American Past Research Articles

Of Subjects and "Savages"

Of Subjects and "Savages" Angela Pulley Hudson (bio) Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 384 pp. 16 b/w illustrations, appendices, notes, and index. $35.00. Quite a few books have appeared over the past two decades dealing with enterprising-but-often-marginal individuals who used performances of identity and authority to access power, privilege, or wealth in the American past. Many of these people attained some level of fame or have received sustained attention from subsequent generations of scholars, despite their frequently obscure and underprivileged origins. The newest entry in this catalog of "slippery characters," as literary scholar Laura Browder termed them, is Jenny Hale Pulsipher's Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England. Taking as her subject the little-known figure of John Wompas (alias White), a 17th-century Nipmuc man, Pulsipher has produced an elegant and revealing microhistorical study that tells us as much or more about the English empire in Native North America as it does about the crafty individual at its center. While we might quibble with the author about whether Wompas was, in fact, an "ordinary Indian" (p. 7), given his central role in a startling number of land transactions and legal maneuvers in New England and Old England, we can certainly appreciate that his life and legacies have been largely ignored or misunderstood. And through her careful analysis, Pulsipher offers a clear and compelling portrait of a man who was "at the heart" of Indian land sales but simultaneously appears to have played a key role in "preserving his homeland" (p. 6). She argues that although his strategic use of both "Native and English political and legal structures" benefitted him personally, he also deftly maneuvered to preserve Native lands in Native hands. Through Pulsipher's detailed reconstruction, based on what must have been maddeningly fragmentary records, we learn that John Wompas was born around 1637 to Nipmuc parents from the town of Hassanamesit. His mother and father were early converts to Christianity and took pains to ensure that their children would receive religious and educational instruction from area [End Page 179] missionaries. Despite the paucity of sources on Wompas's early life, Pulsipher has managed to present a robust picture of the place and time by focusing on parallel experiences among "praying Indians" in the region. Though both his parents died during his childhood, Pulsipher shows that their choice to position Wompas nearer to English missionaries and colonial officials would have an outsized impact on his later life. Beyond her thoughtful signposting, the author also foreshadows a pattern of behavior that features prominently in Wompas's subsequent land-dealing strategies. Pulsipher describes his mother's deathbed prophesying as a deployment of "a Native pattern" for a "Christian purpose" (p. 27). This sort of deliberately cross-cultural strategy of communication would come to define John Wompas's approach to legal status and land claims. After taking up residence with a white family in Roxbury, Massachusetts following his parents' death, Wompas had what appears to have been both an ordinary and an extraordinary adolescence and young adulthood. On the one hand, in comparison to other Indigenous youth who were not so centrally situated within the world of English Christianity, Wompas's immersion in the colonial communities of Roxbury and then Cambridge was quite outside the norm. On the other hand, as a Native servant in an English household, viewed as an object of pity and charity who lacked power and status, Wompas was not unlike the hundreds, if not thousands, of Indigenous people who lived in some form of bondage within English colonial society. One of his peers lived just across the Roxbury town green. She was a Mahican-speaking war captive named Ann Prask and in time she became his wife and an important source of land. Pulsipher works hard to situate the two in space, time, and society, demonstrating the stark differences in how they came to Roxbury while also revealing how similarly they were regarded by the...

Results of ALIVE: A Faith-Based Pilot Intervention to Improve Diet Among African American Church Members

Results of ALIVE: A Faith-Based Pilot Intervention to Improve Diet Among African American Church Members Elizabeth Lynch, PhD, Erin Emery-Tiburcio, PhD, Sheila Dugan, MD, Francine Stark White, MDiv, Clayton Thomason, JD, LaDawne Jenkins, MA, Catherine Feit, Elizabeth Avery-Mamer, MA, Yamin Wang, MA, Laurin Mack, PhD, and Alan Ragland, DMin What Is the Purpose of This Study? • The ALIVE intervention is a church-based dietary intervention to increase vegetable consumption among African American church members that was designed by a partnership between researchers, African American pastors, and church leaders in the Chicagoland area. • The ALIVE intervention reflected local community knowledge and values because it was designed and delivered by pastors and church members using a community-based participatory research approach. • The ALIVE study measured the feasibility of implementing and evaluating the ALIVE intervention. What Is the Problem? • African Americans have a higher prevalence of cardiovascular disease than other racial groups. Improving diet in African Americans could reduce this disparity. • Dietary interventions have been less successful with African Americans than other subgroups possibly owing to insufficient cultural tailoring and skepticism about medical research among African Americans. • A promising cultural tailoring strategy is to conduct interventions in the trusted setting of the Black church. A number of dietary interventions have been conducted in Black churches and many have resulted in increased vegetable consumption but few have been designed and/or conducted in partnership with church community members. • A community-based participatory approach to intervention development and implementation has the potential to increase church member engagement and intervention effectiveness. What Are the Findings? • The ALIVE intervention resulted in a mean increase of one vegetable serving over 9 months as well as improvements in total diet quality and reductions in weight and blood pressure. • ALIVE was successfully adapted to a range of church settings. Who Should Care Most? • African American congregations. • Health professionals. • Researchers and community members interested in reducing health disparities. [End Page 3] Recommendations for Action • Health disparity researchers should use a community-based participatory research approach to develop culturally tailored interventions to improve health equity. • Programs aimed at reducing health disparities and promoting wellness should leverage preexisting social structures and values within subgroups to promote education and motivation for health behavior change. [End Page 4] Elizabeth Lynch Department of Preventive Medicine, Rush University Medical Center Erin Emery-Tiburcio Department of Behavioral Sciences, Rush University Medical Center Sheila Dugan Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Rush University Medical Center Francine Stark White Third Baptist Church of Chicago Clayton Thomason Department of Preventive Medicine, Rush University Medical Center LaDawne Jenkins Department of Preventive Medicine, Rush University Medical Center Catherine Feit Department of Preventive Medicine, Rush University Medical Center Elizabeth Avery-Mamer Department of Preventive Medicine, Rush University Medical Center Yamin Wang Department of Preventive Medicine, Rush University Medical Center Laurin Mack Department of Behavioral Sciences, Rush University Medical Center Alan Ragland Third Baptist Church of Chicago Copyright © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press

Bringing (The History of) Capitalism Back In

Bringing (The History of) Capitalism Back In Noam Maggor (bio) Bhu Srinivasan. Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism. New York: Penguin Press, 2017. 576 pp. $30.00. Peter Kolozi. Conservatives Against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. 264 pp. $60.00. Harry S. Stout. American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism. New York, Basic Books, 2017. 432 pp. $32.00. William J. Novak and Naomi R. Lamoreaux. Corporations and American Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. 528 pp. $35.00. Ten years after the financial crisis that announced the arrival of the "history of capitalism," the impact of this new scholarship remains uneven. "Capitalism" has certainly caught on as a focal point of debate, generating a steady stream of monographs, edited collections, conferences, manifestos, and critical assessments. This lively debate, however, has failed to crystalize any methodological consensus. It has also struggled to broaden the scope of inquiry beyond a few, and mostly U.S.-centered, topics. The effort to foster a broad conversation that would bring together scholars from separate fields and backgrounds, at least thus far, seems to have generated more friction than cooperation. The four works under consideration here, hailing from the subfields of business history, intellectual history, social history, and legal history (or history of the state), demonstrate why continued fragmentation is deeply unfortunate. Each one of the books offers insights from the vantage point of a well-defined subfield. Each exploration brings attention to a neglected topic, deepening and complicating our historical understanding of the American political economy. As works in discrete areas of study, however, the books are nevertheless powerless to more fundamentally dislodge traditional meta-narratives and analytical frameworks. They demonstrate why the pursuit of greater synthesis—of the type historians of capitalism have called for—remains a worthwhile goal. [End Page 140] Bhu Srinivasan's Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism, the least scholarly of the four books, is also most symptomatic of the tendency to use the history of capitalism as a new bottle for very old wine. A tech entrepreneur-turned-author, Srinivasan is an informed and lively narrator. He builds on work in business history to offer a fast-clipped narrative, moving through thirty-five "Next Big Things," from the Virginia Company, through Standard Oil and Henry Ford, to Apple and Facebook. As with many popular histories, the past in this account is emphatically not a foreign country. With terms drawn from the corporate world, capitalism is insinuated into American history as folklore, hence the book's title. The Virginia Company, we are told, was formed via "adventure capital" and had "an unlimited upside" (pp. 6–7). Slaves in the antebellum South were "the single most valuable asset class in America" (p. 126). Federal regulation under Theodore Roosevelt was not anti-business but merely helped "correct for excesses" in the market (p. 275). Capitalism in the U.S., in this rendition, did not emerge over time but has been integral to American society from its inception. All major pivots or collisions in this history are subsumed under a relentless but ultimately benign process of invention and reinvention. The dark chapters—racial slavery, violent labor conflict, residential segregation—are not ignored, but neither are they allowed to cast more than a passing shadow on the overall arc of progress. The result typifies the sensibility of what Nancy Fraser has called progressive neoliberalism: forward-looking, pragmatic, and optimistic about markets. It tells an exceptionally American story of how entrepreneurs, with the helping hand of government (always in a supporting role), transformed the world time and time again. The only real enemy, it proposes, has been misguided dogmatism of any sort, of the libertarian or the socialist variety. That Srinivasan so easily and unproblematically assimilates capitalism into the American past suggests that political economy and cultural methods have not yet made their way into the core of business history, despite considerable efforts to this effect in recent years. The notion that capitalism has always been as American as apple pie, not a historically specific and controversial formation, remains firmly in place. The attempt to rethink U...

Living History: Encountering the Recent Asian American Past

Living History: Encountering the Recent Asian American Past

Curating America: Journeys through Storyscapes of the American Past

Curating America: Journeys through Storyscapes of the American Past

Tariff-Based Disputes Continue to Characterize Trump Administration Trade Policies

Over the summer of 2018, trade relations between the United States and many of its trading partners continued to be marked by tensions. The United States and China ratcheted up their use of tariffs against each other. The United States both received and initiated requests for consultation with various countries at the World Trade Organization (WTO) related to its earlier steel and aluminum tariffs and to tariffs imposed in response by other countries. President Trump has continued to pursue the possibility of further tariffs, including with respect to automobile and uranium imports. The United States also escalated trade tensions with Turkey through various measures, explicitly linking some of these measures to Turkey's detainment of an American pastor. Despite the broader theme of tensions, negotiations have proved productive between the United States and two of its major trading partners—the European Union and Mexico—paving a way for future settlements. With the European Union, the Trump administration has reached a tentative understanding and agreed not to impose new tariffs while the parties negotiate toward finalizing this understanding. As to Mexico, in late August 2018 the Trump administration announced that the two countries had reached agreement with respect to many issues underlying their ongoing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations.

Curating America: Journeys through Storyscapes of the American Past

Book Review| October 01 2018 Curating America: Journeys through Storyscapes of the American Past Curating America: Journeys through Storyscapes of the American Past, by Richard Rabinowitz. University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 392 pp. ISBN 978–1-4696–2950–6,978–1-4696–2951–3 ($39.95 Hardcover, $29.99 E-Book). Dominic DeBrincat Dominic DeBrincat Missouri Western State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Connecticut History Review (2018) 57 (2): 183–185. https://doi.org/10.5406/connhistrevi.57.2.0183 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Dominic DeBrincat; Curating America: Journeys through Storyscapes of the American Past. Connecticut History Review 1 January 2018; 57 (2): 183–185. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/connhistrevi.57.2.0183 Download citation file: 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 Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressConnecticut History Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The US–Turkey rift

Capping an accumulation of mutual grievances, US sanctions on Turkey over its refusal to release an American evangelical pastor suspected of involvement in the July 2016 coup attempt are accelerating the deterioration of Turkey’s economy and threatening bilateral security cooperation and NATO cohesion.

Introduction

The articles collected here were first presented at a one-day symposium held at Florida State University in December 2016. Focused on religious and cultural elements of the First World War, the symposium followed on a fall semester seminar that I, along with my colleague Michael Ruse, taught. Given the lively response to the seminar and symposium, it seemed appropriate to seek publication of some of the work presented, and I am grateful to the editors of Soundings for providing a venue.The collection begins with Nigel Biggar's application of the “just war” tradition to the Battle of the Somme. As Biggar notes, the stunning number of casualties resulting from this protracted conflict (fighting raged from July 1 to November 18, 1916) has rendered the Somme “a byword for criminally disproportionate military slaughter.” Since the standard list of just war criteria suggests that proportionality—first in relation to any resort to armed force, and second in relation to the conduct of battle—is an important measure of justice, Biggar takes the occasion to ask just what the tradition requires. How should we think about proportionality in matters of war? Arguing for a complex understanding of the matter in which the number of casualties must be weighed in relation to the threat posed by a particular foe, the likely results of defeat, and other matters, Biggar suggests the standard judgment regarding the Somme may not be right.Cara Burnidge's article on Woodrow Wilson's “Christian internationalism” takes us in a rather different direction. Here, the focus is on the religious roots of Wilson's ideas about international order. As recent discussions of his legacy at Princeton remind us, Wilson was a complex man, and Burnidge provides an insightful account of the conflicting aspects of a president's program.Turning our attention to the implements of war—in this case, the rifle and the hand grenade—Jonathan Ebel shows us how the discourse of and about soldiers treats weapons not only as “things”—that is, tools for inflicting harm—but as “signs,” spoken of in ways that reflect emotional, cultural, and religious values. In the Great War, people spoke about rifles in ways that invoked an idealized American past; by contrast, descriptions of hand grenades connected with baseball and other sports, as well as with ideas about martyrdom.Returning to some of the ideas at stake in Biggar's article, James Turner Johnson reminds us of the ways the Great War posed challenges to the development of international law. Building on early modern notions of a “law of nations” designed to govern the conduct of war, scholars and practitioners in the nineteenth century crafted the outlines of a positive law related to armed force. While combatants ultimately violated many if not most of the provisions of this law between 1914 and 1918, such failure inspired renewed efforts to regulate and even to outlaw war. Following on this historical outline, Johnson concludes with some reflections on the role of religion in more contemporary attempts to regulate resort to and conduct of war.The collection closes with Michael Ruse's discussion of the relationship between Christian and Darwinian discussions of war, particularly with respect to the Great War. Drawing on Nigel Biggar's In Defence of War, among other sources, Ruse argues for a version of the Christian tradition in which war is an evil, but probably inevitable or inescapable aspect of human existence. By contrast, evolutionary accounts of war suggest that while conflict “seems to be natural, part of the evolutionary heritage of us all,” it may be possible for human beings to render war a thing of the past. Concluding with an appeal for more in the way of “constructive engagement” between Christians and Darwinians, Ruse's article, along with the others in this issue of Soundings, suggests the need for continued inquiry into the moral, legal, historical, and cultural aspects of the experience of war.

The Echo of Sound: The Politics and Perils of “Cultural Appropriation”

The recent death, in May 2018, of Philip Roth robbed America of one of its greatest living writers. Roth’s craft in the use of language was extraordinary. He had the unusual and arresting ability to write in a manner that sparked thought, forcing the reader to think in new ways about familiar matters. He provoked the reader with simplicity, economy, and elegance; striking ideas and insights were embedded in a style marked by lightness, grace, and clarity. Roth’s work, career, and reputation inevitably bring to mind the way in which contemporary politics have influenced the way we think about not only literature, but also all the arts in America. He came to fame as a result of his theatrical brilliance and candor about sex (Portnoy’s Complaint), his Kafka-like imagination (The Breast), and the persistent presence in his work of what it was like to be born Jewish in America. Toward the end of his career a wider consideration of America’s past and present took hold—in American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America.

"Newark's Just a Black Colony": Race in Philip Roth's American Pastoral

"Newark's Just a Black Colony": Race in Philip Roth's American Pastoral

Interpreting violence: The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot and its legacy

Abstract The article analyses aspects of the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma Race Riot and War. In the first part, it presents a brief history of Tulsa, Oklahoma and the reasons that triggered the clash that devastated Greenwood, the black part of Tulsa. The next section focuses on the role of the Red Cross in the relief project for the support of thousands of homeless African Americans, and deals with the long legal struggle for reparations and the role of the legal system in the failure to punish the guilty for the devastation of Greenwood. The last part of the article presents the controversy generated by the renaming of one of Tulsa’s main streets and the direct connection to the city’s violent and racial past. The legacy of segregation is deeply rooted in the American past; the use of the Tulsa Riot and War as a case study demonstrates the impact of racial conflicts on society and the necessity to identify and resolve relevant problems.

Wounded attachments and wounded aesthetics: Wendy Brown, Philip Roth, and a modest theory concerning the interaction of art and politics

ABSTRACT In this essay, I develop a healthy way for aesthetics to interact with political society. In States of Injury, Wendy Brown argues that left-wing identity politics equates to Nietzschean ressentiment, which uses relative weakness to assume moral or ethical supremacy. Brown uses the expression “wounded attachments” to describe politics that allows suffering to establish an advantaged perspective and group identity. I argue that a comparable phenomenon occurs in aesthetics. Some aesthetics are linked to a notion of a sub-group or political message, and proponents of that message forgive art for mediocrity. Borrowing Brown’s nomenclature, I call this “wounded aesthetics.” I establish the roots of wounded aesthetics in Adorno and its expression in such popular forms as Oprah Winfrey’s book club. I contrast this with Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral, asserting that when modern culture examines only art’s explicit message – its content – then art’s value qua art and its relation to politics is problematic. Using Roth, Derrida, and Heidegger, I offer a modest argument in favor of healthy aesthetics.

African American Clergy Perspectives About the HIV Care Continuum: Results From a Qualitative Study in Jackson, Mississippi.

Mississippi has some of the most pronounced racial disparities in HIV infection in the country; African Americans comprised 37% of the Mississippi population but represented 80% of new HIV cases in 2015. Improving outcomes along the HIV care continuum, including linking and retaining more individuals and enhancing adherence to medication, may reduce the disparities faced by African Americans in Mississippi. Little is understood about clergy's views about the HIV care continuum. We assessed knowledge of African American pastors and ministers in Jackson, Mississippi about HIV and the HIV care continuum. We also assessed their willingness to promote HIV screening and biomedical prevention technologies as well as efforts to enhance linkage and retention in care with their congregations. Four focus groups were conducted with 19 African American clergy. Clergy noted pervasive stigma associated with HIV and believed they had a moral imperative to promote HIV awareness and testing; they provided recommendations on how to normalize conversations related to HIV testing and treatment. Overall, clergy were willing to promote and help assist with linking and retaining HIV positive individuals in care but knew little about how HIV treatment can enhance prevention or new biomedical technologies such as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). Clergy underscored the importance of building coalitions to promote a collective local response to the epidemic. The results of this study highlight important public health opportunities to engage African American clergy in the HIV care continuum in order to reduce racial disparities in HIV infection.

American Pastoral’s crisis of humanism: hands, gloves and one colossal Turkey

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that, contrary to the accepted critical discourse on Philip Roth, his novel American Pastoral (1997) contains a powerful critique of traditional humanism. This operates both explicitly and implicitly throughout the novel. In a manner which is frequently foregrounded, Zuckerman, the narrator, revels in exposing the pitiful limits of rationalism. Both the structure and overt content of the novel highlight the inadequacies of rational thought, something which is fundamental to the post-Enlightenment understanding of the human as the rational animal and which underpins the Cartesian understanding of the human. In a less obvious manner, alongside this unravelling of traditional beliefs about the human, we find that Roth exposes the operations of what Jacques Derrida calls carnophallogocentrism, part of which describes how the human is secured through the death of the nonhuman animal. This is seen, perhaps most strikingly, in Roth’s presentation of the Thanksgiving turkey. Additionally, Roth’s focus on the manufacture of leather gloves aptly articulates a set of meanings involving human hands and dead sheep which strikingly engages with and concurs with Derrida’s criticism of Martin Heidegger’s thinking on the human.

The Stupendous US Record Gets Suppressed

In America, free marketeers may sometimes win elections. But they are not winning U.S. history. American history is no longer a history of opportunity. In recent years, the consensus regarding the American past has slipped leftward, and then leftward again. No longer is American history a story of opportunity, or of military or domestic triumph. America’s has become, rather, a story of wrongs, racial and social. Today, any historical figure who failed at any time to support abolition, or, worse, took the Confederate side in the Civil War, must be expunged from history. Wrongs must be righted, and equality of result enforced. The equality campaign spills over into a less obvious field, one that might otherwise provide a useful check upon the non-empirical claims of the humanities: economics. In a discipline that once showcased the power of markets, an axiom is taking hold: equal incomes lead to general prosperity, and point toward utopia. Teachers, book club presidents, and especially professors withhold any evidence to the contrary. Universities lead the shift, and the population follows. Today, millennials, those born between 1982 and 2000, outnumber baby boomers by the millions, and polls suggest that they support redistribution specifically, and government action generally, more than their predecessors. A 2014 Reason/Rupe poll found 48 percent of millennials agreeing that government should “do more” to solve problems, whereas 37 percent said that government was doing “too many things.” A full 58 percent of the youngest of millennials, those 18-24 when surveyed, held a “positive” view of socialism, in dramatic contrast with their parents: only 23 percent of those aged 55 to 64 viewed socialism positively.

Review: Curating America: Journeys through Storyscapes of the American Past by Richard Rabinowitz

Review: Curating America: Journeys through Storyscapes of the American Past by Richard Rabinowitz

Anti-Intellectualism and Natural Food: The Shared Language of Industry and Activists in America since 1830

This article uses the concept of “anti-intellectualism” to explain surprising overlaps in rhetoric between American food activists and the manufacturers they criticize. It shows anti-intellectual elements in the language of, in turn: Sylvester Graham, an influential lecturer during the 1830s; the Natural Food Company, maker of Shredded Wheat and an advocate for “natural food” in the early 1900s; and Michael Pollan, a leading figure in contemporary American food politics. These activists and manufacturers have spoken in an anti-intellectual style about nature and food, arguing that certain forms of knowledge and evidence are more natural than others. Each has favored similar ways of understanding nature, rejecting professionalized expertise for tradition, intuition, and the wisdom of more “natural” peoples. While disagreeing on the proper structure of food production and distribution, activists and manufacturers have both sought authority to tell people how to live by evoking similar visions of the American past. This shared ideal romanticizes a time in which women did more work at home, immigrants and indigenous people were even more marginalized, and custom and tradition more fully guided people’s food choices. With different politics and intentions, manufacturers and activists belong to the same lineage of food discourse and have both furthered an American tradition of anti-intellectualism.

The political ecology of late South American pastoralism: an Andean perspective A.D. 1,000-1,615

Prehispanic South American pastoralism has a long and rich, though often understudied, trajectory. In this paper, we analyze the transition from a generalized to a specialized pastoralism at two geographical locations in the Andes: Antofagasta de la Sierra, Southern Argentina Puna, and the Ancash Highlands, Peruvian North-central Puna. Although at opposite ends of the Andes this herding specialization commences during the same moment in time, A.D. 600-1,000, suggesting that a similar process was at work in both areas. Moreover, this was a process that was irrevocably tied to the coeval development of specialized highland agriculture. From a perspective of political ecology and structuration theory we emphasis the time-depth and importance that Andean pastoralism had in shaping highland landscapes. Taking into consideration risk-management theory, ecology and environment as crucial factors in the development of a specialized pastoralism we nevertheless emphasis the importance of the underlying human decisions that drove this process. Based broadly within the field of political ecology we therefore emphasize how human agency and structure impacted on these landscapes, society and animal husbandry. Our article covers such aspects as the human and animal use of resource areas, settlement location, herding patterns, selective breeding, and human-induced alterations to pasturage.Keywords: Andes, pastoralism, political ecology, Southern Andes, Central Andes

Darlings of the Weather Underground

The figure of the fugitive woman radical has occupied a curiously important place in the American popular imagination. Early depictions of women whose political sympathies have drawn them into radical activism and terrorist plots include Susan Isaacson in E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971) and Marge Piercy’s eponymous heroine in her novel Vida (1979). Fictional characters loosely based on such activist-fugitives as Bernardine Dohrn abound in more recent works as well. Meredith “Merry” Levov, in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), is no doubt the best known, but radical activist women similarly on the lam include Marin Douglas in Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer (1977). Alice Mellings in Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist (1977), Jenny Shimada in Susan Choi’s American Woman (2003), Anna Xenos (nom de guerre Dial) in Peter Carey’s His Illegal Self (2008), Reno in Rachel Kushner’s recent The Flamethrowers (2013), and others. The figure of what Robin Morgan terms the “token terrorist” seems to have survived her immediate political moment and continues to resonate within the American imaginary of a “postpolitical” age. Against the backdrop of recurring contemporary fears about “domestic terrorism” and taking as my primary example Russell Banks’s The Darling (2004), this essay considers the recurrent fictions of the radical woman terrorist and fugitive within the horizon of the eclipse of radical activism and the rise of anxieties accompanying the resurgence of terrorism.