American Consciousness Research Articles

The cigarette century: the rise, fall, and deadly persistence of the product that defined America

The invention of mass marketing led to cigarettes being emblazoned in advertising and film, deeply tied to modern notions of glamour and sex appeal. It is hard to find a photo of Humphrey Bogart or Lauren Bacall without a cigarette. No product has been so heavily promoted or has become so deeply entrenched in American consciousness. And no product has received such sustained scientific scrutiny. The development of new medical knowledge demonstrating the dire harms of smoking ultimately shaped the evolution of evidence-based medicine. In response, the tobacco industry engineered a campaign of scientific disinformation seeking to delay, disrupt, and suppress these studies. Using a massive archive of previously secret documents, historian Allan Brandt shows how the industry pioneered these campaigns, particularly using special interest lobbying and largesse to elude regulation. But even as the cultural dominance of the cigarette has waned and consumption has fallen dramatically in the U. S. , Big Tobacco remains securely positioned to expand into new global markets. The implications for the future are vast: 100 million people died of smoking-related diseases in the 20th century; in the next 100 years, we expect 1 billion deaths worldwide.

Captivity, Liberty, and Early American Consciousness

Captivity, Liberty, and Early American Consciousness

Legally High? Legal Considerations of Salvia divinorum

The legal status of the hallucinogenic plant Salvia divinorum has been rapidly changing. Legal prohibitions on this plant native to Oaxaca, Mexico have emerged at the state level, a phenomenon that has not occurred since the passage of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). Included will be a brief description of the plant that has only recently crept into the popular American consciousness, and a review of the different legal mechanisms through which states have controlled the plant and the pending legislation proposing controls. Lastly, the implications of various state laws are discussed.

New Books on Dying

Questions about how people die, what constitutes a “good death,” what is “natural” in death, and how death should be handled by families, religious, and medical organizations, continue to occupy a prominent place in the American consciousness. While a myriad of studies have addressed these questions, particularly since the “problem of death” gained national visibility in the 1980s, the issues remain complex and unresolved. Individuals and institutions remain deeply ambivalent about death, and that ambivalence continues to shape how people experience their own deaths and those of their loved ones in the United States. Robert A. Burt, the Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Law at Yale University, begins his recent book, Death Is That Man Taking Names: Intersections of American Medicine, Law, and Culture, arguing that American society has been, and remains “death denying.” Death is viewed fundamentally as wrong, as a logical and moral error in American society. Rather than recognizing and embracing the irrationality of death, recent reform efforts have attempted to overshadow it, he argues. As a result, efforts to increase public visibility and rationality around death have been largely unsuccessful, leading not to reform but to “new guises for public concealment” which are temporary at best and allow for the continued abuse and suffering of dying people. Individuals and institutions need to embrace the inevitability of death, Burt argues, and the ambivalence that necessarily accompanies that acceptance. Only then can decision-making structures around death be developed that amplify rather than suppress this ambivalence. Based on a complex synthesis of recent thinking in philosophy, law, and ethics, the majority of this book explores how and why Americans have not embraced ambivalence around death. Beginning with Freud’s assertion that the denial of death is a fundamental component of human cognition, Burt traces the movement of death from the home into medical institutions in the nineteenth century. He then moves between different social institutions, first exploring how thinking about death has been shaped by changing understandings of self-determination with particular reference to the Quinlan decision and the Roe v. Wade decision in the 1970s and the experiences of legal professionals involved with these and other cases. Burt then devotes considerable attention to the ways physicians experience dying patients and to the issue of physicianassisted suicide, seeing examples in each of how well intentioned physicians inflict suffering on the dying. These themes are also explored through detailed discussion of abortion and the death penalty. Burt concludes this book with the argument that “intentional, unambiguous infliction of death in any context should be rigorously avoided and socially disapproved.” When decisions about death need to be made such as in end of life situations, its essential ambivalence should be recognized, amplified and used as a lens through which to evaluate the issue or decision at hand. He sees and supports this kind of structured ambivalence in specific voting guidelines in the designation of health-care proxies and in the process of terminal sedation rather than physician Soc (2008) 45:99–101 DOI 10.1007/s12115-007-9054-4

The Making of Addiction: The 'Use and Abuse' of Opium in Nineteenth-Century Britain

In The Making of Addiction, Louise Foxcroft aims to present a social and intellectual history of the concept of addiction. Focusing on the use of opiates in nineteenth-century Britain, she argues that ‘while personal accounts reveal that opium experiences remained essentially similar, attitudes to it continued to change’ (p. 165). For Foxcroft there was a marked move away from the perception of opium use ‘as a creative sensibility and an intellectually stimulating experience’ and towards seeing it as ‘a reductive, self-destructive sickness’ (p. 167). A fundamental factor governing this shift was the development of the disease model of drug addiction. Through an examination of cultural and medical representations of opiate use, Foxcroft demonstrates that ideas about drug addiction were born out of a combination of both medical and moral concerns. For many historians of drug and alcohol use, this will be familiar ground. Indeed, one of the key problems with The Making of Addiction is that it offers few new insights into opium use in the nineteenth century. Virginia Berridge's Opium and the People (1981 and 1999), Geoffrey Harding's Opiate Addiction, Morality and Medicine (1988) and Terry Parssinen's Secret Passions, Secret Remedies (1983) all deal with the same topic. While there would still be space for another book on opium in nineteenth-century Britain (especially as much of this literature is over 20 years old), for it to be of value one would expect the author to engage with the latest historiography of drug and alcohol use. Foxcroft states that ‘there are few recent historical works that include accounts of addiction’ (p. 3) but this is simply not the case. Articles by Jessica Warner and Tim Hickman, and books such as Mariana Valverde's Diseases of the Will (1998) and Sarah W. Tracy and Caroline Acker's edited collection Altering American Consciousness (2004), all deal with the construction of addiction. Admittedly, some of these texts consider drugs other than opium (especially alcohol) and in different countries (especially the USA), but this work is important: not only for the purposes of comparison, but also because ideas about addiction moved between drugs and between nations. Whilst Foxcroft does briefly examine the relationship between alcohol and opium, this is relegated to an appendix. Integrating such a discussion into the main text would have helped readers trace the development of addiction and its attachment to different drugs and behaviours.

The President the US Needs Next?

A New Bottom Line in American society should be the primary focus of America's next president. Institutions (including corporations and governments), social practices, and even personal actions should be judged rational, efficient and productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity and behavior, kindness and generosity, non-violence and peace, and to the extent that they enhance our capacities to respond to other human beings as embodiments of the sacred, and enhance our capacities to respond to the earth and the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur of creation. Applying this focus to every aspect of American domestic and foreign policy would stimulate a spiritual revolution in American and global consciousness and open the possibility of global solidarity replacing chauvinist nationalism.

Appalachian Stereotypes and Mountain Top Removal

Saving Appalachia from absolute devastation by mining companies has, thus far, been a losing battle. Failure is wrapped up in the image of Appalachia in the public consciousness. Appalachia is a place to get away from, not a place to live. Saving Appalachia is a quest to save an ugly duckling.The duckling has been so strongly ingrained in the American consciousness that it does not matter that Appalachia houses the greatest biodiversity in North America. The cultural stereotypes of Appalachians are noticeably similar to stereotypes of other peoples whose land, natural resources, and labor have been stolen by a majority group. Historically, stereotypes have been wrapped up in efforts to dominate and oppress — to take land and resources — through dehumanizing a group and eroding their dignity. By hiding behind stereotypes and going to great lengths to hide information, the coal industry and its political supporters have embarked on an astonishing path of destruction. Mining literally plows through and under the Appalachian wilderness. When the mining operation is stopped, the structural stability of the mountain areas has been irreparably compromised. The great attack on the Appalachian Mountains continues unabated precisely because the public consciousness does not value Appalachia. Through 150 years of stereotypes, Appalachia has been rendered a place outside normal American life. The cultural image of Appalachia allows Americans to believe — falsely! — that Appalachia is ugly and therefore not worth saving.

Why High School Must Go: An Interview with Leon Botstein

Does our culture protect teens from themselves, or does it create the very irresponsibility we are trying to protect them from? Mr. Epstein believes the latter and so decided to have a conversation with someone who has been saying that for years, Leon Botstein. ********** WHENEVER THERE'S a new school shooting, journalists looking for experts dust off their copies of a book called Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture, by Leon Botstein, longtime president of Bard College and music director and conductor of the American and Jerusalem symphony orchestras. Published in 1997 and thus predating the tragedies at Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Littleton, Colorado, this rambling collection of occasional lectures seems to help explain the carnage. Botstein's views on teens are far from the mainstream. The public believes that the teen years are necessarily a time of storm and stress--a perspective etched into the American consciousness in 1904 by psychologist G. Stanley Hall in a book that defined, and perhaps even invented, modern adolescence. Teens, most people would insist, are inherently incompetent and irresponsible, desperately in need of protection and indoctrination. That's why part-time cashiering is practically the only work we let them do, and that's why we force them to attend school even if they're not ready to learn. That's also why we don't let them sign contracts, own property, start businesses, marry, drink alcohol, or smoke cigarettes--or, in some states, visit malls without chaperones, get tattoos without parental permission, use cell phones while driving, or even enter tanning salons without a physician's prescription. But Botstein says that teens are as capable as adults in many respects and that they are certainly capable of learning important and interesting things--as opposed to all that crap we learned in high school (to borrow singer Paul Simon's word, not Botstein's). High school should, in fact, Botstein says, be abolished. It demeans our young, wastes their time, traps them in the vacuous world of teen culture, turns them off to learning, and isolates them from and makes them hostile toward the very people they're about to become: adults. Botstein knows whereof he speaks. The youngest college president in American history (Franconia College, age 23), he's a living reminder of the extraordinary capabilities of young people, and Bard College has further proved the point by recently creating a thriving college for high school-age teens in New York City, as well as by taking over and running another successful college for teens, Simon's Rock College in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Jefferson's Children came to my attention in connection with survey research I was conducting with a doctoral student, Diane Dumas. We developed a wide-ranging test of adult competencies and compared the scores of adults and teens. To the surprise of many, there was little or no difference. Other research shows that teens are actually far superior to adults in some areas: memory, reasoning ability, reaction time, and sensory abilities, in particular. What's more, in countries where teens are integrated into adult society at an early age, there is no sign whatsoever of teen turmoil. Could it be, as Botstein suggested, that our culture was creating the horrendous problems of American teens--the high rates of depression, suicide, crime, drug abuse, and pregnancy--by infantilizing them? I eventually began working on a book, The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, summarizing the relevant psychological, historical, biological, and multicultural evidence to support this idea. Unfortunately, Botstein's perspective garners media attention mainly while the blood is still wet, and it's almost never considered as part of the solution. Once a crisis is over, the view that teens are needy children prevails, and the typical response is not to reconnect teens with adults, or to give them more responsibility, or to treat them with greater respect, but rather to place more powerful metal detectors in the high school doorways and more video cameras in the hallways and bathrooms--in other words, to infantilize teens even more. …

History as a Core Subject Area of African American Studies

This article examines and theorizes the function of African American history as a valuable African American Studies' core subject area by analyzing the scholarship and historical worldviews of a group of influential African American historians. Although they did not formally earn doctorates in history, at various points from the early 1960s until the mid-1980s, Malcolm X, the recently deceased Harold Cruse, Angela Davis, and Lerone Bennett, Jr., helped validate African American history as an essential core subject area of African American Studies. Challenging conventional Eurocentric notions of what the historian and history constitutes in U.S. academic culture, this article demonstrates (a) how Malcolm, Cruse, Davis, and Bennett embraced the Afrocentric view of history's function as a pragmatic tool for African American liberation and consciousness building and (b) how they provided insightful historical epistemologies, conceptualizations of African American history, and analyses of the African American experience.

Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity (review)

JAZZ STUDIES Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity. By Paul Austerlitz. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. [xxii, 260 p. ISBN 08195-6781-7. $24.95.] Videography, discography, bibliography, index. We ask lot from jazz. To some commentators, is definitive of twentieth-century Americanness, with Ralph Ellison characterizing American life as jazz-based. To others, is epitome of musical avant-garde, indeed central to the great modernist tradition in arts (Alfred Appel, Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002], 7). During Cold War, was United States' secret sonic weapon, as touring musicians helped proselytize Third World domino countries to counter perceptions of American racism (Penny von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up World: Ambassadors Play Cold War [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004]). And in music's early decades, was at once, to many young white Americans, marker of earthy, streetwise hipness, and, to some cosmopolitan urbanites in other parts of Americas, emblematic of sophisticated North American savoir faire. Paul Austerlitz seeks to thicken this well-seasoned stew further with Jazz. Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity, which takes jazz's multivalence as foundational premise. The book's somewhat portentous title accords with Austerlitz's ambitious aims. The theoretical touchstone of his project is often-cited passage from W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk that casts African Americans as gifted with double born of their status as both black and American. As Austerlitz deploys concept, however, Du Boisian doubleness is actually tripleness: is African American, American, and transnational. These discrete but overlapping layers of identity are brought into dialogue through concept of consciousness, which Austerlitz introduces as something like Weltanschauung, or as he puts it, an awareness, mind-set, worldview (p. xiii). Jazz he argues in his introduction, creates virtual space where we can confront, learn from, and even heal contradictions resulting from social rupture (p. xvi). The book's odyssey very much tracks author's own, which he describes as a scholar-musician's journey. At very early age, Finnish-born Austerlitz moved to United States, where he grew up listening to both European- and African American-influenced musics. He later became active as saxophonist, clarinetist, and bass clarinetist and was inspired by Black Nationalist politics of free movement. Austerlitz, trained as an ethnomusicologist, is also an active performer and scholar of Latin music, with several publications on popular musics from Afro-Caribbean and especially Dominican Republic, including his first book, Merengue: Dominican Music and Dominican Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997). The various thematic strands of Austerlitz's biography-Afro-diasporic musicality and musical politics, intersection of and Latin American musical styles, Finnish cultural identity, relationship between musical and academic performative spaces-parallel structure, content, and argument of Consciousness. Austerlitz outlines book's theoretical framework in his first chapter, an exploration of the larger phenomenon of North American consciousness (p. 1). The windup to this pitch is slightly plodding survey of some fairly well-trodden terrain: difficulty of denning jazz and musicians' ambivalence toward label itself; social constructedness of American and African American national identities; and creolization in United States and its consequences. Austerlitz seeks to establish that in country whose diversity has produced both social antagonism and unparalleled opportunity for cross-cultural exchange, is singular vehicle for elevation of individual and collective consciousness. …

Picturing atrocity: Photography in crisis A symposium report

Photographs of atrocities have troubled the American consciousness since 1862, when Matthew Brady displayed pictures of the Civil War in his New York gallery. The public circulation of images documenting human brutality—wars, massacres, genocide—as well as so-called ‘natural’ disasters, such as famines and hurricanes, provokes practical and ethical questions about what such images mean and accomplish, how they are chosen, which are suppressed, how they become iconic, and their short- and long-term ramifications. The symposium ‘Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis’, held at The Graduate Center of City University of New York (CUNY) on 9 December 2005, raised and addressed these questions in a day-long programme that ended with the opening of an exhibition organized by a graduate student seminar, meant to counteract some of the assumptions that atrocity images perpetuate. Organized by Geoffrey Batchen, Nancy K. Miller and Aoibheann Sweeney of CUNY Graduate Center and by Jay Prosser, University of Leeds, the event was co-sponsored by the Humanities Research Institute, University of Leeds, The Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center and The British Academy, and was held in support of Amnesty International.

The river flows on: black resistance, culture, and identity formation in early America

The River Flows On offers an impressively broad examination of slave resistance in America, spanning the colonial and antebellum eras in both the North and South and covering all forms of recalcitrance, from major revolts and rebellions to everyday acts of disobedience. Walter C. Rucker analyses American slave resistance with a keen understanding of its African influences, tracing the emergence of an African American identity and culture. Rucker points to the shared cultural heritage that facilitated collective action among both African- and American-born slaves, such as the ubiquitous belief in conjure and spiritual forces, the importance of martial dance and the drum, and ideas about the afterlife and transmigration. Focusing on the role of African cultural and sociopolitical forces, Rucker gives in-depth attention to the 1712 New York City revolt, the 1739 Stono rebellion in South Carolina, the 1741 New York conspiracy, Gabriel Prosser's 1800 Richmond slave plot, and Denmark Vesey's 1822 Charleston scheme. He concludes with Nat Turner's 1831 revolt in Southampton, Virginia, which bore the marks of both conjure and Christianity, reflecting a new, African American consciousness. With rich evidence drawn from anthropology, archaeology, and religion, The River Flows On is an innovative and convincing study.

Chinese American transnationalism: the flow of people, resources, and ideas between China and America during the exclusion era

The collection's topics (and contributors) include: changing patterns of Chinese immigration and strategies for circumventing exclusion laws (Erika Lee) Chinese trade networks that facilitated Chinese migration (Madeline Hsu) female migration, marriage, and family formation (Sucheng Chan) Chinese herbalists in America (Haiming Liu) the significance of Chinese Americans' economic ties with China (Yong Chen) Chinese American debates about ideological currents in China (Shehong Chen) the role of Chinese-language schools in the United States in promoting ethnic authenticity (Him Mark Lai) and two classic autobiographies that reflect an emerging Chinese American consciousness (Xiao-huang Yin).

Nearest thing to heaven: the Empire State Building and American dreams

This elegantly written appreciation of the Empire State Building opens up the building's richness and importance as an icon of America. The book leads us through the facts surrounding the skyscraper's conception and construction, then enters into a provocative theoretical discussion of its function as an icon, its representation in pictures, literature, and film, and the implications of its iconic status as New York's most important architectural monument to ambition and optimism. The Empire State Building literally cannot be seen in its totality, from any perspective. And paradoxically, this building of unmistakable solidity has been made invisible by familiarity and reproduction through imagery. Mark Kingwell encourages us to look beneath the strong physical presence of the building, to become aware of its evolving layers of meaning, and to see how the building lives within a unique imaginative space in the landscape of the American consciousness. He offers new ways of understanding the Empire State Building in all its complexity and surprising insights into its special role as an American icon.

El Simpático Boxer: Underpinning Chicano Masculinity with a Rhetoric of Familia in Resurrection Blvd.

This essay analyzes the representation of Chicano masculinity in the cable television show Resurrection Blvd., produced by SHOWTIME network (2000–2002). I argue that the television show renders a depiction of Chicano masculinity that is contextualized within a rhetoric of familia and conveyed through familiar mainstream archetypes. Further, Resurrection depicts Chicano masculinity as navigating through and against prevailing masculinities subsequently producing a syncretic masculinity of el simpático boxer. Ultimately, the representation of Chicano masculinity assists in inscribing Chicana/os into the American consciousness.

Tocqueville, Jansenism, and the Psychology of Freedom

In American political discourse, freedom is often spoken of in terms of its inherent rationality or divine origins and is conceptualized as nothing more than a set of concrete institutions coupled with individual rights. By way of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, I will attempt to broaden our political vocabulary by constructing a psychology of freedom. According to Tocqueville, the American consciousness is largely a product of two conflicting tendencies: Cartesian rationality and Pascalian existential angst. Out of the tensions created by the interplay of these two elements Tocqueville demonstrates that the motivations to sustain freedom, as well as the institutions and practices crucial for the maintenance of it, result from a complex psychological mixture of self‐interest, vanity, and a desire for solitude.

Creating the land of the sky: tourism and society in western North Carolina

This is a sophisticated inquiry into tourism's social and economic power across the South. In the early 19th century, planter families from South Carolina, Georgia, and eastern North Carolina left their low-country estates during the summer to relocate their households to vacation homes in the mountains of western North Carolina. Those unable to afford the expense of a second home relaxed at the hotels that emerged to meet their needs. This early tourist activity set the stage for tourism to become the region's New South industry. After 1865, the development of railroads and the burgeoning consumer culture led to the expansion of tourism across the whole region. Richard Starnes argues that western North Carolina benefited from the romanticized image of Appalachia in the post-Civil War American consciousness. This image transformed the southern highlands into an exotic travel destination, a place where both climate and culture offered visitors a myriad of diversions. This depiction was further bolstered by partnerships between state and federal agencies, local boosters, and outside developers to create the attractions necessary to lure tourists to the region. As tourism grew, so did the tension between leaders in the industry and local residents. The commodification of regional culture, low wage-tourism jobs, inflated land prices, and negative personal experiences bred no small degree of animosity among mountain residents toward visitors. Starnes's study provides a better understanding of the significant role that tourism played in shaping communities across the South.

Consuming Nostalgia: Nostalgia and the Marketplace in Cristina Garcia and Ana Menendez

her essay Eating Other, bell hooks observes that Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up dull dish that is mainstream white (21). As hooks suggests, consumerism valorizes selected aspects (e.g. cuisine, fashion, music) of cultures and populations that are otherwise marginalized. What happens when racially or ethnically identified subjects commodify their own identities? this essay, I address this question by examining representation of marketing culture in two American works: Cristina Garcia's 1997 novel The Aguero Sisters and title story from Ana Menendez's prize-winning 2001 collection Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. Both show how non-Cubans (who eat other) and Cubans themselves market, buy, and purchase American culture. my analysis, I focus on nostalgia, which is key to selling America. A corollary of exile identity that much of America has claimed, nostalgia is ubiquitous in American literature. Nostalgia appears in widely acclaimed writing of Garcia and Menendez, as well as in work of other well-known 1.5 generation (Perez-Firmat 2) authors (1) such as Oscar Hijuelos, Achy Obejas, Gustavo Perez-Firmat, Zoe Valdes, and others. However, few works of diaspora have addressed specific issue of commodified nostalgia. Garcia and Menendez recognize that because nostalgia is central to American consciousness, it is important to examine all its aspects, including its commodified forms. I show how in The Aguero Sisters and in In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, authors created unique characters, who struggle both with an overpowering sense of nostalgia and with its transformation into a consumer product. Scholars of contemporary culture have critiqued nostalgia's role in perpetuating a consumer culture built on excessively idealizing and politically conservative visions of past (Appadurai, Jameson, Stewart). For critics, past that is used to sell products (e.g. in Currier and Ives commercials) is often manufactured (Appadurai), that is, not based on experience, and yet evokes longing for perfection of the old days. Other observers, such as Marilyn Halter in Shopping .for Identity. Marketing of Ethnicity, have also suggested that consumers now assume or assert ethnicity and identity through commodities that they buy. Nostalgia is central to identity-for-purchase because it manufactures collective history as a bygone, ideal experience of everyday life, community, landscape, and heritage, to which consumer presumably wants to return. The longing for is implied in very term nostalgia: a seventeenth-century doctor sutured words nostos (return home) and algia (pain) to describe extreme forms of homesickness exhibited by mercenaries on duty away from home (Davis, Yearning 1). contemporary times, return to place or past ways of life may be impossible or inconvenient. As a result, need for strong cultural identities is fulfilled through purchase of foods, clothes, crafts, travels et al., which are marketed through nostalgic discourses. I argue in this essay that although Garcia and Menendez treat such marketing and purchasing of collective history critically, they do not dismiss nostalgia as a whole. For Garcia and Menendez, nostalgia does not solely enable sale of identities and preservation of conservative politics. Nor is nostalgia simply what one critic called Cuban America's most profound psychic addiction (Ortiz 73). The authors take care to validate loss, mourning, and suffering evoked in original definition of nostalgia. What they oppose are stale, stultifying forms of nostalgia that serve consumerism and dominant exile politics. The characters in novel and short story experience collective nostalgia in ambiguous and conflicted ways. While disbelieving idealizing certainties of politicized and marketed nostalgia, they cannot help but be enveloped by nostalgic link to past. …

"Brown" in Fayetteville: Peaceful Southern School Desegregation in 1954

with its decision in brown v. board of education (1954), the United States Supreme Court demanded complete overhaul of the public education system in the South and brought racial segregation to the forefront of the nation's consciousness and conscience. The American public, white and black, could no longer avoid the issue or simply dismiss school segregation as the inevitable product of culture or tradition. Many Americans, seeing the gains African Americans had already made (e.g., blacks voted in many places and both the military and professional sports were integrated), hoped school desegregation would meet with similar success. But, aided by the Court's passivity in Brown II, segregationists began campaign to fight desegregation. Ten of the eleven former Confederate states passed legislation allowing or (in the case of Mississippi) forcing districts to maintain segregated schools. Seven states passed laws withholding funds from integrated schools. This resistance was fiercest in the Deep South, but states such as Florida and Arkansas were not immune.1 There is more to the story than massive resistance, however. While images of angry mobs in Little Rock and New Orleans cemented themselves in the American consciousness, desegregation had largely unnoticed pockets of success-even in the months immediately following Brown. Fayetteville, Arkansas, was one such place. Within week following Brown, Fayetteville announced its intention to desegregate, and, three months later, white and black students were attending the same local high school together. Fayetteville's experience shows that historians must take more comprehensive approach to southern school desegregation, recognizing the quiet dignity that sometimes marked the process. Fayetteville was no racial Utopia, but the town successfully dealt with the most explosive racial issue of the twentieth century. Its experience is instructive in suggesting important ingredients of successful school integration-namely lack of excessive preexisting racial tension coupled with firm local leadership. At the time the Court handed down Brown, Arkansas, like the rest of the former Confederacy, had completely segregated elementary and secondary schools. But separate did not mean equal. The state spent $102.25 per capita on white students but just $67.75 on each black student. Yet Gov. Francis Cherry announced that the state would obey the Court, noting that Arkansas had better race relations than many other southern states. The Arkansas Democrat reported that public reaction to the decision indicated concern but no alarm.2 The newspaper clearly disagreed with the Court's ruling (Trying to alter social pattern by law before custom makes way for change has always seemed unwise to us), but also denounced defiance, stating, Surely, we can reach common understanding without friction in order to preserve all the education and social gains that have been made.3 The Arkansas Gazette editorialized that Brown required a sober reappraisal of the manner in which we have lived up to our long-accepted obligation to provide adequate educational opportunity for all our children .... Once again, we are faced with great time of testing, but we are confident Arkansas will meet the future with good heart and good will.4 Leaders of both races were cautiously optimistic that if addressed locally and gradually, desegregation could occur without major incident. The state's brief to the Supreme Court, submitted in November 1954, advocated gradual integration, arguing that immediate action could have disastrous effects on Arkansas schools.5 Yet by the time the brief was filed, Arkansas had already begun to desegregate its schools. Within few days of the Supreme Court's May 1954 announcement of Brown, three Arkansas school systems, including Fayetteville, had announced plans for desegregation, and fourth moved ahead without making its intentions public. The Arkansas School for the Blind and the Deaf only planned to desegregate'those classes it did not currently offer to black students, fact that, combined with the non-traditional status of the school, muted any potential protest. …

Members of the Tribe: Jewish-Amerindian Theory and the Making of a Modern American Consciousness

This paper examines how seventeenth century Jewish-Indian theory may have contributed to later forms of racial representation in America. The belief that the Amerindians were of Israelite origin had been in circulation since the late fifteenth century. However, only in the seventeenth century did this claim develop into a full-fledged social and political phenomenon. While most of the critical discussions of Jewish-Indian racial theories have related to the Lost Tribe theory, I would rather focus on the role these earlier texts played in scripting later cultural forms of identity and how they impacted later American traditions of perceiving the other. I argue that these texts prefigure a larger, more complex symbolic tradition in American cultural forms. These texts initiate a system of otherness, using rhetorical techniques of simultaneous appropriation and disassociation with the other that are manifested in later traditions such as blackface and minstrelsy in the United States. This paper, however, will focus on the period of nativist America (mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century), and how this era uncannily echoes the Puritan sentiments asserted in the Jewish-Indian theory. Although appropriation of the Indian prevailed throughout American letters, these two periods feature a similar racial configuration of Anglo-American, Indian and Jew. However, an intriguing reversal occurs: as the English Puritans distanced themselves from the Indians through the figure of the Jew, in contrast, the nativists separated themselves from the immigrants, as represented by the Jew, through the figure of the Indian.