bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Eureka Years
Authors: Smith Jad
Published: September 2017

In the early 1950s, working closely with Galaxy magazine editor Horace L. Gold, Bester wrote a highly experimental novel, The Demolished Man. In addition to hybridizing the SF and detective novel, a feat Campbell had declared impossible, The Demolished Man also reimagined telepathy via sociolinguistics, thinking of it in terms of language change. Bester’s telepaths, which he calls “espers,” develop their own idioms, metaphors, and in-jokes, all of which Bester captures through nonstandard orthography, extra-coding, and other forms of innovative, modernist-style language play. This chapter also chronicles Boucher’s continuing influence on Bester’s development as a writer and examines Bester’s preoccupation with the wish fulfillment theme in short stories such as “Hobson’s Choice” and “5,271,009.”
Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright
Authors: Smith Jad
Published: September 2017

From 1954 to 1959, Bester seemed less intent on dismissing pulp clichés than on transforming pulp aesthetics in earnest. “Fondly Fahrenheit” would not poke fun at the mad robot story but revamp it through the use of mixed-viewpoint narration, undercutting Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics in the process. The Stars My Destination would see Bester embrace space opera but handle the form with baroque flourishes of artistry—including stream-of-consciousness narration and synesthesia—that made it sleeker and headier than ever before. This chapter argues that Bester’s distinctive approach is best described as pulp modernism. It also draws on Bester’s unpublished correspondence to reveal for the first time the fierce battle between Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy over the rights to The Stars My Destination.
Conclusion
Authors: Smith Jad
Published: September 2017

Bester’s writable approach, which took shape early in his career and peaked in the fifties, resulted in open texts with layered, incongruous meanings that invited readers to coproduce, even finish, his stories through active imagination. Bester produced this sense of excess through various types of pulp-modernist extra-coding—allusions, nonstandard orthography, synesthesia, and mixed-viewpoint narration, to name a few—but the reader-centered, writable patterns he created mattered more than any of these pyrotechnics alone. The conclusion argues that Bester is rightly remembered as a lodestar for SF’s venturers and nomads, largely because his self-conscious play with SF reading and writing protocols put the field in a highly productive dialogue with itself.
Introduction
Authors: Ammen Sharon
Published: September 2017

The author, through anecdote and personal history as a professional performer, reveals how she
discovered May Irwin. Although Irwin was a major star in vaudeville and musical farce from 1890-1920, she has been largely forgotten today. Irwin’s personal and public successes exceeded those of contemporaries such as Trixie Friganza, Eva Tanguay, Marie Dressler, and Sophie Tucker, yet this is the first full length study of her life and work. She may have been forgotten because of: her status as a female comic star in vaudeville; her failure to make the leap into film; the difficulty in researching her life and work; and her association with the birth of the ragtime “coon” song. This study examines her strategies for success.
The Road to Rainbow’s End
Authors: Ammen Sharon
Published: September 2017

This chapter follows May Irwin’s personal and public life from 1915 to her last performance of the “Frog Song” at a Mark Twain centennial celebration in 1935 followed by her retirement to the Thousand Islands and her death in 1937. The author then analyzes the five interconnected strategies that Irwin used to maintain success, including her use of domesticity and its connection to the private sphere/public sphere argument in feminism. She also looks at how Irwin embodied the American myth of success and concludes that Irwin’s most skillful balance of shifting identities was in her performance of the coon song. Irwin unconsciously embodied the combination of love and envy that critic Eric Lott has found in the dominant white culture’s attempt at black cultural appropriation.
Epilogue
Authors: Ammen Sharon
Published: September 2017

The author’s epilogue examines two of her performances of May Irwin’s material–one in Clayton, New York to a group of older May Irwin fans, and one to a mixed group of African-Americans and white audience members attending a daylong panel on race who had viewed a video from the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia prior to a performance titled Reconstruction to Ragtime. The difference between audience responses and interpretive communities and the nature of the material presented in a readers’ theatre format is taken into account. Audience demographics are examined and the multiple reactions, including audience laughter, to racist material are analyzed.
Introduction
Authors: Mansell James G.
Published: September 2017

This introductory chapter outlines what early twentieth-century Britons meant when they referred to their “age of noise”. It situates the book in the field of sound studies and especially historical sound studies and outlines the central themes dealt with in the main chapters of the book: sound and modernity; sound and selfhood; and competition between auditory experts in situating ideals for sonic modernity. The chapter introduces the “ways of hearing” approach adopted in the book, explaining what it means to listen with rather than listen to the past
The Woman on Pier 13
Authors: Miklitsch Robert
Published: September 2017

Part one of this chapter examines the production history of The Woman on Pier 13 to highlight the ideological mutability of the film’s ostensible, “right-wing” agenda, one endorsed by RKO’s head of production at the time, Howard Hughes. Part two aims to counter the claim that the anticommunist noir is without aesthetic interest by proffering a close textual analysis of a number of noir sequences in The Woman on Pier 13. Part three argues that--as the film’s original title, I Married a Communist, indexes--the political discourse of anticommunism cannot be divorced from questions about genre (melodrama, film noir, gangster film) and from contemporary socio-cultural notions about marriage, notions which receive their most charged expression in the picture’s figuration of gender and sexuality, in particular femininity (the femme fatale), masculinity (the “bad boy”), and homosexuality (the queer “Commie”). Part four revisits the issue of form—here, mise-en-scène--by exploring issues of labor and union subversion via the role of the cargo-hook and Diego Rivera’s painting, The Flower Carrier (1935), in the film.
The Red and the Black
Authors: Miklitsch Robert
Published: September 2017

The working premise of this chapter is that, in the 1950s, film noir and anticommunism form a double helix and that even the most notorious of these “red menace” films—The Whip Hand (1951), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), Walk East on Beacon! (1952), and Big Jim McLain (1952)--is central to our appreciation of classic noir. A close reading of these films’ generic elements, whether “thriller,” melodrama, or semi-documentary, suggests that the Cold War noir represents a critical moment in the genre’s transition from the 1940s to the 1950s and from expressionism to neo-realism. Although the ideological motifs of these ‘50s “red scare” noirs range from communism and germ warfare (The Whip Hand), union subversion and African Americans (I Was a Communist for the FBI), espionage and the space race (Walk East on Beacon!) to HUAC and All-American masculinity (Big Jim McLain), the ‘50s anticommunist noir, despite its manifest glorification of the nuclear family, law enforcement (FBI), and audiovisual surveillance (television), is frequently troubled by the implications of these selfsame institutions and technologies.
Pickup on South Street
Authors: Miklitsch Robert
Published: September 2017

Chapter Abstract: Released at the end of the first cycle of postwar anticommunist noir (1947-1953), Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) is a canonical Cold War picture; it’s also one of the most overdetermined films made during the McCarthy period, centrally concerned as it is with the atom or hydrogen bomb, sex and violence, treason and espionage, capitalism vs. communism, and the politics of informing. Whereas Pickup on South Street depicts both the police and FBI as crudely utilitarian, indifferent to the human costs of the national-security state apparatus, it simultaneously dramatizes the lives of its small-time hoods and hustlers for whom the threat of the “red menace” is less pressing than the day-to-day, dog-eat-dog grind of trying to remain in the black.
“Black Film” and the Bomb
Authors: Miklitsch Robert
Published: September 2017

In the prototypical ‘50s nuclear noir, the protagonist is an elite scientist—a nuclear physicist, to be precise—who’s either overtly opposed to or intimately aligned with the nation state and its institutional agencies. Although the FBI, as in the anticommunist noir, is the dominant investigative figure in these espionage films, it’s dramatically subordinated to other, more pressing issues and agencies such as treason, homosexuality, and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) (in The Thief), Native Americans, national security, and the nuclear family (in The Atomic City), and bombshells, bikinis, and “B” movies (in Shack Out on 101). While City of Fear is not an atomic espionage film—call it a nuclear-epidemiological noir--the film’s representation of the LAPD and metropolitan Los Angeles as well as the rhetoric of disease and contamination, contagion and radioactivity, renders it a quintessential late ‘50s “B” noir.
Niagara
Authors: Miklitsch Robert
Published: September 2017

Niagara (1953) is in many ways the definitive 1950s color noir. One reason is Marilyn Monroe, whose exorbitant sexuality can be read either as yet another instance of the femme fatale or the transgressive force of female fantasy in the 1950s. Another reason is Henry Hathaway, who is one of the most underrated figures in classic American noir and whose direction in Niagara is the key to a renewed appreciation of his corpus and its unique synthesis of “mystery narration” and “documentary realism.” Yet another reason is the photography of Joe MacDonald, whose Technicolor cinematography brilliantly utilizes color and lighting to plumb the mysteries of the film’s donnée, a marriage on the brink of destruction.
The Odyssey of a Nice Girl
Authors: Wilson Kimber Marian
Published: September 2017

Ruth Suckow’s novel, The Odyssey of a Nice Girl (1925), based on her elocution school experiences, demonstrates how gender shaped women’s artistic lives in the Progressive era. Elocution enhanced men’s careers, yet women’s voices were for education or domestic entertainment. However, changing social roles allowed for women to adopt elocutionary performance as a mode of expression. Women’s educations at elocution schools allowed them undertake careers as professional performers and teachers. Female elocutionists’ desire to embody acceptable feminine attributes and to separate themselves from morally suspect actresses influenced their performances, presented as highbrow interpretations of great literature. The decline of elocution was in part due to the backlash against the professionalization of women in the field.
Reading the Fairies
Authors: Wilson Kimber Marian
Published: September 2017

Between 1850 and 1920, readings of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by women took place in conjunction with concerts of Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music, popularized by actress Fanny Kemble. The practice responsed to criticism of the physicality of theatrical stagings and the ability of Mendelssohn’s music to depict extramusical content. Female elocutionists were considered ideal performers due to the depiction of fairies as female and in order to render Shakespeare’s pure poetry stripped of theatrical excess. The combination of Shakespeare and Mendelssohn represented the highest level of elocutionary art. In reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, elocutionists became more voice than body, and the fairy elements were transmitted through Mendelssohn’s magical music, mediating the problem of the female body displayed on the stage.
In Another Voice
Authors: Wilson Kimber Marian
Published: September 2017

Women confirmed their own more highly cultured positions through recitation of African American dialect, particularly the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, or “child dialect,” sometimes with musical accompaniment. Many women incorporated Dunbar’s dialect poems into their repertoires, texts that also inspired settings for speaker and piano by women composers. However white women’s imitations of African American dialect perpetuated racial stereotypes such as that of the Mammy, even while their musical settings negated the text’s origins. Child dialect allowed child imitators to express comedic and rebellious sentiments without transgressing feminine social boundaries. The child-like persona cultivated by diseuse Kitty Cheatham facilitated her eclectic programming of children’s songs, nursery rhymes, and European art music alongside spirituals and African-American dialect texts.
Womanly Women and Moral Uplift
Authors: Wilson Kimber Marian
Published: September 2017

Imagery surrounding the female readers on the Chautauqua tent circuit reflected appropriately domestic ideals. Chautauqua, which lasted from approximately 1904 to 1930, was a commercial venture with “talent” supplied by regional entertainment bureaus. The brochures compiled by the Redpath Bureau document ensembles known as concert companies, which regularly featured women “readers.” Due to Chautauqua’s conservative audiences, spoken word performers worked to distinguish themselves from actresses, through women were sometimes marketed to audiences based on their attractiveness. Readers accompanied themselves in pianologues, such as those by Clay Smith, or recited to others’ accompaniments in musical readings. In spite of the tensions between its highbrow ideals and the necessity of presenting more popular middlebrow entertainment, Chautauqua had a wide cultural impact in rural America.
Multiplying Voices
Authors: Wilson Kimber Marian
Published: September 2017

“Verse-speaking” choirs led by women trained in elocutionary techniques were popular at women’s colleges in the 1930s and 1940s. School groups expressively speaking poetry together reflected the Depression-era values of social usefulness and civic unity. Pedagogical materials written by women consistently relied on musical terminology to describe choirs’ arrangements. Choirs undertook recitation utilizing differently pitched voices and alternating spoken solos with larger groups. The Wellesley College Choir, conducted by Cécile de Banke, was a leading representative of this style of musical interpretation of contemporary poetry. While elocution had featured female soloists in personal interpretations of literary works, the speech choir, with its patriotic overtones of civic good, was an even safer venue for feminine expression, as women’s personalities would be absorbed into the whole.
Afterword
Authors: Wilson Kimber Marian
Published: September 2017

I am a curious girl who likes books.

—Lauren Hancock

Read the poem to the rhythm of the music.

(Use a big voice!)

(Read with feeling!) …

Entertain and amaze your friends with this new way to read.

—Nancy Polette, “How to Do Concert Reading”...
The Policies of Localism
Authors: Ali Christopher
Published: September 2017

Chapters 2 through 5 house the case studies for the book. Each chapter is sub-divided by country to give the reader a detailed understanding of the dynamics at play. Chapter 2 assesses the structural regulation of local television by focusing on a key issue in the debate over local television. It thus considers the FCC’s quadrennial ownership reviews in the United States, the fee-for-carriage debate in Canada, and Ofcom’s reviews of public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom. This chapter also introduces two key terms: public good and market failure. The chapter demonstrates how the local is bound so tightly to commercial markets, broadcasting technologies and the status quo that alternatives views are effective erased.
The Communities of Localism
Authors: Ali Christopher
Published: September 2017

This chapter focuses on elements of local broadcasting that is often glossed over: community television and community media. The chapter begins by defining community media and then proceeds to the case studies: public access television (PEG) regulation in the United States, the redrafting of Canadian community television regulations in 2002 and 2010, and the lack of community television and importance of community radio and hyperlocal media in the UK. This chapter argues that community media need to be fully integrated into a holistic conceptualization of local media among policymakers, regulators, and local media stakeholders. A second goal is to demonstrate that it is within conversations about, and discourses of, community media where larger issues of the local and its relationship to local media become most pronounced.
The Solutions of Localism
Authors: Ali Christopher
Published: September 2017

Chapter 5 chronicles regulatory attempts to bolster local television, particularly local television news, in the US, UK and Canada. It argues that each of these attempts ultimately fell victim to status quo thinking, a reliance on market factors, and a fallback to default localism. The American case study is an analysis of the FCC’s Broadcast Localism Inquiry. The Canadian case study is an evaluation of the Local Programming Improvement Fund, a subsidy to bolster local news amongst television stations. The UK case study is on the Local Digital Television Programme Service, which was an attempt to establish a local television system akin to those in North America in 2013.
The Loyal West
Authors: Stanley Matthew E.
Published: September 2017

The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America examines identity and memory among Union soldiers and veterans in the Lower Middle West, a previously overlooked region. I use the phrase “Loyal West” as shorthand for both the physical region, the dominant identity of its inhabitants, and the multitude of ways in which residents from the lower free states (southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois) came to reject antebellum conceptions of westernness and grew to imagine themselves as distinct from both Confederates and their African American and “Yankee” allies. The basic elements of the Loyal West narrative were, among other things, that western soldiers were tougher (especially vis-a-vis the Army of the Potomac), were more successful on campaign, were more willing to engage in destructive war, were less reliant on blacks and foreigners and liberalizing war measures, and that the West was the origin source of the Union’s preeminent military and political leadership. Although the major themes of the Loyal West memory faded with time, I argue that the Lower Middle West’s mutuality between racial and political identity, cultural memory, and social policy—white space, white memory, and white power—had great implications for the political and racial patterns of the late nineteenth and twentieth-century Midwest.
“The Geography Embodied”
Authors: Stanley Matthew E.
Published: September 2017

The Introduction presents both the concept of the Loyal West and ties it to broader theory about the reciprocity between collective memory and social power. Emphasizing emancipation, reconciliation, and the Lost Cause as modes of collective memory, or attempting to devise sweeping national models, I argue that scholars have neglected the vitality and variety of the Unionist memory of the war, particularly with regard to region. Regionalism and political conservatism were central to the creation of the Loyal West, a vein of memory and constellation of ideas that set the stage for postwar political and racial division in the Ohio Valley and influenced how Americans came to construct both the Midwest and a North–South dyad
“The Boundary between Contending Nations”
Authors: Stanley Matthew E.
Published: September 2017

This chapter argues that the presidential election of 1860 betrayed the ideological flexibility of westernness and conservative Unionism. The region increasingly divided as the war progressed, and the Ohio River—a nucleus of Union supply, contraband camps, raids, and other forms of violence—became more and more a perforated line within popular imagination. Conservative Unionists were swept into a quickly evolving contest in which they “Confederatized” the Border South, imposing a “Yankee vision” on Kentucky that was rooted in antislavery thought. Although most Lower Middle Westerners were slow to accept emancipation and black enlistment (and many never did), liberalizing war policies encumbered conservative Unionism in the Bluegrass State, further separating the antebellum West.
“The War Fattens on the Blood of Western Men”
Authors: Stanley Matthew E.
Published: September 2017

This chapter argues that Union soldiers from the Lower Middle West fought primarily to preserve the Union, rather than primarily for black liberation. Yet despite the refusal of many Lower Middle Western volunteers to embrace or even accept liberal war aims, conservative Unionism in the region proved flexible throughout 1863 and 1864 just as it was eroding in Kentucky. Inasmuch as many Union soldiers pushed emancipation, abundant dissenters, especially in the Lower Middle West, used both rhetorical and active means to pull the revolution backward and rein in its perceived radicalism. Countless “pullers”—conservatives who often had roots in the slaveholding South—never accepted the war’s liberalizing measures, and revealed their discontent by a spectrum of means, from personal protest to mass desertion.
“The Great Brotherhood of the West”
Authors: Stanley Matthew E.
Published: September 2017

Chapter Four examines evolving definitions of loyalty after emancipation and black enlistment, contending that the Ohio Valley, with its persistent Copperheadism, was perhaps the last place in the United States where sectionalism, a form of geographic identity associated with the politics of slavery and civil war, destabilized regionalism. Again, soldiers and civilians adapted the language of region and race either to back or to reject social change. Although Copperheadism dissolved following Abraham Lincoln’s reelection in November 1864, its racial, regional, and economic language was repurposed during the postconflict era by enemies of Reconstruction.
“Was It for This You Fought?”
Authors: Stanley Matthew E.
Published: September 2017

This chapter argues that Reconstruction failed first among northern states in the Lower Middle West. Although the Republican Party won many converts in the region between 1864 and 1872 and the construction of Confederate identity in Kentucky and Missouri worked in tandem with the manufacture of Union identity north of the Ohio River, southern Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio remained fundamentally committed to illiberal ideologies of race. Most white citizens, including old soldiers, linked government spending and corruption to unbidden black advancement and reinforced a “new white supremacy” to oppose civil rights, black migration, currency deflation, labor disputes, and ethnic fears, as the region became the nucleus of extralegal violence, the sundown town program, and, eventually, the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan.
Interview with Cristi Puiu
Authors: Filimon Monica
Published: September 2017

This extended interview with Cristi Puiu tries to intertwine several thematic threads: Puiu’s biography, including his experience with his different films; his involvement in, and reaction to, historical events; and his artistic credo. It includes a discussion of important moments such as the 1989 uprising against the communist regime, the 1990 protest against the neo-communists taking hold of power, or the different confrontations between the young and old generations within the film industry. It also gives ample space to Puiu’s discussion of his religious views of the sacred and the role cinema can play in building bridges among people
Wandering Russians, 1921–1925
Authors: Cherny Robert W.
Published: September 2017

Unable to return to Russia because of his White army service, Arnautoff spent 1921-1925 in northeastern China. He lived hand-to-mouth while studying at the Lotus Art School in Harbin, then took a job with the cavalry of Zhang Zoulin, the local warlord, in Mukden. He met and married Lydia Blonsky, daughter of another White army refugee.
“The Best Pupil in the Class,” 1925–1929
Authors: Cherny Robert W.
Published: September 2017

Arnautoff resumed his long delayed art education when his father-in-law paid his way to attend the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) from 1925 to 1929. There he worked with prominent artists, including Ralph Stackpole and Edgar Walter. First attracted to sculpture, he turned to mural painting. His longing for his motherland led him to read contemporary Soviet literature and to seek out the local Communist party for information about the Soviet Union.
“Perhaps the Most Gifted of the Local Muralists,” 1931–1935
Authors: Cherny Robert W.
Published: September 2017

Returning to San Francisco in 1931, Arnautoff began to paint large murals. Undere the New Deal, federal funds helped to underwrite many public art projects. Arnautoff took a major part in the first large New-Deal art project, at Coit Tower in San Francisco, where a Communist symbol in another artist’s mural generated controversy. Arnautoff then received a commission for another other large, New-Deal mural at the Presidio. Some of his art began to criticize aspects of his society, and he began to define his art as social realism.
King of Parilia, 1935–1941
Authors: Cherny Robert W.
Published: September 2017

Between 1935 and 1941, Arnautoff reached the high point of his artistic career, receiving a large WPA-funded commission at George Washington High School, a smaller commission at the California School of Fine Arts, and commissions for five New-Deal post-office murals. He joined the Stanford University faculty in 1938. The artist members of the Art Association elected him as their representative on the board, and he received other, similar recognition. He and Lydia became citizens in 1937 and joined the Communist party soon after. Unknown to them, the NKVD executed his father, uncle, and cousin in 1938 during Stalin’s Great Terror. By 1941, Arnautoff was one of the most influential members of the city’s arts community, and his influence extended well beyond the city’s boundaries.
“An Unwanted Guest in America,” 1953–1961
Authors: Cherny Robert W.
Published: September 2017

Arnautoff became more isolated in the 1950s. In 1955, he made national news when he was asked to remove a cartoon criticizing McCarthyism from an art show. The event brought a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee and two hearings at Stanford to determine if he should be terminated. In a decision extending academic freedom, the faculty committee did not recommend termination. The California Labor School and the Russian American Society both closed down, and the Communist party shrunk significantly. Victor and Lydia again applied to emigrate to the Soviet Union, were accepted, and traveled there as tourists. Upon returning to the U.S., Lydia died in a car accident.
Introduction
Authors: Pfeifer Michael J.
Published: September 2017

Scholars have argued that lynching--summary group attack and/or homicide seeking to punish behavior defined as deviant--against individuals often deemed socially distant, typically occurs in conditions of social flux, for example in transitions from homogeneous tribal societies to plural, heterogeneous social orders; in locales where patterns of racial or ethnic dominance have been challenged or collapsed; in settings shifting rapidly from rural to urban social arrangements; in polities where authority has effectively lost legitimacy or where multiple, contradictory legal regimes contend for popular support; amid perceptions of a crisis of legal order brought on by rampant criminality; and in contested or fragile states as opposed to settings where the state is able to, in Weberian terms, successfully claim a monopoly of violence.
Lynching, Public Violence, and the Internet in Indonesia
Authors: Bakker Laurens
Published: September 2017

In this chapter, Laurens Bakker argues that brutal, extralegal violence against individuals or small groups considered as a threat to local society has a long and varied history in Indonesia. Its usage includes extrajudicial killings and mutilations of thieves and other wrongdoers by local communities as well as a more sophisticated application of such violence by local power holders aimed at inspiring fear and obeisance in the population. Bakker argues that Indonesia’s recent transition from a nation ruled by a dictatorial central regime, which made ample use of violence to maintain its grip, to a democracy, in which the role of government power is considerably more regulated, has seen the “regime of fear” strategy also successfully make this transition.
New Situations Demand Old Magic
Authors: Smith Nicholas Rush
Published: September 2017

Nicholas Rush Smith’s chapter explores collective violence in postapartheid South Africa, where vigilante violence involving an attempt to necklace alleged criminals has been common. That the necklace--placing a gasoline filled tire around the neck of a victim and setting it alight--is frequently deployed is surprising, Smith asserts, because the struggle against apartheid was, in important ways, a struggle for a procedural rights-based legal system, something necklacing undermines. Moreover, necklacing was originally developed as a tool to sanction political threats under apartheid, whereas today it is primarily used as a technique to punish criminals. Why, Smith asks, is necklacing still practiced twenty years after the dawn of democracy given that it was first implemented as part of the struggle against apartheid? Smith’s chapter argues that citizens deploying the necklace challenge the postapartheid state’s-rights-based legal system, which South Africans often argue enables insecurity and immorality, to proliferate; rhetorically and ideologically, this in some ways parallels the criticisms that American lynchers often made of procedural, due process rights. Through its spectacular violence, the necklace dramatizes these critiques of the democratic legal order much like it dramatized critiques of the apartheid state.
Sitting on the Volcano
Authors: Ben-Ephraim Shaiel , Honig Or
Published: September 2017

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim’s and Or Honig’s chapter focuses on the lynching and mob violence between Jews and Arabs in the area known as mandatory Palestine, and later as the State of Israel and the occupied territories. Ben-Ephraim and Honig seek to answer two questions: when and why has lynching and mob violence occurred, and how has it affected the development of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. The chapter focuses on two periods of intercommunal conflict in which lynching and mob violence took place: the British Mandate period (1920-1948), and the period following the eruption of the first Palestinian Uprising “Intifada” (1987) until today. Ben-Ephraim and Honig find that the main variable determining the use of lynching attacks was the level of institutionalization of national political movements. When there are organized institutions and society is more organized, organized forms of violence such as uprisings or terrorism tend to be more prevalent since society or elements of it can be mobilized to act in a more systematic fashion. Lynching and mob violence reflect a lack of political institutionalization because the leadership possesses the ability to incite, yet lacks the tools to restrain or guide, the violence it inspires. By contrast, when the national movements are well institutionalized, Ben-Ephraim and Honig argue, more spontaneous acts of violence tend instead to take the form of sporadic acts of vengeance.
Employers’ Path to the Open Shop in Detroit, 1903–7
Authors: Klug Thomas A.
Published: September 2017

Thomas Klug focuses on the city of Detroit, a major battleground in employers’ fight for open-shop conditions. Challenging the conventional story that seeks to show that the city’s employers, organized in the Employers’ Association of Detroit, enjoyed victories with little difficulties during a major strike in 1907, Klug has discovered that the organization was characterized by considerable amounts of internal tension. While organization spokespersons promoted the open-shop publicly, some members quietly negotiated with skilled workers, recognizing that collective bargaining offered the promise of industrial peace. Yet all members of the Employers’ Association of Detroit proclaimed their support for the open-shop principle.
The Strange Career of A. A. Ahner
Authors: Feurer Rosemary
Published: September 2017

Rosemary Feurer traces the leading purveyor of anti-union services in the Midwest, A. A. Ahner, to frame employers’ antiunion strategies during the New Deal. She argues that the long learning curve that took place over decades explains why a thug agency survived and thrived instead of being eradicated during what is usually considered the heroic era of liberal intervention. Ahner became an accepted industrial relations advisor and counselor for major firms during the New Deal, with the assistance of a liberal as well as conservative forces, networks and alliances. Ahner’s career path only seems strange because historians cling to a framework of the post New Deal “Rise of the Right” with Southern origins while ignoring longer antecedents, networks, and learning
The “American” Conundrum—Criticism, Attraction, and Antagonisms
Authors: Domínguez Virginia R. , Balakian Sophia
Published: September 2017

This essay introduces the book, Global Perspectives on the United States, including it dynamic structure and its Second and Third Looks. It focuses on multiple meanings of, and approaches to, notions of Americanism, pro-Americanism, anti-Americanism, and even Americanization. Included in this essay are examples of discursive and polling data and practices in numerous countries around the world. It provides an analytic framework to much of the talk on anti-Americanism that exists both inside and outside the U.S., and makes an argument that a great deal of it is misleading.
Internationalizing African American Studies, Too
Authors: Broeck Sabine
Published: September 2017

This essay simultaneously provides a case study of moments of cultural and political crossover between African American liberation movements and the West German public in the Cold War period, and it offers some parameters for how to read the current fraught moment. It argues for a re-centering of African American Studies in the recent scholarly push to internationalize American Studies. It is concerned on many levels with civil rights, going beyond national, ethnic, and religious borders, and it connects some of these struggles to past and current debates about (white) women’s rights and religious freedom.
What We Talk about When We Talk about Anti-Americanism
Authors: Mariani Giorgio
Published: September 2017

This essay examines the issue of “anti-Americanism,” paying special attention to the multiple meanings and uses of it in the Italian context. It argues that “anti-Americanism” is no easier to define than something like “love,” which is as crucial yet equally as slippery. It points to some of the many different issues often discussed, or alluded to, when people talk about “anti-Americanism.” These are often ideological and historical. It argues that contrary to expectations most analysts of “anti-Americanism” are fond of pointing out that those who hate “America” are quite often more or less secretly in love with “her.” Interestingly this essay points out that it was only with the advent of the Cold War that the term “anti-Americanism” came to be installed in European dictionaries as well as in the language of global politics, and the essay actually makes a plea for getting rid of the term altogether at this point in time.
Lost and Found in Translation
Authors: Bán Zsófia
Published: September 2017

This essay contemplates playfulness, levity, and freedom of spirit in relation to Hungary, freedom, and the burden of history. Ban argues that one of the most enduring stereotypes of U.S. culture in Hungary (and elsewhere in Europe) is precisely its supposed “lack of reflection,” its lack of depth, its “childishness,” and its overall unserious nature. Moreover, she writes about Hungarian intellectuals as typically deploring the “Americanization” of their culture and their history. Debates have ensued and are now even being revived with the launch of Fateless, a Hungarian cinematographic memorial to the Holocaust based on Imre Kertesz’s book that earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002. But Ban focuses on examples where the assumed congruence of Americanization and postmodernism can be detected and actually seen as problematic. As she sees it, the problem of Americanization in Central/Eastern Europe goes beyond the simple paradox of “particularism within the U.S.” versus “global Americanization elsewhere.”
“Making Pals in Panama”
Authors: Spellacy Amy
Published: September 2017

This essay examines a series of Coca Cola advertisements that offer insight into notions of neighborhood and community in the U.S. along with U.S. foreign policy in the 1940s. It focuses on the relationship between the U.S. Good Neighbor policy and a 1944 ad set in Panama. The author argues that a significant relationship existed between U.S. imperialism at the time and U.S. domestic racial anxieties. These ads promoted an association between Coca Cola and an “American way of life,” but they also reflected racially limited, exclusionary ideas of community that operated domestically and were exported to other parts of the world through U.S. imperial practices. Invoking a broad understanding of imperialism that stresses economic, political, cultural, and ideological aspects of imperialism, the author draws on the work of Edward Said, Michael Doyle, and Amy Kaplan. The essay includes a detailed analysis of the 1944 Coca Cola ad set in Panama, but concludes by looking at a series of post-WWII ads and their implications. Spellacy notes that the end of WWII signaled the end of the period of U.S. enthusiasm for Latin America, but the historical markers of enthusiasm and lack of interest matter in multiple ways. One example is the early Civil Rights movement in the U.S. The soda fountain might often have been associated with innocence and nostalgia for small-town life in the U.S., but this was, after all, the same era marked by early U.S. Civil Rights battles.
Abajo Los Chinos
Authors: Chang Jason Oliver
Published: September 2017

This chapter follows antichinista organizations from the 1910 revolution through to 1928. Antichinistas challenged the Obregon and Calles administrations’ continued Porfirian era reliance upon Chinese commercial circuits. Correspondence from these organizations with the government shows how their national consolidation in 1925 mobilized new strategies to capture public priorities. In this period the dominant racial image of Chinese people shifted from killable subjects of the revolution to pernicious defilers of the nation. A national antichinista campaign coalesced in the articulation of Mexican women’s concern for the prevention of Chinese men’s sexual relations with Mexican women. Their propaganda depicted Mexican women’s sexual reproduction as an evolutionary mechanism for racial betterment. They spread a popular discourse of a mestizo national racial future to which the Chinese men were the most significant threat. In doing so, antichinistas constructed a popular discourse of ethical governance and authentic revolutionary action in the expansion of authoritarian state power.
Forging a Racial Contract
Authors: Chang Jason Oliver
Published: September 2017

This chapter documents the far-reaching consequences of the rise of antichinistas within the revolutionary state as officials and politicians fought for the hegemony of mestizo nationalism. Antichinismo became an influential ideology that shaped policy, programs, and the country’s longest running political party. The chapter illustrates that antichinismo became popular not because it rejected the Chinese, but because rejecting the Chinese created an image of benevolent intervention and citizenship practices that did not challenge the revolutionary state. The chapter turns to the 1929 presidential election, the raise of Mexican eugenics, the formation of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario, the racial politics of Rafael Melgar’s Depression era Campaña Nacionalista, and several instrumental reforms in land, labor, census, and immigration policy. The ascendence of antichinismo to the highest echelons of Mexican society was reflected back in new rounds of violence against the Chinese and state-wide expulsions in Sonora and Sinaloa in 1931-32.
Teacher Strike!
Authors: Shelton Jon
Published: September 2017

Historians have sought for some time to understand why the labor-liberal coalition’s political influence declined and how the right instituted a conservative revolution in the 1970s and 80s in the US. Teacher Strike! shows that conflict over urban education was fundamental in this story. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of teachers went on strike in virtually every corner of the US in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and in many cases, for weeks or even months at a time. The many contentious and lengthy teacher union walkouts during this era made manifest three interlocking limitations to postwar liberalism: the failure to provide public employees full union rights, the inability to ensure that African-Americans in the nation’s largest cities enjoyed equal educational and economic opportunities, and the drastic, insoluble fiscal crises brought on by deindustrialization and economic downturn in the nation’s biggest cities. This book uses cases studies from New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Newark—all led by locals of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)--to show both the range and depth of this phenomenon. Through this broad treatment of conflict in public education, Teacher Strike! charts the new neoliberal order that emerged from the ashes of labor liberalism and shows how critics’ linking teacher unions and the urban poor together as “unproductive” proved crucial to altering the nation’s political trajectory.
From Labor Liberalism to Neoliberalism
Authors: Shelton Jon
Published: September 2017

This chapter introduces the reader to the phenomenon of teacher strikes in the US between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. It argues that contentious conflicts over urban public education brought on by teacher unions’ struggle for good salaries and control over working conditions exposed three interlocking limits to New Deal labor liberalism: the failure to provide public employees full union rights, the inability to ensure that African-Americans in the nation’s largest cities enjoyed equal educational and economic opportunities, and the drastic, insoluble fiscal crises brought on by deindustrialization and economic downturn in the nation’s biggest cities. The chapter also charts the new neoliberal order that emerged from the ashes of the decline of labor liberalism.
“A New era of Labor Relations”
Authors: Shelton Jon
Published: September 2017

This chapter outlines the parameters of the “public sector labor problem.” When private sector unions grew powerful after World War II, public employees organized for similar rights. In many states they acquired the right to organize but not the right to strike. The chapter chronicles the early history of teacher unions—especially the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—and their quest for meaningful collective bargaining. It uses Pennsylvania—the state that passed the furthest reaching attempt to ensure union rights for teachers—and teacher strikes in Pittsburgh (1968, 1971) and Philadelphia (1970) to highlight the failure of liberal labor policy to prevent teacher strikes.
Teacher Power, Black Power, and the fracturing of Labor Liberalism
Authors: Shelton Jon
Published: September 2017

This chapter chronicles the growing conflict between the Black Power movement—an extension of the civil rights movement seeking the formation of black political and community institutions—and unionized public employees in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Beginning with the United Federation of Teachers strike in 1968 over community control in Ocean Hill-Brownsville (New York City), the chapter also shows how two teacher strikes in Newark (1970, 1971) drove apart the Black community and a majority white teacher union. A close examination of letters to the imprisoned President of the American Federation of Teachers shows that critics of both urban black populations and unionized teachers had begun to link the two groups together as “unproductive” threats to law and order and economic prosperity.
Dropping Dead
Authors: Shelton Jon
Published: September 2017

This chapter documents the New York City fiscal crisis of 1975. The city’s drastic position had been caused by its robust promise of social welfare state coupled with national economic downturn and deindustrialization. Free market ideologues who opposed social democracy, however, blamed teacher unions and recipients of “welfare” (Aid to Families with Dependent Children). Many middle- and working-class whites in New York City joined in popularizing this explanation, and by the time the federal government bailed out the city in late 1975, the “commonsense” narrative was that the city’s “unproductive” citizens had caused the crisis. The most dramatic confrontation over the city’s path toward austerity occurred when President Albert Shanker led a United Federation of Teachers strike in September 1975.
Asianfail
Authors: Ty Eleanor
Published: September 2017

Asianfail examines literary and filmic works by contemporary Asian Americans and Asian Canadians that deal with failure and unhappiness. While the hashtag #Asianfail pokes fun at cultural stereotypes of Asians on social media, the myth of the model minority has serious negative consequences for many young people who feel pressure and anxiety when they do not succeed in professional careers. This book looks at how novelists, such as Ruth Ozeki, Madeleine Thien, Alex Gilvarry, and lê thi diem thúy reveal the "cruel optimism" that characterizes ordinary existence for many people in the 21st century. Films such as The Debut, Red Doors,and Saving Face query immigrant aspirations of the older generation and the feasibility of the American dream. The protagonists in the graphic novels of Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, Keshni Kashyap and Mari Araki express their ugly and painful feelings as they grow up, while Jan Wong and Catherine Hernandez grapple with work and stress-related depression. In Linda Ohama's Obaachan's Garden and Catherine Hernandez' performance, even the aged feel precarity and are burdened with secrets of the past. These works interrogate and expose the limits of our neoliberal notions of the good life and happiness.