This chapter posits that domesticity played a central role in Ginsberg’s life and work. Although images of mobility recur in his work, reflections on his childhood home and his adult apartment life recur as well. The first section of the chapter interprets Ginsberg’s needs for both travel and a homelife as a nexus rather than a binary opposition. The second section provides an account of his discordant childhood home, a midlife pivot in his sense of the domestic, and the varying circumstances of his apartment existence in the East Village of Manhattan. The final section analyzes the role that home, neighborhood, and his “Jewish-enough” identity played in his poems, including “Manhattan May Day Midnight,” “Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters,” and “My Kitchen in New York.” In Ginsberg's later poems, home is an arena of presentness and a harbor of writing.

Delays and denials of health coverage are troubling in a country that underperforms across many health outcomes, but how do coverage denials impose a broader set of administrative burdens? Though KFF analyses highlight the number of denied ACA marketplace claims that are appealed, this chapter offers the first survey evidence of appeals and reversals at the patient level. Such an analysis helps to unpack not only the number of appeals, but also who appeals, and to what extent the admininistrative burdens of appealing are inequitable. Drawing on survey evidence, interviews with patients, and administrative data, this chapter shows how few patients understand they can appeal, and often they underestimate the odds of prevailing against health insurance giants. What’s more, not only are less affluent patients less likely to challenge denials, but also Black and Hispanic Medicaid patients and sicker patients are less likely to appeal successfully. That appealing – and doing so successfully – is so inequitably distributed offers new insights into the scope of this health policy problem and how it can deepen racial and socioeconomic divides in access to health benefits.

A survey of drama and performance in the period 1975-1980, with emphasis on the innovative plays and experimental productions that appeared in New York in 1976, along with consideration of surrounding developments in visual art, literature, film, and music, and attention to the politics of these transitional years.

This chapter traces British American cities as distinctive political spaces that helped pioneer the concept of citizenship, a term that originally meant a city resident, and stood at the forefront of much of the political protest leading to the war for independence. However, from their inception, most American cities were subordinated to their provincial legislatures which were dominated by rural interests. Meanwhile the concept of citizenship came to be associated more with a set of actions rather than a place people lived. All the largest cities were occupied during the war, forcing residents to make difficult decisions and heightening the distrust leveled against them after the war. After the war, most urban residents remained minorities subordinated to the interests of mostly rural polities. Once the cradles of citizenship, most cities were not further empowered as polities by the American Revolution, but continued to be or were more sharply constrained by rural elites after the war concluded.

This chapter studies how land disputes characterized the North American backcountry from the Green Mountains to the Piedmont and west into the territory of the Ohio and Kentucky Rivers. Whatever their specific circumstances, rural rebels throughout the North American colonies shared goals: They wanted secure possession of the land they occupied and improved, and they wanted to rule themselves. These intertwined goals were considered rebellious in the 1750s and 1760s, and became revolutionary in the 1770s when farmers yoked their aims to the growing imperial struggle with Britain. As a result, these uprisings became the kinds of attacks on authority and property that encouraged British officials to intensify their efforts to keep colonial order. Because rebellious farmers wanted secure possession of the land, free access to markets, and to rule themselves, they fought for a brand of independence that contributed to the boiling tensions that inspired colonists to rebel against Britain in the 1770s.

Abstract: This chapter explores how enslaved Americans challenged and resisted bondage during the long eighteenth century. Using specialized skills, cross-cultural knowledge, and personal networks that stretched beyond colonial borders, some chose to self-emancipate, fleeing their enslavers and seeking refuge in neighboring colonies or among Indigenous peoples, while others carved out lives marked by the daily struggles of enslavement. The years leading up to the American Revolution saw European colonists engage more broadly with notions of slavery and liberty, and enslaved people took the opportunity to argue for rights more forcefully, to escape, or to actively fight back against their enslavers, whether through open rebellion or by joining the British or American forces.

Genevieve Lakier (University of Chicago Law) examines Upsolve v. James, where a district court enjoined the application of New York state’s unauthorized practice of law statutes to the Justice Advocates that the nonprofit organization, Upsolve, planned to train, to assist low-income New Yorkers file for bankruptcy. The opinion represents a clear victory for the access-to-justice movement. But it also represents a potentially significant change in how courts understand the First Amendment to apply in unauthorized-practice-of-law cases. Although the decision may be overturned on appeal, the logic of the opinion thus makes clear the promise that what critics have sometimes described as a “Lochnerized” First Amendment holds out to access-to-justice advocates, as well as some of its perils. In this chapter, Lakier explains why the decision is significant, embeds it within a broader story of doctrinal transformation, and spells out some of the benefits and costs of using a Lochner-like First Amendment to promote access to justice.

This chapter focuses on how urban development relates to coastal flood risk. It begins with key concepts related to coastal geomorphology and flooding in river deltas and estuaries (e.g., processes of landscape formation, protective benefit of wetlands, storm surge, human impacts on coastlines). It then presents the urban development and flood histories of New Orleans (including Hurricane Katrina) and New York City (including Hurricane Sandy). The cases are assessed and compared using the Urban Risk Dynamics framework. Both demonstrate how urbanization in coastal cities often entails extensive loss of wetlands, construction of navigational waterways that inadvertently funnel storm surge, and floodplain expansion through land subsidence or building out the waterfront. Urban expansion into more hazardous lands may be intentionally enabled through construction of flood protection structures. Generally, the least economically valuable land was occupied by the most socially vulnerable populations. Catastrophic events like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy spur mitigation but reinforce ongoing urbanization trends. Lower density areas, however, provide opportunities for strategic retreat.

Boulez’s conducting career developed in the United States in the mid 1960s, when he was invited by George Szell to become guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. From then until 1971, he conducted in Cleveland, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, and was the principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra during 1971–7. In later years, he conducted often with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1991–2010). In the context of these engagements, this chapter focuses on Boulez’s involvement with the music of a number of North American composers whose works he conducted, primarily in New York and Chicago. In New York, he pioneered the Prospective Encounters concerts in Greenwich Village, the Rug Concerts and a number of mini-festivals. While Elliott Carter was by far his most favoured North American composer, in Paris he conducted and recorded the work of Frank Zappa and finally in Chicago he conducted several compositions by Augusta Read Thomas.

This chapter explores the newspapers anarchists used to create and disseminate an anarchist Latinidad that was a radical, transnational, anti-capitalist, anticlerical, anti-imperial, and Spanish language-based identity forged initially by US-based migrant anarchists from Spain and Cuba. Using the anarchist press in Florida and New York, anarchists rejected the importance of identifying themselves as “Spanish” or “Cuban” and instead forged a cross-border working-class identity. In creating this identity, anarchists focused on their encounters with US capitalism and republican democracy from 1886 to 1898. Such encounters conditioned their perspectives on what an independent Cuba could look like and what it should avoid. Anarchists also debated whether or not to support the Cuban War for Independence. Was it just another nationalist project that would usher in a new, exploitative ruling elite, or could an independent, non-nationalist anarchist society be constructed? These latter debates began in mid-1891– three and a half years before the mambises launched their uprising against Spanish colonialism.

In 1991, the Abbey Theatre staged a version of The Plough and the Stars that was hailed by Desmond Rushe, then drama critic of the Irish Independent, as ‘the most revolutionary and controversial presentation ever seen of the theatre’s most performed masterpiece’. The director of this production was Garry Hynes, the new artistic director of the Abbey, who had chosen to begin her tenure with a version of O’Casey’s play. This chapter consider how and why Hynes has staged O’Casey,focusing on her productions of his work from 1991 to 2023, tracing an evolution of staging from the Abbey’s 1991 production to Hynes’ DruidO’Casey cycle of 2023.

In 1968, Martin Luther King gave his final major public speech, in which he praised the work of Sean O’Casey. This chapter highlights the way in which O’Casey’s work proved attractive to Black activists, pointing to the comments he made about race in his letters and autobiographies, and highlighting the way in which Black actors in New York began to perform in O’Casey’s drama in the mid-twentieth century. The chapter also draws attention to the way in which figures such as Harry Belafonte and Lorraine Hansberry felt inspired by the Dublin playwright’s work.

In March 1926, the USA saw its first production of an O’Casey play, when a version of Juno and the Paycock appeared at the Mayfair Theater in New York. The text was praised by two of the twentieth century’s most influential theatre reviewers, George Jean Nathan and Brooks Atkinson, who became major American supporters of O’Casey and his work. Their efforts were bolstered by the enthusiasm for O’Casey shown by the American director Paul Shyre. This chapter traces the development of O’Casey’s reputation in the USA, and examines a range of onstage versions of O’Casey’s plays in America, ranging from the introductory work of the 1920s to the 2019 O’Casey season at the Irish Repertory Theater in New York.

Eileen Carey’s books are rarely read; her acting career was forgotten during her lifetime; and her presence in literary culture has always remained in the shadow of her husband. But she provided important support for Sean O’Casey throughout the second half of his life, and there is also great prescience in her own writing. This chapter presents a new assessment of Eileen Carey’s professional career in the wake of the #MeToo (2006–) and #WakingTheFeminists (2015–16) movements, showing how she experienced and wrote about male abuse in the entertainment industry, and how she inspired her husband to write about some of those themes in his own writing.

This chapter imagines potential and as yet unexplored rapprochements between William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) and Julia de Burgos (1914–53), two contemporaneous writers on the brink of Latinx identification, as it is currently conceived. Observing their generically and linguistically diverse writing practices – marked by distinct introspections about Puerto Rican, Caribbean, pan-Hispanic, Anglo-American, and European identities – I open a discussion of the authors’ experiences of everyday spaces (the city street, the hospital ward, the intergenerational home). What I call “lyrical mobilities” constitutes the process of imagining Williams’s and de Burgos’s movements through hemispheric histories as well as geographic and linguistic spaces. It is also a critical attempt to read these two canonical authors in terms of the spaces they had in common, which, in turn, helps extend our understanding of Latinx lives across disciplines that have contained Williams and de Burgos within discrete silos.