Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and Race in Postbellum America
How did Twain’s Huckleberry Finn engage and challenge popular ideas about slavery and race in nineteenth-century America? Can a text be offensive and still be worth reading?
Collection Essays
World War I in U.S. Popular Culture
How did popular publications in the United States respond to World War I? How did artists, writers, publishers, and advertisers work to promote the war effort? What criticisms of the war did dissenting artists make?
Caste and Politics in the Struggle for Mexican Independence
What were social conditions in Mexico before and after independence from Spain? How was the struggle for independence shaped by internal conflicts between people of different social castes?
Subject to Citizen, Kingdom to Nation: Changing Notions of Identity in the Age of the French Revolution
How did French people bring about—or resist—the transition from monarchy to republic during the Revolution? What did it mean to become a citizen of the new nation?
Representing the American Revolution, 1768–1893
How did people interpret the events of the American Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? How did the meaning of the Revolution change over time? In what ways has the Revolution meant different things to different people at any given time?
Imagining the American West in the Late Nineteenth Century
How has the West been imagined as both America’s manifest destiny and a wild frontier? In what ways do American Indian art and literature challenge these popular narratives of the West?
Immigration and Citizenship in the United States, 1865-1924
What role has immigration played in the formation of America’s national identity and ideals? How have Americans understood and debated the social effects of immigration? How have immigrants portrayed their experiences and contributed to these debates themselves?
Women on the Move: Gender and Mobility in American Culture, 1890–1950
What are the relationships between social mobility and spatial mobility in American culture? In what ways do we associate movement—the ability to go anywhere and be anyone—with freedom? How do these relationships change when women are the ones on the move?
Olaudah Equiano and the Eighteenth-Century Debate over Africa and the Slave Trade
What arguments did eighteenth-century writers make about the slave trade? How are these arguments based in understandings of African civilization? How does Olaudah Equiano contribute to these debates?
Shakespeare’s Romans: Politics and Ethics in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus
What is the context for Shakespeare’s Roman plays? What were his sources? Why did classical Rome capture the interest of people in Renaissance England?
Faith in the City: Religion and Urban Life in Chicago, 1870-1920
In 1870, three-quarters of the United States lived in rural areas; by 1920, over half the nation lived in cities. How, if at all, did religious communities change their inherited traditions in the midst of new surroundings?
Lincoln, the North, and the Question of Emancipation
What are Lincoln's arguments against slavery? What distinctions do Lincoln and other white Northerners draw between ending the institution of slavery, saving the Union, and achieving racial equality? What feelings and concerns do writers and artists—both white and African American—express about the consequences of emancipation?