Roots Of America Research Articles

‘Freedom’ on the Road to Ruin: An Australian Apology to America’s Freedom-Loving Hard Right.

Contemporary America faces deep-seated problems - not least because so many Americans have lost respect for their own electoral system and democratic institutions. America suffers too from unrelenting right wing hyperbole in respect of significant social issues, including their conviction that only they understand, and value, freedom. Because of Australia’s restrictive responses to the covid-19 pandemic, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis – a potential Presidential candidate - denigrates Australia as ‘not a free country; not a free country at all’. Australians may dismiss Governor DeSantis’s comments as laughable, but a chorus of hard right comments in support of his view invites a comparison of the different ways in which ‘freedom’ is understood in Republican America and in Australia. One consequence of DeSantis’s conception of ‘freedom’ is the extraordinary American death rate from the Covid-19 pandemic, which in the case of Florida – which DeSantis celebrates as the ‘free-est State’ – stood at about 48 times the Australian rate when he scorned Australia as indistinguishable from communist China. Despite massive American spending on defence budgets, a domestic battle has been waged, and lost, in respect of the more prosaic defence of America’s traditional economic philosophy, and its defining institutions; and American conservatives are now divided even within their own ranks as to what it is that they wish to conserve, other than partisan advantage. The roots of America’s present malaise are to be found in the evolving (mis)understandings of a set of keywords including ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘tyranny’, ‘individualism’, and ‘society’. The radical right has impoverished the understanding of these keywords, and Australia’s pandemic response was in fact designed to give itself freedom from the ‘freedom’ that the Republican right now eulogises. In the name of an implicit and contentious teleological vision, the Republican understanding of ‘freedom’ has now descended to the point where America’s hard right perversely sees itself as actually now needing to save Australia from democracy, while simultaneously undermining its own democratic institutions. The need for a reinvigorated teaching of economic philosophy is plain to see.

Hannah Claire Haines, 1891–1974: Not the Average “Militant Female”

Hannah Claire Haines, 1891–1974: Not the Average “Militant Female”

We Are a Garden: A Story of How Diversity Took Root in America by Lisa Westberg Peters

Reviewed by: We Are a Garden: A Story of How Diversity Took Root in America by Lisa Westberg Peters Deborah Stevenson, Editor Peters, Lisa Westberg We Are a Garden: A Story of How Diversity Took Root in America; illus. by Victoria Tentler-Krylov. Schwartz & Wade, 2021 [40p] Library ed. ISBN 9780593123140 $20.99 Trade ed. ISBN 9780593123133 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593123157 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys Ad 5-7 yrs “Long ago, a strong wind blew. It blew people, like seeds, to a new land.” That’s the description, in Peters’ American migration story, of the first people to come to North America. As millennia and centuries go by, the wind blows those people to every corner of the continent, and then it blows in conquistadors and colonists, enslaved people and voluntary immigrants, from east, west, and south, and it still does today. The garden is an engaging metaphor for both diversity and migration, and the book is honest in its inclusion of enslavement, genocide, and colonization. However, the image homogenizes some very different migrations and renders participants ahistorically passive; there’s also little acknowledgment that the included lines from Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” contradict the experience of many of those blown seeds featured in the book. Tentler-Kylov (herself an immigrant) employs agile watercolors in energetic, dynamically composed spreads; while one spread confusingly differs from the text (the art features conquistadors on horseback [End Page 394] while the text describes colonists with wagons), illustrations are otherwise thoughtful, individualized, and appropriately diverse. Despite the book’s flaws, the garden concept offers a new way to talk about national identity and diversity, and listeners may appreciate the tempered optimism. Appended are a glossary, notes to each spread that provide specifics about the pictured events, and a list of sources. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Special Issue of Studies in Costume & Performance 7.2: “Costume and Fairy Tales”

395 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE in unlikely places, as in the early days of a genre once thought to be the domain of men, and in research and teaching both the history of science fiction and the interrelations between feminism and popular culture. The collection reprints “Letter of the Twenty Fourth Century” (1929), “Men with Wings (1929), “Women with Wings” (1930), “The Conquest of Gola” (1931), “The Fall of Mercury” (1935), “The Human Pets of Mars” (1936), and Stone’s speech from Balticon, “The Day of the Pulps” (1974). I could not have completed the collection without the cooperation and support of the author’s surviving family members, particularly her son Donald Silberberg, whose test of me as a researcher required explaining how I had used his mother’s role-reversal title story in teaching College Writing. 80% of the male students had argued that the author was a woman, while an equal percentage of the female students had argued just as persuasively that the author must have been a man. “My mother would have liked that,” he said, and our collaborative relationship began (5). As a Jewish scholar and multiculturalist researching in the field of ethnic literatures of the United States, I became interested in the work of this Jewish American writer, who lived between 1905 and 1991. Her work appeared with no ethnic markings, as did work of other Jewish sf writers, such as Judith Merril. Born a Rubenstein and living her adult married life as a Silberberg, Stone created characters who were non-Jewish and lived completely Gentile lives. Like Stanley G. Weinbaum’s Ham Hammond in “Parasite Planet” and “The Lotus Eaters,” Dr. Daniel Scott in “The Adaptive Ultimate,” and Captain Harrison and Dick Jarvis in “Valley of Dreams,” Stone’s characters were consistently identified by Gentile, non-Jewish names. For example, in “Men with Wings,” Kennedy is the narrating character. Nevertheless, many issues presented and themes discussed had to do with concerns facing Jews at the time, such as breeding the Aryan superior race, and the questioning of the dual loyalty of a race that had a national identity elsewhere but took posts in American government. The latter could have been an imaginary extrapolation from the known (the Gentile fear of employing Jews in the civil service) to the unknown (what would happen if somebody bred a superior race on earth). By the 1920s, Jewish immigration had slowed down enough for a generation to have established roots in America, but it was clear some were still feeling alien, even having engaged in the struggle for Americanization reflected in earlier Jewish-American literature such as Anzia’s Bread Givers (1925). Although Stone’s work on a story-by-story basis has entered the debates concerning gender in the field, perhaps this collection will diversify that dimension into considering the Jewish impact.—Batya Weinbaum, Editor, Femspec, Faculty of English, American Public University Special Issue of Studies in Costume & Performance 7.2: “Costume and Fairy Tales.” Our special issue invites full-research articles (4000–5000 words), visual essays (1000–2500 words with emphasis on visual evidence), research reports (2500–4000 words), analyses of research documents, and ‘in- 396 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) conversations’ with artists, designers, or scholars (2000–4000 words), as well as reviews of events and new publications. While the relationship between fashion and the fairy tale has been examined in the fields of fashion studies and fairy-tale criticism, the concept of costume in the fairy tale has not yet been sufficiently explored. We believe that an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural approach to this topic will offer fresh insight into the fields of costume studies, fairy-tale studies, performance studies, and (more broadly) studies of art, narrative, and culture across time, space, and discipline. Costume plays an important part both in traditional fairy tales and in their adaptations in diverse media forms: theatre, ballet, opera, and musicals, and also film, visual art, manga, theme parks, video games, and digital and social media. Clothes worn by characters in fairy tales function according to the internal narrative logic that constitutes and organizes the storyworld, defining and transforming the wearers’ identities and social contexts. The ubiquitous persistence of...

Fascism Has an American History, Too

Fascism Has an American History, Too Olivier Burtin (bio) The specter of fascism is once again haunting the United States. After the victory in the 2016 presidential election of a candidate who showed clear affinities with authoritarian leaders abroad and white supremacists at home, many Americans realized that their country was not as immune to such forces as they had thought. On the night of the election, “fascism” was the most searched word on the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.1 While the term had always been popular as a throwaway epithet to condemn one’s political opponents, the publication of a few monographs on the topic in the aftermath of the election marked its return as an important scholarly category in its own right. In Fascism: A Warning (2018), former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright cautioned her readers that the new president had anti-democratic “instincts” and was leading a “herd” of other like-minded authoritarian rulers “in a Fascist direction.”2 The same year, philosopher Jason Stanley dissected the various elements of fascist politics, from the use of a mythical past to the vocabulary of victimhood, in a call for Americans to reject this type of right-wing nationalism.3 It was not a coincidence that both authors were children of Central European émigrés who had fled to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Almost three-quarters of a century later, they feared that history might repeat itself. Not everyone agreed that fascism was the right term to express these anxieties, however. On the right, most voices dismissed such language as yet another attempt by the left to prevent a healthy exchange of ideas by marking its opponents as beyond the pale. Perhaps more surprisingly, fascism also received mixed reviews in liberal and progressive circles. Historian Samuel Moyn argued, for instance, that the concept hid more than it revealed: not only did it obscure the profoundly American roots of the 45th Presidency, but it also “[spared] ourselves the trouble of analyzing what is really new about it” by focusing only on what it had in common with a distant past.4 Historian David Bell joined him in discarding the label, pointing to differences between the present situation and the 1930s as well as to the fact that fascism was for most Americans “an alien, foreign ideology” whereas Donald Trump was a [End Page 494] very American phenomenon.5 Other scholars have also raised the concern that using this term could serve to delegitimize participatory politics as a whole and to give new surveillance powers to the “security state.”6 In rejecting the term “fascism,” these critics seemed to share the common assumption that this phenomenon had never taken roots in America. Here I demonstrate the opposite. This essay reaches beyond contemporary politics in order to assess whether this form of political behavior is really as alien to U.S. history as we often assume it to be. Bringing together recent works in a variety of subfields, I argue that the relative absence of fascism from historiographical debates after the mid-twentieth century tells us less about the historical record than it does about the blinders that hinder historians’ vision. Though fascism as a term was invented in interwar Europe, the kind of politics that it describes could be found as early as the mid-nineteenth century in the United States. After paving the way for the collapse of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, fascist groups continued to play an active role in American politics throughout much of the twentieth century. Scholars have failed to take this phenomenon seriously for a number of reasons. The first has to do with the long debate about the U.S. populist tradition, which was defined to a large extent in opposition to fascism from the 1960s onwards. The second is related to the strength of American exceptionalism, which has made many historians of the United States reluctant not only to compare their country’s past with that of others, but more importantly to import analytical tools initially developed abroad (especially when those were associated with darker episodes of the past). Finally, the U.S. victory in the Second...

The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town by Edward Berenson

Reviewed by: The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town by Edward Berenson Joel Streicker (bio) The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town By Edward Berenson. W. W. Norton & Co., 2019. 271 pp. When four-year-old Barbara Griffiths disappeared in the woods outside the upstate New York town of Massena on September 22, 1928, a rumor spread that she had been kidnapped by Jews intent on ritual murder. There is something mercifully anticlimactic about the recent book on the incident by Edward Berenson, a distinguished professor of history at New York University. The case drew national attention for a bit more than a week, occasioned widespread national support for the town's Jews among their co-ethnics and non-Jews alike, and has been mostly forgotten except by the area's dwindling Jewish population and their descendants, of whom Berenson is one. Perhaps most remarkable is that the accusation was leveled at all: it is the only known case of blood libel in American history. Given the uniqueness of the case, Berenson focuses mainly on explaining the historical circumstances giving rise to the Massena accusation. This requires a deep dive. Relying heavily on the work of Israel Yuval and David Nirenberg, he ably explores the genesis and significance of the blood libel in medieval Europe in the context of the Catholic Church's new (in 1215, that is) dogma of transubstantiation, the claim that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are literally—not merely metaphorically—the body and blood of Christ. Fascination with blood in that era, and the widely held notion that Jews engaged in satanic rituals involving cannibalism, also played a role. The miracles of Mary took on new importance in this era, with Jesus widely depicted as an infant in stories, paintings, and sculpture. This contributed to the notion that Jews sacrificed Christian children as a symbolic means of killing Christ. Moreover, Jews' supposed propensity for the ritual murder of children was, in Christian eyes, given credence by reports of Jewish fathers who killed their own children to prevent them from conversion at the hands of [End Page 287] Crusaders in the eleventh century. In some of these accounts, the murders were said to have taken the form of ritual sacrifice to atone for sins. While Jewish interpreters saw these as praiseworthy acts of martyrdom (many of these men were reported to have committed suicide after killing their children), they also disposed many Christians to believe Jews capable of murdering children. From these origins, Berenson traces blood libel and the anti-Jewish violence it generated through the modernera and, in an epilogue, to our ownday. The idea of blood libel never took root in America. Berenson attributes this to the dominance of Protestantism, which lacks a belief in transubstantiation, never developed a cult of Mary and baby Jesus, and, of course, postdates the Crusades. The author takes great pains to recount the antisemitism plaguing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American society. However, antisemitism did not, by and large, result in anti-Jewish violence. When violence did occur, such as the lynching of Leo Frank, it did not take the form of blood libel. So why Massena? And who was behind the accusation? Here Berenson's account is swift, succinct, and convincing. He provides a brief history of the town's rise as an industrial center near the Canadian border, relying on mostly Catholic immigrant labor from Europe and, especially, Quebec. There is no hard evidence as to who actually started the rumor that Barbara Griffiths had been kidnapped by Jews for ritual murder, but many townspeople credited (or later blamed) an unnamed French Canadian immigrant. Others claimed that volunteer firefighters associated with the Ku Klux Klan, which was experiencing a revival in the area (and nationally), had spread the rumor. Timing here is everything. Berenson makes a case that Quebecois workers likely were behind the accusation. Quebec had, for decades and at that very moment, an active antisemitic press with clear connections to European antisemitism, which was ascendant on the Continent. Moreover, the United States was in the midst of a divisive presidential campaign. Drawing on decades of antagonism toward Catholic and Jewish immigrants...

Islam Takes Root in America alongside Racism

Islam Takes Root in America alongside Racism

A Symposium on American National Character

The articles in this symposium address four themes in relation to the question of American national character: citizenship (Rogers M. Smith), community mores (Rick Santorum), participation (W. B. Allen), and governance (Philip A. Wallach). They are the beginning of our effort to investigate, assess, articulate, and perhaps claim—or reclaim—an ethos shared by the American people. Emerging out of the first phase of our American National Character project, they are far from exhausting the subject but represent an auspicious commencement of a contemporary effort no less important that that described by Washington during the founding era. “[W]e are either a United people, or we are not.” Let us hope that we are and that we can rediscover the roots of America's common cause and act as a nation.

Book Review: The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America’s First Labor War by Mark Bulik

Mark Bulik The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America's First Labor War, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015; 384 pp.: ISBN 97808232O2236, $39.95 On 2 January 1863, five assassins killed James Bergen, a disabled Union Army veteran. A week later, two of his friends were shot and wounded. These events, iMark Bulik writes, marked the start of the first labour war in the United States. The assassins were Molly Maguires, members of a secret society noted for resorting to violence. From 1877 to 1878, 20 Mollies were tried and executed. Plenty of ink has been spilled about the Molly Maguires. Some contemporaries derided them as primitive terrorists. Marxists and Socialists considered the executed Mollies martyrs. Much of what we know about the Mollies, the author argues, is either problematic or badly interpreted. Therefore, this book strips away some of the gray mist of myth, misinformation, and propaganda that has long shrouded the origins of the Molly Maguires' (p. 9). One of Bulik's principal objectives is to contextualize the Mollies by placing them in a transatlantic context. He contends that the lack of consensus about the Molly Maguires is partly because many writers tended to view the violence in a primarily American context, rather than an Irish one' (p. 7). To counter this trend, he spends nearly a third of the book hunting for the Irish roots of the Mollies. To his credit, he unearths fascinating information. For instance, he highlights the relationship between the Mollies and mummery, or, an ancient play performed by amateur troopers who visited nearby homes during the Christmas season' (p. 28). Mummers and the Mollies were different sides of the same coin. The mummers were the 'benevolent face of an alternative social order' (p. 43). The Mollies, the darker side, utilized violence to terrorize landlords in Ireland and mine owners in the United States. Thus, in addition to finding that the Molly Maguires and the mummers were of a piece, Bulik offers a social history of Ireland. He focusses on the fierce conflicts between tenants and landlords. In his analysis of organized agrarian violence, he discusses two broad groups. The Whiteboys were a loose-knit, largely apolitical southern Ireland organization concerned with 'issues related to the land and rural life' (p. 46). The Defenders and the Ribbonmen, on the other hand, concentrated in Ulster and 'busied themselves in sectarian battles, labor activity, nationalist politics, and tenant rights' (p. 46). The Defenders, the earlier organization, were suppressed and reborn as the Ribbonmen. The Molly Maguires debuted on 10 December 1844 and were quickly revealed to be Ribbonmen 'who had adopted a new name, a new agenda, and a new set of symbols, whole keeping their old organizational structure' (p. 87). The Mollies maintained a militant focus on access to land and food and 'showed a remarkable willingness to move beyond mere threats by taking on the authorities with aggressive shows of force' (p. 93). Throughout the rest of the book, Bulik discusses the consequences of transplanting this alternative social order to the United States. Irish immigrants carried their own legacy from the deadly competition for land in the north of Ireland--a tradition of collective action that soon became evident, in two related forms. …

A Sense of Power: The Roots of America's Global Role

John A. Thompson's title echoes two of many explanations of the global reach of the United States: the realist and the materialist. The author names many progenitors of the former, with the latter's forebears being essentially Charles Beard and William Appleman Williams. Another name suggests itself—Robert Endicott Osgood. For it is Osgood's work of sixty-plus years ago that appears to set the basic question for Thompson: What is the relationship between “self [national] interest” and “ideals,” which appear as the twin drivers of U.S. foreign policy making? Thompson blends these two factors in his account of the “great transformation” (Osgood's phrase from Ideals and Self-Interest in America's Foreign Relations: The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century [1953]) from the late nineteenth century to the early 1950s. In this period, policy makers (followed by the opinion-polled public) decided to exploit the huge and diverse resources of the United States to create a world—if not quite in the American image, at least adaptable to U.S. goals. There were three key moments in this transformation: the turn-of-the-century debate on imperialism; entry into World War I and the rejection of the League of Nations; and the building of multilateral institutions and alliances (the United Nations, the Bretton Woods system, the North American Treaty Organization) during and after World War II—the grim lessons of interwar isolationism having been learned.

Sönke Kunkel. Empire of Pictures: Global Media and the 1960s Remaking of American Foreign Policy. John A. Thompson. A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role.

Sönke Kunkel. Empire of Pictures: Global Media and the 1960s Remaking of American Foreign Policy. John A. Thompson. A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role.

A sense of power: the roots of America's global role

A sense of power: the roots of America's global role

John A. Thompson, A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role

For all the talk of Japan in the 1980s or China today overturning American hegemony, it remains the case that no other state on Earth comes close to America in terms of its unparalleled economic and military power, and will not do so for, at least, decades to come. Accounts of how this came to pass tend to focus on America’s reluctant engagement in World War Two and the Cold War, followed decades later by the implosion of the USSR, leaving America as the world’s lone hegemon. In this narrativ...

The Second Girl

The Second Girl

The Second Girl

The Second Girl

The Working Poor: Two Perspectives on Reality—A Communication to the Editor Inviting a Discussion

The Working Poor: Two Perspectives on Reality—A Communication to the Editor Inviting a Discussion

A sense of power. The roots of America’s global role

A sense of power. The roots of America’s global role

A sense of power: the roots of America's global role

A sense of power: the roots of America's global role

Pan American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico by Megan Threlkeld (review)

PAN AMERICAN WOMEN: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico. By Megan Threlkeld. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2014.In her text Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico, Megan Threlkeld illuminates the conflicted and sometimes contentious relationship between feminists of the early-twentieth century, and Mexican women of the same era who sought to establish their own sense of cultural empowerment alongside growing nationalism resulting from the Mexican Revolution. Threlkeld reveals that attempts to establish mutually beneficial relationships between feminists and Mexican nationalists/feminists were complicated by political factors, including U.S. imperialist attitudes in regards to the natural resources available in Mexico, as well as better known global conflicts such as the Mexican Revolution, The Great Depression, and World War II.At the same time such Pan American feminist relationships, as they were pursued by a collection of woman-led groups and institutions and manifested through a variety of means, were plagued by interpersonal conflict, racist attitudes on behalf of women, and the real-life concerns of Mexican women navigating the shifting political landscape of Mexico.Threlkeld's research is impeccable and dense with historical documentation that seems to have received far too little attention in the arenas of history, politics, or feminism. The text is sharply factual, so much so that at times it only touches upon cultural biases that likely have deeper roots in America's own conflicted racial history. For example, Carrie Chapman Catt's reported contention that Mexican women were back on the evolutionary scale could easily be attached to the popularity of eugenics in the United States during this era, anxieties regarding immigration and race relations after the Civil War, and even the forced relocation of Native Americans in the century before (63).Likewise, Threlkeld's text could also be used to further our understanding of gender specific legislation and its success in the U.S. before this time. Florence Kelley's relentless pursuit of such legislation would not be replicated in Mexico, and Threlkeld clearly enunciates how this is rooted in the distinct needs of Mexican women who distrusted feminists. feminists, who sometimes approached Mexican women with attitudes of superiority, also failed to understand how Mexican women could choose to identify with their nationality before they could identify with their gender, and were thus only interested in seeing Mexican women as women, and not as Mexican revolutionaries. …

Tobacco: Incessant Human Health Menace (A Review)

Tobacco plant, the most sought after weed in the world, having its roots in America has already made its appearance felt worldwide along the course of time. Regarded as a medicinal herb in the beginning, now it is held responsible for enormous sufferings and countless ailments affecting almost every system of human body. Tobacco is consumed either by smoking or chewing (smokeless). It is thought to have soothing effects on the consumer thereby making him a habitue. Nicotine, the main component present in tobacco, causes the release of neurotransmitters from the brain thereby, brings the good effect on the body and mind of the individual. But it is a temporary feeling and the person is actually pushing himself to a never ending addiction and life taking diseases including cardiovascular and pulmonary ailments. According to WHO, globally, coronary heart diseases result in around 7.3 million death annually, along with respiratory diseases (3.1 million) and lung cancers (1.6 million). Other worth mentioning health problem is the oral cancer which is very common in Indian population due to widespread habit of chewing tobacco. WHO estimates that India ranks 1st globally in death tally due to oral cancers. The health hazards due to tobacco consumption are escalating and there’s an urgent need to address this issue. Efforts are already being done in the form of advertisements to avoid tobacco but had they been enough, results would have been different. No doubt treatments are available but there are risks, therefore, other programs like cessation and de-addiction need to be promoted. People should be made aware of the consequences and efforts have to be made at local and global level. This review is a step to create awareness regarding tobacco health hazards and how they are being dealt with.