ABSTRACT Nick Witham's Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America provides cogent and accurate accounts of the careers of five American academic historians of the post‐World War II era who won large popular audiences for national narratives: Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner. Witham omits, without explanation, the highly relevant case of Oscar Handlin, author of the 1951 work The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made America . He also fails to engage the heavily Jewish ethnoreligious matrix of popular American historiography of the postwar era. In Popularizing the Past , Witham is directly concerned with today's challenges for writing popular national histories, and he argues that the very idea of a single, national audience has been rendered anachronistic by ideological polarization and media fragmentation. Whereas Witham insists that works resembling Jill Lepore's 2018 book These Truths: A History of the United States should no longer be attempted, he upholds Ibram X. Kendi's 2016 volume, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America , as an example of what is appropriate today: a narrative for a certain community of readers, and not for other readers. Witham's essentially sound account of major features of postwar American writings about history is marred by his jejune comments about the early twenty‐first century. He leaves us with only a shadow of the witness that each of Witham's subject‐historians bore with distinction to the mission of discovering and disseminating the truth about American history in the interests of a national community.

The study focuses on the export of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s theatrical methodology to American stage practices. The problem is specifically discussed based on the staging and set design activities of his Latvian follower Jānis Muncis, who studied in 1918/19 at the Petrograd Courses of Stage Productions’Mastery (KURMASСEP) and lived in the United States for many years. The key milestones of Americans’ acquaintance with Meyerhold’s work are traced – the directorial activity in the USA of his disciple at the GITIS Theatre, Marion Gering and also the International Theatre Exposition in New York. A brief biography of Meyerhold’s follow J. Muncis, now almost unknown to Russian science, is given, as well as a description of the theater where he staged Vsevolod Ivanov’s play Armoured Train – the Pasadena Playhouse. The example of this production reveals Muncis’ continuity with Meyerhold’s constructivist ideas. The article contributes to the study of the development of Meyerhold’s theatrical ideas in America.

Ibram X. Kendi’s bestselling book How to be an Antiracist (2019) has been enormously influential and deserves the serious attention it has received. It follows his important historical work Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016), which is much more scholarly and won the National Book Award the year it came out. But these books seem to take for granted a fairly simple version of cultural relativism in ethics that is widely regarded by moral philosophers as seriously defective. I want to take these doubts further and show that cultural relativism is a disastrous theoretical choice for an anti-racist like Kendi to make. In Section I I explain the kind of relativism I have in mind: agent-based, cultural, normative ethical relativism. In Section II, using the two books I have mentioned, I give textual support to my attribution of this kind of relativism to Kendi. In Section III I argue for my theoretical-disaster claim and defend it against some Kendi-inspired criticism. In Section IV I address some serious relativist doubts about ethical universalism, the opposite of relativism. Finally, in Section V I offer some brief concluding remarks.

The views on America of the Russian Slavist Vladimir Ivanovich Lamansky (1833-1914) are considered. The main monographs of the scholar are used as sources: On the Slavs in Asia Minor, Africa and Spain (1859), On the Study of the Greco-Slavic World in Europe (1871), Three Worlds of the Asian-European Continent (1892). Lamansky’s point of view largely coincides with views on America of other Slavophiles - Ivan Kireyevsky and Nikoay Danilevsky. Late Slavophiles pointed to the confrontational nature of mutual relations between Europe and Russia, which in many ways also applied to America that was perceived as a continuation of European or Romano-Germanic civilisation. It is noted that the image of America was formed within Lamansky’s concept of civilisation, according to which European history and politics are a reflection of the age-old antagonism between two civilisational worlds: the Greco-Slavic and the Romano-Germanic. However, Lamansky corrects the Slavophile assessments of America, believing that within the Western world it is possible to distinguish the Anglo-Saxon world (the British Empire and the North American Republic). Slavophiles regarded Russia and America as civilisations to which the future belonged. Lamansky also reproduced the widespread belief in Russian society (Herzen, Kireyevsky) that the centre of the Western world was moving to North America. He linked this displacement to the principle of Transliatio Imperii, since Russia and the USA both claimed to realise the imperial idea. The peculiarity of the Slavophile approach was the appeal to the biological metaphor of age, according to which Europe was the world of the present, while America and Russia, as young cultural and historical entities, belonged to the future. Lamansky believed that the dominance of the Western world passing to America could lead to a reduction in tensions between the Greco-Slavic and Romano-Germanic worlds, since relations between America and Russia were free of the contradictions that divided Russia and Europe. The specific aspects of the mental image and the stereotypes of the perception of America, which were widespread in the Russian society of the 19th century and which Lamansky reproduced, are pointed out: the idea of America as a country dominated by a mercantile spirit, egoism, and the pursuit of profit; external forms of unity and social life prevail in America; the lack of a unified nationality does not allow the development of a rich literature and a creatively fruitful culture in America. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

On First Reading Thomas Dixon Jr. in 2021: What Racist Fiction from Reconstruction Can Teach Us About Building Multiracial Democracy Today

:<i>Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England</i>

Decolonizing American Philosophy

Reviewed by: Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi Devin Thomas O'Shea (bio) stamped from the beginning: the definitive history of racist ideas in america Ibram X. Kendi Bold Type Books https://www.boldtypebooks.com/titles/ibram-x-kendi/stamped-from-the-beginning/9781568585987/ 608 Pages; Print, $19.99 Like Bertrand Russel's The History of Western Philosophy (1945), Stamped from the Beginning is a hulking 584-page narrative archeology of ideas. [End Page 89] Professor Ibram X. Kendi's argument lays out three competing ideologies which reveal themselves during discussions of race in America dating back to pilgrim days. First, there are segregationists who place non-white people in a fundamentally different category than themselves. Then there are assimilationists who largely believe non-white people could improve, and become whiter, if only they would straighten up a little. Finally, there are antiracists who believe these distinctions between races and cultures are largely bullshit. Russel's history of ideas traces a (fairly) straight line through schools of western thought which builds from one thinker to another. Eventually, Russel comes to the consensus that we've entered a brand-new school of thought, and in that way, philosophy progresses. So too for America's racist ideas—they move from body to body throughout history and evolve. Professor Kendi de-centralizes these ideas through many voices while also selecting a touchstone historical figure to represent an era. For example, pre-Revolutionary America is the realm of Cotton Mather. Mather's conception of race is a matter of religion; he was abnormally progressive in that Cotton believed slaves were human enough to be baptized. From there, we move to the era of founding fathers where Thomas Jefferson gets no gloss. Kendi's work is astounding for its breath of historical understanding; the sections on Jefferson and W. E. B. Du Bois seem especially familiar to the writer. Any question that Jefferson had realized something about slavery later in life (an idea I've read about often) is debunked. The only change in Jefferson's mind seems to be about how attractive Black women are. First they aren't attractive, then there's an epiphany sometime after Sally Hemmings, but there is no deathbed revelation. Kendi navigates pre-Civil War America through William Lloyd Garrison, and transitions to Du Bois for Reconstruction up through the Civil Rights Movement. From that point forward, the book moves at a gallop to cover ground including Sista Solider, The Bell Curve (1995), and Ferguson. Angela Davis is our touchstone intellectual who brings us up to the present, and while Davis's philosophy is covered well enough, this is the section of Stamped that feels hurried. It's bound to feel that way—this is the case with all projects that set out to account for hundreds of years of history. Eventually, the historian crosses a threshold where the debates are no longer dead. The [End Page 90] form changes, and suddenly Professor Kendi is explaining the recent ancestry of our modern debates. At the time of writing, Kendi is under the impression that the most dangerous racist idea of the Obama era is that we live in a post-racial society. That idea, Kendi argues, is what prevents antiracist action in the United States; modern producers of racist ideas have been working to put up "a portrait of America conveying that there was no longer any need for protective or affirmative civil rights laws and policies—and no longer any need to ever talk about race." There's no mention of Trump except for the introduction to the paperback edition (which I think Professor Kendi could have cut since the body of the book stands so well on its own). The US has historical amnesia, and by following the three ideologies—assimilationists, segregationists, and antiracist—Professor Kendi shows how language, profit motive, and technology keep racist ideas alive. These forces also de-claw antiracist efforts. Each step of "progress" in fact finds new ground to exploit. For example, the first half of the book concerns itself with religious ideas transitioning into scientific ideas. The debate over the souls...

The grounding myth of American collective memory is built on the idea of America as a promise, what it shall be. Crises place futures in doubt. Against these two considerations, this article examines how the future can be used to shape the past. In the American context, the future as a general promise is invoked in times of crisis to reassure a nation by way of laundering difficult pasts so as to fit a narrative of progress in spite of the continued presence and recursive nature of these pasts. In the immediate wake of the 2021 Capitol Insurrection, another crisis (itself a harbinger of crises to come), the 2000 Bush v Gore decision, was rewritten as an exemplar of American exceptionalism rather than a stain on it. Beyond displaying the intricate relationship between future and past in collective memory, the case highlights how this operation only works to further neglect the racism and unresolved pasts entrenched in the myth of exceptionalism that motivated the Capitol Riot.

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

This essay arose from a debate held at the 2018 American Studies Association of Norway (ASANOR) about the value of teaching American Literature and Culture survey courses at Norwegian universities. My role, as ASANOR’s president, was to facilitate the debate and offer a response. In the extended version of that response published here, I accept the critique of national survey courses as tending toward exceptionalism and nationalist interpretations of transnational political and aesthetic flows, but in the end advocate for American survey courses. I shift the focus from whether these courses should be taught to how. Taking up Walt Whitman’s description of America as ‘essentially the greatest poem’, I propose that survey classes can ‘read’ that poem in a way that acknowledges America’s complexity and the woeful inconsistencies between its history and its national ideal, while still finding beauty and value in that ideal. The first half of the paper historicizes the American literature survey in Norway in reference to international and national developments in the field of American Studies. The second half elaborates ways of teaching American Literature surveys that foreground students’ and professors’ ‘horizons of expectation’ for American literature and culture, assessing which of those come from American literary and cultural documents and which come from the uses to which the idea of America is put in the lives we live here and now.

Compte-rendu de l’art états-unien dans « Ouverture », l’exposition inaugurale de la Collection Pinault à la Bourse de Commerce, Paris.

Ibram X. Kendi. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

ABSTRACT This paper examines the early printings of Bloomfield's works in the USA, of which there were very many. Some tried to duplicate the British illustrations; others did not. Some were illustrated anew by American printmakers. All of the efforts show an effort to domesticate Bloomfield, the working-class poet, to the American landscape, or to an idea of America as a society in which the class distinctions that marked Bloomfield’s life and career would be erased. The paper concentrates on the early American editions of The Farmer’s Boy and Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs, with particular attention to the paratextual matter, especially where it modifies information in the British editions, to the illustrations (if any), and to reviews and advertisements for Bloomfield’s poems in American journals and newspapers. The aim is to lay the groundwork for an examination of the ways in which Bloomfield’s poetry served as an inspiration for young American poets, a subject almost entirely unexplored.

Writing and Democracy in the Early United States

Psychoanalytic training institutes are not exempt from being part of structural racism, that is, the ways society at large has been developed to uphold and maintain White supremacy using social, cultural, and political institutions. Ibrahim X. Kendi’s tome, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, outlines how racist ideas have proliferated throughout the history of the United States to ensure structural inequality. Psychoanalytic training institutes are not exempt from being part of this structural racism. Such racism can be seen in a number of ways, including who originated and runs the institute, the location, tuition, supervision, and other ways in which exclusivity is systemic. I will examine these areas as they are reflected at The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute in New York City.

The author of this paper expresses his agreement with the long perspective adopted by Axel Korner for his study of American influences on the Italian Risorgimento, though he addresses his remarks mainly to the last decades of the Settecento and to the beginnings of the nineteenth century. He shares, in particular, Korner’s contention that «the idea of America as a model for the Italian Risorgimento was at leastly partly an American projection».

CLA JOURNAL 179 Black Books and Dead Black Bodies: Twitter, Hashtags, and Antiracist Reading Lists Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II In 2000, Janifer P. Wilson started Sisters Uptown Bookstore in Harlem, New York. For two decades, she struggled to turn a profit selling books, and so Wilson worked a different full-time job to keep her bookstore afloat. But her fortunes greatly improved during the summer of 2020, as conversations and sympathy concerning violence against black people prompted unprecedented sales of black books at black-owned booksellers. Wilson welcomed the uptick in profit yet was conflicted about the circumstances:“to have our business surge in a matter of weeks as the result of an unfortunate incident with a man losing his life and the whole world getting to see it has just impacted my spirit and soul” (de Leónet. al). Like many people, Linda Duggins, Senior Director of Punlicity at Grand Central Publishing, thought that it was“awesome”that conversations related to Black Lives Matter led to unprecedented support for books by African Americans and blackowned bookstores. However, she too had reservations. “It does sadden me,” she noted, “to know that the push for the sales is connected to that stacking of dead Black bodies” (de Leónet. al). As life-long participants in and students of black culture, we are aware of the longstanding interest in successful black books expressed by African American literary scholars and general readers. The remarkable feats in sales and media attentionAfricanAmerican booksellers and books about racism and white privilege achieved in June 2020 indicate that significant news coverage about brutalities committed against black people can substantially drive the interests of readerconsumers . This situation is made evident in the available data and reporting on book publishing. The relative lack of attention for African American novels and volumes of poetry suggests that these genres matter less for consumers in dire moments, at least in comparison to what is categorized as “antiracist” nonfiction. Our observations reveal that those of us who study and teach African American literature should do more to discuss the relationship between successful black books and dead black bodies. Not long after George Floyd was killed on May 25,protestors took to the streets. Activist groups removed or altered Confederate statues. Employees prompted their employers to release public statements supporting Black Lives Matter. And, notably, people published and circulated antiracist reading lists. The lists were especially designed for apparent white audiences or other groups that presumably 180 CLA JOURNAL Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II overlookedthehistoriesof blackstruggleandwhitesupremacy.Journalists,scholars, librarians, and others offered roundups of titles that addressed systemic racism, and sympathetic readers responded by ordering those book recommendations— in some cases tens of thousands of select works. Our long-standing interest in the implications of data concerning black cultural products led us to consider the convergence of protests and books sales. We focused on bestselling books supplied by NPD BookScan and presented in Publisher’s Weekly. During the month of May, virtually no book on the top ten bestseller list dealt directly with antiracist topics or subjects, though Michelle Obama’s autobiography Becoming remained on the list. In the first week of June, however, a discernible shift took place. So You Want to Talk about Race (2018) by Ijeoma Oluo entered the bestseller list at number 2 with 35,859 sales for the week, and White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (2018) by Robin DiAngelo was ranked number 3 with 30,221 sales. The next week, Oluo’s and DiAngelo’s books remained on the top ten bestsellers list and were joined by Ibram X. Kendi with Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016) at the #5 spot and How to Be an Antiracist (2019) at the #7 spot with sales at 37,862 and 26,755, respectively. Between May 25, when Floyd was killed, and July 3, the last date for which we collected book data, DiAngelo’s White Fragility sold 408,401 copies; Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist sold 308,309; and Oluo’s sold 185,850. Put another way, those three books...

Imagining a Great Republic: Political Novels and the Idea of America

Editor's Column: “the beacon thing”: Musings on John Steinbeck, America, and Light