1959
		quarterly
		English
		interdisciplinary
		0026-3079
		Mid-America American Studies Association

Thomas Augst, New York University Michael Cowan, University of California, Santa Cruz Kate Delaney, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dennis Domer, University of Kansas Jonathan Earle, University of Kansas Gerald Early, Washington University James Farrell, St. Olaf College Daniele Fiorentino, University of Macerata Iris Smith Fischer, University of Kansas Doris Friedensohn, New Jersey City University William Graebner, State University of New York at Fredonia Mark Hulsether, University of Tennessee, Knoxville J. Robert Kent, Independent Scholar Frieda Knobloch, University of Wyoming Angel Kwolek-Folland, University of Florida Cheryl Lester, University of Kansas Sherry Linkon, Youngstown State University Karal Ann Marling, University of Minnesota Carol Mason, Oklahoma State University Jay Mechling, University of California, Davis Bernard Mergen, George Washington University Joane Nagel, University of Kansas Eric Porter, University of California, Santa Cruz David Roediger, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Eric Sandeen, University of Wyoming David Sanjek, University of Salford Alex Seago, Richmond, The American International University in London Shirley Wajda, Kent State University Ryo Yokoyama, Kobe University
Format and style of submissions:  Please include a cover letter, providing your preferred address, telephone number, e-mail, the manuscript title, and any other important information.  Manuscripts (including endnotes, tables, and references) should be double-spaced with one-inch margins on all sides. Because American Studies uses a double-blind review process, contributors are asked not to put their names on manuscripts; only the title should appear on the manuscript.  Contributors agree upon submission that manuscripts submitted to American Studies will not be submitted for publication elsewhere while under review by American Studies. Manuscripts should be prepared following the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th Edition, and may use either the documentary-note system of documentation frequently used in history or the author-date system more common in literature or the social sciences.    Form of submission:  We encourage authors to submit manuscripts (with a 100 word abstract) electronically, either in Microsoft Word (for Mac or IBM file format) or WordPerfect 6.0 or above.   If electronic submission is not possible, we require four copies of the  manuscript, two copies of a 100-word abstract, and a computer disk (either Mac  or IBM file format) containing the manuscript (in either Microsoft Word or  WordPerfect).  Disks will not be returned.   NOTES ON EDITORIAL POLICIES AND PRACTICES American Studies' editorial process is designed to encourage dialogue, colleagueship and communication without regard to disciplinary boundaries.  Editors and readers attempt to assist contributors by suggesting ways in which  manuscripts might be improved, and by prodding them to think of the relationship between what they have done and ideas and hypotheses developed in other sectors of American Studies. Few articles are ever accepted without having gone through at least one round of substantial revisions.   Many authors report that they have enjoyed the interchange with our staff and reviewers and the stimulation of connecting their often specialized work with the interests of scholars in contiguous, or more distant fields.  Ideally an article is reviewed by an outside specialist, an editorial board member familiar with the field, and an editorial board member from outside the academic discipline who reads for broad interest.  The non-specialist's review is weighed equally with that of the specialist, for the goal of American Studies is to cross academic disciplines and to expand dialogue beyond narrow fields.  We would like to make research accessible to the widest band of scholars.  Essays are sometimes sent back with the warm invitation to place the argument within the larger context of American culture, and then resubmit.   Because we use specialist consultants not on our staff, our processing of articles is somewhat slower than some other journals.  We expect an article returned from a reviewer within six weeks.  Often, the delay in processing is caused by our hunt for a specialist who is willing to review.  If an author has not heard from us within four months, we encourage them to write or phone us for an explanation.  We do not accept "multiple submissions." We ask our referees to provide in-depth reviews and offer extensive critique and comments to the author.  This is a time consuming process, and we consider multiple submissions exploitive of us and our reviewers.  We expect from reviewers not only a detailed and thoughtful response to a manuscript, but also an evaluation of the significance of the piece, its potential, and most importantly, whether or not the author would be capable of revising it for publication in American Studies.  It is important to keep in mind however, that publishing in American Studies is only one goal of the journal.  We are also committed to helping scholars improve their work, and the readers' reports forwarded to the authors nearly always offer detailed critiques and suggestions for improvement.  Even when manuscripts are turned down, we hope that authors will have had a constructive engagement with other scholars through American Studies. When the editors invite revision and resubmission, they send the revised manuscript to the same readers who read it previously.  We always send back the reviewer's comments to the author, and invite the author to respond to criticisms by informally "talking back" to the referees in appended notes or explanations.  We like to share the comments of our reviewers directly with our contributors, and we hope that contributors and reviewers are thick-skinned enough to take criticism without bitterness.  Our goal is to be helpful and to give a personal and detailed response to each submitted piece.  American Studies currently processes about 75 articles a year and prints about 10.  Many are finally turned down not because of their quality, but  because they are too narrow.  Articles that do not ultimately answer the question "What does this study tell us about society or culture in the United States?" are almost never printed.  We strongly advise prospective contributors to read through a few recent issues to familiarize themselves with American Studies and our readers' interests.  American Studies does not use "quotas" and generally has no backlog.  Articles are accepted or rejected on their own merit, and not because we have run too many or too few on given subjects.   We try when there is a larger than usual number of accepted essays in the shop  to find the funds to get all in print within the year.  This accounts for the occasional oversized issue.  The editors and editorial board members of American Studies often invite scholars to submit pieces to the journal.  Invited manuscripts, however, go through the same review and decision process as unsolicited ones.  American Studies uses a double blind-review process, and requires four non-returnable manuscripts without the author's name on them.

American Studies

American Studies encourages interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholarship in U.S. cultures and histories broadly defined.  We welcome frameworks of comparative, international, and/or transnational perspectives.  With an editorial staff from a number of areas of study, the journal offers provocative perspectives on a variety of issues.  Frequent special sections and special issues (such as the Fall 2004 issue on Hawaii and the Fall/Winter 2005 issue, "Indigeneity at the Crossroads of American Studies.") create a space for a broad discussion on a single topic. Articles on pedagogy inform the American Studies classroom. The book review section aims at keeping readers conversant with contemporary scholarship. American Studies first appeared in 1959, and is sponsored by the Mid-America American Studies Association and the University of Kansas. It has 1,400 current subscribers. In 2005 it merged with American Studies International, and welcomes submissions with an international perspective. Find the American Studies Journal on Facebook.

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Fall 2007, Vol. 48, No. 3

The Terror Within:  Obesity in Post 9/11 U.S. Life

By Charlotte Biltekoff
This essay is based on the premise that all biological sites are also cultural sites. Its central claim is that understanding the cultural work performed by the public health campaign against obesity is essential to a broader accounting of post 9/11 life in the United States. Through analysis of the relationship between the simultaneous wars against obesity and terror, this essay argues that the "war against obesity" plays a role in sustaining the "war on terror" by contributing to the post 9/11 culture of fear, providing a focus for wartime communal self-sacrifice, and obscuring the toll that the war on terror is taking on minority communities.

From White Supremacy to White Power: The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE and the Nazification of the Ku Klux Klan

By John Drabble
In the 1960s, the leader of the largest Ku Klux Klan organization in the United States presumed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was a meritorious ally engaged in a common battle against Communist subversion. During the 1970s however, Klan organizers transformed a reactionary counter-movement that had failed to preserve white supremacy by terrorizing civil rights organizers and black citizens, into a revolutionary White Power movement that engaged in terrorism against Jews and the Federal Government. Based on a forthcoming article in American Studies, this paper describes how these organizers combined latent revolutionary impulses within Klan ideology with esoteric anti-Semitic and anti-Republican discourses, infusing Christian Americanism-the Klan's particular admixture of white supremacy, anticommunism, nativism, and segregationist theology -with transnational discourses of National Socialist politics, Christian Identity theology, and racial anti-Semitism. This change occurred as American race relations went through a profound transformation. The rise of neoconservatism, which attacked liberalism and the welfare state while eschewing overtly racial rhetoric, was particularly important in this context, as Americans learned to understand race in "nonsystematic, nonstructural terms." Like neoconservatives, Klansmen also shifted focus from racial minorities to the Federal Government, but they clung to biological notions of race. As their former segregationist allies discarded the formal institutions of white supremacy, Klansmen came to realize that it was no longer possible to revive white supremacy or to attract a mass base. They turned to esoteric conspiratorial discourses to cope with this predicament. This development occurred within larger processes of political, social, and cultural restructuring during the most recent wave of globalization. Yet this particular trajectory, from a localized white supremacist vigilantism inspired by white supremacist nationalism, to a transnational cultic milieu of revolutionary terrorists inspired by White Power millennialism, was in no small part due to a successful FBI covert action program called COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE, which exposed, disrupted and helped to vitiate Klan organizations between 1964 and 1971, spurring Klan organizers to fundamentally rethink their rhetorical and organizational strategies.

Cold War Revival:  Neoconservatives and Historical Memory in the War on Terror

By David Hoogland Noon
Throughout the cold war, neoconservative intellectuals argued that the United States is an inherently virtuous nation engaged a permanent struggle against enemies at home as well as abroad. This essay addresses the ways that contemporary neoconservative voices have tried to revive the narrative of struggle, in part by claiming that the war on terror must be understood as a "present danger" that resembled the cold war. According to these commentators, a victorious strain of American foreign policy was born during the early years of the cold war. After three decades of setbacks and faltering national "will," these principles were supposedly were reanimated by Ronald Reagan, who eventually carried the nation to triumph. By arguing that Americans are capable of restoring abandoned paths to victory, neoconservatives insist that the lessons of the cold war must be revived and applied to the struggle against radical Islam.

Burlesquing "Otherness" in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Image of the Indian in John Brougham's Met-a-mora; or, The Last of the Pollywogs (1847) and Po-Ca-Hon-Tas; or, The Gentle Savage (1855).

By Zoe Detsi-Diamanti
On the 19th-century American stage, the call for a "romanticized" representation of the Indian was part of the national effort to produce an indigenous literature. The popularity of such Indian stereotypes as the resistant but rapidly vanishing Noble Savage Metamora and the acquiescent Indian Princess Pocahontas was sustained by a wider political ideology that sought to define the limits and character of a distinctly American national identity. However, the highly sentimentalized Indian stereotypes that dominated the American stage in the 1820s and 1830s gradually turned white Americans' attention from the historical reality of the Indians, whose presence had long required political action, to the imaginative realm of myth and symbol. John Brougham, an Irish actor-playwright who immigrated to America in 1842, quickly captured the essential discrepancy in the perception of the Indian as image/fiction and the native as reality. With his two burlesques, Met-a-mora; or, The Last of the Pollywogs (1847) and Po-Ca-Hon-Tas; or, The Gentle Savage (1855), Brougham signaled the end of the serious Indian dramas of the 1820s and 1830s and awakened the American audience of the time into an awareness of the absurdly false images they had been seen for so long and the excessively sentimentalized acting style they had been applauding. Through their essentially humorous approach to the national image of the Indian, Brougham's burlesques constitute a reliable register of the social, political, and cultural context of mid-19th-century American society. His Indian characters are rendered closer to the lower classes and satirize the dominant political ideology that offered white Americans a world vision and historical sense that blurred their perception of the interaction between myth and history, thus permitting them to celebrate the Indian-symbol while abusing the native.

Jim Crow, Jett Rink, and James Dean: Reconstructing Ferber's Giant (1952-1956)

By Jennifer Smyth
In the years since Giant's release as a major Hollywood film, its complex portrait of the western hero and twentieth-century racism has been overshadowed by the legend of James Dean as one of America's pre-eminent cultural icons. But ironically, Edna Ferber's construction of the poor white ranch-hand, Jett Rink, and Dean's performance are crucial in understanding Ferber and director George Stevens' confrontation with the darker side of America's frontier myths and Giant's enduring racial legacy. This article examines Ferber and Stevens' critique of postwar masculinity, the ideology of the western, and Texas racism within the context of Jett Rink's transgressive racial hybridity.

2006 MAASA Presidential Address - Infantasia: A Meditation on International Adoption and American Studies

By Jeffrey S. Miller

Other Issues

Fall/Winter 2008, Vol. 49, No. 3/4
Spring/Summer 2009, Vol. 50, No. 1/2
Aaron Douglas and the Harlem Renaissance, Vol. 49, No. 1/2
Winter 2007, Vol. 48, No. 4
"Homosexuals in Unexpected Places?", Vol. 48, No. 2
Spring 2007, Vol. 48, No. 1
Fall/Winter 2006, Vol 47, No 3/4
Summer 2006, Vol 47, No 2
Indigeneity at the Crossroads of American Studies , Vol. 46, Nos. 3/4