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.

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.

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 explores Toni Morrison's preoccupation with, and reimagining of, the landscape of the so-called New World. Drawing on scholarship that has investigated dominant discourses about freedom, bounty, and possibility located within the Americas, it identifies various counternarratives in Morrison's fiction, tracing these through the earlier Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987), but primarily arguing for their centrality to A Mercy (2008). The mapping of seventeenth-century North America in the author's ninth novel both exposes colonial relations to place and probes African American experiences of the natural world. In particular, A Mercy is found to recalibrate definitions of “wilderness” with a sharpened sensitivity to the position of women and the racially othered within them. The dynamic between the perspectives towards the environment of Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader Jacob Vaark and Native American orphan and servant Lina, is examined, as well as the slave girl Florens's formative encounters in American space. Bringing together diverse narrative views, A Mercy is shown to trouble hegemonic settler and masculinist notions of the New World and, especially through Florens's voicing, shape an alternative engagement with landscape. The article goes some way towards meeting recent calls for attention to the intersections between postcolonial approaches and ecocriticism.

Throughout this essay, I will show the characters of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy moving between modernism and postmodernism, and discuss the way some of them epitomize either largely modernist or postmodernist epistemologies. My purpose is to offer a reconstruction of Auster's dialogue across both, and I will resist situating the novelist in either the modern or the postmodern camp. I see him as rather watching from a distance, while his characters scour the terrain (both terrains, as a matter of fact) for him. My conclusion is that Auster seems to acknowledge the inevitability of inhabiting the cultural space of the postmodern, while staking out a claim to question, or even to challenge, some of its presumptions. While modernism still holds a powerful spell for the protagonists of City of Glass and Ghosts (less so for the latter), the narrator of The Locked Room posits the inextricability of embracing our contemporary sensibility, the postmodern, without necessarily rejecting altogether what went before. Auster associates modernism largely with the secluded, invisible, despicable Fanshawe, whose spell and influence over him the narrator of the third novel of the trilogy manages to break.

This article is a comparative study of two epic works that share a historical setting and a broad political outlook, but diverge significantly in at least one respect. Frequent and heavy alcohol consumption is a feature of both Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and John Dos Passos's USA trilogy, but the way in which these authors describe heavy drinking – and hedonistic behaviour in general – indicates fundamental differences between the modernism of Dos Passos and Pynchon's postmodernist strategies. The article contends that this aspect of Pynchon's novel represents a critique of attitudes within the twentieth-century American left towards sensuality, patriarchy and the failure of leftist aspiration within a contemporary context that invokes such subjects as the complicity of consumption, terrorism and the ethics of political assassination.

This paper examines the attitudes of feminist activists, intellectuals and filmmakers to US intervention in Central America during the 1980s. It traces the development of mutual intellectual and political sustenance between feminism and anti-interventionism, arguing that as feminist thinking bred new ways of approaching US involvement in Central America, so anti-interventionist struggles bred new ways of thinking about women's activism. In making this point, the paper complicates narratives of the “age of Reagan” that overlook the persistence of left-wing politics during the 1980s. Instead, it argues that a specific form of international feminism enabled a community of activists to contribute to a vibrant culture of dissent that criticized conservative approaches to women's rights and, at the same time, vigorously contested the interventionist foreign policy of the Reagan administration.

This article reexamines the “Albert Maltz affair” in light of debates about art and literature in the journal New Masses (1926–48), as well as in international Marxist aesthetics. I argue for a reexamination of the “para-Marxist” theory of art he developed to clarify the role of leftist criticism and the “citizen writer.” The controversy stirred by the publication of Maltz's “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” (New Masses, 12 February 1946) is only fully appreciated through the aesthetic implications that many historians of the Hollywood Ten have overlooked. The immediate attacks on Maltz by critics like Mike Gold were motivated primarily by the view that a properly Marxist aesthetics must follow the Leninist–Zhdanovite theory of “art as a weapon.” More importantly, the support that Maltz and like-minded authors earned from New Masses readers for expressing the “Engelian” thesis that left-wing critics should evaluate art for dialectical tensions of form (and not solely for proletarian messages) suggests that this episode might be read as a beacon of salutary developments in international Marxist aesthetics rather than as an omen of American communist repression caused by the HUAC trials.

In the late nineteenth century, white land and tourism promoters invested in the selling of Florida to American migrants and winter visitors began to recast the Seminoles. From being feared and denigrated as mixed-race killers, associated with runaway slaves, who had defied earlier US attempts to remove them to the West, the Seminoles were “realigned” by boosters into praiseworthy specimens of moral and racial purity. According to promoters, the Seminoles were now human emblems of the Florida wilderness, but also pure-blood primitives. As such, they fitted much better with the Jim Crow ideals of benign racial separation. Although neither smooth nor complete, this process of racial realignment transformed the Seminoles from terrifying threat to marketable curiosity, easing the incorporation of the Seminoles into the selling of south Florida.

This article addresses the recent attempts to integrate evolutionary history in the US national narrative. Focussing on the cultural, legal, and scientific controversy over Kennewick Man, the ancient human remains discovered in Washington state in 1996, the article explores the narrative politics of American national belonging. Through a popular historical novel on Kennewick Man's life, the article further theorizes nostalgia as a narrative tool in imagining the evolutionary origins of the nation. The article argues that nostalgia produces a temporal dynamic that bridges the gap between national history and global prehistory, and that this dynamic is reinforced through cultural ideas of genetic knowledge. At the same time, prehistoric nostalgia renders problematic ideas of ethnic difference largely invisible.

In recent decades, revisionist challenges to the traditional “declension hypothesis” have generated a much more nuanced and positive approach to the Black Power movement. However, attempts to explain the narrative's initial popularity have too often focussed on the latter half of the decade and blamed a media-assisted white backlash or the inflammatory rhetoric of Black Power activists. Concentrating instead on the earlier half of the decade, this article examines the media strategies of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and demonstrates how its public approach to nonviolence and interracial organizing purposefully hid developments within the movement that were seen to be at odds with the dominant discourse. By highlighting the ways in which the early media strategies of a militant organization like SNCC strengthened and legitimized a misleading movement narrative, this article challenges scholars to be more critical of early movement rhetoric and re-examine how and why Black Power was portrayed as a fundamental break with the past.