American History Research Articles

San Isidro, Sonsonate, El Salvador: Development of a Preclassic Settlement in Chronological and Geographic Context

ABSTRACT This paper presents a study of the San Isidro archaeological site in El Salvador, providing significant insights into the development of Preclassic settlements in the region. Through analysis of ceramic sequences, radiocarbon dating, and excavations, the study traces the site’s evolution and its contextual significance within Mesoamerican and Isthmo-Colombian spheres. We report on the discovery of over 50 mounds constructed around 400 b.c., indicating the emergence of a complex social structure at that time. The unearthed artifacts, including jade objects and Bolinas-type figurines, suggest cultural exchange with often distant regions of Mesoamerica and the Isthmo-Colombian area. This research not only contributes to understanding the chronological and geographic development of San Isidro but also highlights the site’s role in broader Preclassic Mesoamerican cultural dynamics. Our findings challenge existing perceptions of cultural peripherality and emphasize the need for nuanced regional studies in reconstructing ancient Central American history.

‘I bet you like looking at that asshole, dontcha?’: Jeff Stryker’s enigmatic sexuality

ABSTRACT Jeff Stryker, impossibly endowed, bulging with muscles, foul-mouthed, and unquestionably masculine, remains an enigmatic porn icon whose legend persists some 35 years after he first growled his way on screen. Stryker appeared primarily in gay male porn, where his level of stardom has never been surpassed. Yet, for all this, he is rarely discussed in connection with non-binary and bisexuality, his bi films are dismissed as gay or part of a failed fad, and he is typically regarded as the epitome of the ‘gay for pay’, non-reciprocal, emotionless porn star so ubiquitous in a post-HIV era infused with fear, shame, and self-loathing. This article aims to resituate Stryker as a trailblazer in the harnessing and subversion of porn categorization at a critical moment in US history, an important lens through which we might better understand porn stardom and the performance of masculinity and desire.

Emotional remodelling: sketching emotion regimes in the United States since 1900

This article highlights the concept of emotion regime while discussing available applications. It then applies the regime concept to two distinct periods in 20th-century US history: the first, from early in the century through the 1950s, stressing emotional restraint, and the more recent opening to more vigorous emotional expression. The article ends with a discussion of the causes and significance of the change.

Protecting the Deli: Jewish Nostalgia and Social Justice in E. Lockhart's Whistle: A New Gotham City Hero

ABSTRACT: In this article, I analyze E. Lockhart's comic Whistle: A New Gotham City Hero (Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2021) as a distinctively American Jewish text. I argue that Whistle draws upon nostalgia for an imagined Jewish past by creating an alternative present infused with the material culture of American Jewishness. In so doing, I show how the comic develops features of mainstream American Jewishness—such as eating at Jewish delis, holding a nostalgic attachment to American Jewish history, and working for social justice—in the construction of a superhero narrative. I explore how Whistle's visual depiction of Jewish food and space construct an authentically Jewish environment. Lastly, I suggest that, as a superhero comic book written for teenage readers, Whistle promotes nostalgia and the pursuit of social justice as components of American Jewishness.

A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961–2021 – Alan S. Blinder’s reviewed by James L. Caton

In the realm of economics, fostering debates and embracing diverse opinions is paramount for driving innovation and achieving optimal outcomes. Alan S. Blinder’s seminal work, “A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961-2021,” published in October 2022, exemplifies this ethos. Blinder, a renowned economist and Professor at Princeton University, draws from his extensive experience, including roles as Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and a member of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, to offer a unique perspective rooted in Keynesian economics. Through his book, Blinder not only enhances our comprehension of various economic concepts but also underscores the significance of critical thinking and vigorous debate in shaping public research.

Democratization, Local Government and Political Parties during the Allied Occupation of Southern Italy after 1943

The article seeks to cast doubt on the prevailing notion that regards the Allied occupation of (Southern) Italy as a harbinger of democracy by examining it from a local, decidedly bottom-up analytical perspective. I argue that the Allies disfavored the formation of political parties and the expression of political thought, even though ‘you can't have a democracy without political parties’, as the Italian-American Charles Poletti, one of the principal American civil affairs officers (CAO) organizing the occupation on-site, phrased it. This was particularly true during the first phase of the occupation, when military priorities reigned supreme. However, even at a later point, after the CAOs had theoretically assumed the role of an external supervising authority, a deep distrust of the country's political parties informed much of the Allies’ attitudes. Rather than serving as a foundational layer for democracy, the Allies perceived the country's political parties as a threat to democratization insofar as these were believed to obstruct the former's political and economic agendas. Such antagonisms between occupier and occupied, of course, especially applied to Italy's largest and most well-organized party during the period of the Allied occupation – the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI).

Symbolic Elements and Their Connection to Magical Realism in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Depiction of Latin American History

This paper explores the profound impact of symbolic elements in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s works on the depiction of Latin American history and culture through the lens of magical realism. Focusing on key symbols in One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patriarch, and Love in the Time of Cholera, the study delves into how these symbols enhance the narrative and offer deeper insights into historical and cultural contexts. The analysis reveals how Marquez uses symbols such as the banana plantation, the decaying palace, and the river to critique colonialism, political corruption, and societal upheaval. Furthermore, the paper examines the interplay between reality and fantasy in Marquez’s works and its role in shaping readers’ understanding of historical events and cultural identity. By connecting personal stories with broader historical and cultural themes, Marquez’s symbolism fosters a nuanced and imaginative engagement with Latin American history, encouraging readers to reflect on the complexities and enduring legacies of the region.

Documentary Film Brings a Visual Addition to Asian American History

Documentary Film Brings a Visual Addition to Asian American History

Re-membering Blackness: Digital Archives, Collective Memory, and a University’s Black History

abstract: The Re-membering Blackness Digital Archive at the University of Scranton shares the university’s racial story as part of a campus-wide initiative devoted to reconciliation and collective memory. By bringing together archival records on Black history in a thematic digital collection, the project presents a corrective lens through which the university community transformed its understanding of the historical Black experience on campus and considered how this history reverberates in the present. The initiative contributes to a growing collection of institutional research projects on African American history and the legacies of slavery and racism in higher education. This article considers the metaphor of archives as memory within critical archival literature, and it examines the relationship between archives and collective memory in the context of the University of Scranton’s initiative to recover Black memory.

A Case Study of Integrating Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) and Building Information Modeling (BIM) in Heritage Bridge Documentation: The Edmund Pettus Bridge

The Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama, a symbol of the American Civil Rights Movement and an exemplar of early 20th-century engineering, stands as a testament to the progress and challenges of its era. The bridge, recognized for its pivotal role in the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” conflict and the following Selma to Montgomery marches for voting rights, also represents significant engineering achievements with its distinctive design and construction methodology. In this study, the research team presents a comprehensive framework for documenting heritage bridges by utilizing Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) technology, supplemented by other Reality Capture (RC) techniques, including Structure from Motion (SfM), 360-degree photography, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), and integrating the data within a Building Information Modeling (BIM) environment. The focus on the Edmund Pettus Bridge case study demonstrates how this novel approach can capture the intricate details of its structural and architectural features while preserving its historical narratives. The documentation outcomes, including a detailed BIM model and a set of Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) drawings, highlight the effectiveness of combining TLS and BIM in conserving unconventional heritage structures like bridges. This paper also discusses the technological challenges encountered, such as dealing with heavy traffic and environmental constraints during data acquisition and developing the BIM model and drawings. It outlines the strategies implemented to address these issues. This research contributes to preserving a severely under-represented American National Historic Landmark (NHL). It sets a precedent for documenting other non-building heritage structures, balancing technological advancements with historical integrity.

Book review: Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History, By Michael D. Wise

Book review: <i>Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History</i>, By Michael D. Wise

Trumbull Talk: White Vernacular and the Politics of Persecution, 1953-1954

Following in the microhistory tradition, this essay draws on an unpublished report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to delve deeply into the political worldviews of working-class white mill workers in 1950s South Deering, Chicago, during their massive resistance to the racial integration of a local public housing project in the post-World War II period. A close analysis of casual conversations between members of this insular white community demonstrates that an intense fear of demographic change, exacerbated by a certainty that white city elites had “sold out their race” and were working with civil rights organizations to promote the interests of Black Chicagoans, instilled in South Deering’s whites a sense of powerlessness that failed to ease even as evidence mounted that white city leaders were giving the neighborhood segregationists much of what they wanted.

Native American History as Counter-Discourse in James Welch’s Narratives: The Examples of “Fools Crow” and “Killing Custer”.

A peculiar dimension in the Native American writing is the documentation of the history of the Native Americans’ traditional lives before, during and after their encounter with the white settlers. It is a development that is essentially explicable within the purview of postcolonial discourse, given that, in some contexts, historical distortions from the perspective of the ‘other’ have been asserted as the rationale for such creative explorations on the part of the Native writers. In the context of this study, such a dimension, with particular reference to James Welch’s novels, is considered as, indeed, counter-discursive. Two of his novels, Fools Crow and Killing Custer, are selected with a view to assessing how the historical documentations in the texts translate to counter-discourses in the context of the Native Americans’ historical evolution. The study reveals that, while the Native American histories in the texts dovetail into each other, they are largely inspired by the Native Americans’ colonial experience vis-à-vis the need to represent their history from the perspective of ‘us’ as opposed to ‘other’. It concludes that the narratives have, in a significant way, performed the allegorical configuration function, as a counter-discourse strategy described by Slemon (1987). This holds in that they have conceivably assumed ‘readings’ and ‘contestations’ of the previously textualised colonial experience of the Native Americans from the perspective of the ‘other’.

The Story of Inequality: Xenophobia and Racial Discrimination Against Asian Americans During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic is a catastrophic global human rights crisis, and it has aggravated the racism experienced by racial minorities around the world. This article explores the serious discrimination against Asian Americans within the US society during the pandemic from the political and historical perspectives. It finds that the inappropriate practices of conservative politicians, led by Donald Trump, to link the virus to Asian groups have triggered the deep-rooted anti-Asian discrimination among the American public in the US history, which has adversely affected the well-being of Asian Americans during the COVID-19.

Kathryn Lasky, “Women’s Voice Counts”

The American women did not await the 21st century to express their disapproval of matters of general interest. At every stage of human history, they always assert their presence as agents of social development and promoters of liberties; they prove their ability to serve humanity. In all parts of the world, despite the deliberate ideological restrictions inflicted upon them, they show integrity, decency, and honesty; their pragmatism, literacy, actions, and ideas serve as bow. Those qualities enable them to free themselves from all forms of ostracism and subjugation. Along the march of history, when defending their common cause, some of them sometimes lose their lives, others are incarcerated, but the survivors remain committed and hopeful. They continually fight to climb the social ladder. In socio-professional and political sectors where men are hostile, they demonstrate absolute resilience. A retrospective glance at the US history helps to revivify the American women’s involvement. Labeled as vulnerable and passive beings, they embark on a timeless struggle whose purpose is to restore their tarnished image and dignity. Better still, their awareness enables them to eradicate the prejudices, social inequalities, and barriers, which disadvantage and devalue them. Like other Western countries, the United States has a long tradition of marginalizing women. Its excluding policy is narrowly connected with patriarchal tradition; a practice, which emerges not only in the family sphere, but also on the political stage, where women are deprived of their suffrage. In such circumstances, they suffer from male domination with impunity. That burning social injustice is pictured by writers, such as Kathryn Lasky whose literary works pay tribute to the American suffragists for their boldness and great sense of duty in the construction of democracy in America. As a field par excellence for the symbolization of social facts, literature appears as a location where the American women’s bravery and ingenuity are realistically expressed. Therefore, the study of Laskian female characters’ trajectories through the textual prism is advantageous. For that purpose, the use of Derridean deconstruction as a methodological tool will be helpful. This will scrutinize the political scope of Laskian female characters’ struggle for suffrage through two axes: “A masculinized political system” and “women’s awareness and US democracy.”

The Devil’s outriders: a LiDAR and KOCOA investigation of the battle of Buckhead Creek, 1864

ABSTRACT Funded by an American Battlefield Protection Program grant, LiDAR and KOCOA, guided a systematic metal detector survey to identify, and evaluate levels of preservation and battle pattern signatures from the Battle of Buckhead Creek, the largest American Civil War battle site in Southeast Georgia untouched by development. In November 1864, during Sherman’s March to the Sea, Confederate and Union cavalry forces waged a running battle across Jenkins and Burke County, Georgia. These actions were ephemeral events in an archaeological sense, in time-depth and their impact on the archaeological record. However, this paper demonstrates that the application of conflict archaeology methodologies can identify and evaluate these sites, despite their wide-ranging geographical context, short-time spans, and the impacts of illicit metal detecting on the battle site.

Conspiracy Theories and Populism: Analyzing the Trumpian Embrace of Conspiracy Narratives as a Political Instrument

The attack on its Capitol on January 6, 2021, was an unprecedented event in the history of the United States. It was made more peculiar by the fact that the conspiracy theory (CT) that the election had been fraudulent was spread by the outgoing president, Donald Trump, too. The purpose of this research is to show that CTs are suitable political tools for populists, as both are based on the division of society and appeal to alienated, dissatisfied groups. The main conclusion of the research is that populism and CTs spread because of political polarization, which, in turn, these narratives themselves deepen. For this reason, the populist use of conspiracy theories is almost inevitable.

“We are openly, proudly Subjective … This history is important to our contemporary survival”: queer embodied knowledge and the curatorial work of ICT-based LGBTQIA+ history content creators

PurposeThis article reports on findings from interviews with ICT-based content creators whose work focuses on documenting and curating queer history and culture. The research specifically examines how as amateur historians, the participant’s embodied knowledge plays a central role in how they engage with discourse about queer historical figures, methods of queer historiography and community accountability.Design/methodology/approachThe research deploys a queer constructivist framework to qualitatively gather and analyzes the semi-structured interviews of 31 North American content creators who curate digital project related to queer history and culture. The interviews were gathered between August 2022 and August 2023.FindingsThe research highlights how the subjectivity of queer embodiment aids, rather than hinders, participants' ability to collaborate with LGBTQIA+ communities while also addressing more significant ethical questions around intersectionality and inclusive historiographic work.Research limitations/implicationsThe content creators’ own positionality and commitments to community accountability and queer inclusivity fostered richer stories and historical documentation, while also helping make visible queer identity as affirming and valuable within queer culture. Additionally, practical implications include highlighting the value of ICT-based content within the distribution of educational and informational resources related to queer history.Originality/valueThis research offers an underexamined intersection of historiography and queer embodiment. While extensive scholarship on institutional and community-based historiography work exist the content creators interviewed within this study exist within the space of both, often using a combination of embodied knowledge and traditional curatorial work to translate between such spaces, inviting, in turn, new ways of thinking about queer archival knowledge.

Romani American history: Historical absences and their consequences

American historians have created an historical absence by ignoring Romani people’s presence in evidence from the past. The origins of this “absence-ing” are multifaceted and interrelated, but fundamentally stem from the continued influence of out-of-date and unprofessional ways of thinking and knowing. Examining and understanding “absence-ing” requires a consideration of the nature of the discipline of history as well as a history of the missing historicization of Romani Americans. The consequences of the “absence-ing” of Romani people from American histories have negatively and distinctively influenced four different groups of people: historians of the Americas; historians of Romani people in Europe; Romani studies scholars of the Americas who are not historians; and Romani Americans. The harm that each of these four groups experiences builds upon and influences the others. Epistemic injustice is thus perpetuated in linked ways. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .

Post-January 6th deplatforming reduced the reach of misinformation on Twitter.

The social media platforms of the twenty-first century have an enormous role in regulating speech in the USA and worldwide1. However, there has been little research on platform-wide interventions on speech2,3. Here we evaluate the effect of the decision by Twitter to suddenly deplatform 70,000 misinformation traffickers in response to the violence at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 (a series of events commonly known as and referred to here as 'January 6th'). Using a panel of more than 500,000 active Twitter users4,5 and natural experimental designs6,7, we evaluate the effects of this intervention on the circulation of misinformation on Twitter. We show that the intervention reduced circulation of misinformation by the deplatformed users as well as by those who followed the deplatformed users, though we cannot identify the magnitude of the causal estimates owing to the co-occurrence of the deplatforming intervention with the events surrounding January 6th. We also find that many of the misinformation traffickers who were not deplatformed left Twitter following the intervention. The results inform the historical record surrounding the insurrection, a momentous event in US history, and indicate the capacity of social media platforms to control the circulation of misinformation, and more generally to regulate public discourse.