This article engages the controversy over whether Malcolm Little, who would become Malcolm X, had same-sexual encounters. A minute sifting of all evidence and claims, augmented by new findings, yields strong indication that Malcolm Little did take part in sex acts with male counterparts. If set in the context of the 1930s and 1940s, these acts position him not as a “homosexual lover,” as has been asserted, but in the pattern of “straight trade” – heterosexual men open to sex with homosexuals – an understanding that in turn affords insights into the black revolutionary's mature masculinity.

This article explores how Jesmyn Ward's novel Salvage the Bones and Kara Walker's visual essay After the Deluge can be read through the concept of Giorgio Agamben's “bare life” in order to explore the complexities of representing bodies that have been stripped of their political significance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Walker and Ward both situate Katrina within a longer lineage of representation of African American life extending back to slavery, prompting wider debate about the conceptual frameworks that we use in order to describe rupturing incidents that are connected to structural forms of persecution.

This introduction embeds the Exploring the Global History of American Evangelicalism special issue into current historiographical debates in the field of US evangelicalism and globalization. It lays out the methodological framework and thematic scope of the special issue.

“American Monsters” analyzes the satanic panic, an episode of national hysteria that dominated the media throughout the 1980s. It involved hundreds of accusations that devil-worshipping pedophiles were operating America's white middle-class suburban daycare centers. Communities around the country became embroiled in trials against center owners, the most publicized of which was the McMartin Preschool trial in Manhattan Beach, California, still the longest and most expensive criminal trial in the nation's history. This article explores how the panic both reflected and shaped a cultural climate dominated by the overlapping worldviews of politically active conservatives. Their ideology was incorporated into the panic and reinforced through tabloid media. Infotainment expanded dramatically in the 1980s, selling conservative-defined threats as news. The panic unfolded mostly through infotainment, lending appeal to subgenres like talk shows. In the 1990s, judges overturned the life sentences of defendants in most major cases, and several prominent journalists and lawyers condemned the phenomenon as a witch hunt. They analyzed it as a powerful delusion, or what contemporary cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard termed a “hyperreality,” in which audiences confuse the media universe for real life. Integral to the development, influence, and success of tabloid television, the panic was a manifestation of the hyperreal.

If C. L. R. James could later reflect in Beyond a Boundary that before arriving in Britain, “about Britain, I was a strange compound of knowledge and ignorance,” then the same was fundamentally true about his relation to American society before his arrival there in 1938. This article will begin with discussion of the attraction of America for black West Indians, including George Padmore, in the era of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as the young James's own love of jazz and American literature. The complexities of the young James's “anti-Americanism” will be also explored, before we explore how James's turn to both Marxism and pan-Africanism after 1934 led to a new appreciation of both the power of the American working class and a new understanding of how a revolutionary solution might be found to the “Negro Question,” the question of the systematic racism towards black people in America. The article will conclude with discussion of James's 1938 work A History of Negro Revolt, in particular its Marxist analysis of the history of American slavery and its abolition during the American Civil War, as well as the strengths and limitations of Garveyism as a social movement.

This article examines the crucial role that print media played in the global expansion of American evangelicalism during the late 1890s: a moment when the United States was exercising new forms of military, economic, and cultural power to extend its influence in world affairs. Analyzing the strategies that publicists employed to make the popular press an effective medium of spreading American evangelicalism sheds light on the theological and social factors that influenced – and circumscribed – the ways in which evangelicals imagined, fostered, and undermined the creation of a global Christian community in this increasingly imperial era.

This article explores the Beatles’ invasion of America as a moment of cultural globalization. Paying attention to the political economy underpinning the Beatles’ success, the international hybridity at the heart of their cultural work, and the diverse ways in which Americans interpreted the Beatles, the article argues that the band was a primary vector of pop culture's increasing globality in the 1960s. More broadly, the article argues that the Beatles’ trajectory reveals that cultural globalization cannot be understood as a process either of homogenization or of creolization. Rather, the Beatles represented an increasingly unified and commodified culture that simultaneously served to reproduce cultural differences when different social formations projected their own meanings onto the hybridized group. The article therefore provides new perspectives on the historical significance of the iconic band and on the intersections between global and domestic cultural history in the 1960s, as well as suggesting a new framework for thinking about both the history and the contradictions of cultural globalization.

The resurgence of American evangelicalism since the 1940s unfolded in conjunction with efforts by policymakers to instrumentalize religion for the assertion of empire. Missions and foreign aid are two key areas where these dynamics intersected. They show that evangelicals were both at home in the “American century” and deeply critical of global power. Rather than being a weakness, however, these tensions enabled the movement to become a crucial arbiter at a time when the country's new role was not yet firmly legitimized at home. In particular, evangelicalism helped reconcile isolationist, antistatist, and antimilitarist sentiments with hegemonic aspirations, the national security state, and the military–industrial complex.

Billy the Kid spoke his last words in Spanish. Calling out “¿Quién es? ¿Quién es?” before he was killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett, the young outlaw's final moments signal his diverse ethnic context. This article examines the Kid's close contact with the Southwest's communities of color – New Mexico's Mescalero Apache Indians, African American soldiers, and Hispano farmers – and why these communities have been removed from countless popular representations of the Kid's story. Their omission has helped to perpetuate a uniquely Western and white American ideal of individualism and served to legitimize a libertarian and ahistorical ideal of violence: the rebellion of an outlaw who defies the rest of his society and his times.

After World War II, American evangelicals realized that the European religious landscape had been seriously damaged, causing them to begin to include Europe in their mission programs. Their initiatives reversed the established direction of things, changing the pattern of who sent and who received missionary support. The religious aid flowing from the US fell almost entirely within the masculine framing of the American state, which had so recently exerted its influence in Europe in the military, economic, and cultural spheres. This essay explains how, as a result of practical experience and general social change, gender relations in American missions came to embrace greater inclusivity. European evangelicals, in turn, were both empowered by working with the American missionaries and impacted by the American debate over the separation of male and female roles in the mission field.

While ethnic rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks in the film West Side Story has long figured as a point of scholarly concern, we argue the musical's main conflict is not between the two gangs, but rather that of youth versus adult authority. Engaging in a close analysis of the dances choreographed by Jerome Robbins, we contend that the gangs' enmity against each other is subsumed by their collective struggle to reject the socially prescribed roles of adults and children in Cold War America, which fetishized childhood innocence. Robbins's complex representations of youthful play participated in defining a “youth counterculture.”

It took years, at the dawn of the twentieth century, for the National Zoo to capture Rocky Mountain sheep. The split hooves and remarkable eyesight of bighorns made these animals virtually impossible to catch alive. This is a story about a national government chasing sheep for the purpose of zoological display. This is also a story about the construction of knowledge, the ironies of conservation, and the building of the American West. More important, this is a story about storytelling. The following tale will call attention to the opportunities that zoological parks, animal history, and narrative history offer the historian.