With the appearance of D. W. Griffith's 1915 racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, the six-year-old NAACP reluctantly organized a campaign to ban the film entirely or at least to censor its most offensive elements. Although this struggle was a failure, it helped transform the association in ways no one could have imagined at the outset. Up to this point, the issues the NAACP had taken up, such as housing segregation and lynching, focussed primarily on southern or border states. The Birth of a Nation, however, was a national event. As the film moved from major population centers to smaller ones throughout the country, so too did the protests and countless meetings between local NAACP leaders and mayors, city councils, censors, and governors. In the end, this failed campaign had the effect of providing local association members with invaluable political experience and of elevating the NAACP to a position of national stature and indeed prominence in the struggle for civil rights in America.

During the early 1840s, as the right to rule the continent found a slogan in manifest destiny, nothing was seen as a greater barrier to expansion than the region, between the Mississippi and the Rockies, known as the Great American Desert. As a rhetorical figure, it was nearly ubiquitous – shaping everything from the expedition reports of Zebulon Pike and Edwin James to the western narratives of James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving. The first serious challenge to this image was a report John Charles Frémont presented to Congress after leading an Army expedition to South Pass. Frémont knew that his report had to refute the empirical evidence for a Great Desert to strike it down it as a rhetorical barrier to emigration. Thus he developed a distinctive mode of description that focussed on “topographic geology” while utilizing an aesthetic of the picturesque. This allowed him to create a rocky specificity and contrast where once a grassy and arid uniformity had reigned supreme. In the process, he began to create a nexus between scenery and science that would make both more deliberate and exacting – and the American landscape as a whole more uniquely “western.” By the end of the report, Frémont's ardent impressions of the West were so multiple and intense that the Great American Desert suddenly seemed without significance as a place or a name.

In the American theater of the 1930s and 1940s, the designation “queer star” was an oxymoron – except when applied to Clifton Webb. The Indiana-born singer and dancer was (according to colleagues) homosexual and (according to critics and audiences) queer. He was also, after 1932, a star on Broadway and the road as well as a reliably queer presence in the gossip columns and arts pages of the daily paper. Unlike any other show business personality of his rank, he used his star text to raise the visibility of queerness in early twentieth-century entertainment culture.

The Detroit electronic music (DEM) community is a group of urban residents who, since the 1980s, have used new technologies in music production as well as changing communications technologies to create a transnational arts community. This article is a result of ethnographic research of the DEM community conducted from 1999 to 2007 and is focussed on the city's biggest independent distribution company, Submerge. The phrase “electronic music” refers to both house and techno music. Techno music and house music are African American music genres created in Detroit and Chicago respectively during the early 1980s. Recent concerns in the field of American studies – transnationalism, community collaboration, issues of technology and global communication – can be seen in a group of urban residents who have been exploring similar issues, in some cases by necessity, for the past three decades. It is important for the study of American urban places to include a clear picture of heterogeneous urban populations in places of crisis. With a richer idea of what life is really like in cities in crisis, we can better plan, develop, and encourage urban revitalization.

The Jefferson Davis Highway (JDH) is a controversial Confederate memorial. Since 1913 the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) have placed markers along roadsides across America to commemorate the Confederate President. The women's organization claims that the JDH stretches over four thousand miles from Alexandria, Virginia to the Pacific coast and the Canadian border. In 2002, conflict ensued in the Pacific northwestern state of Washington when a local politician initiated a campaign to remove a granite JDH marker from a state park where it had been erected by the UDC sixty years previously. This led to dispute over whether Jefferson Davis should, or should not, be honoured by a commemorative marker on Washington's border with Canada. Drawing on contemporary secondary sources to interrogate these contests over the meaning of Jefferson Davis and the Confederate legacy, we argue that behind the veneer of heritage and genealogical celebration forwarded by groups such as the UDC there is a neo-Confederate nationalism that works to maintain white supremacy as a dominant interpretation of US history.

This article examines the place of the past in Charles Sheeler's photographs and paintings made in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, around 1917, in New York City during the 1920s, and in the short film of New York, Manhatta (1921), which he made with the photographer Paul Strand. It situates these works in the context of the scholarship on Sheeler and on the art of New York in the early twentieth century, in particular that of the Ashcan School and of visual representation which attends to the architectural fabric of the city in preference to depicting its inhabitants. The article argues that although the scholarship has identified Sheeler's interest in making connections with the American past, it has not recognized the fraught nature of that relationship. By looking at the Doylestown and New York pictures, the analysis demonstrates how the problematic status of the past for Sheeler appears in these works as hauntings and absences.

This study attempts to find out the reasons for the emergence of blogging in the contemporary media scene and for its widespread acceptance. First, it delineates the various events that contributed to the notoriety of political blogs. In a second stage, it traces the origins of contemporary blogging back to the history of early journalistic forms, from the penny press to the muckraking movement. After identifying the characteristics linking blogs to the American journalistic tradition, it focusses on what differentiates blogging from other forms of journalistic writing.

Jazz music and culture have experienced a surge in popularity after the passage of the Jazz Preservation Act (JPA) in 1987. This resolution defined jazz as a black American art form, thus using race, national identity, and cultural value as key aspects in making jazz one of the nation's most subsidized arts. Led by new cultural institutions and educational programs, millions of Americans have engaged with the history and canon of jazz that represent the values endorsed by the JPA. Record companies, book publishers, archivists, academia, and private foundations have also contributed to the effort to preserve jazz music and history. Such preservation has not always been a simple process, especially in identifying jazz with black culture and with America as a whole. This has required a careful balancing of social and musical aspects of jazz. For instance, many consider two of the most important aspects of jazz to be the blues aesthetic, which inevitably expresses racist oppression in America, and the democratic ethic, wherein each musician's individual expression equally contributes to the whole. Balanced explanations of race and nationality are useful not only for musicologists, but also for musicians and teachers wishing to use jazz as an example of both national achievement and confrontation with racism. Another important aspect of the JPA is the definition of jazz as a “high” art. While there remains a vocal contingent of critics arguing against the JPA's definitions of jazz, such results will not likely see many calling for an end to its programs, but rather a more open interpretation of what it means to be America's music.

The curious case of So This Is Africa (Columbia, 1933) shows that both Hollywood's in-house censors and state and local censors took seriously cinematic violations of racial and sexual norms. This spoof of “jungle” films exploited audience interest in a cycle of fictional and nonfictional depictions of “primitive” life. These films claimed partial exemption from taboos against sexual and racial boundary-crossing, and usually showed unclothed “native” women. But So This Is Africa went further. However farcical, its suggestions of adultery, interracial sex, homosexuality, and even bestiality raised an unusually large storm among the censors. Cut by one-third, the film still outraged many and helped precipitate the industry's creation of the Production Code Administration, designed to police the screen more tightly.

As the Vietnam War concluded with the failure of US foreign policy, the so-called “Cold War consensus” collapsed in American politics and society. A significant number of lawmakers came to revisit their national security positions, and under these circumstances the Anti-ballistic Missile (ABM) bills came up in the 91st Congress (1969–70). The costly missile program quickly stirred a major controversy, particularly over a trade-off between guns (defense budget) and butter (welfare spending). This article examines how and why party rank-and-file members in US Congress stayed the course or shifted their positions during the ABM debates. The empirical findings suggest that representatives did not immediately abandon their national security preferences, but rather employed gradual position shifts in legislative processes. In addition, institutional conditions such as “in-party” and “party-out-of-power” hindered or helped legislators' position reversals. This case study of the “guns-or-butter” debates in 1969 and 1970 sheds light on how the representative system in America works in response to public discomfort, with lawmakers trying to fine-tune their individual policy positions and collective party reputations simultaneously.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan began the tradition of returning military personnel's salutes. At his inauguration, President Barack Obama returned the salutes of the troops as they paraded by the reviewing stand. Some may suggest these actions are simply a sign of respect by Presidents for the service of the military. Nevertheless, we must also understand how Presidents have used military ritual and symbols to enhance their powers. By embracing military symbols, the President is transformed from a civilian to a military figure. This transformation diminishes Congress's ability to exercise its constitutional war power. Congress is less likely to challenge a President perceived as part of the military than one perceived as the civilian chief executive.

From 2002 to 2004, the children's animated series Liberty's Kids aired on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the United States' public television network. It runs over forty half-hour episodes and features a stellar cast, including such celebrities as Walter Cronkite, Michael Douglas, Yolanda King, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Liam Neeson, and Annette Bening. Television critics generally loved it, and there are now college students who can trace their interest in the American Revolution to having watched this series when they were children. At the turn of the twenty-first century, it is the most extended and in-depth encounter with the American Revolution that most young people in the United States are likely to have encountered, and is appropriately patriotic and questioning, celebratory and chastening. Although children certainly learn a great deal about multiculturalism from popular culture, the tropes and limitations of depicting history on television trend toward personification, toward reduced complexity and, for children, toward resisting examining the darker sides of human experience. As this essay suggests, the genre's limits match the limits of a multicultural history in its attempt to show diversity and agency during a time when “liberty and justice for all” proved to be more apt as an aspiration at best and an empty slogan at worst than as an accurate depiction of the society that proclaimed it. This essay is not an effort to be, as Robert Sklar put it, a “historian cop,” policing the accuracy of the series by patrolling for inaccuracies. Rather, it is a consideration of the inherent difficulties of trying to apply a multicultural sensibility to a portrayal of the American Revolution.

This article argues that the Jack Benny radio program reflected and illuminated America's sense of mission coming out of World War II by providing listeners with a conceptualization of a world in which the promotion of universal values was to usher in an era of lasting peace. A study of the Jack Benny Program from 1945 to 1950 illustrates how World War II changed the purpose of the show; how Jack Benny, his writers, and his cast understood notions of openness, pluralism, and internationalism; how the correlation they drew between social equality at home and international priorities abroad sometimes preempted official US policies; and how they provided, in the form of the show's central character, a model of supremely confident leadership in an era fraught with anxieties.