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Imperial Cityscapes

Urban History and Empire in the United States

By | 1 comments |

The intrigue cities hold for us as Historians and Americanists seems a natural extension of our curiosity about culture, civilizations, politics, economics and power. It is at the level of cities—these modern crossroads of trade, ideas and materials—that the modern intellectual finds, in everyday stories, some of the most influential connections between institutions, cultures, and political and aesthetic movements. American history simply cannot be told without constant reference to its cities. It is the wish of the editors that this forum and the questions raised throughout this introduc-tion will generate a more vigorous discussion that will introduce the tricky yet indispensable themes of imperialism, empire, and transnationalism to U.S. urban historiography, and prompt reflection on how cities feature in the study of America more generally.

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An Interview with David Clayton-Thomas

By NeoAmericanist | 1 comments |

An Interview with Canadian Music Hall of Fame musician David Clayton-Thomas.

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A review of Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre by Tamar Jeffers McDonald

By Beatriz Oria | 0 comments |

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A review of Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America by Elisa Tamarkin

By Ann Ostendorf | 0 comments |

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A review of Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York by April F. Masten

By Steven McGrail | 0 comments |

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A review of That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution by Lars Schoultz

By Matt Jacobs | 0 comments |

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“The People We Found There Are Tall and Well-Built”

Visions of Native Americans by a Sixteenth-Century Spanish Conquistador

By Carmen Gomez-Galisteo | 0 comments |

The grandson of a conquistador, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca surely wanted to emulate his forebearer’s success when he was appointed treasurer to the Pánfilo de Narváez’s expedition to Florida in 1527. However, much as he wanted to be a conquistador, the failure of the expedition prevented him from fulfilling such aspirations. Instead, he became a captive of the Native Americans, totally dependent upon their protection to survive. Finding himself in the role of slave, merchant, physician, and almost a god to the Native Americans, he soon abandoned his prejudices about Native Americans and got a first-hand experience. With this, he grasped a better understanding of American reality and the manners of the Native Americans that he communicated to others in his Account. From being a man who knew nothing of either America or its inhabitants prior to the expedition, he subsequently became the best source of first hand information for generations of authors and expeditions to the area. Also, different from other analyses of Cabeza de Vaca’s treatment of Native Americans that are limited to his experiences in Florida, this essay also explores Cabeza de Vaca’s attitude towards Native Americans as governor of Argentina later on.

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Disputably a Woman

Recovering Incoherence in Sarah Piatt’s Poetry

By Ben Bagocius | 0 comments |

Within the past twenty years, many scholars have begun to “recover” nineteenth-century American women’s “sentimental” poetry that New Critics and their aesthetics have overlooked.  Sarah Piatt’s poetry in particular has garnered contemporary critical attention as a result of the important “recovery” efforts of scholars such as Paula Bernat Bennett, who celebrate Piatt as a proto-modern feminist who is thus, according to Bennett, “indisputably a woman.”  My article, however, brings Piatt’s “womanhood” and recent criticism’s affirmation of it into dispute.  After charting out the ambivalent rather than coherent discourses surrounding literary “recovery,” sentimentality, modernism, and gender, the lenses usually used through which to read Piatt’s work, I offer a reading of Piatt’s most anthologized poem, “The Palace-Burner.”  My reading aligns Piatt not with a completely legible proto-feminist politics, but with a politics of the ambiguity of identity itself.  Ultimately, my study hopes to encourage a “recovery” method that reads a poet’s political and social identities as propitiously mysterious and open to conjecture rather than subsumes a writer into contemporary discursive allegiances.

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Transcendental Installations

Robert Irwin (works between 1964-1980)

By Gabriel Perri Silberblatt | 0 comments |

At the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, radical conceptual artist Robert Irwin was busy removing all of the contents of the museum’s fourth floor gallery spaces.  The controversial installation which resulted—a room ostensibly devoid of “art” altogether—was just one in a long line of critical investigations into what Irwin called, “the pure subject of art.”  The danger of misreading Irwin is high; he is a man containing multitudes.  His artistic projects are at once intensely private, yet public, utterly personal, and yet universally relevant.  In fact, the scope of Irwin’s aesthetic and intellectual inquiry resonates with that of the prototypical American theorist, Ralph Waldo Emerson.  While Emerson’s philosophy can help to illuminate the conceptual underpinnings of Irwin’s art, we might also hope to learn something about the gentleman poet-philosopher from the life and art of a more contemporary Transcendentalist.

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Closing Guantanamo Bay

The Future of Detainees

By Jessica Ross | 1 comments |

At the start of his presidency, Barack Obama issued an Executive Order to shut down the naval base at Guantanamo Bay and halt all detainees’ trial proceedings pending the creation of a review process. Legal scholars and White House advisors made suggestions regarding how to shut the prison down and what to do with its occupants.  In this paper, I will argue that detainees should be tried in federal courts and sent home or transferred to prisons within the United States.  I will examine the nature of the President’s Executive Order and documents outlining traditional protections granted to detainees including the Geneva Conventions, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and Supreme Court rulings.  An analysis of how to proceed with the adjudication of detainees will follow.  My findings illustrate that the most efficient solution to these problems is to implement domestic parole programs and try detainees in US federal courts.

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