

Claims for Shakespearean universality often position Shakespeare's works as resonating with all people across all time. But how far can one take such a claim? A 2013 sketch on Comedy Central's Key & Peele, entitled “Othello Tis My Shite!”, uses satire precisely in order to challenge assertions of Shakespearean universality. I argue that the sketch – which follows two Renaissance Moors, Lashawnio and Martinzion, who attend Shakespeare's Othello – suggests that Shakespeare may find the limits of speaking for “all people” when depicting black masculinity. Yet the sketch's twist ending helpfully proposes the transformative potential in Shakespeare for more effective, authentic representation.

Though Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) is one of the best-known texts of the Harlem Renaissance, it has rarely been discussed with the text alongside which it was initially imagined: Waldo Frank's Holiday (1923). These works were inspired by a joint trip to Spartanburg, South Carolina and were conceptualized as a shared project, what the authors termed “Holiday + Cane.” This essay tracks their coproduction with particular attention to their parallax vision of lynching to theorize what we call, building on Achille Mbembe's work, “sex under necropolitics.” This dispensation does not take shape within a privatized notion of sexuality, but instead is “ungendered” and unindividuated in the ways that Hortense Spillers has described through the notion of the flesh. We take up her work to suggest that black bodily practices and corporeal intimacies are governed by a regime other than sexuality. In this essay, we map the contours of this regime and its effects on both sides of the color line. Our new cartography promises to reconfigure understandings of the sexuality of Toomer and Frank and of the Harlem Renaissance, and to clarify the relationship between (white) queer theory and queer-of-color critique.