Department of American Culture and Literature

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Open Access
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.
The author of over one hundred novels, Horatio Alger, Jr., has come to be associated with a rags-to-riches narrative that combines moral uplift with social mobility. In the majority of his novels, a young, destitute street boy is discovered by an older, wealthy man who enlists the boy's services, offers assistance and guidance, and enables him to ascend the social ladder. Alger's novels address the consequences of urbanization and economic transformation for changing notions of manhood in Gilded Age America. Alger's emphasis on paternalistic relations as a means of uplift may have a biographical background: In 1866, Alger had to leave his post as minister of a Unitarian church in Brewster, Massachusetts, over charges of having sexually abused young boys. Upon arriving in New York, Alger ...
Open Access
All the pretty Mexican girls: whiteness and racial desire in Cormac McCarthy's all the pretty horses and cities of the plain
(Western Literature Association, 2014) Reimer, J. A.
All the Pretty Mexican Girls: Whiteness and Racial Desire in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain” uses a critical analysis of race and gender to argue that John Grady Cole’s relationship with Alejandra and Magdalena invokes a larger and longer history of the commodification and sexualization of women’s bodies in the contact zone of the US-Mexico borderlands. The critical concerns this article addresses seek to re-situate McCarthy’s influential borderlands writing within a more nuanced series of border encounters that expose how transactions between regional, national, and international material realities on the US-Mexico border make available certain identities and modes of representation. Exposing the links between McCarthy’s representations and real-world material realities are crucial to this analysis because they reveal how McCarthy both accounts for and disavows the operations of power and history on the US-Mexico border. McCarthy’s border novels represent an in-between space where western history and the Western genre can be self-consciously invoked and revised, but only to a certain extent. John Grady Cole may be a more compassionate and “politically correct” John Wayne, yet the violence, sexual and otherwise, perpetrated on the bodies of brown women in the Border Trilogy reminds us how much McCarthy’s white masculinities rely on such abject bodies in order to fashion their own ambivalent agency in the brutal world of McCarthy’s borderlands.
Open Access
American Gothic; or, what Melville can teach us
(New Politics Associates, Inc., 2021-07-19) Johnson, Daniel
Open Access
American Romantic Tradition and the Proletarian Novel in the 1930's
(1996) Grieco, Peter
Open Access
Anthropology in history: Lewis Henry Morgan and Margaret Mead
(The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010-09) Bryson, D.
Open Access
Boardinghouse life, boardinghouse letters
(Georgia State University, 2007-01) Faflik, D.
Open Access
The Brown Threat: Post-9/11 conflations of Latina/os and Middle Eastern muslims in the US American imagination
(Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2014) Rivera, C.
In the post-9/11 American imagination, stereotypical images of the terrorist from the Middle East and the illegal migrant worker from south of the US border consistently appear in media and rhetoric. Dominant US representations of Latinos and Middle Eastern Muslims shape not only how US government and media construes them as “Brown Threats,” but also how citizens in the US interpret these minority groups as dangerous, foreign, inauthentic and brown(ed) Americans. By analyzing law, rhetoric and visual culture, the concept of the Brown Threat interrogates contemporary conflations of Latinos and Middle Eastern Muslims
Open Access
Bureaucratization
(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.
Bureaucracy, or bureaucratization, refers to routinized, deper-sonalized, and dispersed processes devoted to the execution of a variety of administrative tasks, and to the regulation and assessment of these tasks. Within a bureaucratic system of governance, authority is dispersed and disconnected from ownership or physical production. Notions of a “bureaucratic manhood,” or a “bureaucratic team player,” slowly began to appear in U.S. society as bureaucratic systems of governance and administration emerged after 1830. This development enabled men to articulate masculine power and authority out-side the contexts of craft skills (which were slowly displaced by industrialization after 1830) and ownership and entrepreneurial control (which were transformed by corporatization after 1880). In addition, a mode of bureaucratic manhood gained ground after 1880 that linked masculinity to the exercise
Open Access
C. Dallet Hemphill, Philadelphia stories: people and their places in early America
(Oxford Univ Press Inc, 2023-08-16) Johnson, Daniel Peter
Open Access
Civil War
(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.
The American Civil War (1861–65) between the North (the Union) and the South (the Confederacy) was a conflict over issues of national identity, economic development, western expansion, and slavery. With roughly 2 million soldiers fighting for the Union and about 800,000 for the Confederacy, the war wrought transformations in the lives of both black and white men and altered ideas about manhood in both the North and the South. It served as a juncture between two regional sets of ideals of manhood and highlighted the race, gender, and class hierarchies on which they were contingent.
Open Access
Class
(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.
The economic and social transformations engendered by industrialization, urbanization, and the emergence of a market economy in the nineteenth century led to processes of class formation, class difference, and class identity that have profoundly shaped definitions of manliness in the United States. A man's position in the process of production, the type of work he performs, and the amount of managerial and entrepreneurial control he exercises are determinants of class status and are intricately connected to notions of masculinity and gender. As an expression of a man's economic status, and of the cultural attitudes and perceptions that it engenders, class and class difference are connected to articulations of gender and manliness in U.S. society.
Open Access
Coat of many colors by Eugene Eoyang
(Forkroads, 1996) Grieco, Peter
Open Access
Cold War
(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.
The Cold War, which began after World War II and lasted through the 1980s, was a geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union grounded in an ideological rivalry between capitalism and communism. The Cold War raised concerns about both external and internal threats to American strength, social stability, and security, and particularly to material abundance, middle-class lifestyles, and cultural norms about masculinity. Motivated by fears of emasculation, effeminization, and homosexuality, Americans anxiously defined their nation and their way of life in terms culturally associated with masculinity, including power, diplomatic and military assertiveness, economic success, sexual and physical prowess, moral righteousness, and patriotism.
Open Access
Confidence Man
(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.
The confidence man—a man who takes advantage of people by gaining their confidence, convincing them to trust him with their possessions, and then stealing those possessions— was a male archetype of Victorian middle-class culture. He symbolized middle-class Americans' anxieties about the potential for predatory male behavior in the increasingly anonymous, impersonal, and competitive social world being created by urbanization and the market revolution.
Open Access
Crime in the city of brotherly love
(History Today Ltd., 2022-01) Johnson, Daniel
Open Access
Crisis of Masculinity
(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.
It was during the late 1960s that historians first developed the notion of a “crisis of masculinity” to describe the nervous concerns that middle-class men had regarding masculinity and the male body during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This idea not only brought scholarly attention to important changes in constructions of manhood in the twentieth century, but also raised questions about the timing of changes in cultural constructions of masculinity, the extent of uniformity and variation in men's experiences of social change, and about men's attitudes toward feminism.
Open Access
Crossing the Rubicon: Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the 1884 Republican National Convention
(Cambridge University Press, 2006-01) Kohn, E.
Open Access
Cult of Domesticity
(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.
The “cult of domesticity” was first explored as a historical phenomenon in antebellum U.S. society by Barbara Welter, who wrote in 1966 of a “cult of true womanhood,” though the phrase itself was coined by the historian Aileen Kraditor in 1968. Part of a broader nineteenth-century northern middle-class ideology of “separate spheres,” the cult of domesticity identified womanhood with the private or domestic sphere of the home and manhood with the public sphere of economic competition and politics. While the cult of domesticity primarily concerned a definition of femininity, defining the home as a space governed by women's sentimental, moral and spiritual influence, this ideology also contributed to definitions of manliness and sought to control male passions at a time when the market revolution, urbanization, ...
Open Access
Dangerous spending habits: the epistemology of Edna Pontellier's extravagant expenditures in the awakening
(Mississippi State University, 2001) Bunch, Dianne
Open Access
Democratic Manhood
(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.
Between 1815 and the 1840s, a concept of democratic manhood emerged in the United States, marking a conscious rejection of European (especially British) notions of ascribed social status. Strongly associated with Democratic president Andrew Jackson, democratic manhood was defined as political equality and broadened political participation among white men—and by the exclusion of women and nonwhites from the privileges of citizenship. It emphasized physical prowess and boisterous patriotism, expressed by the popularity of such frontiersmen as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Furthermore, the concept informed a developing urban counterculture that resisted the aristocratic pretensions and bourgeois morality of an emerging middle class.