American Past Research Articles

A COVID-19 Memoir: Using the Co-Occupation of Crafting and Spirituality to Promote Health and Wellness in the United States.

The occupational therapist authors explored the evolution of co-occupation during their experiences of social distancing related to the COVID-19 pandemic and times of ongoing civil unrest. The research method used is auto-ethnography to describe and analyze their personal experiences juxtaposed with their cultural experiences. The authors, one white and one African American shared a desire to promote emotional and spiritual wellness during isolation, healthcare disparities, and social unrest. This collaboration led to a creative partnership aimed at promoting health and wellness for both themselves and sectors of their local African American spiritual community. Through designing, creating, giving, and receiving cycles, they worked cooperatively to interweave craftwork with social ministry. Intrigued by the traditions of African kente cloth, they designed and carried out a handwoven kente-style liturgical stole ministry focused on encouraging African American pastors who experienced difficulty engaging in their usual worship and fellowship, which serves as their respite from civil unrest and providing comfort during illness and death.

“Goodbye, Americana, Hello Real Time”: The Death of Idealism in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral

“Goodbye, Americana, Hello Real Time”: The Death of Idealism in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. Philip Roth’s 1997 American Pastoral is a textbook illustration of failed cultural transmission: the transference and transformation of values, idea(l)s and information in the lives of Seymour Levov, his family, his community prove to be governed by loss, misrepresentation and gradual decline into disorder. Far from delivering the romanticized version of life in the Jewish neighborhood that the title implies, the novel captures a disenchanted Americana, wherein idealism and radicalism clash against the background of the ideologically fractured 1960s. While ‘the Swede’ apparently initially embodies the (super)hero, middle-class American Dream, American Pastoral chronicles America’s evolution after World War II, which is captured as a mixture of convention and rebellion, both stemming from clashing political ideologies. This paper examines the book’s polarizing discourses, keeping an emblematic passage in mind: “Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.” Keywords: Americana, community, discourse, ideology, identity, myth, trauma

Curating the American Past: A Memoir of a Quarter Century at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History

Curating the American Past: A Memoir of a Quarter Century at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History

The Most Iniquitous Lobby: The Committee for Constitutional Government and the Shaping of American Politics, 1937–1955

AbstractThis article examines the Committee for Constitutional Government, a conservative organization that spearheaded a novel form of mass-based mobilization and direct-mail propaganda to counter New Deal reforms from 1937 to the late 1950s. I argue that the members of the committee offered a supple and variegated response to New Deal liberalism, one with deep roots in the American past. Organizationally, the committee differed from other conservative groups of the period in the vastly greater reach of its propaganda, the small-donor financial base of its operations, and its extensive cultivation of a grassroots movement committed to right-wing reform. The committee was a critical political actor from 1937 to 1955, systematically shaping legislation and countering the trend toward social democracy in America. The ultimate result of its campaigns was to retard the growth of the administrative state and help formulate a cogent conservative critique of reformist liberalism.

(Indoctri)Nation: Duty, Disruption, Disintegration in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral

(Indoctri)Nation: Duty, Disruption, Disintegration in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral

The West Wing: a fictitious dramatization of American idealism

The aim of this article is to investigate the reasons behind the origins of the ideal American society and its embodiment in the television series The West Wing. To this end, the factors that led to the success of the series will be explored, at the precise moment when the public’s viewing habits began to change, as they started demanding more complex and ambiguous dramatic characters. In this context, the article examines the way in which Aaron Sorkin, the creator of the series, approached the writing of the episodes, avoiding overly naive idealism without renouncing the aim of building bridges with the foundations of the American past. The study analyses the most important plots of the first four seasons and their links to the society that emerged in the New World. Despite the problems inherent in such an undertaking, the conclusions show how Sorkin’s dramatic skills managed to dramatize idealism in order to bring the series closer to 21st century audiences, avoiding the cynicism that was starting to take hold in society at that moment, yet at the same time adapting the conflicts of the plot to the level of complexity required by the audience. Moreover, the prestige of the series has outlived the years in which it was produced, as it is still viewed today, at a time when the innocent point of view has decisively disappeared. Among the findings of the study, one interesting fact is that the fictional president, Josiah Bartlet, was given the name of a senator who actually signed the Declaration of Independence.

The (New) American Political Tradition

The year 2023 marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It—a bestselling book that captured the imagination of many of Hofstadter's fellow Americans in the early postwar period and, at the same time, defined the terms of argument for much of academic history for the next generation.1 It was also the book my high school teacher, Mr. Backfish, assigned in eleventh-grade Advanced Placement (AP) American History that helped transform me into a historian. So different was it from the dry, conventional textbook in both its riveting, sometimes acerbic prose and its unsentimental view of venerated figures in the American past. I still have my original copy (Figure 1).

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

Abraham Maslow’s Notion of Self- Actualization in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral

This article makes the argument more specifically on the humanistic psychology; a vibrant movement of the late 1950s; emphasizing the qualities, growth, need, creativity, and motivation of an individual. Philip Roth’s American Pastoral was an American classic, a novel of 
 American culture. It is not only a biography, but an intensive interpretation of the fall of American dream. The author demonstrates the American Pastoral from the humanistic point of view. This paper attempts to analyse the humanistic attitudes and values in the novel American Pastoral. The process from the basic to the being needs in the novel is being critically expressed within the framework of the humanistic psychology.

The Winds of Minidoka: Preserving the Japanese American Past

The Winds of Minidoka: Preserving the Japanese American Past

Anticipation and Divination of Technological Culture: Dialectic Images of the Internet in Emerson’s Nature

The article presents certain aspects of the Internet (interface design, user behavior, advertising, codes of conduct) as new incarnations of the American pastoralism, defined in terms derived from literary criticism and history of American literature. The rationale of this procedure is provided in terms of “dialectic images,” which are old pieces of imagery that seem to anticipate subsequent technological and social developments. Of particular importance is the set of dialectical images derived from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings, and the pastoral descriptions of nature derived from various American poets and fiction writers. Arguably, dialectic images of the Internet offer an opportunity for a better understanding of contemporary development of the Internet, and its possible future.

Machines in the Garden: De-Gothicizing the American Pastoral in Tales from the Loop

The television series Tales from the Loop, released in 2022, launches an ambitious attempt to revise the traditional gothic iconography of the violent intrusion of technology into pastoral spaces. Mapping out a spatially and temporally defamiliarized county in the American Midwest, home to an enigmatic high-tech research facility nicknamed The Loop, the series employs an idiosyncratic visual style and a narrative strategy inspired by high modernist fiction designed to foreclose specific thematic options. To the degree that these options provide the foundation for the polarized political discourses, in which the Rustbelt States of the American Midwest are currently framed in terms of right-wing nostalgia or neoliberal techno-optimism, the series’s uniquely creative illustration of Leo Marx’s evocative metaphor of the “machine in the garden” suggests ways of reframing that larger political discourse.

«ЛИЧНАЯ ДРАМА, ОПРЕДЕЛЕННАЯ ИСТОРИЕЙ»: ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННЫЙ МЕТОД Ф. РОТА В РОМАНЕ «АМЕРИКАНСКАЯ ПАСТОРАЛЬ»

The article analyzes the implementation of Philip Roth’s (1933–2018) artistic method in the novel “American Pastoral”, which connects the historical events with a personal family drama and problematizes the Jewish identity in diaspora. The analysis shows that several key events from the history of the United States (the second half of the 20th century) were used as a conceptual basis for narrative structure and for the set of characters. World War II, the Vietnam War, which Roth had not previously discussed in a comprehensive manner, the 1967 Newark riots, and the Watergate scandal turn out to be not a panoramic background, but a dynamic force. References to the events help the narrator – Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s alter ego – form a non-linear plot: the large-scale events are to center each part of the novel and determine the nature of the period and the characters. The protagonist of the novel is Seymour “The Swede” Levov, an entrepreneur, a veteran of World War II, the embodiment of the American dream, symbolizing good old America during the times of economic growth. Seymour's pastoral life is destroyed by the inevitability of historical process that intrudes the family idyll: a terrorist attack committed by Seymour's daughter Meredith in support of the Vietnamese people “returns the war” to Lyndon Johnson and breaks the family ties. Attempts to find the root of evil retrospectively lead Seymour and Zuckerman to the idea of the cruelty of American history and the atomic nature of society. The ongoing dialogue between Jewish and American cultures is represented by the images of Seymour and Merry as both, individualized and collective images, actors of history who (re)shape the American dream.

Instances of fame in postmodern fictional works an analysis based on Philip Roth’s and Marin Preda’s novels

This article will discuss multiple instances of fame in postmodern fictional works. The authors chosen are Philip Roth, the American author well known for works such as “I Married a Communist”, “The Human Stain”, “The Dying Animal” etc. and Marin Preda, the Romanian author who wrote “The Moromete Family”, “The Intruder”, “The Delirium”. The novels representing the postmodern literary current in this article “merican Pastoral (1997)” and “The Most Beloved of Earthlings (1980)”. Through a close analysis of the main characters and the most important events in the novel, the theme of fame will be observed in multiple instances such as the historical point of view, the sociological point of view, the psychological point of view. The first part of the article will introduce the reader to Philip Roth and one of his most famous novels “American Pastoral” in which the theme of fame suffers a metamorphosis because of the events that take place in the novel and therefore affect the main character. In this part the concept of deconstruction will be observed and conceptualized with examples from the novel, the depiction of the utopic world through the American dream, and finally, the transformation of this world into a dystopian one because of the social issues presented in the novel. The social issues presented are related to true historical events which took place in the 1960’s in America. These events are also represented in the micro universe of the main character through the family problems of the main character. The second part of the article will focus on a comparison between the main characters of the novels stated above, Seymour Levov respectively Victor Petrini. This comparison is based on the analysis of their physical and behavioral characteristics and finally, some significant events they are part of. In this section, the concept of dandy will be discussed, and relevant examples will be given to demonstrate that both have traits in this direction. This article aims to prove that the theme of fame in postmodern fictional works is a topic worth studying. It brings new viewpoints upon the American and Romanian postmodern works because of the complexity and multiplicity of concepts that come into its construction. Also, I intend to demonstrate how certain social issues, such as the impact of totalitarian regimes on society, influenced the writers to create works in which the effect of these problems is visible on successful people. The theme of fame in postmodern fictional works in these two novels encompasses myths and literary concepts, creating the impression of the perfect world for the perfect celebrity. Finally, the authors chose to transform everything into chaos and destroy this seducing illusion, converting fame into disgrace.

Review: Curating the American Past: A Memoir of a Quarter Century at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, by Pete Daniel

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: Curating the American Past: A Memoir of a Quarter Century at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, by Pete Daniel Curating the American Past: A Memoir of a Quarter Century at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History by Pete Daniel. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2022. 260 pp.; 75 images; clothbound, $16.46; eBook, $13.17. Marla R. Miller Marla R. Miller University of Massachusetts Amherst Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2023) 45 (2): 141–143. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2023.45.2.141 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Marla R. Miller; Review: Curating the American Past: A Memoir of a Quarter Century at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, by Pete Daniel. The Public Historian 1 May 2023; 45 (2): 141–143. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2023.45.2.141 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search Pete Daniel is well known to many public historians as the first practicing museum professional to serve as president of the Organization of American Historians (2008–9; he also had been the first curator to serve in the same role for the Southern Historical Association, in 2005-6). By that time Daniel had spent more than twenty-five years as a curator at the National Museum of American History (NMAH), and so his election signaled for many a real sense of public history’s “arrival.” An award-winning historian of the rural south, Daniel has also authored several monographs on a wide range of subjects rooted in southern, labor, and agricultural history, including his powerful study Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Curating the American Past is also a work of labor history—an account of tensions between bosses and workers, contexts... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Immigrant Superpower: How Brains, Brawn, and Bravery Make America Stronger by Tim Kane

In 1951, Handlin began his Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, The Uprooted, by centering the role of immigration in the history of the United States: “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”1 Kane now makes an equally bold claim in The Immigrant Superpower, contending that the greatness and prosperity characterizing the American past and present are the products of immigration more than of any other factors.The subtitle of Kane’s volume was chosen with far more than alliteration in mind. In Kane’s view, newcomers’ “brawn” yielded economic dividends derived from their labor. Their “bravery” translated into patriotism and contributed to the military strength and security of the United States, and their “brains” fueled the innovation that has made the United States a model for every nation aspiring to world leadership.Kane’s book is a history but also unabashedly a work of advocacy. Conservative politically, Kane does not hesitate to criticize those Republicans, including Donald Trump, who push for a restrictive approach to immigration. Kane views immigration as an essential ingredient in preserving this country’s dominant place in the world order. He views immigration as both “central to American identity” and a “force multiplier,” essential to the grand strategy that today makes the United States “a dominant superpower,” capable of fending off foreign threats such as a “technologically surging China” (7, 10). Although seasoned with colorful anecdotes, Kane’s evidence is grounded in a carefully constructed quantitative analysis of economic data. What emerges is a portrait of how immigrants have enriched the United States with a “demographic vibrancy” expressed in their physical strength and vitality, their commitment to serving their country patriotically in the military, and the brainpower they contributed to their adopted home, evidenced by the number of patents acquired, companies started, and prestigious awards won in science and medicine (11).According to Kane, immigration advocacy has also proven to be the key to political success for American presidents. He counts Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Wilson, Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan, and George W. Bush as successful presidents because they advocated opening America’s doors to the foreign-born, while rejecting the criticisms of nativists. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency is clearly not among Kane’s favorites. Kane reminds readers of President Roosevelt’s “shameful turning away of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution” (66). In contrast, he praises President Truman who “encouraged the country to ‘fulfill our responsibilities to these suffering and homeless refugees of all faiths’” (90).Kane finds immigration advantageous at both the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels of analysis. His microeconomic perspective on immigration suggests that the local impact of immigration on the job market is mixed and not nearly as disruptive to less privileged Americans as some critics, such as Borjas, have sometimes claimed.2 He finds the macroeconomic effect of immigration even more positive because in an open economy immigration contributes to efficiency and productivity.Kane also addresses critics who charge that newcomers from abroad pose a threat to the culture of the American people. Nativists see in the nation’s increasing cultural diversity a threat best neutralized by exclusion. Kane, however, sees cultural diversity as an American strength that was present from the earliest days of the country’s history. He deplores the contemporary conflating of immigration and racial-identity politics, focusing instead upon “the common unity of ideas embodied in [the United States’] founding documents,” such as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (13).At times, Kane’s pro-immigration argument seems unrelentingly positive. His focus on the long-term benefits of immigration causes him to pay scant attention to its short-term burdens on local communities. Therefore, he does not adequately address immigration reform from the perspective of redistributing the immediate costs of settling newcomers into homes, jobs, and schools.Kane’s abundant evidence in support of immigration’s importance in shaping America’s strength and prosperity throughout its history fuels a persuasive argument that will engage scholars in think tanks and classrooms. It will also stoke the fire of an already heated contemporary debate about current policies.

The 1619 Project Forum

Why has the American Historical Review commissioned nineteen scholars to review the 1619 Project? There is no precedent in the history of the journal for a review forum of this scope and magnitude. Without question, the 1619 Project has become a very public flash point within academic and public debates centered on the work history does in the world. Its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, won a Pulitzer Prize for her lead essay that opened the project in an August 14, 2019, special issue of the New York Times Magazine.1 And some historians of the United States credited the 1619 Project with opening up new ways of looking at the American past and with helping to give the work of academic historians on slavery a broader audience. But many specialists in early American and antebellum history offered sharp criticism of the project for what they termed interpretive overreach and factual slippage. “Was slavery really the salient cause of the American Revolution?” some of them asked. For other American historians, the 1619 Project did not go far enough in its efforts to reconceptualize the larger meanings of the Black experience in North America.

Legacies of the Past and the American Family: Sam Shepard’s True West and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog /Underdog

Isolation from societal and historical continuity ingrained in American thought and culture has resulted in an unprecedented economic growth, creativity, and flexibility in all facets of American life. Paradoxically, a constant search for an American past—generated by the lack of a common history—also prevails in American culture and these mutually exclusive trends lead to a sense of “rootlessness, loss of connections, and anxiety about identity” (Menides 607). American literary expressiveness appears to reflect these opposing views on history as well as the impact these attitudes exert on the (in)stability of the American character. Viewed from the “classic” period of American literature a variety of responses were generated by the literary culture. American writers’ approaches to history range from evident separation from the constraints and restraints of history and tradition (Emerson, Thoreau) through creating romanticized versions of the American past (Cooper, Longfellow) to the search of a “usable past”2 (Eliot, Pound) that would explain the causes and impinge on the way how Americans exist in the present (Menides 607).

In Medias Res

In Medias Res Ross Berger (bio) EAST COAST CONNECTION I grew up in a rural suburb of Hartford, Connecticut, about 35 miles away from Philip Roth's home in Warren. Charlotte Hungerford, in nearby Torrington, served as Roth's hospital for standard care for a better part of four decades. I was born there in the 1970s. Warren is located in Litchfield County, the northwest section of Connecticut, known for its remote beauty and two-hour drive to Manhattan. The latter, along with the area's woodsy calm, is why it has been a popular residential destination for many luminaries in the performing arts and literature, including Meryl Streep, Mia Farrow, Arthur Miller, William Styron, and Terrence McNally. Roth's name would be included among this list when proud Litchfield County residents rattled off its bona fides: "Bucolic and peaceful…" "Home to the first American law school…" "Plenty of celebs including…" I never once saw Philip Roth when I set foot in Litchfield County, and believe me, I was on the lookout in my early twenties whenever I was on break from college or grad school. But he was a man who protected his privacy dearly, so I tempered my expectations—eliminated them actually, as I was accustomed to doing (more about this later). I'd like to think I spotted him in person one Saturday evening in July 2000, among an exodus of participants of Midsummer Night Swing, a weekly summer-long "outdoor dance party" at Lincoln Center. The glut of people around me made it impossible to verify. Perhaps it was a random accountant who bore a resemblance to the great author. Or maybe it was Moishe Pipik, Roth's fictional doppelgänger from Operation: Shylock. Or maybe—no: likely—it was just wishful thinking. For a couple of years after that evening, I had tried to draw connections to Roth any way that I could, but to no avail. I didn't know anyone who went to Bucknell or University of Chicago in or around the time he did. And I had no publishing network to speak of. [End Page 119] The closest I got, which is not close at all, is my New Jersey story—a slight echo of American Pastoral through my mother, a native of Trenton. Her brother, my uncle, was a high school athletic star and war veteran just like American Pastoral's Swede Levov, who once hailed from a city bigger than Trenton—Newark. My uncle was slightly younger and served not in Korea like the Swede, but in a different conflict in the Pacific (Vietnam). Both were Jewish, physical, mythic. Both married non-Jews. Both could assimilate in either Jewish or gentile crowds, and, in either, be idolized and accepted as one of their own. Alas, these details are not unique or special in America's most populated state per square foot. It's just that American Pastoral is a deeply relatable fiction. If I must admit the obvious, my true connection to Roth has been as a reader. In this role, I found consolation as a student dealing with the long aftermath of a family tragedy and, once more, as a young writer in need of basic guidance. During each of these times, Roth served as a comforting sage-on-the-page, whose words were radar through the fog of trauma. WORDS OF HEALING I came to Roth's work after an on-again-off-again journey of reading Saul Bellow in my mid-to-late teenage years. It started when I studied Henderson the Rain King for a term paper in my tenth grade American Literature class. From a list of authors typed likely on an IBM Selectric (this was 1992, mind you, well past the era of the typewriter), I chose Bellow because of two descriptors next to his name: "Jewish" and "Nobel Prize-winning." (Admittedly, the former was the bigger enticement after months of reading nineteenth-century works with strong Christian overtones and Lost Generation novels rife with anti-Semitism.) I did not take to Henderson the Rain King. Finding it too tame and, at times, culturally exploitative, I moved on to Dangling Man and Seize the...

Shaping Swede Levov: The Myth of American Adam and Narrative Distance in Phillip Roth's American Pastoral

Shaping Swede Levov: The Myth of American Adam and Narrative Distance in Phillip Roth's American Pastoral