This article examines Mattel’s mid-1990s American Stories Collection—a short-lived line of Barbie dolls depicting moments from U.S. history—as a lens on the intersection of popular culture, material culture, and collective memory during the “History Wars” of the 1990s. Created in part to compete with Pleasant Company’s American Girls and to appeal simultaneously to children and adult collectors, the series distilled iconic historical themes—Pilgrims, the Revolution, westward migration, the Civil War, and Indigenous life—into “charming costumes” and simplified narratives. Through analysis of the dolls’ clothing, accessories, and storybooks, the article situates the series within longer traditions of historically themed playthings, highlighting continuities with earlier educational dolls and role-model biographies. The study underscores how these products reinforced familiar, conservative ideals about women’s roles—caregiving, industriousness, hospitality—while often relying on stereotypes, omitting African American and Latina stories, and abstracting Indigenous figures from historical time. Placing the series in the broader cultural context of 1990s debates over public history, curriculum standards, and museum interpretation, the article argues that American Stories offered comforting, uncomplicated visions of the past at a moment when established narratives were under challenge, illustrating the enduring power of toys to shape and reflect public understandings of history.

This article examines how the Trump administration’s embrace of ethnic majority nationalism—rooted in white identity and anti-Latino sentiment—shaped its policies toward Puerto Rico and Latino communities more broadly. It argues that Puerto Rico’s treatment following Hurricane María in 2017 exemplified this dynamic: despite devastation comparable to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in the mainland, federal aid to the island was slower, smaller, and more conditional. Puerto Ricans, framed as outsiders and burdens to the nation, experienced a discriminatory response rooted not in logistical constraints but in nationalist exclusion. The article concludes that this racialized nationalism, now embedded in the MAGA movement, threatens inclusive democratic governance and Latino belonging in the United States.

This article explores the current popularity of conspiracy theories in terms of Peter Knight’s description of them as a “hermeneutic of suspicion” and Eve Sedgwick’s alignment of the same term with paranoid reading strategies. It situates this discussion in terms of Fredric Jameson’s argument that a major part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that they offer a cartographic antidote to the disorienting effects of our current age whose vertiginous complexities can be understood in terms of Lyotard’s “postmodern sublime” or Althusser’s “absent cause.” David Frum’s reminder, both of the continued relevance of Richard Hofstadter’s argument about “the paranoid style” today and its applicability to both the political right and the left required Sedgwick’s and Rita Felski’s corrective argument that the real impact of the paranoid style on the left has been the stifling grip of “critique,” which is the academic version of a hermeneutics of suspicion.

“Tainted Love” invites a new reading of Joyce Carol Oates’s critically acclaimed short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by analyzing the story’s evolving musical elements through a fusion of trauma studies and sound studies. Early in the story, 1950s popular music guides protagonist Connie in navigating her life and misleads her about the implications of having sex with Eddie before she is ready. After her sexual encounter, popular music abandons her and forces her to navigate the subsequent sonic advances of Arnold Friend alone. In exploring how the evolution of sound in the story connects to Connie’s sexual trauma, this article aims to uncover another avenue of analysis through which to interact with Oates’s impactful short story.

This paper engages the stories, jokes, anecdotes and illustrations of a single “Editor’s Drawer” from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in the 1890s. Modulating between description, interpretation, and theorization, I risk pedantry in order to demonstrate the relations between humour and advertising during an important phase of the emergence of mass culture. The paper concludes by concentrating on how two readers—one a US traveling ad salesman, the other a Canadian druggist and entertainer—used magazine print conventions like layout to coin humour in their own business practices.

This article investigates the nineteenth-century craft idealism and twentieth-century aesthetic materialities in the American Studio Glass Movement (1962–). Second-generation studio glassblowers are cited as having equipped the glassblowing studio with a “how-to” technical knowledge system learned in Venice, Italy. Drawing on four years of ethnographic research, this article investigates the origin, transmission, and integration of this logic into early expressionist studio glass in the context of both American progressive and counterculture values. In doing so, it shifts the historical narrative of studio glass away from individuals to broader social forces.

This paper argues that Herman Melville’s White-Jacket (1850) begins to redefine individualistic and popular meanings of temperance reform and self-restraint in its attention to the biopolitical and civilizing processes on a man-of-war on the high seas. A renewed understanding of temperance and appetite emerges through the oceanic experience in White-Jacket and Moby-Dick (1851). The texts depict a modified civilizational process through interrogations of the regulation of appetite and addiction in acts of flogging, the grog ration, and in overlapping meanings of wage slavery, racialized slavery, and slavery to the bottle. This essay explores the implications of excessive appetite in sailors’ experiences of various modes of cannibalism, the transatlantic slave trade, and in their relationships with the ocean. The temperate oceanic perspective indicated in Moby-Dick and in moments of White-Jacket suggests a consumptive cosmology that evokes an ethical and religious meaning of cultural, human, and animal relations based on temperate, environmental reciprocity.

This paper argues that the recent popularity of military science fiction, particularly the focus on the training of the recruit soldier as they make their way through boot camp, comes from and also benefits America’s ongoing adoration for its military. With reference to three series by authors John Scalzi, Marko Kloos and Joel Dane, the paper argues that the texts are examples of what French theorist Jacques Ellul called integration propaganda.

During Amiri Baraka’s sentencing in 1967 for possessing an illegal weapon, Judge Leon Kapp read parts of Baraka’s poem “Black People!” including the line “[t]he magic words are: Up against the wall motherfucker!” This quickly became one of the most powerful phrases of the 1960s: an anarchist group in Manhattan went by the name Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers, and the slogan was central to the student uprising at Columbia University. This became a form of political blackface in which White radicals claimed they occupied the same position as Black people. Simultaneously, Baraka sought to distance himself from it. Recognizing that African American voters could dominate Newark politics, Baraka constructed a cynical public persona, blaming the riots following the death of Martin Luther King Jr. on “outside agitators.” At that point, the phrase was little more than a bit of radical chic that apolitical bands like the Jefferson Airplane could mouth.