The Bulletin of the British Association for American Studies (1956–66) provided a valuable platform for many British pioneers in the study of American history, politics and literature, and laid the ground for a more professional and permanent American studies journal when the field had become well established in this country. Here I have both attempted to analyse the Bulletin's content and commented on the professional background and intellectual interest of its contributors, including the very limited number of women whose work appeared in its pages.

Representations of Jessie Fremont, the wife of the Republican presidential candidate in 1856, had a prominent role in the campaign poetry of that year. The Jessie poems bind the period's cult of domesticity to the party's figurative anti-slavery system. According to these poems, Northerners intent on conciliating the Slave Power were spreading their own sterility, whereas men willing to make a home for Jessie in the White House were reproducing, through their own redemption, a future free West. The code of domesticity thus helped these poems to define collective political action as growing out of the strengths of free labor.

Looking at the methodological principles and rhetorical forms that structure James Jackson Jarves's often-cited 1864 book The Art-Idea, this essay reconsiders Jarves's role in the historiography of American art. Jarves has long been associated with post-Civil War shifts toward international aesthetic trends, which eroded the native bias in favor of verisimilitude and anecdote. He is thought to mark a turning point. His texts, however, only partially corroborate the reputation. Here, firstly, I reread Jarves's art theory to suggest what were the aesthetic preferences he hoped to foster among Americans, and why. Secondly, I propose that the reputed Jarves fulfills an apparently unrecognized need in the subdiscipline of American art history – a fundamental understanding of American art as automatically, necessarily, indexical. It is primarily a manifestation of American culture, and more specifically American culture as defined by change, growth, disruption, reintegration.

In the United States between the approximate dates of 1800 and 1870, a group of writers whom I call Romantic Antiquarians invented and disseminated a narrative of Native American prehistory radically at odds with the later findings of modern archaeologists. Romantic Antiquarian discourse borrows from the themes and modes of literary Romanticism, and textual analysis of this work (which enjoyed widespread public acceptance before it was profoundly discredited) offers insights into the complex relationship between Native and Euro-American cultures. This essay provides an overview of the Romantic Antiquarian movement and explores its ideology. The writing of antiquarian Joshua V. H. Clark of New York is examined closely, including his theories concerning the Iroquois, his relationship with E. G. Squier, and his use of the Gothic mode.

Reinhold Niebuhr's “Christian realism” had a favorable and lasting impact on the eminent political theorist Hans J. Morgenthau. The two men developed a lasting friendship and, on Morgenthau's lead, came to oppose America's war in Vietnam. This article explores the relationship between Niebuhr and Morgenthau, giving special attention to the role of Niebuhr's theology in shaping his own version of political realism. The dialectical relation between love and justice that gave Niebuhrian realism its distinctive quality and differentiated Niebuhr from realists such as Morgenthau and George Kennan is also examined. Finally, the unresolved problem that fellow realist Kenneth Thompson saw in Niebuhr's dialectic is considered.

This essay examines the representation of sexuality and identity in the fictions of American novelist Edmund White. Gay sexuality and identity politics are discussed in relation to “coming out,” the discourse of American identity, and whiteness. White's output is shaped and informed by the cultural, historical and political circumstances which have conditioned how gay male sexuality has been discursively shaped over the last forty years. Yet his work has been inflected by theorizations of sexuality which have called into question the very specificity of a homosexual and/or gay identity. Who is White's audience today, and who wants to read a “white” boy's story anyway?

Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother is an Amerasian rewriting of Rudyard Kipling's Kim. Fenkl transforms the adventures of a white boy in colonial India into those of an Amerasian boy in post-/neocolonial Korea and changes the Russo-British rivalry of the nineteenth-century Great Game into the Russo-/Communist–American competition of the twentieth-century Cold War. He resurrects the native voice silenced by colonial discourse and highlights the dilemma of Asian women and their biracial children. He ultimately denounces the troubling legacy of the US military presence in Korea and critiques the centuries-old Western imperialist project in Asia.