Category: American Studies
Guest post by Sheri Chinen Biesen I’m a bit of a nerd. I like digging around in Hollywood studio archives investigating classic cinema like you see on Turner Classic Movies with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. I specialize in film noir, a series of 1940s–1950s American crime pictures noted for their moody, shadowy visual style…
Guest Post by Dane A. Morrison ISIS, Ebola, globalization, the Ukraine. State-sponsored terrorism, globally transmitted disease, worldwide economic disruption, fraught relations with overseas powers. The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and FOX News shout this constellation of dangers to even the casual, cowering observer. In response, we imagine better times and think of these troubles…
Guest Post by Dane A. Morrison ISIS, Ebola, globalization, the Ukraine. State-sponsored terrorism, globally transmitted disease, worldwide economic disruption, fraught relations with overseas powers. The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and FOX News shout this constellation of dangers to even the casual, cowering observer. In response, we imagine better times and think of these troubles…
Guest post by Robert C. Post On the dust jacket of my book, Who Owns America’s Past, there is a blurb from Dr. Deborah Douglas, Director of Collections at the MIT Museum and a marvelous historian. Debbie calls it “part history, part memoir, and part polemic,” and I’ve had to admit that she “got” my…
Guest post by Carl Benn We normally think of native people in the War of 1812 participating in traditional war parties, which is accurate for the vast majority of the Iroquoian, Algonquian, Siouan, and Muskogean peoples of eastern North America who took up arms between 1812 and 1815. A small number, however, served within Euro-American…
Guest post by Marc Ferris In 1996, while sitting in a graduate history seminar at Stony Brook University, I searched for a topic to write about. My professors indulged my inquiry into the culture clash between United States authorities and headhunting tribes in the Philippines after the Spanish–American War, but I wanted to combine my…
Guest post by Eric Allen Hall As the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, make clear, the fight for civil and human rights is far from over. The shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen, by a white police officer provides a window into contemporary race relations. The predominately African American protesters in Ferguson argue…
Guest post by D. Rose Elder The media typically portray Amish characters as either disapproving, humorless, and colorless adults rigidly humming a solemn hymn to keep worldly thoughts at bay or conflicted, cocky, out-of-control rumspringa adolescents listening to ear-splitting rock and testing all the limits of decency. Of course, TV and the movies are by…
Guest post by D. Rose Elder The media typically portray Amish characters as either disapproving, humorless, and colorless adults rigidly humming a solemn hymn to keep worldly thoughts at bay or conflicted, cocky, out-of-control rumspringa adolescents listening to ear-splitting rock and testing all the limits of decency. Of course, TV and the movies are by…
Guest post by Marc Ferris The story of how The Star-Spangled Banner became America's national anthem and what took Congress so long to designate it as such is a fascinating tale that reflects the give and take between the rulers and their subjects over national symbols, the symbiotic relationship between patriotism and religion, and the song’s…