Results by title
145 books match the query 'American Studies' and 24 start with t
Texan Crucible
How the Irish, Germans, and Czechs Became AngloMarian J. Barber
University of Texas Press, 2026
A history of European immigrants in Texas and how they redefined racial identity.
While the creation of a Black-White racial binary was foundational to most of the United States, nineteenth-century Texas developed a unique tripartite system that acknowledged the role of individuals of Mexican ancestry in a region that was Spanish, Mexican, and an independent nation before becoming a US (and briefly Confederate) state. Yet this framework was fraught, struggling to accommodate new arrivals from beyond North America, in particular the Irish, Germans, and Czechs. Texan Crucible tells the story of these immigrants and how they became Anglo.
Marian Barber reveals the ways language, religion, alcohol use, and attitudes toward slavery distinguished these newcomers to Texas from those arriving from the eastern United States and how they nevertheless created thriving, influential communities. Their status was shaped by events inside and far beyond Texas, including an 1887 prohibition fight, the Civil War, and two world wars that encouraged them to erase their distinctiveness. As segregation was formally outlawed and civil rights activism grew, understandings of race shifted, cementing these groups’ status as Anglo. Texan Crucible recovers the histories of German, Irish, and Czech immigrants and unveils the social construction of racial difference underpinning Texan identity.
Texas-Style Exclusion
Mexican Americans and the Legacy of Limited OpportunityJennifer Van Hook
Russell Sage Foundation, 2024
Drawing on census and archival data on the quality of public schooling, Van Hook and Bachmeier find that Industrial Era European immigrants, who were primarily located in the northeastern U.S., benefited from programs and policies championed by the Americanization and Progressive movements. The Americanization movement sought to help acclimate new arrivals and transform “foreigners” into “Americans” by providing night school programs to promote civic integration and basic education, as well as other services. The Progressive movement, which aimed to improve education, work, and health conditions, sought to expand investment in public schools and make primary and secondary schooling mandatory, which kept working class children in school as opposed to entering the workforce. This access to education allowed for integration and astonishing intergenerational mobility.
Mexican immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s, the majority of whom resided in Texas, had radically different experiences from their European counterparts. Mexicans in Texas were subjected to racism, segregation, labor exploitation, and intentional school failures. This resulted in tremendous generational disadvantage that persists to the current day. Mexicans from this cohort who left Texas for states with strong Americanization and Progressive movements saw improved educational outcomes and integration. Additionally, Mexicans who immigrated after the Civil Rights Movement saw significantly greater inter-generational mobility and educational attainment than earlier cohorts due to the protections provided by civil rights laws. Van Hook and Bachmeier conclude that whether one is optimistic or pessimistic about the integration of Mexican Americans depends on when and where one looks.
Texas-Style Exclusion is an engaging examination of policies and practices that have been glossed over and forgotten that promoted mobility and integration for certain immigrant groups and impeded them for others.
The Bars Are Ours
Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America,1960 and AfterLucas Hilderbrand
Duke University Press, 2024
The Borders of America
Migration, Control, and Resistance Across Latin America and the CaribbeanSoledad Álvarez Velasco, Nicholas De Genova, Gustavo Dias, and Eduardo Domenech, editors
Duke University Press, 2026
Contributors. Soledad Álvarez Velasco, Tanya Basok, Janneth Clavijo, Nicholas De Genova, Gustavo Dias, Eduardo Domenech, Roberto Dufraix-Tapia, Jonathan Echeverri Zuluaga, Valentina Glockner Fagetti, Luin Goldring, Patricia Landolt, Carolina Moulin, Margarita Luz Núñez Chaim, Juan Ordóñez, Daniel Quinteros, Romina Ramos, Martha Rojas-Wiesner, Fabio Santos, Amarela Varela-Huerta, and Laura Velasco Ortiz
The Ellis Island Snow Globe
Erica Rand
Duke University Press, 2005
Rand notes that portrayals of the Statue of Liberty as a beacon for immigrants tend to suppress the Statue’s connections to people brought to this country by force. She examines what happened to migrants at Ellis Island whose bodies did not match the gender suggested by the clothing they wore. In light of contemporary ideas about safety and security, she examines the “Decide an Immigrant’s Fate” program, which has visitors to Ellis Island act as a 1910 board of inspectors hearing the appeal of an immigrant about to be excluded from the country. Rand is a witty, insightful, and open-minded tour guide, able to synthesize numerous diverse ideas—about tourism, immigration history, sexuality, race, ethnicity, commodity culture, and global capitalism—and to candidly convey her delight in her Ellis Island snow globe. And pen. And lighter. And back scratcher. And golf ball. And glittery pink key chain.
The Futures of American Studies
Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds.
Duke University Press, 2002
Contributors. Lindon Barrett, Nancy Bentley, Gillian Brown, Russ Castronovo, Eric Cheyfitz, Michael Denning, Winfried Fluck, Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Dana Heller, Amy Kaplan, Paul Lauter, Günter H. Lenz, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Walter Benn Michaels, José Estaban Muñoz, Dana D. Nelson, Ricardo L. Ortiz, Janice Radway, John Carlos Rowe, William V. Spanos
The Genuine Article
Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary ManhoodPaul Gilmore
Duke University Press, 2001
From characters in Indian melodramas and minstrel shows to exhibits in popular museums and daguerrotype galleries, primitive racialized figures circulated as “the genuine article” of manliness in the antebellum United States. Gilmore argues that these figures were manipulated, translated, and adopted not only by canonical authors such as Hawthorne, Thoreau, Cooper, and Melville but also by African American and Native American writers like William Wells Brown and Okah Tubbee. By examining how these cultural notions of race played out in literary texts and helped to construct authorship as a masculine profession, Gilmore makes a unique contribution to theories of class formation in nineteenth-century America.
The Genuine Article will enrich students and scholars of American studies, gender studies, literature, history, sociology, anthropology, popular culture, and race.
The Great Disappearing Act
Germans in New York City, 1880-1930Christina A. Ziegler-McPherson
Rutgers University Press, 2022
This study examines these questions in relation to the German immigrant community in New York City between 1880-1930, and seeks to understand how German-American New Yorkers assimilated into the larger American society in the early twentieth century.
By the turn of the twentieth century, New York City was one of the largest German-speaking cities in the world and was home to the largest German community in the United States. This community was socio-economically diverse and increasingly geographically dispersed, as upwardly mobile second and third generation German Americans began moving out of the Lower East Side, the location of America’s first Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), uptown to Yorkville and other neighborhoods. New York’s German American community was already in transition, geographically, socio-economically, and culturally, when the anti-German/One Hundred Percent Americanism of World War I erupted in 1917.
This book examines the structure of New York City’s German community in terms of its maturity, geographic dispersal from the Lower East Side to other neighborhoods, and its ultimate assimilation to the point of invisibility in the 1920s. It argues that when confronted with the anti-German feelings of World War I, German immigrants and German Americans hid their culture – especially their language and their institutions – behind closed doors and sought to make themselves invisible while still existing as a German community.
But becoming invisible did not mean being absorbed into an Anglo-American English-speaking culture and society. Instead, German Americans adopted visible behaviors of a new, more pluralistic American culture that they themselves had helped to create, although by no means dominated. Just as the meaning of “German” changed in this period, so did the meaning of “American” change as well, due to nearly 100 years of German immigration.
The Hero and the Victim
Narratives of Criminality in Iraq War FictionGregory Brazeal
Lever Press, 2024
The emphasis on soldier criminality in Iraq War fiction can be partly explained by the rise of moral cosmopolitanism and its blurring of the traditional conceptual lines between war and crime. The anti-war literature of the twentieth century often presented fallen soldiers on both sides equally as victims and viewed the distinction between heroes and villains as part of the illusion that battlefield experience strips away. Written in the long shadow of Nuremberg, Iraq War fiction grapples with the possibility that the soldiers on one’s own side may not be the heroes in the story, or even the victims, but participants in a wrong, and perhaps even complicit in crimes. The Hero and the Victim contributes to the ongoing, public reexamination of American traditions by confronting a topic that has, up to now, been largely untouched: the moral celebration of military service.
The Hero and the Victim explores the theme of soldier criminality through close readings of several works by American authors, including Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds, Phil Klay’s Redeployment, Helen Benedict’s Sand Queen, Chris Kyle’s American Sniper, and Roy Scranton’s War Porn. This volume will be an essential text for students of American literature, historians of war culture, and any scholar interested in representations of the Iraq War.
The Journey into Adulthood in Uncertain Times
Robert Crosnoe
Russell Sage Foundation, 2025
Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative survey data over five decades, Crosnoe and Cavanagh find that young adults are, in fact, waiting longer to take on “real” adult roles, such as worker or parent. However, this is not out of a reluctance to grow up. Instead, increased inequality and changes in the economy have forced young people to adapt their lives in new ways. Young adults are now spending more time in school, have more trouble finding their footing in the labor force, and consequently postpone getting married and having children. They also mix and match roles in more complicated ways now than in the past—going back and forth between school and work over longer periods of time or disconnecting parenthood from their romantic relationships. While the period from late teens to mid-twenties does look different now than in the past, the change has been slow and steady rather than a dramatic shift due to social crises. The Great Recession, for example, had a more muted effect on young people’s social and economic attainment and family formation than fears of a lost generation would suggest.
Crosnoe and Cavanagh find that while the panic over young adults today may be somewhat overblown, this conclusion should not obscure some clear concerns. Young adults do struggle with their social and emotional wellbeing. They are more depressed than their counterparts in previous generations, drink less alcohol in ways that suggest less engagement with social life, and express deep distrust of social institutions and the idea of the American Dream. The authors argue that worries about the state of young adulthood today should trigger more reflection about how to support young people rather than how to fix them.
The Journey into Adulthood in Uncertain Times is a comprehensive and illuminating examination of the challenges faced by contemporary young adults.
The Motherlode
Why Most US Mothers Will Find Themselves Financially Supporting Their ChildrenJennifer L. Glass
Russell Sage Foundation, 2026
Despite cultural scripts that continue to view fathers as the primary breadwinners in their families, there has been a striking escalation of mothers’ assumption of that role. Over the last twenty years, the rate at which mothers become the primary breadwinner has increased by almost 50 percent and an astonishing 70 percent of American mothers can expect to become the primary earner for their household for at least a year before their first child turns eighteen. In The Motherlode, sociologist Jennifer L. Glass traces the rise of mothers as the primary financial providers for their children, investigates the causes of this increase, and evaluates the consequences of this shift for mothers and families.
Glass finds the swift increase of fiscal responsibility for children by their mothers is occurring in households of all racial backgrounds and across the educational spectrum. This increase is not due to more divorces or relationship breakups. In fact, the most rapid growth in mothers’ financial responsibility for the household has come from married mothers, not single mothers, and about half of contemporary mom-breadwinners have spouses or romantic partners living in the home. Nor is it due to a narrowing of the gender pay gap or mothers’ ability to out-earn their partners—the bulk of breadwinning mothers see large financial losses or are better off financially but still living in poverty when they become the primary earner. Instead, this rise is due to broader, long-term changes in the economy, which have led to less job security and wage stagnation for all workers.
The increase of mothers’ financial obligations to their children has occurred at the same time that nonfinancial responsibilities for children has increased—more time is dedicated to identifying, evaluating, and obtaining goods and services for children, including healthcare and schooling. There has not been a corresponding increase in support for mothers by their employers, the government, or fathers. This leaves mothers with greater burdens of both financial support and nonmonetary care for their children, which increases the number of children that are vulnerable to dependency on their mothers’ earnings and intermittent poverty. While this rise in maternal breadwinning is unlikely to decline anytime soon, Glass suggests policies that could provide mothers with more support, such as enacting labor protections for care occupations dominated by women and federal paid family and medical leave and providing federally funded, wraparound, non-means-tested systems of childcare.
The Motherlode is an illuminating and in-depth examination of the surprisingly pervasive phenomenon of maternal breadwinning in American society.
The Other Presences
Reading Literature Other-Wise after the Transnational Turn in American StudiesFlorian Tatschner
Dartmouth College Press, 2019
The People of the Standing Stone
The Oneida Nation from the Revolution through the Era of RemovalKarim M. Tiro
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
The Oneidas' physical, political, and emotional division persists to this day. Even for those who stayed put, their world changed more in cultural, ecological, and demographic terms than at any time before or since. Oneidas of the post-Revolutionary decades were reluctant pioneers, undertaking more of the adaptations to colonized life than any other generation. Amid such wrenching change, maintaining continuity was itself a creative challenge. The story of that extraordinary endurance lies at the heart of this book.
The Political Force of Musical Beauty
Barry Shank
Duke University Press, 2014
The Politics of Care Work
Puerto Rican Women Organizing for Social JusticeEmma Amador
Duke University Press, 2025
The Product of Medicine
How Efficiency Made American Health CareCaitjan Gainty
Duke University Press, 2025
The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Stacey Margolis
Duke University Press, 2005
Margolis provides readings of fiction by Hawthorne and James as well as Susan Warner, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins. In these writers’ works, she traces a distinctive novelistic tradition that viewed social developments—such as changes in political partisanship and childhood education and the rise of new politico-legal forms like negligence law—as means for understanding how individuals were shaped by their interactions with society. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature adds a new level of complexity to understandings of nineteenth-century American culture by illuminating a literary tradition full of accidents, mistakes, and unintended consequences—one in which feelings and desires were often overshadowed by all that was external to the self.
The Selling Sound
The Rise of the Country Music IndustryDiane Pecknold
Duke University Press, 2007
Pecknold draws on sources as diverse as radio advertising journals, fan magazines, Hollywood films, and interviews with industry insiders. Her sweeping social history encompasses the genre’s early days as an adjunct of radio advertising in the 1920s, the friction between Billboard and more genre-oriented trade papers over generating the rankings that shaped radio play lists, the establishment of the Country Music Association, and the influence of rock ‘n’ roll on the trend toward single-genre radio stations. Tracing the rise of a large and influential network of country fan clubs, Pecknold highlights the significant promotional responsibilities assumed by club organizers until the early 1970s, when many of their tasks were taken over by professional publicists.
The Un-Americans
Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon CultureJoseph Litvak
Duke University Press, 2009
Litvak traces the outlines of comic cosmopolitanism in a series of performances in film and theater and before HUAC, performances by Jewish artists and intellectuals such as Zero Mostel, Judy Holliday, and Abraham Polonsky. At the same time, through an uncompromising analysis of work by informers including Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan, and Budd Schulberg, he explains the triumph of a stoolpigeon culture that still thrives in the America of the early twenty-first century.
The Unruly Facts of Race
The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth-Century Immigration DebateSunmin Kim
University of Chicago Press, 2026
Unfortunately, we’re all too familiar with the US’s legacy of maligning immigrants. Some Americans see immigrants as inherently threatening, a blank screen onto which the nation’s worst fears are projected. But this phenomenon is neither timeless nor static. Instead, it arose and transformed alongside the unprecedented arrival of immigrants in the early twentieth century—and the federal government’s response. In The Unruly Facts of Race, sociologist Sunmin Kim explains how American ideas about race and ethnicity were transformed in the early twentieth century as an unintended consequence of anti-immigrant mobilization.
Kim presents a wealth of archival evidence, including the proceedings of the 1907 Dillingham Commission, to reconstruct how competing racialized visions of nationhood evolved in the early twentieth-century immigration debate. Immigration restrictionist politicians believed that the United States should be a White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant nation. However, when they mobilized researchers—some of whom were women and/or immigrants—to gather data at a massive scale to rationalize their aims, they were met with unruly facts that did not support their racial project. Newer European immigrants, as the data showed, were not much different from descendants of earlier immigrants from northern Europe. When facts failed to support the vilification of immigrants, exclusionist politicians instead turned to race as a marker of ineluctable difference to justify their aims. This led to a new principle of national belonging: the United States transitioned to a country that encompassed various European groups, including Catholics and Jews, but excluded non-White immigrants, as they were deemed too different to become a part of the nation.
Kim’s analysis shows that throughout US history, the opportunity for belonging for some immigrants was predicated on the exclusion of others. His focus on the role of facts in the early twentieth century provides a refreshing take on why the so-called “nation of immigrants” has always demonized some immigrants while cherishing others, highlighting the selection and control of immigrants as the core principles of the American nation-building project. Amid a vitriolic explosion of American immigration discourse, Kim offers a needed corrective to and context for debates around who belongs in the United States.
Theatres of the Body
Dance and Discourse in Antebellum PhiladelphiaLynn Matluck Brooks
Temple University Press, 2025
Reviewing print culture in the 1840s, Brooks shows how newspapers, magazines, and popular fiction provided documentation of dancing in Philadelphia as well as the responses of dance commentators, practitioners, and moralists. Theatres of the Body also considers the interplay of science with dance in the 1850s, which impacted both dance practices and reception.
Providing an expansive historiography of these significant contributions to dance in the United States, Brooks deepens our understanding of antebellum culture and history.
Theorizing Music for Antiracist Futures
Key Terms and Critical MethodsEdited by Jade Conlee and Tatiana Koike
University of Michigan Press, 2027
Every day, musicians and teachers use terms like “pitch,” “scale,” and “meter” to describe what music is made of and how it works. But what are the stories behind our musical terminology? Theorizing Music for Antiracist Futures contends that seemingly neutral musical terms are entangled with human histories of oppression and resistance. Bringing together scholars from music theory, ethnomusicology, music history, and popular music studies, the book reads music history alongside critical philosophies of race and ethnic studies to illuminate the power structures that inform musical description and analysis across disciplines. With each chapter focusing on a single musical term, topics covered include: how ancient Greek philosophers used “harmony” to promote peaceful relationships between the ruling class and their subordinates; how sixteenth-century European colonizers perceived Indigenous groups as “dissonant;” and how nineteenth-century scholars measured “pitch” to form now-discredited scientific proof of Europe’s cognitive and musical superiority over its colonized populations. Other chapters take a global perspective, examining theorizations of meter, scale, and musical texture in Japan, Iraq, Malawi, Georgia, and Central Africa. Theorizing Music for Antiracist Futures brings these histories to light and is a crucial volume in creating antiracist futures for music studies.
Third Worlds Within
Multiethnic Movements and Transnational SolidarityDaniel Widener
Duke University Press, 2024
Total Market American
Race, Data, and AdvertisingMarcel Rosa-Salas
Duke University Press, 2025