bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Bayesian framework for THz-TDS plasma diagnostics
Authors: Brown Nathan P. , Grauer Samuel J. , Deibel Jason A. , Walker Mitchell L. R. , Steinberg Adam M.
Published: January 2021

Terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) is an optical diagnostic used to noninvasively measure plasma electron density and collision frequency. Conventional methods for analyzing THz-TDS plasma diagnostic data often do not account for measurement artifacts and do not quantify parameter uncertainties. We introduce a novel Bayesian framework that overcomes these deficiencies. The framework enables computation of both the density and collision frequency, compensates for artifacts produced by refraction and delay line errors, and quantifies parameter uncertainties caused by noise and imprecise knowledge of unmeasured plasma properties. We demonstrate the framework with sample measurements of a radio frequency inductively-coupled plasma discharge.
Molecular characterization of extended-spectrum β-lactamase-producing Escherichia coli isolated from postpartum uterine infection in dairy cattle in India
Authors: Agrawal Samiksha , Singh Ajay Pratap , Singh Rashmi , Saikia Raktim , Choudhury Soumen , Shukla Amit , Prabhu Shyama N. , Agrawal Jitendra
Published: January 2021

Background and Aim: Selection and dissemination of plasmid-encoded extended-spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL) among Enterobacteriaceae confers resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics. The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence and molecular characteristics of ESBL-producing organisms isolated from dairy cattle with a uterine infection.

Materials and Methods: Bacterial isolates (n=62) were characterized by biochemical test for genus and species determination. Antimicrobial susceptibility tests were performed by Kirby–Bauer disk diffusion method using panel of antibiotics for initial screening of ESBL organism. Phenotypic confirmation of ESBL-suspected strains was done by combination disk method and double-disk method. Multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was carried out for phylogrouping of Escherichia coli isolates as well as for genotyping ESBL genes. Enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus-PCR method was used for genotypic characterization of isolates.

Results: Antibiotic susceptibility profile of E. coli (n=40) isolates showed high rates of resistance for ampicillin (95.0%), cefpodoxime (97.5%), cefotaxime (87.5%), and ceftriaxone (70%). However, low rates of resistance were observed for cefoxitin (25%), amoxicillin/clavulanic acid (20%), ceftazidime (17.5%), gentamicin (10%), and ertapenem (7.5%). A total of 39/40 E. coli isolates were confirmed as ESBL with Epsilometer test as well as the genotypic method and 28 (70%) of them were multidrug-resistant. Genotype blaCTX-M was observed as a predominant beta-lactamase type with the preponderance of CTX-M Group 1. The following combinations were observed: blaTEM + blaCTX-M in 15 (36.2%) isolates, blaTEM / blaSHV in 8 (5.2%) isolates, and blaCTX-M / blaSHV in 6 (5.2%) isolates. The phylogenetic grouping of E. coli strains revealed the highest prevalence for B1 (22.0%) followed by A (20%).

Conclusion: This report shows a high frequency of ESBL E. coli from cattle with postpartum uterine infections. These isolates showed reduced susceptibility to common antibiotics used for the treatment of uterine infections greater affecting the therapeutic outcome.
Jockomo
Authors: Lief Shane , McCusker John
Published: January 2021

This book represents the very first publication to explore how Native American traditions have influenced the history of New Orleans music over the past three centuries, specifically how this connection has culminated in the Mardi Gras Indian cultural system. In addition to including the perspectives of the cultural participants themselves, this book draws upon manuscripts and archives from the earliest days of the French colony of Louisiana, providing a range of views on how the Mardi Gras Indian tradition developed. A number of linguistic analyses focus on Native terms which are significant for regional language history. By showing these Native roots, the authors give empirical evidence for a much earlier origin for the Mardi Gras Indian tradition than has previously been recognized in conventional New Orleans historiography. A series of archival images and contemporary photographs help the reader to visualize the transformations of public life in New Orleans, including musical processions in the streets of the city during Mardi Gras celebrations. The complex background of the “American Indian” icon is also recognized as a component in how Mardi Gras Indians have developed their cultural practices over time. Key political events and time periods, such as the Civil War and the Reconstruction era that followed, are indispensable to understanding how the Mardi Gras Indians emerged in New Orleans during the nineteenth century. This book features rare images, such as the first known photograph of Mardi Gras Indians, giving the reader a more complete audiovisual journey through New Orleans history.
Chick-a-ma-feeno
Authors: Lief Shane , McCusker John
Published: January 2021

This chapter lays out several different narratives about the origins of Mardi Gras Indians. Some are based on oral histories shared among Mardi Gras Indians themselves, while others are based on various archives and newspaper accounts. The emergence of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition is set against the backdrop of the evolution of Mardi Gras as celebrated during the colonial period and beyond, after Louisiana had become part of the United States. The struggle for African American political power and social equality is another parallel thread for this narrative, especially as Mardi Gras Indian practices overlapped with other masking traditions and institutions in the Black community. The earliest known account of Mardi Gras Indians, identified as such, is analysed and the personal histories of the first known Mardi Gras Indians reveal connections to Black participation in the Civil War and continuing struggles during Reconstruction and through the early twentieth century.
Rebirth
Authors: Lief Shane , McCusker John
Published: January 2021

This final chapter describes how Mardi Gras Indians became more prominent in the public eye during the twentieth century. While they were often associated with violent street clashes during the early decades, by the last quarter of the century, a deliberate move towards harmony and growing cooperation led to more peaceful encounters among Mardi Gras Indians. This development paralleled the city’s growing acceptance and ultimate embrace of the Mardi Gras Indian as a cultural icon of the city. Just a few years into the twentieth century, Hurricane Katrina caused a major disruption in the cultural life of New Orleans, impacting the lives of Mardi Gras Indians and throwing the future of their tradition into doubt. Featured in this chapter is another series of interviews in which Mardi Gras Indians describe their struggles to return to New Orleans and their role in leading the city back to recovery and renewal.
Conclusion
Authors: Lief Shane , McCusker John
Published: January 2021

The conclusion explores the philosophical implications of ancient traditions overlapping with the current Mardi Gras Indian cultural system. Through many generations of interaction, different groups of people have learned to create new forms of language and music together. The simple ability to engage in active listening is a doorway to personal and collective transformation. Our ability to balbaha toba (a Choctaw verbal phrase defined as “become one who speaks a foreign language”) and share new forms of music reveal the possibility of experiencing intersubjectivity. Stepping outside of frozen notions of history requires the ability to understand time as both cyclical and linear, as it is sometimes impossible to tell apart what is new and what is old within cultural practices. The Muskogean origins and changing meanings of “Jockomo” in different contexts are an embodiment of the mysterious transformations which can take place whenever people learn to live and sing together.
Oversharing on and off the Internet: Crossing from Digital to Print (and Back) in Young Adult Works Authored by YouTube Stars
Authors: Rickard Rebellino Rachel L.
Published: January 2021

The mid-2010s saw a wave of nonfiction young adult literature published by authors who initially gained fame through YouTube. In addition to the authors’ shared background experiences, these memoirs have another feature in common. Each example of life writing puts forward a consistent narrative regarding the rationale for their existence: increased intimacy. This chapter offers an analysis of YA YouTube memoirs, first identifying the unique features of this subgenre of youth literature and, then, exploring the question of intimacy across print and digital formats. Despite these author’s claims, intimacy in print or digital narratives might be an impossibility; however, analysis of these memoirs, which function as examples of transmedia storytelling, offers a fruitful space to explore the question of what counts as young adult literature and how scholars of YA literature might study this genre as it expands beyond print texts.
Fathoms Below: An In-Depth Examination of the Mermaid in Young Adult Literature, 2010–2015
Authors: Gray Amber
Published: January 2021

In response to the rise of young adult paranormal romance in the mid-2000s, more than thirty young adult novels with mermaids as central characters (many of which belonged to multi-volume series) were published between 2010 and 2015.This chapter investigates the complex history of mermaids in fiction, examines the figure of the mermaid and the protagonist’s position between worlds in mermaid-themed young adult novels, and explores how mermaid characters illustrate the possibility of identity and the body as characteristics potentially capable of transformation.
Who Are These Books Really For? Police-Violence YA, Black Youth Activism, and the Implied White Audience
Authors: Mootz Kaylee Jangula
Published: January 2021

This chapter discusses trends in the genre of police-violence YA, specifically: embracing Black identity; confronting white privilege; focusing on police violence and structural racism; urging readers to speak out; and remembering victims of violence. While recognizing the importance of police-violence YA to anti-racist literature for youth, this chapter is critical of the genre’s tendency to pander to a white readership, arguing that these texts foreclose Black youth experience in favor of educating white readers about racism. Despite this criticism, this chapter promotes police-violence YA as a necessary addition to the field of young adult literature for its propensity to inspire youth activism and empower young Black readers.
Manufacturing Manhood: Young Adult Fiction and Masculinity(ies) in the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Jesse Tom , Jones Heidi
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines representations of masculinity in contemporary young adult fiction and identifies four major trends within the genre. These trends suggest a recent shift in YA texts away from traditional gender binaries and toward a more open, fluid understanding of what it means to “be a man” in the twenty-first century. The chapter concludes with a set of recommendations for dealing with these changing gender norms in today’s classrooms by adopting a critical literacy stance when helping students read and discuss these texts.
“No Accident, No Mistake”: Acquaintance Rape in Recent YA Novels
Authors: Harde Roxanne
Published: January 2021

Following the thematic foundations set out in Laurie Halse Anderson’s germinal YA rape novel, Speak—when, how, and whom to tell about the rape; the ways in which the survivor reacts to the rape, including self-harm; the ways in which the survivor is both shamed and blamed; and ways to understand the rapist—this chapter analyzes a body of recently published novels about acquaintance rape.The scenarios in these novels work to offer readers alternate discourses about culpability and shame, detail options for survivors, and give readers access to voices too often silenced, helping them toward understanding the social codes that lead to and the circumstances that arise from acquaintance rape. At the same time, this chapter make clear, these texts often reify rape culture and undermine the progress they are working toward.
Eliminating Extermination, Fostering Existence: Diverse Dystopian Fiction and Female Adolescent Identity
Authors: Toliver S. R.
Published: January 2021

This chapter engages in a much needed exploration of the popular sub-genre of dystopian texts with female main characters. An intersectional examination of female protagonists of color provides readers with a valuable resource to introducing diverse texts to readers and classrooms. By disrupting the hypercanon of YA dystopian texts that focus largely on white protagonists, this chapter moves conversations about identity and the treatment of marginalized populations in future societies into a more central space in the discussion surrounding these texts.
The War on Poverty in Mississippi
Authors: Folwell Emma J.
Published: January 2021

When President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty arrived in Mississippi in 1965, it was met with a ferocious response. The federally-funded war against poverty—the embodiment of 1960s liberalism—clashed explosively with Mississippi’s closed society. In the years between 1965 and 1973, the opposing forces of the war against poverty and a war against the war on poverty transformed the state. Through a state-level history of the war on poverty, this book traces the attempts of white and black Mississippians to utilize antipoverty programs to address the desperate poverty in the state. The war on poverty was, at times, a powerful tool for black empowerment. But more often, antipoverty programs became a potent mechanism of white resistance to black advancement.
Through the war on poverty, both black activism and white opposition to black empowerment evolved following the momentous events of 1964. White Mississippians used massive resistance as a template for resistance to black economic empowerment, forging antipoverty programs into tools to marginalize black political and economic power. This book traces the grassroots war against the war on poverty that laid the foundation for the fight against 1960s liberalism, as Mississippi became a national model for resistance to social change through its evolving resistance to the war on poverty that lay at the heart of the emerging new conservatism. Many white Mississippians forged this resistance into the political, economic, and social structures of the state, contributing to the development of the state’s Republican Party and articulating a new conservatism.
From Civil Rights to Economic Empowerment
Authors: Folwell Emma J.
Published: January 2021

Chapter one traces the development of President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty. It explores how the nation’s first anti-poverty program—the Child Development Group of Mississippi—formed a central part in the fight for African Americans’ economic empowerment, building on the state’s long tradition of community organizing. White Mississippi launched a renewed massive resistance campaign against the Group, led by Senator John Stennis and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. While the campaign was only partially successful, it was hugely significant in shaping the state’s war on poverty. White segregationists drew on a color-blind language that Senator Stennis had been using to oppose civil rights advances for years, calling for “local responsible people” to take control of the war on poverty. Their calls were little more than a thinly veiled request for whites to enact a “defensive localism” that enabled whites to re-establish their control over African American advancement.
Black Empowerment in Jackson
Authors: Folwell Emma J.
Published: January 2021

Chapter four traces the intersection between Mississippi’s long freedom struggle and the federally funded war on poverty in the state capitol, Jackson. First, it describes the development of the capitol’s civil rights activism through the 1950s and into the 1960s, with sit-in campaigns drawing on the vibrancy of Tougaloo College, the Jackson NAACP Youth Council, and the leadership of Medgar Evers. The chapter then explores the way in which the class divisions which undermined activism in Jackson fed into the creation of the city’s anti-poverty program, Community Services Association. It traces the way in which one black activist and poverty warrior, Don Jackson, used his position in the Neighborhood Youth Corps to foster the city’s youthful activism. These efforts were, however, quickly undermined by the city’s powerful mechanisms of white supremacy, notably the state sovereignty commission.
STAR, the AFL-CIO, and the Diocese of Natchez-Jackson
Authors: Folwell Emma J.
Published: January 2021

This chapter traces the racial and legal changes that shaped the landscape of Mississippi by 1970. Into this context, the chapter places the story of the state-wide job training program Strategic Training and Redevelopment, sponsored by the Mississippi Catholic Church. It explores the way in which the diocese and Catholic staff by turn helped and hindered the operation of STAR, but often perpetuated a racial paternalism that characterised the program. The chapter also explores the relationship between the war on poverty and the state AFL-CIO, led by Claude Ramsay. Ultimately the story of STAR illustrates how class divisions and racial discrimination hampered the program, while the changes implemented by Nixon’s administration unravelled the foundations of the war on poverty.
The Demise of the War on Poverty
Authors: Folwell Emma J.
Published: January 2021

Chapter eight traces the effect of President Nixon’s efforts to undermine the war on poverty through his plans for regionalism through new federalism and through funding cuts into the 1970s. It exposes the way in which Mississippi Republican Party leaders established relationships with Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in the OEO and staff in the Office of Child Development in their efforts to undermine black empowerment through the war on poverty. The chapter then picks up the story of Jackson’s antipoverty program, Community Services Association, illustrating how these national developments shaped the lives of poor Mississippians at the grassroots. It also explores the many challenges faced by the Legal Services programs in the state. The chapter ends in 1974, as regionalism, discrimination, and funding cuts had stifled much of capitol’s community action.
Epilogue
Authors: Folwell Emma J.
Published: January 2021

The final section of this book reflects on the social, economic, and political changes that transformed Mississippi over the years of the war on poverty. It exposes the changes in the war against the war on poverty over time. The mechanisms utilized by Senator Stennis in his opposition to the Child Development Group in 1965 were far removed from the Klan violence unleashed in 1967. Different again were the methods of white Jacksonians as they participated in biracial antipoverty programs in order to shore up white supremacy. Perhaps the most significant facet of the fight against the war on poverty was the color-blind language used by white segregationists that encouraged “local responsible people” to join the boards of antipoverty programs. The chapter also looks forward to the visit of Ronald Reagan to the Neshoba County Fair to announce his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.
Young, Gay, and Latino: “Feeling Brown” in Emilio Rodriguez’s Swimming While Drowning
Authors: Boffone Trevor
Published: January 2021

This chapter addresses the issue of queer Latino coming-of-age narratives with special attention to urban youth homelessness. Specifically, this chapter analyzes Emilio Rodriguez’s play Swimming While Drowning. While not explicitly written for young audiences, Swimming While Drowning focuses on gay Latino teen coming-out and coming-of-age narratives and the issues affecting this often-forgotten demographic, specifically the perils of LGBT youth homelessness. While plays such as Swimming While Drowning are fundamental to Latinx theatre for their inclusion of gay teen narratives of sexuality and desire, this chapter argues that Rodriguez’s work does this while also broadening the confines of representation for queer boyhoods. This chapter engages with Jose Esteban Munoz’s theory of “Feeling Brown” to explore the ways in which queer Latino outsider identities manifest, ultimately pushing against stereotypes of urban youth such as the cholo identity.
The Coming-of-Age Experience in Chicanx Queer Novels What Night Brings and Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Authors: Alonso Carolina
Published: January 2021

This chapter establishes a dialogue between Chicanx canonical coming-of-age and queer young adult novels What Night Brings (2004) by Carla Trujillo, and Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (2012) by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. These writers have destabilized the traditional Chicanx coming-of-age genre by placing two social outcasts and queer characters as their protagonists. In these two novels the main characters do not integrate with the rest of their peers; they are both knowledge seekers and outsiders. Additionally, these main characters have a queer sexuality, and they, along with other characters, break from gender binaries and gender stereotypes.
The Brotherhood of Co-operative Commonwealth: Modernizing Infrastructure and Public Welfare at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century
Authors: Gessler Anne
Published: January 2021

In 1897, the confluence of a four-year national depression; interracial violence; unpredictable flooding and epidemics; and legalized segregation and disenfranchisement spelled intense social disruption for New Orleanians of color and impoverished whites. Trem-based Creoles of color joined a renewed effort to bring utopian socialism to bear on state-sanctioned economic and political oppression. Meeting in integrated labor halls and saloons, multiracial socialists and labor activists translated American, Caribbean, and European utopian socialist theory into a cooperative blueprint for equitably integrating unemployed workers into the city’s economic structure. These interracial utopian socialists, called the Brotherhood of Co-operative Commonwealth, and later, the Laboring Men’s Protective Association, built coalitions with labor, women’s rights, and political reform allies to temporarily reknit the city’s fractured labor movement, improve the city’s crumbling infrastructure, and implement an egalitarian public welfare system to benefit all New Orleanians.
The Consumers’ Co-operative Union: Embedding Integrated Popular Front and War on Poverty Social Programs in the South
Authors: Gessler Anne
Published: January 2021

Chapter three analyzes radical Great Depression- and World War II-era consumer cooperatives in working-class Freret neighborhood as their anti-racist, socialist calls for a complete overhaul of the capitalist system careened into their constituents desire for economic expediency. Opening an integrated grocery store called Consumers’ Co-operative Union, along with host of affiliated cooperatives, German, black, and Latin American organizers muted their Popular Front sympathies to lower the cost of living for racially mixed Freret residents and implement New Deal economic reforms in the South. Although critics charged that Rochdale cooperatives were too apolitical, and while radicals’ principles were co-opted to serve a capitalist agenda, chapter three illuminates how the city’s mid-twentieth-century credit union movement embedded Popular Front ideals into Great Society social policies. Credit unions operated as political channel for marginalized communities, situating New Orleans urban growth within the context of the long civil rights movement.
Exploring the Monstrous Feminist Frame: Marvel’s She-Hulk as Male-Centric Postfeminist Discourse
Authors: Stevens J. Richard
Published: January 2021

This chapter shows in the various portrayals of She-Hulk the paradoxes of female agency in a hyper-masculine sphere. She-Hulk is nearly always a giant green woman, but her monstrosity varies depending on the space she occupies. Despite consistently having superhuman powers and a law degree, the varied portrayals of the transformed, incredibly strong She-Hulk and her alter-ego Jen Walters reveal the tenuous agency of a woman in hyper-masculine public spaces, both in the text and in culture more broadly.
“There Is More to Me Than Just Hunger”: Female Monsters and Liminal Spaces in Monstress and Pretty Deadly
Authors: Cooper Ayanni C. H.
Published: January 2021

This chapter analyzes the power of liminality that forces readers to identify with the transgressive ‘other.’ For the important female characters in the two comic books Monstress and Pretty Deadly, liminality and the abject are paradoxically sources of their power as revealed in their relationship to profanity, blood, and boundary crossing. While these female characters are undoubtedly situated as monsters because their liminal, abject natures, they are also the protagonists, and so the reader is compelled to identify with monstrosity. Because the celebrated creators of these comics, Marjorie Liu and Kelly Sue DeConnick, have voices in the wider U.S. cultural context, there is powerful potential in their choices to call readers to examine their own relationship to the abject and thus to challenge assumptions of social normalcy.
Kicking Ass in Flip-Flops: Inappropriate/d Generations and Monstrous Pregnancy in Comics Narratives
Authors: Ludlow Jeannie
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines a number of comics to determine whether texts about abortion, miscarriage, and birthing exceed normative discourses of maternity (which frequently frame such life-events as horrific and monstrous), or if, despite their potential to perform otherwise, certain comics perpetuate the characterization of maternity as abject. This chapter provides an analysis of how particular comics do, or do not, make use of monstrosity in order to imagine im/possibilities relating to birth.
Beauty and Her B(r)east(s): Monstrosity and College Women in The Jaguar
Authors: Reynolds Pauline J. , Durazo-DeMoss Sara
Published: January 2021

This chapter shows how idealized foreign, exotic female characters become monstrous in comics. Specifically, in their reading of The Jaguar, the authors of this chapter examine the ways ethnicity, female sexuality, and language mark the identity of Maria/The Jaguar as bestial and thus, position her as monstrous in ways that undermine her performance as a hero. Further, this chapter explores how a social role fraught with so much contradiction—both beast and hero—can reveal the lived complexity of navigating college campuses for real-world international students.
Circling the Boundaries of the Tradition
Authors: Massé Guirdex
Published: January 2021

This chapter is not so much concerned with reviewing, assessing, or critically analyzing the body of Yerby’s work, as it is with delineating the writer’s relationship to these major literary moments that have characterized the black literary tradition at the midpoint of the twentieth century. To simply dismiss Frank Yerby as a peculiar case in African American writing is to miscalculate how significant turns in his literary career reflected dominant movements and trends, as well as formal and thematic innovations and limitations that have characterized the trajectory of African American literature from the early 1930s to the 1940s. This period ranges from the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro Movement to an era of social realism in African American fiction.
“I Ain’t no Man!”
Authors: Watson Veronica T.
Published: January 2021

As an African American man in Augusta, a town deeply rooted in the racist ideologies and practices of the segregated South, Frank Yerby certainly had had enough experiences with Jim Crow living, discrimination, and racial terrorism to fuel his writing for a lifetime. Despite becoming best-known, perhaps, for his prolific authorship of novels that focused primarily on white lives and characters, Yerby commented in an interview with Maryemma Graham, “In every novel I have written about the American South, I have subtly infused a very strong defense of Black history and Black people” (70). Rhetorical defenses in novels that are largely not about Black lives are certainly worth noting; however, in this chapter I argue that the exploration of the world as it impacted Black people was a more consistent interest for Yerby than many recognized. He wrote a number of short stories that specifically focused on the impacts of racism and subjugation on the Black psyche and identity, the intimate relationships between men and women of African descent, and the understandings and performances of Black masculinity.
Overstuffed and Undercooked
Authors: Teutsch Matthew
Published: January 2021

Published in 1946, Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow sold over 500,000 copies within its first two months; the novel’s sales numbers led to a film adaptation by Twentieth Century Fox the following year. Directed by John M. Stahl with a screenplay by Wanda Tuchock, the film eliminates most of the subversive elements found within Yerby’s text that seek to counter the glorification of a mythologized Old South that never truly existed. The removal of these aspects only serves to maintain the image of a glorified, idyll, and nostalgic South that the adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1939) epitomizes on screen. Ultimately, the movie falls short of serving as a major touchstone in cinematic history on the representation of African Americans on screen. Instead, it perpetuates, while also challenging in some ways, the continued view of African Americans in subservient roles to white masters.
Pirates of the Caribbean in Frank Yerby’s the Golden Hawk
Authors: Lowe John Wharton
Published: January 2021

This essay argues that Frank Yerby’s 1948 costume drama, The Golden Hawk, offers a prime example of a transnational/circumCaribbean novel. Concurrently, however, it is also a carefully researched historical novel, one that builds on the formulas of both the romance and the adventure tale, while mining the then-current popularity of the pirate novel and film. Issues of race, gender, and nation figure prominently in this critique, as well as histories of Haiti, Columbia, and Caribbean piracy.
Victim’s Guilt
Authors: Jarrett Gene Andrew
Published: January 2021

Speak Now, Yerby’s twenty-third novel, marks the first time he cast a Black protagonist to discourse on racial politics—that is, on the race relations between blacks and whites, and/or on how these relations factor into political action. At the same time, the novel highlights the degree to which Yerby was sensitive to the legal and cultural controversies surrounding interracial marriage across the United States from his position in Europe. Attending to both the national and international realities of societal and legal norms, Speak Now stands as a remarkably global analysis of the sexual politics of race relations.
Finding the “Necessary Anguish”
Authors: Brown Stephanie
Published: January 2021

Critics have been content to summarize Frank Yerby’s extensive oeuvre by claiming that after unsuccessful attempts to publish “This is My Own,” a protest novel, Yerby shifted his focus to “costume novels” centered on white characters in exotic settings. Critics continue by noting that in 1969 Yerby suddenly produced Speak Now, a novel centered around the story of a Black American expatriate musician who falls in love with a white Southern heiress. Some critics mention that between 1946 and 1969 Yerby produced a second “protest” novel, “The Tents of Shem,” which was twice rejected by publishers. The connection between Yerby’s first unpublished protest novel and his second, however, has never been explored. This chapter argues that “Tents” plays a crucial role in the evolution of Yerby’s work. “The Tents of Shem” is a bridge between early and late Yerby, one that helps to delineate both the continuity and the development of his politics and his art.
Introduction
Authors: Amanik Allan , Fletcher Kami
Published: January 2021

Till Death Do Us Part emerged from the 2014 OAH conference, which chose “Crossing Borders” as its theme, but has reflected over the course of its development upon seemingly new (and surprisingly dormant) divisions in American society. It takes as its subject the tendency among most Americans to separate their dead along communal lines rooted in race, faith, ethnicity, or social standing and asks what a deeper exploration of that phenomenon can tell us about American history more broadly. This introduction gives a brief outline of each chapter. Comparative in scope, and regionally diverse, chapters look to immigrants, communities of color, the colonized, the enslaved, rich and poor, and religious minorities as they laid their dead to rest in locales spanning the Northeast to the Spanish American Southwest.
“A Beautiful Garden Consecrated to the Lord”: Marriage, Death, and Local Constructions of Citizenship in New York’s Nineteenth-Century Jewish Rural Cemeteries
Authors: Amanik Allan
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores immigration, race, and religion through the nation’s first Jewish rural cemeteries of the 1850s. These grounds embodied an important duality for Jewish New Yorkers’ social belonging to an emerging white middle class while also safeguarding Jewish particularity and continuity. Still recent Jewish immigrants eagerly participated in the Rural Cemetery Movement, laying out lavish cemeteries and embracing its universalism by setting those grounds in closer proximity than ever before to non-sectarian Christian counterparts. Conversely, Jews of all stripes made sure to cluster together behind clear physical barriers, and nearly all synagogues and Jewish fraternities prohibited Christian burial and maintained old links between interment rights and intermarriage. Aware of increasing acceptance in the United States, Jewish New Yorkers celebrated their costly new cemeteries as symbols of mobility and belonging. At the same time, they doubled down on physical, ritual, and intangible divisions within them to temper that integration.
An Ocean Apart: Chinese American Segregated Burials
Authors: Chung Sue Fawn
Published: January 2021

As early as 1781 the Chinese began migrating to the American Pacific coast and those who passed away usually were buried in unmarked graves. Economic opportunities attracting more immigration in the nineteenth century coincided with the rise of labor unions and anti-Chinese movements. Riots against the Chinese and occupational hazards resulted in hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths. Since Confucianism dictated the rituals for funerals and burials for many Chinese Americans, the ideal between 1870 and the 1930s was to be buried across the Pacific in one’s home town or village. For those who remained in the United States, segregated cemeteries were established until the 1970s. Chinese traditions of grave offerings and reverence for ancestors in the spring and fall continued. Events between 1931 and 1970 stopped the repatriation of bones, but in recent years high cost of travel and cemeteries in China has increased the practice of exhuming remains and bringing them back across the Pacific for a final re-burial in the West.
Till Death Keeps Us Apart: Segregated Cemeteries and Social Values in St. Louis, Missouri
Authors: Smith Jeffrey E.
Published: January 2021

This chapter uses St. Louis, Missouri’s Bellefontaine Cemetery as a case study to explore the contours of servitude before and after the Civil War by examination of cemeteries and burial patterns. It asserts that while cemeteries were segregated by both policy and practice, slavery blurred the lines of segregation when masters buried enslaved people on family lots and when free Blacks of social status sought burial alongside white counterparts. Using this unique research resource, it finds that urban enslaved people continued to live in masters’ households with their families, and that masters buried them as they had before the war, sometimes almost a decade after the Thirteenth Amendment passed.
“For Interment of White People Only”: Cemetery Superintendents’ Authority and the Wealthy White Protestant Lawn-Park Cemetery, 1886–1920
Authors: Arehart Kelly B.
Published: January 2021

This chapter explores how white Protestant cemetery superintendents developed cultural and physical boundaries in and around their cemeteries to keep immigrants, people of color, and the poor–dead or alive–outside the walls of lawn-park cemeteries. Cemetery superintendents separated native white Protestants from those they perceived as their social inferiors through pricing, locations, and social pressure. Superintendents did this with the intention of demonstrating authority to those who were welcome in the cemetery and those who were not, including undertakers and monument makers. This authority over the lawn-park cemeteries made it possible for cemetery superintendents to position themselves as arbiters of taste. This status meant that superintendents were able to shape how their clientele decorated the lots and appreciated these cemeteries. Ultimately, cemetery superintendents became gatekeepers who enforced economical and racial hierarchies with the blessings of the native-born white Protestants interred in their cemeteries.
Family, Religion, and Relocations: Arab American Burial Practices
Authors: Hassoun Rosina
Published: January 2021

Through pioneering research into nineteenth- and twentieth-century Arab American cemeteries, this chapter overlays shifting approaches to burial onto three broad phases of Christian and Muslim Arab immigration to America. Like other immigrants these newcomers buried along denominational lines, whether Catholic, Orthodox Christianity, or Sunni and Shi’a Islam. They also did so in separate sections of extant grounds or later in independent cemeteries as Arab Americans gained communal numbers and means. Looking to the nation’s largest Arab population centers, this chapter traces a rich array of Arab American cemeteries and offers a unique lens to explore communal dynamics among Muslim and Christian Arabs as they intersected with immigration policy, family, socio-economic standing, and a larger sense of rootedness to American society over time.
An Invitation to the Table
Authors: Keeling Kara K. , Pollard Scott T.
Published: January 2021

Children’s literature is filled with foods to eat, reflecting the pleasure humans take in taste, which occurs as much in the mind as in the body. Food studies as a field has grown since the 1990s, crossing boundaries from the social sciences into the sciences. Within literary studies, work has shifted from seeing food as a literary trope to using material culture as an approach to what food signifies in a socio-historical context. Table Lands is a broad survey of food’s function in children’s texts, showing how comprehending the socio-cultural contexts of food reveals fundamental understandings of the child and children’s agency and enriches the interpretation of such texts. In roughly chronological order, it examines a variety of texts from historical to contemporary, non-canonical to classics—many from the Anglo American tradition but enriched by several books from multicultural traditions (Native American, Jewish American, African American, and immigrant Vietnamese)—and including a variety of genres, formats, and age-group audiences. These include realism (both historical and contemporary), fantasy, cookbooks, picture books, chapter books, young adult novels, and film.
American Children’s Cookbooks as Scenes of Instruction
Authors: Keeling Kara K. , Pollard Scott T.
Published: January 2021

This chapter tracks US children’s cookbooks over 150 years, showing how adults’ expectations change based on shifting ideologies of child capability. The essay analyzes cookbooks from three periods: 19th century, mid-20th century, and late 20th to the 21st century. The nineteenth-century housebooks deploy literary tropes (story) to foster agency, focusing on preparing young girls for taking on kitchen and household duties. In the period after World War II, children’s cookbooks transform cooking into an extension of play, reducing childhood agency significantly, a development that mirrors the disempowerment of women in the kitchen through advances in food technology (frozen foods, boxed foods) in the postwar period. Contemporary children’s cookbooks match what Warren Belasco calls the “countercuisine” and the resultant foodie culture: these texts re-empower child cooks with agency in a world that is much more aware of organic, sustainable practices and the downsides of industrial foods.
Puddings and Pies
Authors: Keeling Kara K. , Pollard Scott T.
Published: January 2021

In The Tale of Mr. Tod, The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan, and The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, or, the Roly-Poly Pudding, Potter uses quintessential British foods—pies and puddings—to motivate the plot, shape the characters, and create a social world. The chapter uses period cookbooks by Mrs. Beeton and Eliza Acton to understand the preeminence of puddings and pies in British cooking. To take into account Potter’s representations of class and setting, the analysis considers British rural and urban cultures, the food-related problems of poverty, and period-applied social work theory. In these tales of failed pies and puddings, Potter represents food as strategic in a fictive world where characters must be alert to the constantly changing ways that food shapes the social landscape. Potter uses food to show the complexities of the real world within her stories, acknowledging the hidden violence of social relations.
Troubling Masculinities
Authors: Donnar Glen
Published: January 2021

The association of the attacks of 9/11 with Hollywood science fiction and disaster spectacle was immediate and pervasive. Succeeding calls in media and politics for the reassuring return of ‘strong’ masculine types—predominantly drawn from Hollywood westerns, action and war films—were widespread, revealing renewed cultural fears of threats to America from both within and without.Troubling Masculinities is the first dedicated multi-genre study of representations of masculinity in encounters with terror in post-9/11 American cinema. The book examines the impact of “terror-Others”, from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, across a broad range of sub-genres—including disaster melodrama, monster movies, post-apocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and ‘home invasion’ horror, action-thrillers and ‘frontier’ westerns—especially in relation to cinematic representations of masculinity in previous periods of national turmoil.
The book demonstrates that the supposed reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Engaging critical arguments about how Hollywood cinema attempts to resolve male crisis in part through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this unraveling reflects an inability to effectively extinguish the threat or frightening difference of terror. The heroes in these movies are unable to heal themselves or restore order, often becoming as destructive as the threats they encounter. The book concludes by showing how interrelated anxieties about masculinity and nation continue to affect contemporary American cinema and politics. By showing how persistent these cultural fears are, Troubling Masculinities offers an important counternarrative in this supposedly unprecedented moment in American history.
“Shielding Us from What We Are Not Yet Ready To See”
Authors: Donnar Glen
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines direct representations of being caught inside terror. Concentrating on Oliver Stone’s 9/11disaster-melodrama World Trade Center (2006), it demonstrates how the eclipse of professional capacity and mobility, focused on Port Authority officers entrapped at “Ground Zero”, profoundly destabilizes male identity. A sub-generic mid-film shift from “disaster epic” to “mine accident” movie seeks to contain (this) terror, making space for the trapped officers’ symbolic restoration to the home as husband-fathers. This recuperation is undercut by subsequent, idealized returns to uniformed “protective” roles by rescuers, which remasculinizes American manhood (and national identity). The chapter finally argues that these already ambivalent recoveries are irretrievably overwhelmed by numerous gaping absences that conclude the film, including of the frighteningly unspecified “terror-Other” attackers. The chapter also examines the imagined experience onboard United Flight 93 in United 93 (2006) and the ambivalent association of male characters with the Twin Towers in 25th Hour (2002).
“I Don’t Know Why This Is Happening”
Authors: Donnar Glen
Published: January 2021

This chapter examines imaginings of living through terror. Cloverfield’s (2008) hand-held amateur camera aesthetic and giant monster’s unmotivated attack on NYC indirectly restages the terror of 9/11. Innovatively recasting the giant monster movie via realist horror locks the audience into the Everyman protagonists’ highly mediated victim-perspective, and foregrounds restricted vision and limited knowledge. Unequipped to professionally counter the monstrous threat, the Everyman’s response is necessarily displaced onto a heroic-redemptive rescue quest. The chapter argues the giant monster exceeds the Everyman/hand-held camera’s capacities to “capture” it, and so remains frighteningly unknowable—for doomed male protagonist and audience alike. Its absolute Otherness thwarts the Everyman’s remasculinization quest and finally confirms he is the monster that requires annihilation. The chapter also explores the shame of the emasculated male in the home invasion horror, The Strangers (2008), and the ambivalent redemption of the working class Everyman in Spielberg’s The War of the Worlds (2005).
Conclusion
Authors: Donnar Glen
Published: January 2021

This concluding chapter interrogates the presumed eradication of deep-seated anxieties identified throughout the book about the failings of males in “protective” roles in recent Hollywood film. The chapter focuses on the jingoistic 12 Strong (2018), which recounts the story of the first Special Forces team deployed into Afghanistan following 9/11. The film restages both America’s initial military response to the originary terror attacks and of reassuring “male action” subgenres—from the cavalry western to the WWII combat film—to erase the gendered sense of failure of 9/11 and the irresolution of the “war on terror.” The film’s coda showcases the supposedly triumphant return of soldier-father heroes, paragons of idealized American masculinity, to the home. However, the chapter finds that gendered anxieties about “protective” failings persist through multiple genre and narrative incoherences, which invert the “hero’s homecoming” and reiterate just how pervasive and enduring “gender trouble” remains in American film post-9/11.