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.

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 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.

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.

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.

My article focuses on the film California Dreamin’ (Endless) in order to examine the way the movie problematizes and brings in dialogue contemporary overlapping and contradictory Romanian ideologies in relation to the US. By taking the movie as a lens for the Romanian context, my paper analyzes how the US is signified and decoded in the aftermath of communism in Romania. I discuss how the movie envisions a continuous questioning and interrogation of the precommunist past and the postcommunist present upon which images, perceptions, fictions, and appropriations of “America” are predicated in the post-1989 Romanian context. My argument is that by mapping the overlapping terrain of the foreign and the domestic past and present, the film critically reconfigures the space between the US and one of its main supporters in the “New Europe.” It explores axes of local, national, and international interests, pointing to the contradictory, ambiguous sociocultural representations that accrue to “America” as it is caught up in itineraries and mis/translations across a “Second World” site. I contend that the dialogic examination Romania–US that the movie successfully achieves can become an ideal model for approaching the US in the Eastern European space.

The historical thoughts and opinions of one nation regarding another are useful both for the purpose of analyzing global events and for understanding both nations. Until modern times, the Azerbaijani people did not have contact with the USA or widespread knowledge of American people, but throughout the past two centuries elite Azerbaijani thinkers and scholars have expressed interest in America from various viewpoints, including the political, scientific, and educational fields. The article reviews statements about the USA as they are documented in the publications by Azerbaijani historians, journalists, creative writers, educators, and politicians from the 1830s through to contemporary times. Using these documents, and poetry of Soviet times, the article analyzes Azerbaijani perspectives on America, which over time have wavered, both upwards and downwards, but often reflected the prevailing political ideology towards the USA, particularly during the Soviet period.