Not only money crossed the ocean: letters between the French orphans and their benefactors went in each direction across the Atlantic. The correspondence between France’s orphans supported through the FCFS and their American benefactors revealed both the power of the connection and the power dynamic between the recipients and the “godparents.” Letters from the fatherless children of France told of the moral and psychological support that accompanied the financial assistance that sponsorships provided. And while it seems that the correspondence helped open an ocean of hope and fostered the conviction that France was not alone in its fight against Germany, the letters from France also reflected the power dynamic of the sponsorship: those in need had to keep the assistance coming. The letters also show the FCFS at work: the instructions to the recipients of aid as to how they were to communicate with donors; the typed transcription and translations of the letters, most likely carried out by women in the Paris and New York offices; and the messaging to the benefactors, who were reminded that mothers needed money, but children cared more for the attention from a far-away friend.

In the sixth and final chapter, we continue to trace how Lucretius rehabilitates Roman men and their performed gender. Although I resume exploring the sexual language and figures by which Lucretius depreciates male presumptions of anatomical and sociological advantage, in “Vir Recreandus” I also tease out from the poem a positive argument about masculinity. Following the poet’s cues, I construct what an Epicurean man is, what he can do, what he is for, and how he can flourish in Lucretius’ reordering of the world. This Epicurean homo turns out to be manly in behaviors that, in part, map onto traditional scripts for a vir even while acting and self-regarding in ways that Romans would deem strange indeed. Much to Cicero’s vexation, Epicurean men become Rome’s true patriots.

Chapter 1, “Building the Nation and Modern Manhood,” examines the tense negotiations over different types of men, manhoods, and masculinities – spanning the early processes of nation-state formation and empire-building, through defeat and democratization, to the current challenges of a globalizing society and straining economy. Following the empire’s defeat in 1945, the soldier almost immediately lost his status as a hegemonic icon of masculinity. That role was taken on by a dramatically different kind of man: the white-collar, middle-class worker – who for decades was hailed not as the successor of the Imperial Army soldier but as the “modern samurai.” Two generations of men strove to embody that ideal manhood, but the heyday of the salaryman came to a crushing end in 1992. A new sense of vulnerability in the wake of the March 11, 2011 triple disaster – earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown – has fed into the processes of a rapid diversification of masculinity that continues to this day.

This chapter will provide context for Roth’s interrogations and representations of masculinity. In Roth’s texts, Jewish protagonists often face competing expectations for their manhood: one definition of manhood is offered by a their Jewish family and culture while another, more aggressive and violent model of manhood, however, is operative and idealized within the larger constructs of American society, performed by white, Gentile men. These competing definitions are further complicated by anxieties over the history of victimization and feminization associated with Jewishness

The twentieth century dawned on a regional, southern-based African American community on the verge of diasporic national change. Decades before the Great Urban Migration, Black individuals had migrated west as homesteaders, cowboys, soldiers, and town-builders, participating in the project of Manifest Destiny. But by the early 1900s, the “frontier” was receding into the realms of myth and memory, and white writers such as Frederick Jackson Turner, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister wondered what would become of American manhood once the “Wild West” disappeared in the new, industrializing order. Black male writers, who had themselves sought to establish masculine credentials by joining frontier conquest, wondered too. Nat Love, a former slave turned ranch hand, and Oscar Micheaux, a farmer turned filmmaker, recorded their experiences, respectively, in their memoirs The Life and Adventures of Nat Love and The Conquest. In their writings can be seen the literary tension between the “Wild West” of violence and savagery and the “agrarian West” being settled by farmers and ethnic groups from across the world.

Paul Robeson, Negro sits uneasily alongside recent reconsiderations of the Harlem Renaissance as a localized if significant instance of wider afromodernist currents in play in the early decades of the twentieth century, and has received little attention in scholarship.

Adventure magazines constructed a version of World War II and Korea that depicted heroic men as warriors, protectors, and sexual conquerors. Here was both a friendly genre for veterans and a way for curious young men to get a glimpse of what war might be like. Many of these wartime stories were written by veterans themselves. Some wrote to honor their fallen comrades, others to deal with the traumas of war by sharing their experiences, still others to advocate for veterans’ rights and opportunities in an increasingly consumer-oriented society. The narratives were simple in construction, stories of good versus evil revolving around individual men or small groups of heroes. A militarized version of masculinity seemed an antidote to Cold War emasculation. In these storylines, tough men survived the worst of war and proved that democracy could still produce the best soldiers. Adventure magazines also demonstrated that war was meritocratic – anyone could be a hero. Yet the magazines’ stories and the vibrant artwork skirted the harsh realities of war, focusing on individual triumphs rather than the horrors of combat. By avoiding the truths of war’s ugly side, adventure mags constructed a battlefield memory that relied mostly on an imagined reality.