This essay explores the intersection of race and the field of war and society in U.S. history. Centering race as a critical fault line, it examines how racial identities, hierarchies, and constructions have shaped—and been shaped by—U.S. experiences of war, both during and beyond moments of active conflict. While race is the central focus, the essay also considers how gender, ethnicity, and class intersect with it. These interconnected forces help define not only who is recognized within "society" but also how war is waged, experienced, and remembered. By analyzing key historiographic debates, the essay considers how scholarship on race has contributed to a deeper, more complex understanding of the war and society field. It also argues that race-based inquiry challenges conventional definitions of war and society, expanding them beyond state-sanctioned actors and discrete wartime events to include long-term, systemic forms of violence and resistance. In doing so, the essay highlights the co-productive relationship between war and society and how race reshapes our understanding of both.

This chapter discusses Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, which focuses on domesticity and labor aboard a space station during a twenty-four-hour period of circling the earth. It argues that Harvey builds the novel through a focus on four intertwined forms of labor: natural science experiments, space station maintenance, interpersonal talismanic-memorial labor, and the aesthetic-affective-emotional labor of metabolizing human-planet relationality. To focus on this last form of labor, the chapter examines Harvey’s use of myriad formal strategies that call attention to themselves as mediating technologies for encountering the earth’s surface. Furthermore, it highlights the novel’s primary socioecological affects: awe, anxiety, disgust, love, nostalgia, and precarity. To situate the assessment of how Harvey produces planet-scale affect, the chapter considers the overlap and divergence of the concepts planet, planetary, and planetarity. Ultimately, it argues that Harvey productively pressures the more conventional and anthropocentric concerns in the novel with her forceful centering of the earth as an object worthy of non-anthropocentric attention.

This chapter examines how fashion points to alternative forms of pleasure that exceed conventional narratives about choices between a life of political struggle and one of security and luxury. It focuses on British Labour politician Ellen Wilkinson’s novel Clash (1929), which is set during the 1926 General Strike and features a feminist heroine whose male suitors offer two distinctly different futures: one committed to the workers’ cause, and the other an escape into bohemian indulgence. Appropriating the genre of the romance, Wilkinson configures her protagonist’s conflict through two key fashion and design networks of the 1920s, Bloomsbury bohemianism and the European avant-garde, against which a third realm, the world of class struggle, is positioned as a counter-text. Engaging recent theories of affect and aesthetics, this chapter reveals how fashion attunes characters and readers to otherwise foreclosed ways of sensing and being, including unrealized forms of women’s expression and cross-class solidarity.

Seen as a path to Americanization, the sweatshop is a cultural trope. From Abraham Cahan’s fictional autobiography, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), to Amy Sherman-Palladino’s comedy-drama, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-), stories set in the sweatshop comprise a subgenre of US immigrant narratives. Melissa Rivero’s The Affairs of the Falcóns (2019) adds to and disrupts that subgenre while challenging dominant conception of assimilation. As a story about undocumented labor and the informal economy, The Affairs of the Falcóns seems to say little about assimilation as it is widely perceived and celebrated. Yet Rivero’s novel offers a fresh take on this concept: Ana is incorporated in the US economy not only as a sweatshop seamstress, but also as a disposable worker. The Affairs of the Falcóns calls attention to the paradox of assimilation – inclusion via marginalization and subordination – and to the elusiveness of the American dream.

This chapter explores how the cotton field structures the symbiotic relationships among American literature, fashion, freedom, and slavery. In an era when most paper was made from cotton rags, the page as well as the shirt or shift began their interconnected lives in the cotton south. In this sense, unfreedom is woven into the physical pages of the texts that connect free U.S. Americans to each other over an increasingly expansive United States. However, worn next to the body, clothing and objects of fashion become apparatuses for forming distinct spheres of public discourse. Attending to the material and labor conditions that generate both fashion and literature, this chapter seeks to expand our understandings of whose lives and experiences engender and constitute public discourse. In the age of the mechanical reproduction of both texts and textiles, freedom and slavery were mass produced.

How might we read Paul Laurence Dunbar as a poet of place and landscape? Dunbar wrote his poetry in an era where local color, regionalism, and realism were dominant forces in American literature, and his poetry engages in complex ways with these generic traditions. At the same time, Dunbar’s poetry, particularly his writing in non-dialect verse, is deeply influenced by his lifelong study of and engagement with British Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions, and the modes of environmental representation through apostrophe, lyric meditation, and balladic narrative central to these traditions. I read Dunbar’s explorations of place and landscape in dialogue with these intersecting influences, in and through which Dunbar develops a sustained reflection on struggle, displacement, violence, and unfreedom as the fundamental conditions of Black experience in the post-Reconstruction era United States. Less oriented by local specificity or realist detail, evocations of landscape and place in Dunbar’s work engender abstract and self-reflexive meditations on terrains of anti-Black violence and pain as well as sites of retreat and resilience in the face of these conditions.

Mycenae’s LH IIIA2-IIIB palatial stonework was spectacular, and attention is given here to the innovative construction processes and specialized stonecutting tools that elicited awe. A fresh look at Mycenae’s final three tholoi illustrates the strategy of conveying power through stonework. The chapter also assesses the semiotics of the site’s architectural sculpture.

Total war meant unprecedented intrusion of states into the patterns and practices of economic and social life, with massive consequences for the structure of industry, organization of the labor process, and regulation of labor markets. New triangulations among government, employers, and unions settled into institutionalized arrangements of corporatism. Persuasive public discourses of “war socialism” and the “socialized state at war” captured those logics. Together, mass conscription of men and economic mobilization of women regendered the character and perceptions of work, employment, family, and citizenship. By 1917–1918, the intensified hardships of warmaking, both militarily and on the home front, brought impending societal collapse. Collective action – in strikes and shopfloor militancy; mutinies and desertion; food shortages and urban protests – threw political order into crisis.

This chapter and Chapter 9 offer a detailed reading of central arguments in The Human Condition. A striking fact about this study of the “active life” is the absence of any discussion of morality, apart from minimum obligations to keep promises and forgive unintended consequences of action. The chapter sets out the problem, and then offers a conjecture about what moved Arendt to neglect morality: her fear that moral constraints would handcuff human action, which in her view makes life meaningful. The following chapter analyzes that conjecture in depth. The remainder of this chapter sets the stage by examining central themes and vocabulary in The Human Condition. It explains what Arendt means by “human condition”, unpacks her concepts of labor, work, and action and the risks of confusing them, and explains why the human condition of natality (“unto us a child is born”) matters so crucially.

While Sancho discussed slavery in his letters decades before British opposition to that institution coalesced and became institutionally codified, he undeniably took a firmly anti-slavery and anti-racist stance in his manuscript correspondence. He used his familiar letters to critique and oppose slavery as a practice and an institution as well as to reject and undermine the validity of emerging concepts of “race” in an effort to oppose their effects in the world. Three core strategies emerge: first, satirizing and critiquing the metaphorical mapping of moral character onto skin color in the service of white supremacy; second, reappropriating and resignifying animal metaphors and racial tropes to undermine their efficacy in subjugating humans and non-humans alike within a slaving society; and third, recovering self-determination and agency for Black subjects by asserting ownership over his own body through the manual labor of writing.