This article examines Australian responses to the imposition of stringent national origins quotas in the United States during the 1920s. Following the introduction of the American quota system, many Australians worried that large numbers of undesirable southern and eastern European migrants would make their way toward Australian ports. Widespread calls for preemptive restrictions forced the Australian government to finally implement a range of measures designed to limit immigration from Italy, Greece, Albania, Yugoslavia, and Malta. More broadly, this article argues that American quotas often inadvertently engendered a wide range of indirect and unintentional consequences around the world that scholars of migration and American foreign relations might explore in greater depth. It concludes by suggesting some opportunities for individual and collaborative research into the international effects of the United States’ notorious national origins quota system.

“‘Can't Repeat the Past?’ Gatsby and the American Dream at Mid-Century” analyzes The Great Gatsby's Cold War rise to explain its subsequent canonization. The essay uses Ernst Bloch's theory of disappointment and utopianism to dwell, in particular, upon the novel's representations of the American Dream as intimately related to failure and the promise of the New World. Bloch's insistence that disappointment is embedded within utopian formations suggests that the novel's tragic take on Gatsby's dreams is the key to its mid-century fame and its continued cultural appeal.

Scholars have questioned what Nat Turner meant to others in the past; in this article, I question what he means today. Reversing William Andrews's injunction to read “Prophet Nat's” 1831 insurrection through the US's encounter with religio-political terrorism on 9/11, I instead examine the effect September 11th has had on the rebel slave's contemporary afterlife. Ultimately this article asks what cultural work Nat Turner now performs, what his recent depictions tell us about the racial formations of the present. Drawing on comics theory, I parse the visual rhetoric of Kyle Baker's popular and increasingly studied comic Nat Turner, in which Baker tropes Nat Turner as Christ just as Nat Turner himself did in his Confessions. Baker produces an iconic black hero, one who is visually antithetical to racist images of “the terrorist” circulating in post-9/11 discourses. By doing so, Baker safeguards not only Nat Turner but US “blackness” from Islamophobia during the age of the global War on Terror. Finally, by reading Baker's comic alongside other recent, unexamined depictions of the rebel slave, this article updates the archive on Nat Turner and complicates the political possibilities that inhere in other sites of cultural memory.

The display of a “family crest” to signal family identity is prevalent in the contemporary United States. However, during the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, many American commentators perceived the widespread use of heraldry by the high bourgeoisie as at best a mark of social pretension and at worst a symptom of an un-American predilection for aristocracy. Over the course of a century, heraldic entrepreneurs sought to broaden the market for family crests, and in doing so Americanized heraldic practice. The early projects of Albert Welles, Frank Allaben and Frances M. Smith linked heraldry with new approaches to genealogical research and encouraged its use by a broad cross section of American society. In the late twentieth century, entrepreneur Gary Halbert sold millions of heraldic mementos that epitomized the modern commodification of history and identity. The result of a century of marketing is an American heraldry that is both more accessible than its European antecedents and less closely tied to verifiable genealogical relationships.

This paper posits a socioeconomic explanation for the popularity of the slasher film genre. These films created a unique sub-genre in which teenage protagonists had to contend with unstoppable forces, in the form of manic killers, while every aspect of modernity and the middle-class lifestyle failed them. Cars and telephones die, the suburbs offer no sanctuary, and adults are absent or ineffectual. The slasher genre rose in popularity as the American economy spiraled into recession. By examining the big three franchises of Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street this paper analyzes the slasher films of the 1980s and their remakes in the late 2000s. It argues that slasher films symbolized a cathartic release for their mainly adolescent audiences at a time in their lives when impending adulthood and an unfavorable economic climate seemed to conspire against them.

This article explores the gendered potential and limitations of eastern bloc immigration to the United States under Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. When Dulles endorsed the romantic marriage of Czechoslovakian Olympic gold medalist Olga Fikotova to fellow Olympic winner – and American – Harold Connolly in 1957, he engineered a cultural-diplomacy coup that complimented the president's New Look brinkmanship abroad. Feminine, heteronormative, Protestant, and a world champion, Fikotova initially seemed an ideal Cold War immigrant. When she and her new husband arrived on American shores amid media fanfare, though, she exercised her newfound freedom of speech to criticize American social problems and advocate women's equality.

During the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), stories of dangerous bandits, rebels, dictators, and Indians defined Mexico for US audiences. Most scholars assume that these narratives reinforce the conventional rhetoric of Latin savagery that justifies US imperialism, but this essay reveals an array of writers who told such stories to undermine state power and contest military intervention. Three of the era's best-known leftist journalists, John Kenneth Turner, John Reed, and Katherine Anne Porter, craft a discourse of activism to help the US public imagine themselves as participants in a new hemispheric democracy. These writers posit moral bonds between the US and Mexico that exceed the expansionist interests of politicians and industrialists. Their vision was embodied in the trope of the foreign correspondent, an American who could physically enter Mexican territory, witness the crimes and heroisms of the revolution, and relay the voices of the Mexicans whose lives were at stake in the conflict. Turner, Reed, and Porter hope that journalists can inspire democratic fraternity between the US and Mexican peoples. They also set the terms and conventions utilized by radical humanitarian journalists for decades to come.

Patent medicine shows became popular in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century by selling their products alongside free musical and theatrical entertainments. The “doctors” promised a range of cures, but usually mixed their remedies with alcohol or narcotics – using the promise of health to evade religious authorities and law enforcement, even in dry counties. Many talented black performers toured with medicine shows, including a number of artists later associated with the blues. I argue that the medicine show had a decisive impact on the blues by providing not simply training in performance, but also an impetus for the notorious suggestiveness of its lyric code. The blues borrows from the medicine show its lawless appeal to ailments uncategorized and ignored by socially sanctioned experts.

The first in a series of regional studies by the photographer Paul Strand, Time in New England pairs the iconographical landscapes and portraits of Strand with a cross-section of historical and fictional accounts of New England life from 1630 to 1950. The texts, chosen and edited by Nancy Newhall, constitute a counterpoint to Strand's images, designed to historicize the ideological parameters, subjects, and faces of a vernacular New England. This essay examines some of the problems inherent in Strand and Newhall's attempts to record an essentially democratic vision of America through a specific cultural landscape both found and constructed. Partly a postwar response to the trauma of fascism in Europe, Time in New England sought to confirm the intrinsic values of America as a safe haven for democratic principles, a project jeopardized by the increasing harassment of leftist artists that drove Strand out of the US in the same year Time in New England was published.

This article explores how a city remembered a national event that took place before its own existence. To this end, two public works of art in the city of Chicago that have American Revolutionary War participants as their subjects are examined. Particular attention is paid to the historical context surrounding Revolutionary War-themed public art in Chicago as well as to the two men who were responsible for erecting the sculptures – Robert R. McCormick and Barnet Hodes. McCormick, the publisher of the Chicago Daily Tribune, chose to immortalize the doomed Revolutionary spy, Nathan Hale, while Hodes, an attorney for the city of Chicago, centered his attention on a monument that included representations of General George Washington and immigrant financiers Robert Morris and Haym Salomon. By doing so, this article considers what motivated Chicagoans during the 1930s and 1940s to remember the American Revolutionary War. The general consensus that surrounded these acts of remembrance suggests the limitations of otherwise useful and important approaches that focus on conflict and healing in public memory formation.

This article utilizes recent developments in postsouthern theory to explore Appalachian literature and culture. Analyzing novels by Ron Rash, Terry Roberts, and Charles Frazier, I argue that Appalachian literature will likely follow a trajectory similar to the one identified by scholars in southern literature more broadly. Despite the seeming persistence of historicity among leading Appalachian writers, I anticipate that the homogenization of the region will increasingly lead writers either to commodify outdated notions of Appalachian exceptionalism or to rely upon an ironic, parodic relationship with past Appalachian literary narratives.

Whereas in 1915 Theodore Roosevelt could proclaim with great conviction that there was no room in the United States for hyphenated Americans, today it is common for Americans to identify precisely as hyphenated Americans, proud of their ethnic heritage. And whilst in 2015 the debate on undocumented immigration is perceived to have reached crisis point, the US continues to project itself as a “nation of immigrants.” These reversals and contradictions in American political discourse are scrutinized here in a historical survey of the Americanization movement of a hundred years ago and the concept of the “nation of immigrants” that originated with John F. Kennedy in the Cold War sixty years later. In the analysis of primary and key historiographical sources on twentieth-century American immigration, a change from ethnic shame to ethnic pride is tracked down, revealing both the long-term effects of Americanization as a programme of social engineering and the ongoing ideological work that the “nation of immigrants” slogan performs for American national identity.

This essay considers the television series Breaking Bad in light of Nicos Poulantzas's concept of the new petty bourgeoisie and Bruno Latour's notion of the production of “monsters” in modern society as a result of the compartmentalization of science from society. Breaking Bad, which has received near universal praise from the popular press, established itself as the most recent dominant show in the recent wave of serial dramas. As a show that resembles the experimental vacuum chamber described by Latour, Breaking Bad succeeds in naturalizing its own terms so that they go unquestioned by viewers. My article views the character Walter White not as the everyman antihero presented by the show, but rather as a representative of what Poulantzas has termed the new petty bourgeoisie. A contention made in this essay is that the quarantined nature of such serial dramas allows them to work as vehicles for ideologies that go unexamined by their viewers.

In an age when politicians and the mainstream media continue to divide immigrants into deserving and undeserving subjects, making them both hypervisible and yet invisible, the essays by Lauret, Krause and Schreiber are timely and compelling. Together, they map the historical and contemporary processes of state violence, legal erasure and cultural coercion that have shaped immigrant lives and subjectivities. Models of cultural conformity and whiteness, hyphenation, and either/or binaries that enforce the strict separation of old and new, legal and illegal, have affected the immigrant psyche and induced forms of individual and collective trauma, including ethnic shame, madness, family fragmentation and the physical exploitation of human bodies. In their essays on Americanization and Dominican American fiction, Lauret and Krause reveal the less than celebratory narratives that get lost in stories of emancipatory assimilation, ethnic persistence and hyphenated and multiple subjectivities. Likewise, in her essay on contemporary Latino/a music video and undocumented immigration, Schreiber asks us to see what is obscured from view, but also to find room in these new narratives for patterns of immigrant visibility, agency and activism. These essays suggest that immigrant testimony, literature and visual and aural media can be powerfully combined with historical analyses of immigration policy to unravel the complex realities behind the walls of national nostalgia and racial stereotyping. They also suggest alternative ways of seeing that demand we recognize every immigrant's right to humanity and a sense of belonging.

An unusual kind of community existed between early twentieth-century women radio broadcasters in the American Mid-west – known as radio homemakers – and their listeners, one that depended on mutual trust. Radio homemakers established this trust via the concept of “visiting,” where the broadcasters used the familiar notion of informal social interaction to establish an ostensibly intimate relationship with their audience. Through playing with their listeners' understanding of visiting, radio homemakers made public the professionalization of domestic work that emerged from the Progressive Era's home economics movement. Because their shows primarily addressed domesticity, radio homemakers linked the conventions of domestic work to modernity through the technology of radio, drawing attention to women's frequently invisible household work.

As is evident in their popularity and uses in television and film, power ballads have been prized for their emotional intensity. That intensity results from the ways in which the songs transform aspects of sentimentality developed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century repertoires, particularly parlor songs and torch songs. Power ballads energize sentimental topics and affects with rapturous feelings of uplift. Instead of concentrating on individual emotions like earlier sentimental songs do, power ballads create charged clouds of mixed emotions that produce feelings of euphoria. The emotional adrenaline rushes in power ballads are characteristic of larger experiences in popular culture in which emotions are to be grand, indiscriminate, and immediate.

In the fall of 2015, a great debate began taking shape internationally and in the United States over how to reconcile foreign-policy interests, national security concerns, and a response to a profound refugee crisis emerging in Europe as a result of the conflict in Syria. World leaders vacillated, demagogues pontificated, and social media memes employed bad historical analogies to shame fellow citizens into action. Despite the sudden urgency, the arguments blasting from twenty-four-hour news stations and ill-drawn cartoons depicting seventeenth-century pilgrims as forlorn refugees given safe harbor by Native Americans at Plymouth Rock did not represent a new line of thinking in the longer history of international migration management. The public is once again debating how to balance humanitarianism against fear, and which sentiment should play the greater role in governing the decision to admit new migrants. As the papers in this forum ably show, policies, procedures, and perspectives on migration have always had an international-relations component that can trump the local concerns that often dominate domestic debates.

During and after the 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, thousands of photographs were taken. None, however, would become as iconic as Thomas Franklin's photo of three firefighters raising an American flag above the rubble of the World Trade Center. Franklin's photo, I argue in this essay, casts 9/11 in the familiar myth of American exceptionalism, screening out but still gesturing to the heterogeneous memories left unsettled and animate in amateur photographs, missing-person posters, bodies in pain, and performance. In considering the struggle over the visual memory of the attacks, I first consider how, in the wake of 9/11, the discourse of exceptionalism served to disavow the exceptions historically taken by the state and to rationalize the War on Terror. I show how this system of myths works in dialectical relation to other disruptive forms of cultural memory. I then read Franklin's iconic photograph as a screen by which traumatic memories are masked and onto which nationalist desires are projected. Finally, I analyze 9/11 photography that troubles the exceptionalist optics of Franklin's photo by evoking the visual legacy of the Vietnam War and so challenging the logic of righteous warfare.

This article argues that the adaptation of the play State of the Union into a film made the changes to the original that were necessary in a rapidly developing Cold War political culture. Helpful in this project was the way in which a Cold War culture had borrowed from an earlier form of postwar internationalism. In particular, it appropriated the demonization of isolationists as breeders of a corrupt domestic American political system that threatened republicanism and world peace alike. Indeed, the continuity in the representation of isolationists in the immediate postwar period of the play and the very different period of the film helped to lend legitimacy to the otherwise new Cold War rhetoric. The film, therefore, was able to make only minor revisions to the play and yet serve entirely different ideological purposes.

This article explores conceptual writing and the linked concept of boredom in the work of Kenneth Goldsmith. Specifically, the article examines Goldsmith's claims about boredom and uncreativity; suggesting that Goldsmith's work furthers our understanding both of the materiality of language and of the “function of language,” situating Goldsmith's work within the context of a “gift economy,” and, most centrally, proposing Goldsmith's poetics as “durational” rather than “spatial.” The argument then develops this reading via an extended discussion of the role of boredom in Goldsmith's volume Day.