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Death to Fascism focuses on how social justice immigrant activist Louis Adamic went from being a Slovenian peasant to leading a coalition that included black intellectuals and journalists, working-class militants, ethnic community activists, novelists, and radicals who made antifascism the dominant US political culture from the mid-1930s through 1948. By championing racial and ethnic equality, workers’ rights, and anticolonialism, Adamic and his fellow antifascists helped to transform the US understanding of democracy. From the 1920s through his death in 1951, Adamic became a celebrity because his writings tapped into a larger US identity crisis. This conflict pitted those who associated being American with a static category informed by Anglo Protestant culture against those who understood identity in a constant state of flux defined and redefined by newcomers and new ideas. Adamic shaped the latter view. During his life, he saw himself—and those he identified with—as traversing through four states of being: exile, cultural pluralist, agent of diaspora, and dedicated anticolonialist advocating a new humanism. His legacy has been lost because his anticommunist enemies, who largely succeeded in misrepresenting his beliefs after his likely murder, engaged in a conscious effort to erase him from the historical record because of the threat his ideas posed to the procorporate, hypermilitaristic, and racist outlooks baked into the Cold War liberal order.

Hostile Heartland examines racial violence—or, more aptly, racist violence—against blacks (African Americans) in the Midwest, emphasizing lynching, whipping, and violence by police (or police brutality). It also focuses on black responses, including acts of armed resistance, the development of local and regional civil rights organizations, and the work of individual activists. Within that broad framework the book considers patterns of institutionalized violence in studies of individual states, like Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas over a number of decades; it also targets specific incidents of such violence or resistance in case studies representative of changes in these patterns like the lynching of Joseph Spencer in Cairo, Illinois, in 1854 and the lynching of Luke Murray in South Point, Ohio, in 1932. Significantly, Hostile Heartland not only addresses the years from the Civil War to World War I, which are the typical focus of such studies, but also incorporates the twenty-five years that precede the Civil War and the additional twenty-five that follow World War I. It pioneers new research methodologies, as exemplified by Chapter 4’s analysis of the relations between and among racist violence, family history, and the black freedom struggle. Finally, Hostile Heartland situates its findings within the historiography more broadly.

American musical theater is often dismissed as frivolous or kitschy entertainment. But what if musicals actually mattered a great deal? What if perhaps the most innocuous musical genre in America actually defined the practices of Mormonism--America’s fastest-growing religion? Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America is an interdisciplinary study of voice, popular music, and American religion that analyzes the unexpected yet dynamic relationship between two of America’s most iconic institutions, Mormonism and American musical theater. This book argues that Mormonism and early American musical theater were cut from the same ideological cloth--formed in the early nineteenth century out of Jacksonian principles of self-fashioning, white supremacy, and broader understandings of the democratic principles of vicariousness. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mormons gravitated toward musicals as a common ideological platform, using musicals not only to practice a theology of voice but also to transition from outlier polygamist sect to become by the mid-twentieth century emblems of white, middle-class respectability in America. In an effort to become gods themselves, Mormons use the musical stage to practice transforming into someone they are not, modeling closely the theatrical qualities of Jesus and other spiritual leaders in Mormon mythology. Thus, learning to vicariously voice another person on the musical stage actually draws the faithful closer to godliness. Looking outward from the shared ideological roots of Mormonism and musical theater, this book offers a compelling study of how the ways Americans sound determine the paths of their belonging.

This book is a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. Drawing on the critical insights of queer theory and the history of sexuality, it challenges approaches to lesbian representation, initially by reframing the emergence of lesbian figures in cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s as only the most visible and belated signs of an array of strategies of sexuality. The emergence of lesbian representation and spectatorship in early cinema is not a linear progression and consolidation but rather arises across multiple sites in dispersed forms that are modern and backward-looking, recursive and anachronistic. In this tumultuous period, new but not always coherent sexual knowledges and categories emerge, even as older modalities of homoeroticism persist. The book articulates some of the discursive and institutional processes by which women’s same-sex desires and identities have been reorganized as impossible, marginal or—perhaps not so surprisingly—central to new forms of cinematic representation and spectatorship. Complicating the critical consensus of feminist film theory and history, the book foregrounds the centrality of women’s same-sex desire to historically distinct cinematic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality. It articulates across its chapters the emergence of lesbian sexuality—and that of its intimate “other,” heterosexuality—as the effect of diverse discursive operations of early cinema, considered as a complex assemblage of film texts, exhibition practices, modes of female spectatorship, and reception.

First-ever biography of controversial journalist and author Randy Shilts, one of the nation’s first openly gay reporters for a major daily newspaper. Known for his tenacity in reporting, he quickly became the “AIDS scribe” among American journalists. His work was not without controversy, however, with posthumous reviews of his “new journalism” techniques called into question, including the accuracy of some of his research. Review is provided of Shilts’s childhood struggles with physical abuse, his adult battles with alcohol and drug addiction, and his ultimate death from AIDS. The critical review of Shilts is most focused on his 1987 book, And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic – although his work on The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1982) and Conduct Unbecoming: Gays & Lesbians in the U.S. Military (1993)

This book studies the multi-generational transition of rural and semi-rural southern black migrants to life in the embryonic urban-industrial town of Huntington, West Virginia, between 1871 and 1929. Strategically located adjacent to the Ohio River in the Tri-state region of southwestern West Virginia, southeastern Ohio, and eastern Kentucky, and founded as a transshipment station by financier Collis P. Huntington for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in 1871, Huntington grew from a non-descript village to the state’s most populated city by 1930. Huntington’s black population grew in concert: by 1930, the city’s black population comprised the second largest in the state, behind Charleston, the state capital. The urbanization process posed different challenges, burdens, and opportunities to the black migrant than those migrating to the rural-industrial southern West Virginia coal mines. Direct and intensive supervision marked the urban industrial workplace, unlike the autonomy black coal miners’ experienced in the mines. Forced to navigate the socioeconomic and political constraints and dynamics of Jim Crow Era dictates, what state officials euphemistically termed, “benevolent segregation,” Huntington’s black migrants made remarkable strides. In the quest to transition from slave to worker to professional, Huntington’s black migrants forged lives, raised families, build black institutions, purchased property, and become black professionals. This study centers the criticality of their efforts to Huntington’s growth as a commercial, manufacturing, industrial, and cultural center.

This book is a social history, theorizing participatory dance in New World public spaces as a tool that has enabled subaltern communities’ political resistance to hegemonic control. Drawing upon musicology, ethnomusicology, iconography, anthropology, dance studies, and folklore, and spanning examples from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century, it identifies recurrent strategic patterns in the music, movement, and “noise” that political minorities--including persons of color, economic underclasses, women, gays, and other resistance movements--have employed to oppose, contest, and transgress dominant cultures’ social control. The book applies multidisciplinary analytical practices to movement and sound in historical idioms, little documented by period scholarship, whose data are indirect, inferential, and reconstructive. Case studies include frontier Pentecostalism; Native American resistance; Shakerism; African American communities; the English- and French-speaking Caribbean; film and theatrical dance; the Stonewall Uprising and Chicago 1968 protests; twentieth-century noise ordinances; and punk-rock, hip hop, and twenty-first-century global protest movements. Examples in diverse media, from prose description to watercolor to film, are selected in order to showcase the consistency of these political understandings across diverse situations and to demonstrate the synthesis of analytical approaches, which this topic mandates. The book argues for understanding participatory music and motion--bodies and sound interacting in contested public spaces--as a central, intentional, effective, and recurrent resistance strategy in American social history.

This book reconsiders the history and study of women’s documentary filmmaking in the United States from 1920 to 1940, and during the long 1970s--when significant transformations in cinematic technologies coincided with major transformations in sociopolitical discourses surrounding gender and race. Rather than comprehensive, the approach is transhistorical, setting women’s cultural expression during these two periods into conversation, and thereby provoking a reconsideration of a number of key debates about subjectivity, feminism, realism, and documentary that have had lasting epistemological and material consequences for film and feminist studies. The book excavates a lost ethnographic history of women’s documentary production and investigates the political and aesthetic legacy of this early history in later, more deliberately feminist and yet equally misremembered periods, especially the 1970s. In particular, Subject to Reality asks how ethnographic thinking and seeing shaped the historical arc and aesthetic, ethical, and political commitments of women’s realist documentaries throughout the twentieth century. The shared interests of women in anthropology, academic film studies, and political feminism have long shaped the production and reception of documentary in the United States. Subject to Reality explores the consequences of this cross-pollination as it has shaped women’s documentaries, and especially the realist films that have been glossed over as “boring” “organizing tools” or merely “talking head films.”

When primarily immigrant, day-laboring clientele eat a meal at a traditional taco truck, the taco truck becomes a significant social space in which Mexican cultural identity is reaffirmed. But the traditional taco truck is also a politically charged symbolic space that can spark heated debates about Latino culture and the uses of street spaces in cities. This book uses the taco truck as a vehicle to tell a story about the Mexican American experience and identity and deconstructs the myriad meanings taco trucks represent to diverse community groups and how such meanings influence urban politics and the built environment. The traditional taco truck is a powerfully transformative feature of the American landscape because the trucks’ social spaces intersect with complex geographic processes of immigration, class, ethnicity, gentrification, commodification, food-ways, and the right to public space. Thus the book is also about power, privilege, and the political economy of cities and the novel ways marginalized Mexican immigrants take and remake urban space through their food practices. Through investigating taco trucks in various U.S. metropolises, this book elucidates the ways neoliberal cities work and how Mexican immigrants claim their right to the city.

This book examines interracial labor and radical organizing in Los Angeles, California, and the United States/Mexico borderlands between 1900 and 1930. Domestic and transnational migration to Los Angeles—including from Europe, Asia, and Mexico—created one of the most racially diverse regions in the United States. Uneven regional economic development drove continued labor mobility for many working-class residents. The book documents a thread of working-class culture in which interracial solidarities formed to oppose capitalism, racism, and often the state itself. These solidarities flourished most frequently among workers with the most precarious employment and living situations, fueled by the ideals advanced in anarchism, socialist internationalism, the syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). This book uses the anarchist notion of affinity to frame its understanding of interracial organizing as the mobility of workers often made coalitions and solidarities short lived. Affinity frames the individual cooperative actions that shaped the social practices of resistance often too unstructured or episodic for historians to capture. This approach maintains focus on the continuity of organizing practices while tracing changing solidarities, associations, and organizations that formed and dissolved through struggle, repression, and factionalism. The radical practices that germinated in and near Los Angeles produced some of the broadest examples of interracial cooperation in U.S. history.