The New Old Style explores how the deliberate use of cartooning styles that mimic those of the early twentieth century has paradoxically become one of the most significant vehicles for formal experimentation in contemporary comics. Dubbing this phenomenon "the anachronistic aesthetic," Matthew Levay argues that what can initially appear to be a ......
The Farm Crisis, Agrarian Activism, and the Rise of Anti-Federalism
Historically, rural spaces in the United States have encompassed a wide array of political cultures and affiliations, but in the late twentieth century, rural America became a breeding ground for anti-government militancy. Disparate groups coalesced around an ideology grounded in virulent rural anti-federalism. Although farmers today are often ......
Credit, Taste, and Power in the U.S.-China Tea Trade, 1784-1911
Popular history tells the story of how the tea boycott during the American Revolution caused a transition in American taste from tea to coffee, making the young country a coffee-drinking nation. In truth, Americans did not give up their tea so easily, and the United States grew to be the second-largest importer of tea from China. Diverging from ......
The world has changed since the 1930s, but human nature has not. What can we learn when comparing far-right populism in the United States to far-right populism elsewhere? How can we better understand the underlying ideas and ideologies that seem to transcend time and place? How can we best address them? How can we communicate what we have learned ......
How Basket Diplomacy Saved the Chitimacha Indian Nation
Daniel H. Usner offers a cultural, political, and social history of the Chitimacha Tribe in South Louisiana and its struggle for political sovereignty. Between the 1890s and 1940s, Chitimacha Indian women in South Louisiana - with extraordinary baskets they created from rivercane - strategically built a network of allies that originated in a ......
The construction of the nation-state, the development of capitalism, and the modernization of society have historically been defined as masculine endeavors, with women on the sidelines. This biography of Juana Catarina Romero (1837-1915) shatters many of the stereotypes of nineteenth-century women and provides a new perspective of women's national ......
Although it has long been claimed that Willa Cather destroyed most of her letters in order to protect her privacy, the record now makes clear that this is largely myth: The Complete Letters of Willa Cather digital archive has collected more than three thousand letters, and more are regularly being located. What can we learn about Cather and her ......
The construction of the nation-state, the development of capitalism, and the modernization of society have historically been defined as masculine endeavors, with women on the sidelines. This biography of Juana Catarina Romero (1837-1915) shatters many of the stereotypes of nineteenth-century women and provides a new perspective of women's national ......
In the early eastern theater of the American Civil War, the Northern and Southern armies saw little of combat and little of each other, with most of their military intelligence more akin to propaganda than objective fact. However, by 1862, both sides knew through bloody experience how the other could fight, though gaps in knowledge of the other's ......