Drawing primarily on archival material such as plantation records, this article places the figure of the plantation overseer at the centre of the drama of the American Revolution in the southern colonies. Occupying a contested liminal space within colonial society, between rich and poor, and between the free and the unfree, the overseer was not necessarily the ne'er-do-well of conventional stereotype. This “Predatory War,” however, tested the overseer's loyalties and sense of duty to the fullest extent. Understanding his role in the conflict offers a significant insight into the experience of a plantation society at war. In particular the overseer was caught in the tension between elite and yeomanry, between the conflicting calls of loyalism and the cause of the Patriots. Perhaps most significantly of all he stood at the forefront of the defence of race slavery during the tumult of civil conflict.

In this forum, seven established scholars of the US South, working from a variety of institutional and intellectual bases, discuss the latest developments in southern studies, connecting them to broader trends within American studies and in their own home disciplines, particularly literature, cultural studies, and history. Critically engaging with recent work in the New Southern Studies, the participants consider the importance – or otherwise – of recent theoretical, especially transnational and interdisciplinary, moves within the field of southern studies. In the process, the contributions, individually and collectively, offer a provocative assessment of what has been really innovative and of lasting significance in the field over the past decade. Equally important, the essays contemplate the topics, time frames and analytical techniques that might drive important research in both southern and American studies in the future.

In this article I argue that scholars have been insufficiently attentive to Frederick Douglass's engagement with American cities, particularly Washington, DC. I show that Frederick Douglass's 1877 speech “Our National Capital” should not be relegated, as it usually is, to an autobiographical footnote, but is in fact an important document both in Douglass's philosophy and in the history of Washington, DC. This essay places that speech in both of those traditions. First, I give a brief account of Pierre L'Enfant's late eighteenth-century plans for Washington, DC as a cosmopolitan and regionally inclusive place, then use several figures, including Charles Dickens and Eastman Johnson, to show that actually existing DC failed to meet those ideals. The bulk of the essay then shows that Douglass's speech has great affinities with L'Enfant's original ideas, with Douglass adding the crucially important category of race to L'Enfant's vision for the city. I also use a number of Douglass's other writings, including speeches, essays, and autobiographies, to show that “Our National Capital” can serve as a capstone for Douglass's career, in which he articulates how an urban environment should function if it is to live up to his ideals.

Opinions of John F. Kennedy differ but it is commonly agreed that he was an impatient man and easily bored (though when he was laid up lengthily in a hospital bed, which happened not infrequently, his stoicism and patience were nothing short of astonishing). It stands to reason, then, that one of the things that bored him in the 1950s was the cold war, by then solidified into a dogmatic and rigid system.1 It is the ideological nature of that boredom, or discomfort, its dilemmas and limits, that interest me here. My double wager is that if one pursues Kennedy's idiosyncrasies on this score without reading him backwards from the unflinching coldwar policies he actually launched, apparently, in his presidency, then one will learn something both about the cold war at the time and about Kennedy himself.

This essay examines Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, or The Transformation (1798) as engaging with the distinctive “secular age” of the early republic, a volatile moment in American cultural history when such experiences as having visions and hearing voices, both prevalent in the novel, drew an array of religious and medical explanations. Drawing upon the work of theorists of new secular studies, I argue that the doubts of the novel's narrator Clara regarding who or what is responsible for her family's undoing signal the difficulty of storytelling in an age of spiritual and intellectual uncertainty. By thus reading Clara's indeterminacy as a reaction to the contrapuntal religious and medical discourses of the early republic, my essay offers new insight into the significance of her rhetorically strained, inconclusive attempt at rendering a didactic narrative. Rather than offering Clara merely as a negative example for readers – a victim of her own imperfect discipline, as she herself assesses – Brown utilizes her self-proclaimed failure to ironize the self-assuredness of eighteenth-century didactic novels in an age rife with doubt.

This article argues that the imagery that American policymakers deployed to represent poverty as a social problem in the United States in the 1960s was rooted in the conceptual vocabulary that had emerged to describe “underdevelopment” in Third World in the years after 1945. Relying upon a close reading of still and moving images produced and distributed under the auspices of the American state in the mid-1960s – including the Academy Award®-winning documentary, A Year Towards Tomorrow – this article explores the ways influential American liberals represented poverty as an explicitly global social problem demanding the intervention of middle-class “agents of change.” This moment in the history of poverty fighting marks the origins of the concept of “global poverty.”

This article examines the rise of the Nation of Islam (NOI) within America's penal system during the late 1950s and the 1960s. In doing so, it explores the reasons for the NOI's appeal among African American prisoners, its contribution to the politicization of those prisoners, the responses of penal, state and federal authorities to the proliferation of prison mosques, and the way in which imprisoned Black Muslims' campaign for freedom of religious expression established the legal groundwork for the prisoners' rights movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s. This research presents the prison as a locus of black protest and the African American prisoner as an important, but largely overlooked, actor within the black freedom struggle. It calls upon historians to recognize the importance of the prison as both a site and a symbol of black resistance during the post-World War II period.

Although James's first published response to Whitman's poetry, an 1865 review of Drum-Taps, was dismissive, he expressed a profound affinity with the poet later in his career. This essay considers how his reading of two volumes of Whitman's correspondence in 1898, in particular The Wound Dresser letters, are crucial to James's reevaluation of Whitman and may be seen to be exerting pressure in The American Scene (1907). Through also examining a key event of the year previous, when James's Civil War memories were reignited by the dedication of the Robert Gould Shaw memorial in Boston, I suggest reasons for his changed relation to Whitman's aesthetic project. My argument focusses on how Whitman's epistolary and poetic treatment of the wounded body reformulated vital representational and emotional issues for James, and made Whitman an active presence for him during his 1904–5 American sojourn. James makes no explicit comment about Whitman when he details his journey in The American Scene, yet the poet's influence can be felt in the way James writes about recently erected Civil War monuments by Saint-Gaudens, in New York and Boston, and Whitman is also acknowledged by the stylistic memorial, in this work, that James builds for him.

This essay is an examination that, primarily comparativist in its approach, links publication materials from the temperance and Prohibition periods with the Big Book to show how AA's narrative antidotes to the traumas of modernity (sited in alcohol abuse) were as much the product of premodernist and turn-of-the-century hysteria as they were an attempt to write a new chapter in America's relationship with alcohol based on contemporary medical and social research.

This article considers the arguments of one evangelical anti-slavery advocate in order to freshly examine the relationship between abolitionism and religious revivalism. Although it has often been thought that evangelicals were wholly supportive of revivals, the Reverend Isaac Nelson rejected the 1857–58 revival in the United States and the 1859 revival in Ulster partly owing to the link between these movements and pro-slavery religion. Nelson was no insignificant figure in Irish abolitionism, as his earlier efforts to promote emancipation through the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society, and in opposition to compromise in the Free Church of Scotland and at the Evangelical Alliance, received the approbation of various high-profile American abolitionists. Unlike other opponents of revivals, Nelson was not attacking them from a perspective which was heterodox or anti-evangelical. Hence his critique of revivalism is highly significant from both an evangelical and an abolitionist point of view. The article surveys Nelson's assessment of the link between revivalism and pro-slavery religion in America, before considering his specific complaints against the revival which occurred in 1857–58 and its Ulster counterpart the following year.

The defeat of the Dyer anti-lynching bill in 1922 was a turning point in relations between black Americans and the Republican Party. Little is understood, however, about the role played in the debates by President Warren Harding. This article contends that Harding's conflicted views on presidential leadership caused him to badly mishandle the bill. The President's inability to choose between a restrained and consensual “Whig” approach and a more active “stewardship” role on a wide range of issues resulted in an erratic and ultimately unsustainable style of leadership. The Dyer bill's failure was affected by this dilemma as the hopes of black and white reformers were alternately raised and dashed by Harding's apparent indecisiveness. Black resentment at the bill's ultimate defeat was thus heightened still further, with severe consequences for the Republican Party's long-term electoral relationship with black voters.

This essay surveys George W. Bush's public statements from 1993 to 2001 to examine the evolution of his religious and political rhetoric. Bush's personal religiosity and his use of religious rhetoric during his campaigns for the presidency and in his two terms in office have received extensive comment from the press as well as from scholars. Yet very little scholarly work has considered the role of religion in his earlier political career. Although Bush had evinced a deep and genuine evangelical faith for years before he launched his bid for the governorship, he did not begin his political career as an overtly Christian leader. Instead, over the course of his governorship, he gradually incorporated Christian tropes in his speeches to develop, explain, and gain support for his “compassionate conservative” policies and to build rapport with voters.

Since its 1953 publication, John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet has incited debate. The text's dialogue with the first published poet of colonial North America has been described as a factual study, a redaction of adultery and a veiled critique of modern society. It is seldom noted, however, that Berryman's strategy of “modulat[ing]” his voice into Anne Bradstreet's raises key questions regarding his reappropriation of her life and writing. Does Homage's conscious ventriloquism problematize its status as a “historical” poem? And how might this revised understanding illuminate the work's relation to America's origins? This paper proposes a more multifaceted context for Homage's composition than has hitherto been recognized. Through mapping the poem's rewriting of history, I demonstrate it to be the product of both national and literary anxieties: if voicing Bradstreet enables Berryman to interrogate the American Dream's legacy, her canonical status casts scrutiny upon the contemporary poet's role in an age of sociopolitical tensions. Foregrounding Berryman's public self-positioning in Homage invites a reassessment of his engagements with society that liberates his oeuvre from “confessional” designations. As a result, it opens the way for readings that might situate Homage and The Dream Songs within the wider tradition of American epic poetry.

William Gibbs McAdoo is best known as the other half of the great Democratic Party meltdown at the party's national convention in 1924, when he and Alfred E. Smith fought for the presidential nomination over nine days and 102 ballots. We know much about Smith, but much less about what McAdoo stood for and what constituencies he appealed to during his unsuccessful campaign for that nomination. This article puts some flesh on the bones of McAdoo's candidacy in 1924 by looking more closely at his nomination platform and strategy, and by showing how his term as director general of the United States Railroad Administration (USRRA) in 1918 was pivotal in his campaign for the presidential nomination in 1924. At the USRRA McAdoo used federal control not only to rationalize the railroads but also to create an electoral constituency for his presidential ambitions. Although his time at the helm of the USRRA finished at the end of 1918, McAdoo remained prominent in the debate over its fate and then assiduous in his attempts to cash in the political chips he had accumulated through his work with it.

US Army Chaplains in World War II grappled with many problems associated with the moral welfare of their soldier congregations. One of the most troubling issues was the consumption of alcohol. Analysing the archival data from the Chief of Chaplains files and the first-person accounts of chaplains, this article focusses on the difficulties chaplains faced with their concerns about saving men's souls during a time of war. Alcohol consumption was high among both enlisted men and officers in the US Army and many chaplains worried about the impact that alcohol would have on the men's moral well-being. There were differences among chaplains relating to their denominations, which goes some way to explaining the different approaches taken by individual chaplains. Methodist chaplains did not approach the issue of alcohol consumption in the same way as many Catholic chaplains, for example. The Chief of Chaplains, as a Catholic and a regular army serviceman, had a more pragmatic view. This article explores those differences.

This article considers whether the novel Banjo's sailors and vagabonds, described by James Smethurst as proponents of “a transnational proletarian blackness,” provide a Harlem Renaissance-era alternative to Monica L. Miller's Harlem-centred notion of “subversive dandyism.” Indeed, author Claude McKay – a Jamaican who spent much of the 1920s and 1930s abroad before taking American citizenship in 1940 – has come increasingly to be regarded, as by the novelist Caryl Phillips, as one among numerous twentieth-century “writers for whom the national label is unhelpful if we wish to see the full nature of their achievement.” McKay declared that “a patriot loves not his nation, but the spiritual meannesses of his life of which he has created a frontier wall to hide the beauty of other horizons.” This article addresses Banjo's representation of sartorial self-fashioning as part of this critique of narrowly national identities.

No land artist of the 1960s was more influential at the time than Robert Smithson. If anything, earthworks such as the Spiral Jetty and essays such as “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape” have only added to his importance over the years. One of the reasons Smithson still seems so relevant is that his work responded so directly to a nostalgic trend that arose in both American studies and American environmentalism during the 1950s and 1960s. On the whole, it was a nostalgia for nineteenth-century pastoralism, but it also led to a revival of interest in such figures as Thomas Cole, Timothy O'Sullivan, and Olmsted himself. To counteract this elegiac tendency Smithson developed a “toxic discourse” in which he treated the nineteenth-century landscape as a totally engineered prototype for the twentieth. The first fully formed expression of this toxic discourse was an essay he published in 1967, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.” It was there that Smithson began to elaborate an aesthetic that treated the open-pit mine, the suburb, and the desert as mirror images of each other.

In this essay, I rethink place in terms of the traumatic experience of lynching through Angelina Weld Grimké's “Blackness” and “Goldie,” which fictionalize Mary Turner's 1918 lynching in Georgia. Grimké's stories, I argue, place racial tensions within an American landscape and challenge the potential erasure that often occurs by viewing landscape only through white experience. “Blackness” and “Goldie,” as examples of black nature writing, exhume the memory of lynching and reveal the constructiveness of nature. By analyzing the racialized construction of a southern landscape, I contend that racial terror impacts the meaning of nature and argue that place can be reconstituted in the mind through memories associated with it. Even though Grimké relocates “Blackness” in the North, the protagonist cannot escape traumatic memories of lynching. Instead, his memories of racial violence stay in “place” and begin to affect Reed, his law partner from the North, as well as the reader. Thus this essay reveals how racial trauma transforms the meaning of nature and reinvents place, and through the protagonists' traumatic memories of the trees and hanging black bodies, the southern landscape “creaks,” voicing black oppression that threatens to engulf both white and black.

The eleven-week dispute at the Amsterdam News in Harlem was the first time in US history that black workers were successful in a labour dispute with black management. Some contemporaries argued that the event represented a triumph for the class-inspired activism of the left, an interpretation in line with the historiography of the long civil rights movement. This article argues that the dispute actually demonstrated the challenges inherent in pursuing labour-based protest strategies. Success was achieved by a concentrated group of workers who used their collective power and propitious geographical and social standing to harness the support of a cross-section of leadership groups. This moment of apparent unity concealed enduring divides over interracial activism, not only between nationalist groups and the radical left but also within mainstream groups like the NAACP. Temporary success could be achieved when workers like the Amsterdam News staff managed to bridge these divides. Supporters, however, proved unable to avoid the subsequent dismissal of union instigators by the newspaper's new owners. More broadly, the problems of coordinating activism to target the different groups who controlled black employment continued to bedevil subsequent protests during the transformative era of the New Deal.