This essay explores the relationship between welfare, eugenics and documentary photography during the New Deal in order to explain how a set of government photographs taken by Arthur Rothstein in the Shenandoah became entwined in the rhetorical structure of eugenic ideology. The photographs discussed portray victims of forced sterilization before their incarceration, yet there is no evidence to show that the photographer was aware of, or complicit with, this fact. This essay responds to the questions this raises about the images: what historical and social contingencies were behind their production? What is the relationship between the photographer, the photographs, the New Deal and the subjects depicted? How did efforts to help America's poorest lead to their incarceration and sterilization? Why is the full picture impossible to see? And how do we read and understand them today?

This article examines the construction, the development and the denouement of the Museum of Safety in New York during the early twentieth century. Through a detailed assessment of the institution's own bulletin, newspapers and accompanying literature, the manner in which the museum served its visitors, promoted its cause and failed to secure its own future will be examined. The significance of this institution has been overlooked despite the way its role and responsibilities in exhibiting safety devices and procedures to industry, workers and the public reflect important trends within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society. The Museum of Safety also emerged as the effects of capitalism, immigration and industrialization began to be addressed. Examining the history of this “lost museum” will, therefore, reveal how responsibility, awareness and modernity were encountered in New York.

Sharing of Ministries Abroad (SOMA) was formed in the late 1970s as an international organization for the cultivation of charismatic renewal amongst leaderships within the global Anglican Communion. This article explores the ethos and activities of its American national body. It argues that its short term, cross-cultural missions increasingly displayed mutuality and long-term partnership rather than one-directional American influence, and thus reflected a developing shift in the understanding and practice of global mission in the late twentieth century. The organiztion shaped awareness of the global Church amongst some US Episcopalians and constructed an influential transnational network within charismatic Anglicanism. Furthermore, SOMA's network was one context for the emergence of global North–South conservative solidarity in the politics of the Anglican Communion.

This article examines the cultural politics of military awards during the Obama administration. It examines the administration's posthumous recognition of three Vietnam veterans, arguing that the President has embraced a remembrance of the war that encourages Americans to celebrate veterans without regard for the illegal, controversial, or morally questionable activities in which they participated. This effort, I argue, helps build support for the United States' continuing expansion of war fighting in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere by encouraging Americans to adopt a similar perspective regarding current wars – one that celebrates military personnel while not questioning the policies that they pursue or the manner in which they do so.

In June 2013, Iran surprised many observers by electing the moderate, but still firmly establishment, cleric Hassan Rouhani as President. Following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's eight years in office, few analysts predicted Rouhani's victory. It was expected that Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would oversee the election of a more controllable conservative politician than Ahmadinejad had turned out to be. Instead, the array of hard-line candidates presented to the electorate on polling day split the conservative vote, resulting in an overwhelming victory for Rouhani.

During the years of Japan's “bubble” economy, writers and artists in the United States became increasingly susceptible to “Japan-bashing,” a discourse that objectified Japanese for their trade practices, overseas purchases, and tourist presence. In the following article, I draw upon a range of cultural texts, from Truman Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's to Michael Crichton's novel Rising Sun, in order to investigate how the trope of the camera-toting Japanese expatriate encapsulated the fears of the era. I then move to explore the ways in which Japanese Americans negotiated these tropes in their writings, paying particular attention to Ruth Ozeki's novel My Year of Meats. I hypothesize that Japanese Americans remained aware of the phenomenon of “Japan-bashing” throughout the era, yet did not confront it in a sustained fashion. Instead, tropes were either dismissed out of hand or, as in Ozeki's case, incorporated into a narrative before undergoing a process of gradual dismantlement.

As a new paradigm and frame for US geopolitical imperatives, the war on terror poses particular challenges of representation. Like other media today, American cinema screens the war on terror – that is to say, it functions both to show and to conceal the conditions and effects of perpetual war. It dramatizes the hauntology of this war and it also mystifies and demystifies its violence. This essay focusses on the example of the film Zero Dark Thirty to consider how the film re-presents the aporia of representation that structures the production of the war on terror as a field of perceptible reality and reflects the geopolitical priorities of an American worldview. Central to this aporia is the mystification of the “elusive enemy” and the naturalization of a “long war.” The hunt for Osama bin Laden has been a symbolic narrativization of this aporia and the essay comments on how Zero Dark Thirty re-presents this.

This essay examines an underexplored aspect of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland – namely its German–Indian context – and reads it through the story's main plot device: ventriloquism. Using some of Brown's manuscripts as well as journalistic pieces, the essay brings together the more puzzling aspects of this central US American gothic tale into a study of colonial violence and transplanted voices. Following Sarah Rivett's recent claim of a “spectral presence of American Indians” in the story, this essay argues for a rereading of the character of the “bioloquist” that brings to the surface a deep history of the dispossession of Native peoples (especially the Lenape) carefully interwoven into the novel's subtext.

This article considers the cultural significance of the garbage panics of the 1980s, including the voyage of the infamous Mobro 4000 “garbage barge.” The article argues that the trash at the centre of these panics is important to our understanding of both the 1980s and the present because it demanded – and still demands – that Americans see and understand it as a class of matter unmoored from temporal as well as spatial boundaries. The alarming durability of the supposedly ephemeral refuse of a culture of mass consumption invoked an “archaeological consciousness” prone to muse upon the longevity of material remains. This consciousness was expressed in various cultural and discursive arenas throughout the 1980s, revealing that durable detritus was not just a pressing public policy issue but a marker of cultural anxieties emerging out of the operations of archaeological consciousness. From concerns about contingency of the mass-consuming culture of the late twentieth-century United States to reflections on trash's own epistemological complexity, trash spoke in unexpected ways throughout the 1980s, raising important questions about the relationship between producers of culture and their audience, whose receptiveness to the urgencies of archaeological consciousness suffers from a frustrating transience as far as trash is concerned.

This paper is a critical examination of Louise Erdrich's novel The Antelope Wife, one that has a particular focus in conceptualizations of origins. That is to say, it is an analysis of the novel that scrutinizes the various ways in which “origins” are a vitally important aspect, both of the narrative and of the conceptual paradigms that might be used to interpret it. The Antelope Wife thus problematizes the ways that historical and epistemological foundations are predicated on certain crucial moments of origin, which are then used to legitimate particular interpretations. A concept of a definitive origin is also used to underwrite ideas about cultural authenticity which are then placed in the service of social and political perspectives, with wide-ranging consequences. Such origins concern the beginning of narrative, the politics of ethnicity, and the original innocence of a fall from grace. In each case, the novel is notable for its subtle examination of where such concepts begin, and of the political implications of the very concept of beginnings.