‘We’re sailing west, we’re sailing west,/To prairie lands, sun-kissed and blest—/The crofter’s trail to happiness’ … So goes an Emigrant jingle from the Canadian Pacific Railroad Archives. It sums up the apparently glamorous allure of the New World, as packaged to the Scottish and Scots-Irish settlers, who did not need much persuading, considering the many adverse factors driving them to risk the perilous crossing – Highland and Lowland Clearances; the Potato Famine; punitive changes in farming practices and land

ownership; extreme poverty and hardship. It is not surprising they fell for the hype. But they took with them their own songs and tales which evoked the longing of the exile, the backward glance to the lost land of birth, of blood, the soil in the soul.

Many of those settlers ended up in the mountains, laurel meadows and hollers of the Appalachians, planting their culture in different soil that shared the same geology – for once their respective landmasses had been joined as Laurentia. Maybe they felt the ancient rhyme in their bones – it made them feel at home.

Inspired by this notion, of finding unexpected common ground across the divide, my main focus was all things Appalachian. I am working on a novel for a creative writing PhD at the University of Leicester dramatizing the diasporic translocation and cross-fertilisation of ballad- and tale-cultures between the Scottish Lowlands and Southern Appalachians. I had already done a fair bit of ballad research at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, Cecil Sharp House, but needed to explore certain aspects of Appalachian culture relating to my characters (some real, some fictional) and setting (ditto). I am fascination by the collision of the actual and the imaginary as Nathaniel Hawthorne termed it in his 1850 introduction to The Scarlet Letter, ‘The Custom-House’, on observing the effect of the co-mingled warm light of the coal-fire and the cold light of moon-beams upon the room’s surfaces:

Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.

The actual anchors the imaginary, providing what Hawthorne defined as ‘the authenticity of the outline’, within which a writer can embellish. It was the need for the solid timber-frame of facts upon which to furnish my fictive world that sent my searching through the archives – for the general texture of the milieu and the telling detail with which I could bring alive specific scenes.

Key subjects I looked at in the British Library were: Long-hunters; Medicine Shows; Log-cabins; and Appalachian history. The log-cabin research culminated in a lunchtime talk in July as part of the Summer Scholars series. It felt great to share my shed-obsession with a lovely audience including general public, staff and specialists. Having visited the iconic ‘log-cabin’ of Thoreau fame, on Walden Pond, during my US research trip, this felt like full circle in a way.

And my Appalachian field trip was certainly a highlight.

During 22 August-8 September 2015 I undertook a road trip, courtesy of my American friends from Rhode Island, down the East Coast to North Carolina. I wanted to go by road to experience more closely the transition from New England to the Southern Appalachians, and take in as much of the geography and culture as possible. As a novelist, this kind of texture is vital. It is all in the ‘telling details’, that no amount of book or virtual research will ever uncover. You have to be there, get off the beaten trail, talk to locals, have an experience.

My intentions with this field-trip were to experience North America directly, to observe, record, and reflect (in my trusty Moleskine); to use the above to enrich the novel, paying particular attention to the quotidian texture of the everyday (what novelist Colum McCann called ‘the miracle of the actual’ ); to identify and record examples of the idiolect and ecolect of North Carolina; to make some useful connections; to hear some live music and perform a little myself (sharing my tales and poems at local ‘open mics’ and round campfires); and, finally, to find (fresh) inspiration.

Particular highlights included meeting fretless banjo-player Rick Ward, a singer descended from long-hunters and a long line of local note-worthies (including the famous Hicks family – see below). I recorded one of his stories, a local folk tale, on my phone, during our conversation at a Boone coffee-house. I was introduced to Rick by local music impresario, Mark Freed, of Jones House – a centre for bluegrass, Americana and Old Timey music in Boone. Another highlight was a visit to Jane Hicks Gentry house, Hot Springs, NC (Jane Hicks Gentry was a ‘tradition-bearer’ with a vast repertoire of ballads and Jack-tales, recorded by Sharp, Lomax, et al). I got to meet her great-grandson in Gentry Hardware and purchased a copy of the biography on Jane Gentry Hicks, A Singer Among Singers, signed by the author, Betty N. Smith and the grandson. During my stay I got to check out a fine slice of different types of music – buskers on the streets of Asheville; the Boston bluegrass all-female outfit, Della Mae, in concert at the legendary Grey Eagle; the Shindig on the Green: a weekly hoe-down in the centre of Asheville with music and dancing; a taste of the Counter Culture at Organicfest in the same venue the next day; bluegrass and blues in the downtown ‘pub’, Jack of the Woods; a folk duo at Shenandoah national park; and merry campfire singalongs. In an intangible, but vitally qualitative way, my field-trip enabled me to simply soak up the texture of the American freeway, and ‘Main St America’.

My field-trip also afforded some unexpected but priceless by-products, including spending quality time with an American family – sharing meals, living space, birthday/Labor Day celebrations, et cetera; researching in App. State special collections (where I immediately felt at home!); exploring the Urban Walking Trail, Asheville; visiting the inspiring aSHEville Museum, which celebrates the lives of Appalachian Women; and hiking round in the ‘Backcountry’ on various trails.

What was heartening from all this was confirmation that in my initial envisioning and depiction of my American characters and settings I was pretty near the mark – indeed I felt, at times, that I met real people who could have been from the pages of my novel! Time and time again I did a double-take as I seemed to step into my own book. This was interesting as the working title of the novel was ‘The Two Seeings’, from the Gaelic for Second Sight, An Da Shealladh (literally, the ‘two sights’, the mortal and the visionary sight of the seer) and inspired by the William Stafford poem, ‘Bi-Focal’

So, the world happens twice—

once what we see it as;

second it legends itself

deep, the way it is.

On my final night in Jamestown, Rhode Island, my hosts held a farewell celebration inspired by the theme I suggested: ‘Crossways Medicine Show’. We had fun creating various ‘snake oils’! I MCed a fire circle where I encouraged the sharing of stories, songs and poems, in any language; and painted a banner upon which I asked guests to sign with their respective countries/heritage. It was a great way to celebrate our various narratives, our common ground, and the conclusion of a rich and inspiring trip.

Upon my return to England I followed up some of my field-work with further study in the archives at the British Library; and I went onto incorporate my findings into the second draft of the novel, written while a writer-in-residence at Hawthornden Castle, November-December 2015. I feel my time in the Eccles Centre has been fruitful – taking my research to the next level. It has helped bed my novel in the actual, providing essential nutrients for the orchids of the imagination I have planted there.

Notes:

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, ‘The Custom-House’, Introductory to The Scarlet Letter (1850) http://www.bartleby.com/83/101.html [accessed 20.09.2016]

Stafford, William, “Bi-Focal” from Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems. Copyright © 1954 by William Stafford. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org., from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/42779 [accessed 20.09.2016]

Acknowledgments:

I would like to thank the Eccles Centre this opportunity to deepen and widen my research. It has been a great pleasure and privilege to delve into the bottomless archives of the British Library – actual and virtual. It is truly one of the great places in the world to spend time in scholarly pursuits.

Kevan Manwaring (FHEA) is a Creative Writing PhD student at University of Leicester; and an Eccles Centre Postgraduate Fellow in North American Studies (2015-2016).

In April 2015 I was fortunate enough to receive the BAAS postgraduate fellow award, and was able to spend two weeks using the resources of the Eccles Centre at the British Library. The fortnight I spent there has proven to be vitally important to the direction of my studies into the Presidency of Lyndon B Johnson. I am currently looking at the media strategy of President Johnson and how his relationship with the media affected his popularity during the course of his elected presidency.

Johnson’s relationship with the media was fraught – he did not trust the journalists working around him and they, in turn, distrusted him. These difficult conditions helped lead to a credibility gap opening up over the course of the mid-1960s over the direction of the war in Vietnam, and jeopardised Johnson’s plans to enact a Great Society programme which would fight poverty, push for civil rights and improve medical care for millions of Americans. Ultimately, the PhD thesis looks to further the discussion over how public perception affects leadership decisions by viewing the specific case study of the Johnson presidency, and argues that Johnson’s inability to pursue a pro-active press strategy contributed to the credibility gap and damaged his reputation with the American public.

The time I spent in the British Library has been vital to my continued understanding of Johnson and the media. The resources that were made available included large amounts of secondary material and explanations of how presidents and their administrations use poll data to manipulate public opinion. The book LBJ and the Polls by Bruce Altschuler was a particularly strong example of this kind of material, as it included several case studies which were relevant to my studies, including discussions of how Johnson’s staffers courted pollsters such as Louis Harris and George Gallup in order to obtain more favourable reports.

Works such as, “Presidential Polls and the News Media,” by Paul J. Lavrakas and “The Superpollsters” by David W Moore were of great help to my theoretical understanding of the subject of opinion polls, while works such as “Power and Personality” by Harold Lasswell and “The Arrogance of Power” by J William Fulbright were useful in gaining an understanding of both presidential issues and the specific issues that Johnson had to deal with in Vietnam.

Several first hand reports from government officials to the President were informative and showed how the president and his staff handled the media during crisis situations. None of this information was readily available to me prior to my visit to the library.

As well as this, I was able to read biographies and memoirs from important figures in the administration such as General William Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, and senior Johnson aide Jack Valenti, as well as figures who were central to foreign policy decision making such as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his undersecretary George Ball. These accounts of decision making at the highest level show the influence of media and public perception, particularly when focusing on Vietnam – one of the first widely televised wars – and have been integral to my continued study of the topic.

Finally, the material available from the Library helped me to better understand the period of time in which Johnson’s presidency took place. The 1960s were a volatile and difficult period in American history, with the assassinations of major political figures Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and a series of riots taking place in cities such as Detroit and Newark, New Jersey. On top of the Vietnam war and Johnson’s Great Society program, it has been greatly important to understand the issues that pulled at the president and his administration during his time in the White House, and how these affected both media coverage and the relationship that the media had with the White House.

Ultimately all of this material has helped me to understand the discussion behind the press relations and strategy of the Johnson administration, as well as to understand how Johnsonian decision making worked. I have been able to integrate the material into several papers that I have given at postgraduate level including at the Scottish American Studies Association, Historians of the Twentieth Century United States and at several university postgraduate conferences. I hope to submit articles around the subject in the near future.

The help of BAAS and the Eccles Centre award has been fundamental in my continuing understanding of the 1960s, Lyndon B Johnson and the political history of the United States. I am extremely grateful for the opportunities that have been afforded to me as a result of this award, and I would not be able to complete my PhD without the materials I have been able to work with as a result of it.

Ben Quail is a PhD student at the University of Strathclyde

In May 1926, American newspapers were alive with the story that the American aviator Richard Byrd had become the first person to reach the North Pole by air. While several historians have argued that Byrd’s use of aircraft marked the end of the era of heroic polar exploration, contemporary reactions suggest that aerial polar exploration continued to fascinate interwar American publics and that they continued to understand it as a heroic endeavour. But, if the introduction of aircraft heralded the end of heroic polar exploration, why was Byrd celebrated as a national hero? Lurking behind this question are others: how was it that explorers continued to be seen as exceptional men, even when ensconced in the protective shell of a machine that seemed to be doing all of the difficult work? How did

aviation become part of the narrative of heroic exploration and what effect did the use of aircraft have on popular cultures of exploration? And, perhaps most importantly, what can this tell us about broader trends in American interwar culture?

Images of the Arctic landscape played key roles in 19^th and early 20^th-century Anglo-American polar narratives. Constructed as an untamed, wild space beyond the limits of the modern, civilized world, the polar environment supplied the necessary setting for the explorer’s enactment of a set of interlocking heroic, masculine, and national identities. In particular, the direct encounter between the explorer’s male body and the powerful forces of this wild space, by turns alluringly beautiful and fatally dangerous, provides the opportunity for the explorer to demonstrate his masculine heroism. The introduction of aircraft, with their ability to lift the explorer above the dangers of the Arctic’s icy surface, however, seems to fundamentally destabilize both this relationship between explorer and environment, and the Arctic’s status as a space untouched by the modern world. Previous expeditions had deployed modern or cutting-edge technologies such as Robert Falcon Scott’s motorized sledges or Robert Peary’s steamship, the Roosevelt, but placing aircraft at the centre of his expeditions in the way that Byrd did represented a departure from previous treatments of technology. Indeed, according to some scholars, the use of aircraft presented such a challenge to the existing narratives that it marked the end of the era of heroic exploration. And yet, chroniclers of Byrd’s expedition, including the explorer himself, sought to preserve his status as heroic explorers. To do so they produced complex, sometimes ambivalent, re-imaginings of polar exploration as they sought to integrate heroic masculinity within a technologically advanced practice.

My research investigates the popular culture of 20^th-century American exploration by analysing the narratives and images surrounding American aviator Richard Byrd’s interwar polar flights. Exploring the popular culture of 20^th-century polar exploration offers important insights into the changing nature of American cultures of masculinity – particularly the relationship between notions of masculinity, technology, nature, and heroism.

My research approaches exploration as an endeavour that encompasses more than simply the journey itself, but also involves the process of converting the expedition into consumable narratives. As existing scholarship on the history of exploration demonstrates, representations of explorers and expeditions often functioned as expressions of more general historical and cultural contexts. Thus, I draw on a variety of historical sources, including print media, in order to evaluate what popular images of Byrd can tell us about broader cultural trends. By examining Anglo-American press coverage of the expedition my work explores the renegotiation of these narratives. Extending the history of exploration into the interwar period, my research challenges the assumption that the introduction of aircraft automatically produced an image of a conquered North, and illustrates how writing technology into the narratives of polar exploration produced complex, layered, and sometimes contradictory images of masculine heroism. At the same time, this material also demonstrates the ways in which polar exploration continued to function as an important field for the expression and negotiation of national identities.

My project greatly benefited from access to the British Library’s strong collection of American periodicals and newspapers that are not available elsewhere in the UK. During my fellowship I consulted a broad range of publications from across the United States, including 18 newspapers from cities on the East coast, the West coast, in the Midwest, and the South, all of which carried coverage of Byrd and his flight. Access to media covering a variety of geographical locations and political positions afforded me a more nuanced, nation-wide picture of American popular cultures of exploration than that available through standard papers of record such as the New York Times. I also had the opportunity to consult a number of American periodicals, including Woman’s Home Companion, Popular Science, McCall’s, and Boy’s Life. This material provided important insights into the ways in which Byrd’s flight was represented for specific audiences – particularly how notions of masculinity and technological heroism were presented to women and children.

During my fellowship I completed two chapters of a book-length project based on this project. The material from the British Library provided essential information for these chapters, which examine changing American notions of masculinity and popular cultures of technology and modernity. I also contributed an entry on aerial exploration for the British Library’s Science Blog, and appreciated the opportunity to present the results of my research as part of the Eccles Centre’s Summer Scholars programme, as well as at the University of Aberdeen Museums, the ‘Heroes’ conference hosted by The Hero Project, and ‘Debunking National Heroes’ at the University of Manchester.

Marionne Cronin is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen.

In response to the Fake News and Alternative Facts doctrine twittered so incoherently from the Trump White House, people have remembered George Orwell’s Doublethink and Newspeak, and sales of 1984 have boomed in the USA. No doubt we shall soon appreciate anew the Orwellian warning that Big Brother is Watching You. The revelations by Edward Snowden still linger in our consciousness as a reminder of the caution. In my book We Know All About You, I sketch the development of

government surveillance in the United States and the UK since the late eighteenth century, dwelling on such subjects as American and British McCarthyism, and concluding with an assessment of contemporary attempts at reform.

But I contend that Orwell and Snowden shared an oversight. Few people realize – the novelist John le Carré being one exception – that some of the most intrusive surveillance has been not governmental, but private. The Islington News made the point in 2007 when it commented on the CCTV installations within 200 yards of Orwell’s final residence: ‘far from being instruments of the state, the cameras – more than 30 of them – belong to private companies and well-to-do residents’.

Some of the twists and turns in the story of private surveillance will be familiar. The activities of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, with its motto The Eye That Never Sleeps, are an example. And it wasn’t just the Pinkertons. There was a mushroom growth in private detective agencies in late nineteenth century America. The spied on two stock sources of profit. The first was workers who tried to unionize or draw attention to unsafe working conditions. The second, with divorce booming by the 1920s, was the family bedroom and its adulterous extensions.

More of a surprise to me, when I looked at it, was the role that credit agencies played. Lewis Tappan, the anti-slavery radical who championed the Amistad case, was, less famously, a pioneer of the creditworthiness assessment industry. His firm listed and graded 800,000 US businessmen by the end of the nineteenth century, having subjected them and their habits – alcohol consumption, gambling, sexual behaviour – to surveillance by 10,000 professional informers.

Do you have a supermarket credit card? It is watching you and bending your mind through targeted advertizing. Private surveillance is multi-faceted, and is with us to stay. I devote continuing attention in the book to the unsavoury history of anti-labour surveillance. It took many forms, ranging from spying on bathroom visits to identifying activists and blacklisting them. Ralph Van Deman and ‘Blinker’ Hall, heroes of wartime military intelligence in America and Britain respectively, both set up private anti-labour spying units in the 1920s. Such surveillance continued into the twenty-first century, and now shows signs of reviving in Trump’s America and May’s UK.

Attempts to curb government surveillance have yielded at least partial success, and have received media attention. In spite of the prevalence of blacklisting on some of our most prestigious construction projects, and the phenomenon of merciless hacking and other intrusiveness by mass-circulation newspapers, less constructive attention has been paid in our two democracies to the excesses of private surveillance.

One reason for the strength of the headwind is that the press is privately owned, reponsive to private business interests, and indisposed to report favourably on proposals for its own reform. When it does listen to surveillance grievances, they are those of the middle classes concerned with their own right to privacy. So how impartial has our ‘free’ and ‘truthful’ press been? I argue that we have not properly addressed some of the kinds of surveillance that have done the most harm.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is the author of We Know All About You: The Story of Surveillance in Britain and America (Oxford: OUP, 2017): https://global.oup.com/academic/product/we-know-all-about-you-9780198749660. An emeritus professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh, Rhodri is honorary president of the Scottish Association for the Study of America. His work The American Left: Its Impact on Politics and Society since 1900 was the winner of the Neustadt Prize awarded by the American Politics Group for the best UK book published on American politics in 2013.

If you would like to announce your latest book publication in American Studies in Britain, email Michelle at michelle.green[at]baas.ac.uk

I spent a month in the British Library researching the various French Canadians delegates who came to London to lobby the British authorities between the 1763 cession of Canada and the 1840 Act of Union. The project is tied to a wider programme of research that I am pursuing on French Canadian loyalism, and will form the basis for a scholarly article that I was able to get underway during my time at the library.

Before arriving at the British Library, I had compiled a list of persons, using secondary sources, who had been delegated by a significant body or institution within French Canada and who came to London in order to lobby the imperial

authorities in favour of the expansion French Canadian rights. These delegates were most often appointed by the Roman Catholic Church, French Canada’s leading institution before the 1960s, but they were also selected by the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada and by various ad hoc committees and assemblies.

I chose to examine French Canadian delegations rather than Quebec delegations because my focus is on those missions that sought to expand French Canadian political, legal, and religious rights. Missions to London were also organised during the British Regime by leading English-speaking colonists, but these often had the goal of preventing the expansion of French Canadian rights.

Delegates were attempting to negotiate a place within the British Empire for French Canada. They hoped to participate in civic life within the framework of British political institutions while retaining the religious and social institutions that were particular to French Canada. In my research, I wanted to understand how successful these delegations were, overall, and what they reveal about French Canada’s relationship with Britishness and the Empire.

The British Library’s remarkable collection contains a great deal of material related to Quebec, and I was able to locate many sources related to my topic. The papers of Governor Frederick Haldimand and those of apostate Jesuit Pierre Roubaud were of great use to understanding the delegates who came to London in the 1780s, as were those of Lord Goderich for the 1830s. The British Library’s excellent material related to parliamentary debates and committees was also important to my research, especially to the missions that were organised as a response to legislative initiatives in the 1770s, and again in the 1820s and 1830s. Finally, I should note that the British Library’s general collection of books and microfilms contains remarkable material related to Quebec, including some, like Michel Chartier de Lotbinière’s 1774 pamphlet on the Quebec Act, which not currently available in any Canadian library. Indeed, the British Library’s collection of Canadian material compares quite favourably with that of some of Canada’s best research libraries.

The material at the library helped me to establish a list of 12 missions to London that were organised between 1763 and 1840. Some of the persons that I had initially regarded as delegates, like Joseph-Gaspard Chaussegros de Léry (1721-1797), who was the first Canadian seigneur to be presented to George III, do not appear to have been delegated by any particular group and were thus eliminated as a result of my research.

The goals of the various missions to London mirror the shifting priorities of French Canada’s elites. The issue of religious rights is present throughout the period under study, as a Catholic nation, French Canada, attempted to negotiate its place within a Protestant Empire. It was most acute, however, in the 1760s, when religious leaders sought to ensure the basic survival of Catholicism in Quebec. The issue of political and legal rights emerged soon thereafter and had become central to French Canadian missions by the 1820s and 1830s.

Most French Canadian missions met with little success. They failed because delegates were often denied the support of the British authorities at Quebec, or because their requests ran contrary to British policy. They also failed because they did not enjoy the support of powerful British lobbies and interest groups. For instance, unlike the representatives of Quebec’s Protestant merchants, French Canadian delegates were not successful in being able to cultivate support among the Britain’s business community. By and large, delegates from Quebec, a Catholic society that had recently been integrated into the British Empire, did not have entrées to Britain’s circles of wealth and power. Instead, the allies that they were able to cultivate tended to come from groups who were politically marginalised within the United Kingdom, like English Catholics, Irish nationalists, and radical reformers.

But the story of French Canadian efforts to directly lobby London is not by any means characterised by unrelenting failure. On the contrary, several missions achieved notable successes. When success was achieved, it was usually because delegates had the support of the British authorities at Quebec. Successful missions also enjoyed the support of the Roman Catholic Church and civil society in French Canada. They advanced moderate claims that ultimately fostered Britain’s long-term goal of maintaining order and British rule in Quebec. Prescient officials in fact understood that allowing Quebec to retain its culture and institutions was likely in Britain’s best interests.

Overall, my research on French Canadian delegates reveals the extent to which elites in French Canada sought to negotiate a place for Quebec within the British Empire. Delegates wished for Quebec to participate in imperial life on terms that allowed for the preservation of French Canada’s religious, legal, and cultural specificity. In doing so they developed an essentially civic notion of Britishness, one that rested on political institutions and British notions of equity and the rule of law.

The research I was able to complete during my stay in London will thus contribute to our understanding of Quebec’s place within the British Empire. It would not have been possible without the support of the BAAS and the Eccles Centre, and I am proud to record my appreciation for their assistance.

Damien-Claude Bélanger is an Associate Professor of Canadian history at the University of Ottawa and the co-founder of Mens : revue d’histoire intellectuelle et culturelle.

Welcome to the BAAS Schools Resources Page. Below, we have collated materials created by American Studies scholars that may be useful for teaching and studying American topics in English Literature, History and Government and Politics A-Levels. 

Resources are divided by period for History and English, and by topic area for Government and Politics. But they are also tagged with the exam board and topic  for which they may be relevant (e.g. AQA: The Birth of the USA, or OCR: American Literature 1880-1940), so you can search the website for relevant content by placing this term in the search box in the right hand corner.

All resources can be reproduced for private study, and for use in the classroom, but must be credited to their original authors.

We welcome advice from teachers and students on further topics that we could cover.

History

The BAAS Marcus Cunliffe Travel Award provided me with an opportunity to obtain research materials from the United States crucial to my analysis of American independent film. My PhD project offers the first academic study of the key US film production company Laurel Entertainment Inc., established in 1973 by film director George A. Romero and his partner Richard P. Rubinstein. Romero is best known as the director of a series of zombie films, including 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, and his ability to craft commercial, yet politically challenging low budget genre films which made him one of the most culturally significant independent filmmakers working in America. Based in

Pittsburgh, Laurel’s geographical separateness from mainstream production was unprecedented and my work aims to offer new insight into the industry of independent film, demonstrating how economic, legal and institutional forces feed into and help dictate such cultural objects.

In this media industries investigation, I am reliant on an array of empirical data, including corporate records and interviews with industry figures. Particularly, I had been looking for Laurel’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents from 1980-1988, a series of governmental reports containing rare financial and corporate information. These materials proved unavailable in the UK, and in fact are so scarce that even in the US the complete set could only be obtained by visiting two institutions. I therefore began my search at Columbia University’s Butler Library in New York, where, thanks to Head of Access and Operations Michael Lillard, the SEC microfiche files were waiting for me upon arrival. Though incomplete, these wide-ranging materials immediately suggested a more rapid growth in company infrastructure than I anticipated, moving quickly away from Romero’s filmic output to facilitating an eclectic array of in-house talent by as early as 1983. This move placed emphasis on more saleable product and contradicts preconceived notions that position independent filmmaking above marketplace concerns.

To obtain the rest of these documents, it seemed only fitting to travel to Pittsburgh, the city at the core of Laurel’s production activity and home of Romero’s alma mater Carnegie Mellon University. Carnegie’s economics librarian Roye Werner had been instrumental in pointing me to the existence of these SEC files at the start of my project, but following her retirement, Jill Chisnell graciously picked up where Roye left off. As we loaded the documents onto the microfiche reader, Jill and I noted Laurel’s numerous literary acquisitions, including Thomas Bell’s iconic novel on immigration and the Pittsburgh steel industry Out of This Furnace. Laurel’s intent to adapt this into a feature film suggests a fascinating diversification from their usual genre output, expanding a current understanding of the company’s artistic and marketplace intentions.

On day three at Carnegie Mellon I began pouring through the University’s archival collection of regional newspapers, including the Pittsburgh Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the North Hills News. These articles demonstrated Laurel’s close ties to regional space. Not only did they attempt to build a studio in Pittsburgh, but their interaction with the local community uncovered additional, and sometimes unusual, means of funding. This ranged from business firms investing in tax shelter schemes, to ice rink owners enticed into collaboration by the glamour of film production. In these press interviews, Rubinstein and Romero talk candidly about synergetic moves into publishing and television, and such activities appear to have been heavily influenced by these investment opportunities.

The assistance and expertise offered by university staff during this research trip far surpassed my expectations. But the ease in which I obtained materials here was in stark contrast to my interaction with the film industry itself. Much of my time in New York and Pittsburgh was spent chasing an assortment of former Laurel personnel, many of whom refused to confirm dates and times, lost e-mails, backed out at the last minute, didn’t return calls or spent the entire duration of my trip asking me to call back tomorrow. While awaiting confirmation, I decided to visit several locations pivotal to Romero’s work, starting with Laurel’s former offices downtown. I then headed out to the Monroeville shopping mall, the setting of Romero’s 1978 consumerist satire Dawn of the Dead, before continuing my zombie hunt to Evans City, home of the iconic graveyard seen at the start of Night of the Living Dead. Rather than simply a pop culture pilgrimage, these locales gave valuable insight into the spatiality of this filmic centre and here I was a uniquely positioned to consider Laurel’s physical relationship with the region. How important this space was in shaping aspects of filmic aesthetic, identity and business practicalities demands further enquiry.

Only a few days before leaving, I was contacted by Tony Buba, an independent filmmaker who worked closely with Laurel during their formation in 1973. In turn, Tony introduced me to Tom Dubinsky, a film editor who began his career as an apprentice at the company. Both agreed to be interviewed (at a coffee shop and an Orange Julius respectively) and they went into considerable detail regarding their polymorphic roles as cameramen, editors, sound editors and actors, shedding new light onto corporate infrastructure. This was particularly useful since the majority of their experiences pre-dated the records kept by the SEC.

These primary interviews suggest Laurel began as a post-Fordist company with a relaxed attitude to traditional modes of production, allowing a period of experimentation and creativity. The SEC documents meanwhile show a growing professionalism. Accordingly, as stock and shareholder profit became a primary incentive, product was increasingly standardised. Finally, regional newspapers and locations place this in a socio-economic context, giving grounding to Romero’s specific investigations into American culture and politics. Already this research has revealed much about the often-hidden infrastructure of independent film, suggesting alternatives for economic survival, while complicating notions of creative autonomy so central to analysis of independent film.

At this stage, the collated research still has a lot to reveal, particularly as I begin to interpret the vast economic data contained in the SEC filings. Taken as a collective, the information gathered on this research trip will give solid foundation to my exploration of Laurel Entertainment and developments within American independent film. Fundamentally, it is the intent of this analysis is to extend an existing critical terrain to encompass a previously neglected area of American cultural production. The generous contribution of BAAS has been a major step towards fulfilling this ambition.

Tom Fallows is a PhD student at the University of Exeter.

The BAAS Founders’ Research Travel Award enabled me to carry out an invaluable archival trip to the University of Hawaii to research United States’ Pacific expansion and the California-Hawaii relationship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writes Henry Knight Lozano. The archives reveal how California and Hawaii were tied together in promotional visions from the U.S. acquisition of California in 1848 to the Second World War. Having previously done extensive archival work at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, it was important to delve into a range of materials held at the University of Hawaii to realise the transpacific ambitions of the project.

The project traces a relatively long period of time – nearly a century from the U.S. acquisition of California in 1848 to the Second World War – and this approach made the extensive Special Collections at the University of Hawaii particularly useful. Over the two-week period, I worked with a treasure trove of materials. I was, for instance, able to consult the Sanford Dole Papers, including the private correspondence of the first Provisional Governor of the Territory of Hawaii, who pushed for the Americanisation of Hawaii socially, industrially, and politically, not least through close ties with California. Another Dole – James – owned the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, the records of which provided insights into the rapid expansion of a fruit corporation that took inspiration, in part, from California’s marketing of citrus into a promotional icon.

From a much earlier period, the archive held scores of travelogues written by U.S. authors in California, Hawaii, and the wider Pacific world throughout the nineteenth century. These showed not only the transportation and literary connections that developed between the West Coast and the islands, but also how ideas of Manifest Destiny (and the “inevitable” Americanisation of California and of the Hawaiian Islands) worked to bind the pair together conceptually in the 1840s and 1850s. Materials on the early twentieth century were equally rich, demonstrating how the annexation of Hawaii not only reflected but also fostered significant promotional connections with California. Formed in 1903, for example, the Hawaii Promotion Committee and its records illuminated how island agencies worked closely with Californian counterparts to attract tourist travel and investment and develop an attractive imagery for Hawaii modelled, in part, on the successful promotion of Southern California as an exotic, semitropical U.S. destination. Lastly, and importantly, I was also able to explore the archive’s Hawaiian Collection, which included diaries of Kanaka Maoli leaders and a wealth of sources relating to the islands’ constitutional monarchy (pre-1898), providing insight into how many native Hawaiians resisted the formal Americanization of their homeland in the nineteenth century. In addition to all this, and with the expert guidance of local archivists, I found fascinating materials on the Hawaiian sugar industry, U.S. military development, and the growing Japanese community in the islands either side of 1900, all of which has added to the project’s exploration of the promotional visions and perilous ties that bound California and Hawaii together in this period.

In providing crucial funding that covered my flight to Hawaii, the BAAS Founders’ Research Award made possible this highly productive archival trip and thus helped to carry forward my book project in myriad ways. I am extremely grateful to have received this prestigious and generous award: thank you BAAS!

Henry Knight Lozano is Senior Lecturer in History and American Studies at Northumbria University.

It’s very exciting to have been selected as the EAAS representative for BAAS at this moment in time: everything concerning Europe and America (and the UK’s relationship with both) seems ‘up for grabs’ and I’m looking forward to taking part in some of the dynamic discussions that will inevitably take place among EAAS members concerning the past, present and future of America and American studies more broadly. To hear a wider set of views and perspectives is going to be hugely rewarding, and working at keeping relationships functioning productively will clearly be an exciting challenge in the current political climate.

On an institutional level I hope that some of the experience that I gained as Chair of BAAS 2013-16 can be brought to this role. During my term I was most inspired by being able to initiate policies that led to greater inclusion of all our members at various career stages, as well as to begin to address the issue of equality and diversity in American studies more generally.  I hope to bring that experience to the post of EAAS rep and to continue to work on these widening participation issues more broadly. To do this I will be looking at best-practice in EAAS as an organization and work to bring back what I learn from that to the BAAS executive, as well as offering my expertise and knowledge in this area to EAAS, where appropriate. In this way I hope to promote American studies in Europe and the UK as a discipline and academic space which is fair, tolerant and inclusive, as well as intellectually rewarding.

For BAAS I prioritized modernizing the organization and improving our outreach and media communications. Over my term as EAAS representative I would like to extend this and hope to see stronger connections made between the members of BAAS and EAAS that would lead to greater collaborations and knowledge-sharing; connected media communications; and increased support for early career and postgraduate scholars at national conferences and events. To kick this off, of course, we have the joint EAAS and BAAS conference taking place in London next April (2018) and I look forward immensely to welcoming European members and working to bring our work together more fully. I hope that through this work we can keep our intellectual field border-free, if not our nation states.

In 2019, when the BAAS conference comes to my home institution of Sussex University, I hope that many of those who come to the London conference will feel at home enough in BAAS to return and keep coming back to us each year. Finally, I’d also like to say a huge thank you to Martin Halliwell, my predecessor (twice now!) who has been tireless in his work for both BAAS and EAAS.

Sue Currell is Reader in American Literature and former Chair of the British Association for American Studies (2013-16). Her research interests include American literature, culture and modernism in the first half of the twentieth century as well as eugenics and popular culture. Among her publications are The March of Spare Time: The Problem of Leisure in the Great Depression (Pennsylvania, 2005) and American Culture in the 1920s (Edinburgh, 2009) and Popular Eugenics. She is currently writing a history of New Masses, a communist arts and culture magazine published in New York between 1926-48.

I’m delighted to have been elected Early Career Representative for BAAS. My thanks in particular to Sarah Daw and Rebecca Stone for also standing in the election. Our platforms touched on some common themes: we all emphasised BAAS’ commitment to diversity and inclusivity, and expressed concerns at the march of casualisation and continuing uncertainty about TEF – all issues of grave import to ECRs.

I’d also like to express my thanks to Ben Offiler, who has done sterling work in the post of ECR Representative in the past two years, and who will no doubt continue in the same vein as Ordinary Member on the Executive Committee. Ben has pioneered some excellent ECR-centric schemes since taking office in 2015, and his work in designing and disseminating the BAAS members’ survey, as well as securing funding for the Adam Matthew Digital Essay Prize,

has been tireless and invaluable. I will be working to maintain that essay prize in the future, as it’s an excellent opportunity to showcase fresh and exciting new scholarship.

My aim as ECR representative is to help members combat the isolation, demoralisation, and demotivation that can sometimes plague this stage of the academic career. In particular, I’d like to set up a series of peer-review workshops to encourage ECRs to maintain momentum and enthusiasm in their research (which may fall by the wayside when confronted with heavy teaching loads or lack of formal institutional affiliation). I want to create an accessible and supportive forum providing not only constructive criticism on written work but also a sense of community and solidarity among young scholars of American Studies in this country. I’d value your input and suggestions on the best way of organising these workshops – whether by discipline, by time period, or even by geographic location (I’m based in Hull myself, and so I’m aware that potential participants might be dissuaded from attending by long journeys).

Making the ECR experience a positive, rewarding one means making it positive and rewarding for everyone, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, socio-economic background, disability, educational history and so on. I welcome the frank and respectful discussions about accessibility, diversity, and inclusivity that took place at the Women’s Network event in Canterbury – this is a fantastic springboard for encouraging open, destigmatised consideration of these issues at all future BAAS events. I look forward to the results and analysis of the members’ survey, which will hopefully tell us more about our diverse academic community, and how the current state of HE and FE supports (or, indeed, fails) the constituency. It would be great to devote workshops and panels at future BAAS conferences to discussion of accessibility, and to matters of concern for ECRs, such as TEF, job interviews, academic publishing, and impact.

I left the annual conference in Canterbury last month feeling invigorated, motivated, and positive, after some excellent discussions (and excellent pastries) with old friends and new contacts – and I’m sure many of you felt the same. This is indicative not only of the hard work and commitment of the team at Canterbury Christ Church, but also of the wonderful community BAAS provides for academics at every stage of their career. I’m looking forward to being a part of maintaining that community and making sure it’s open and welcoming to all.

Finally I want to encourage ECRs to keep applying for the wide range of awards and fellowships offered by BAAS, and to keep writing for US Studies Online, a fantastic platform for new writing – which also welcomes reflective pieces about pedagogy, the job market, research practise, and other aspects of academic life and professional development.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions about how BAAS can best support ECRs working in American Studies, please do get in touch via email (R.Williams3@hull.ac.uk) or Twitter (@RachWilliams87). Looking forward to representing you all!

Rachel Williams is Lecturer in American History at the University of Hull. Her research interests include antebellum reform, the social and cultural impact of evangelicalism, and the social history of American medicine. She is currently completing a monograph on civilian relief agencies during the American Civil War, exploring the role of philanthropy, evangelical postmillennialism, and bureaucratisation in the Union war effort. She is also developing new modules on slavery and civil rights and the Civil War in history and culture. 

During my month at the British Library as an Eccles Centre U.S. Visiting Fellow, from June 8 to July 8, 2016, I was able to access rare first-person accounts from eyewitnesses to the turbulent history around the struggle for independence in Guiana, the former British colony in South America. The most important was an interview available only at the British Library, as part of the Communist Party of Great Britain Biographical Project.

During my fellowship, I worked on a biography of Janet Rosenberg Jagan, the first American woman to serve as a head of state anywhere in the world. Born in Chicago to a middle-class Jewish family, she met and married Cheddi Jagan, one of Guyana’s future independence leaders, while he was in the United States studying to become a dentist during the Second World War. Back in Guiana, she worked by his side in the fight to overthrow colonial rule and was very much his equal as a co-founder of a multiracial socialist party, the People’s Progressive Party. Ultimately, in the late 1990s, she succeeded him as president but for many decades the couple was in the political wilderness, ousted from power through a U.S.-British alliance opposed to their Marxist politics.

Trevor Carter, a Trinidadian immigrant who was a member of the British Communist Party, saw first-hand the campaign to destabilize the People’s Progressive Party in the early 1960s. In interview sessions spanning 18 tapes and roughly 20 hours, he provided vivid storytelling. I learned how he came to be recruited to work in rural Guiana by Janet Jagan, at a party in London thrown by a Communist Party member, a Jewish emigre. His observations on her character and persona, like his observations on politics in Britain and the West Indies, were honest, evocative and astute. She recruited him to work in Guyana at a rural college, where he taught members of the PPP the basics of Marxism and party organization. Going to Guyana, to do the work of the Communist Party at a time when comrades were being jailed in Malaysia and India, was an adventure for him.

He went, and from 1961 to 1964, in a political world he evokes as one of guns and guayaberas, and a social world he describes as one flowing with women and alcohol, he saw plenty to shock and disturb him. He witnessed some gruesome violence between Indians and Africans in the country during strikes that U.S. labor and intelligence figures played a role in inciting. A grenade attack on a bus taking white children to school, blamed on the PPP, happened right outside the party college where he worked. He was present in Freedom House, the PPP headquarters in Georgetown, the Guyanese capital, during a bomb explosion that martyred a party member. The immediacy of the material he provides is matched by their analytical value. Carter provided key insights into some of the leading actors in the independence movement: not only the Jagans and their chief rival Forbes Burnham but lesser known figures such as Moses Bhagwan and Ranji Chandisingh. As a black man in a party that had become largely Indian in a place that was becoming ever more racially polarized, Carter also provided unique insight into those tensions. Furthermore, he reflected on splits in the West India Committee of the British Communist Party and the Caribbean Labour Congress which turned on racial tensions in Guyana. His oral history interview is invaluable not only because of its unvarnished eyewitness content but because of Carter’s style, very much a no-holds-barred raconteur’s style. As my book will be narrative history, the details he offered (embedded in plot and setting, with attention to character) will deeply enrich my work.

While at the library, I was also able to listen to oral history interviews with John Platt, a barrister who represented both Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham in cases spanning decades, some involving the racialized political violence of the early 1960s. An interview with Bookers executive Jonathan Taylor, who visited Guyana in 1959 with chairman Jock Campbell, provided some important context on how the politics of Guyana changed the nature of this British multinational, which made its fortune in sugar plantations in Guyana. Taylor’s job was to help steer the company to a much more diversified future; its fears of the nationalization of the sugar industry in Guyana did later come to pass. Taylor’s interview provides some insight into that process, as important a shift for Guyana as it was for Bookers.

While much of the significant headway on my project was made through oral histories archived at the library, I was also able to read pamphlets and articles by both of the Jagans and their rival Burnham, who was effectively placed in power by the Anglo-American alliance in 1964. The library holds one of the few existing original copies of “Beware of my Brother Forbes,” a caustic election-year attack on Burnham by his sister Jessie during his bid for prime minister in1964. She warned of Machiavellian tendencies and stated: “I do not want to see my country become a police state state, where a power hungry man can sacrifice our liberty for his personal gain.” Another rare text I read during the fellowship was London’s Heart Probe and Britain’s Destiny, a very unusual travelogue by Ayube Edun, a man born on a sugar plantation in Guyana who went to England to study in 1928. The book is a sort of Plato’s Republic for Guyana, envisioning an ideal state and its components, including “Manpower Citizens” who worked with their hands rather than their heads. Edun, who would go on to serve in the colonial legislature, also founded a sugar plantation workers union in Guyana called the Manpower Citizens Association. It was this union that the Jagans, when they first emerged on the political scene, tried and failed to lead, and it was this union that was later used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency as a counterweight to the Jagans. While Edun’s treatise, an odd combination of Anglophilia and revolutionary idealism, was published two decades before the Cold War events I will focus on, the plantation workers’ union he first dreamed in its pages played a critical role in Guyanese politics and in the fate of Janet Jagan and her husband. It provides rich subtext and important background.

Outside the library, I was able to interview one of the two founders of the People’s Progressive Party who are still alive: Eric Huntley, who was jailed for a year by the British government in the mid-1950s. Huntley left Guyana in 1957 and became one of the key figures in Black British anti-racist struggles and movements as well as the co-founder, with his wife, of the groundbreaking radical black publishing house Bogle-L’Ouverture. As an elder of the party, his memories of the struggle for independence, the Jagans and the fight from abroad against Burnham’s repressive rule are pivotal. I spoke to him over two sessions lasting in total eight hours. I hope to continue the conversation with him on subsequent trips.

The Eccles Postgraduate Research Fellowship enabled me to spend two weeks in London, based at the British Library on a daily basis. My research findings at the British Library were fundamental to the development of a thesis chapter, which could only be completed with access to the various digitized American newspaper databases at the British Library; the only institution in the United Kingdom to have comprehensive access to the resources I required.

I am a current third-year Ph.D. student based in the Department of History at the University of Glasgow. My thesis questions the notion of conservative ascendancy

and the so-called ‘Reagan Revolution’ in 1980s America by reinterpreting the impact of liberalism at the time. By thoroughly examining how liberals functioned both within and distinct from the Democratic Party in opposition, I intend to dispel the argument that the history of 1980s liberalism is one of incompetence and ineffectiveness. Instead, I will highlight how the networks that formed and developed whilst in opposition helped liberals attain success at state and congressional level, as well as facilitate Bill Clinton’s subsequent presidential triumph in 1992. Furthermore, as this is the era in which Barack Obama – at the time an organiser for Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Group – and many of the President’s allies became politically active, it would be impossible to understand the present administration’s historic ascension without an examination of the political environment that first nurtured Obama and his cohort.

In order to effectively survey liberalism during this tumultuous decade, a section of my thesis focuses on Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY.), a liberal champion and vocal critic of the Reagan administration. From an examination of my initial research, completed whilst a 2014 John W. Kluge fellow at the Library of Congress, it became clear that Moynihan played a crucial role in protecting liberalism’s brightest jewel, Social Security, from conservative dissection. With a new case study titled ‘Social Security and the 1982 Midterms’, I sought to use the collections at the British Library to show how and why a strong liberal defence of Social Security in 1982, driven by Moynihan in the Senate and supplemented by the activism of liberal interest groups, dissuaded the Reagan administration from attempting major revisions and had a dramatic impact on the 1982 midterms.

My research findings highlighted that by exploiting the Social Security issue, liberals effectively regained ideological control of the House of Representatives following the 1982 midterms. Moynihan, alongside Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, literally took the Social Security issue and ran with it, slowly gaining much needed ground on the political terrain of domestic issues. Using the British Library’s US government documents collection, particularly the Congressional Serial Set and the Congressional Record, allowed me to discover how the Social Security issue effectively reshaped the contours of Reagan’s America and slowed the pace of the ‘Reagan Revolution’ steam train. Alongside this, I was able to use contemporary newspaper and magazine clippings to pinpoint the exact moment that this successful liberal backlash to a key facet of Reagan’s conservative agenda started to take hold. Gathering this information has helped me to map out how and why liberals were able to gain such political traction on an issue seen by conservatives to epitomise the supposedly elephantine nature of the federal government. By discovering some of the varied strategies implemented in order to save Social Security from the conservative chopping board, this research has greatly improved the range and depth of my thesis.

The lack of access to such varied materials at The University of Glasgow hindered the progression of this research beforehand – my university library does not have access or subscriptions to most digitized American newspaper databases for example. Thus, outwith a research trip to the United States, the best (and perhaps only) way to comprehensively research the observations of the American press from the 1980s was at the British Library. The Eccles Fellowship allowed me to carry out all of the research required for this chapter over a two week period. I sub-rented a room in Surrey and commuted to the library each day in a fortnight filled with record heat waves and unavoidable tube strikes.

The majority of my findings regarding Moynihan and the Social Security battle of the early 1980s will be published in my thesis, which has the working title ‘Standing in Reagan’s Shadow: Liberal Strategies in a Conservative Age.’ The overall range and depth of this thesis has benefited greatly from the BAAS/Eccles Centre Award and the consequential research period in the British Library, both allowing me to precisely determine the role liberals played in influencing policy, as on Social Security, as well as enabling me to initially uncover some of the networks and organisational strategies that developed to ensure success whilst in opposition. Finally, alongside supporting me to further develop a key analytical aspect of my PhD, my time at the Eccles Centre enabled me to begin work on a paper based on my research for consideration in a number of high-impact journals.

Joe Ryan-Hume is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow.

When people made their way to the registration desk for BAAS 2017 at Canterbury Christ Church University it was, for the first time, with the aid of a dedicated conference app. In an effort to commit to ecological sustainability, delegates were encouraged to decide, from a digital list of the over 250 papers, spread across 55 panels, which they wanted to attend. While this year’s conference had unique time-constraints compared to previous conferences we did our best to accommodate as many lively and stimulating talks as possible between the afternoons of Thursday 6th and Saturday 8^th April 2017.

Good weather accompanied the first set of panels and was kind enough to stick around for the duration of the conference. At the end of the first day, Professor Brian Ward (Northumbria University) delivered the conference’s first of three plenary lectures while also presiding over his first BAAS conference as Chair of the Executive Committee. Brian’s lecture analysed three very different operas that take the US South as their topic in order to ascertain what it is that makes a musical work “sound southern.” In Frederick Delius’ Koanga (1897), Donald Davidson’s Singin’ Billy (1952), and The Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera (2001) the South, according to Ward, is constructed through a complex intermingling of musical style, authorial background, and listeners’ pre-existing ideas of the region. Sponsored by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, Ward’s talk capped off a stimulating first day of papers. Following the lecture, delegates made their way to Augustine House for a wine reception hosted by EBAAS 2018, next year’s joint conference of the British and European Associations for American Studies, that will be jointly hosted by King’s College, London, University College, London, and the British Library.

In the second of the conference’s plenary lectures (sponsored by Journal of American Studies) Professor Marjorie Spruill (University of South Carolina) urged delegates to reconsider the women’s movement of the 1970s and the controversial equal rights amendment. Spruill argues that the feminist activism of figures like Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug was one of two women’s movements in conflict during the period and that scholarly complexity is lost if we ignore or marginalize the conservative movement led by Phyllis Schlafly. As suggested by the lecture’s title, shared with Spruill’s latest monograph Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (Bloomsbury, 2017), Spruill offered a new way of exploring a critical moment in the history of the nation that continues to resonate today.

In the final keynote lecture Professor Trudier Harris (University of Alabama) offered new ways of understanding an endlessly complex theme in American culture with a lecture titled “Home in African American Literature: Difficult to Define, Impossible to Claim.” Interrogating the sometimes simplistic need to “return” to Africa in African American fiction and memoir – a sometimes pathological desire that Harris terms “African Fever” – the lecture charted new ways of reading for the notion of home in black literature from the “Freedom Narratives” of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs to contemporary black writing. Sponsored by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Canterbury Christ Church, Harris’ talk encouraged the assembled scholars to think differently about texts and ideas we thought we understood.

Following Harris’ plenary everyone returned to Augustine House for a well-earned glass or two of wine at a reception overlooking the beautiful city of Canterbury. The reception was followed by a gala banquet in Augustine Hall, which gave diners the opportunity to celebrate the hard work of the many winners of prestigious awards for outstanding work in the discipline from school-level onwards. Chief among them was Professor Philip Davies, Director of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, who was rightfully celebrated for his contribution to the field and the Association when he was awarded the BAAS Fellowship.

If the delegates were feeling fatigued as the conference drew on it certainly did not show during a final morning of excellent papers and lively discussion. The conference concluded on Saturday afternoon with a Women’s Network roundtable and discussion on the need for gender equality and diversity in the organization and the profession. The network event marked the organisation’s renewed emphasis in recent years on the need for equality and diversity in American Studies in Britain. It was the same emphasis that textured the organisers’ decision to avoid men-only panels and it is encouraging indeed to know that the same practice will continue in EBAAS 2018 and at future BAAS conferences.

Lydia Plath, Senior Teaching Fellow and Director of Student Experience at the University of Warwick

Gavan Lennon, Lecturer in the School of Humanities at Canterbury Christ Church University

The Eccles Centre Postgraduate Fellowship enabled me to undertake an intensive five-day research trip to the British Library in May 2017. During this trip, I was able to consult the Library’s expansive collection of hard-to-find audio and textual resources on Gertrude Stein, Natalie Clifford Barney, and the Stettheimer sisters—all of whom hosted important literary salons in the early 20^th century. From listening to Stein’s readings of her salon-inspired word portraits to consulting Barney’s own painstakingly hand-drawn map of her salon and its habitués, I came away from this research trip with a more intimate and multidimensional understanding of how the 20^th century salon operated.

Upon receiving the fellowship, I was entering the last leg of my PhD in English at the University of Sussex. In my doctoral thesis, tentatively titled Networking Subversion: The Feminist Potential of Modernist Literary Salons, I build upon existing feminist theorizations of the 17^th and 18^th century salon in order to assess how we can consider the 20^th century salon as a space conducive to feminist modes of creative expression or political action. Using three American women-led salons from the early to mid-20^th century—the Stein salon, the Barney salon, and the Stettheimer salon—I assess how matters of gender and sexuality were treated within the 20^th century salon space and in the literary and artistic works that derived from it. While I had already consulted hundreds of archival letters and out-of-print texts at the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques-Doucet and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, I was at a stage in my research where I needed to cross-reference my findings and add a bit more colour and depth to my descriptions of the salon space—especially that of Gertrude Stein’s salon.

For the first two days of my visit, I focused my research exclusively on published collections of letters and personal essays between Stein and three of her most loyal habitués: writer Sherwood Anderson, Cubist artist Pablo Picasso, and writer/photographer Carl Van Vechten. Through these letters, I uncovered a wealth of little details that not only reinforced my current interpretations of Stein’s salon-inspired word portraits and her positioning within the salon space, but also brought Stein and her salon to life. Through Sherwood Anderson, I came to see Stein as a strong, jovial woman, who chose to laugh in the face of her detractors. The “he he he”s of “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (1923)—which I had already read as concomitant to Hélène Cixous’ “The Laugh of Medusa”—took on a new subversive power and significance. Similarly, Correspondence: Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein (2008) gave me new context for understanding Stein’s other literary portrait of Picasso, “Picasso” (1911); in the portrait, Stein repeatedly refers to Picasso as one who “was one going on working,” which Picasso—in many of his early letters to Stein and her brother, Leo—describes himself as. What most caught me by surprise, however, was a series of letters between Stein and Van Vechten in which they discuss Florine Stettheimer’s Portrait of Carl Van Vechten (1922)—a work which I analyze in my chapter on the Stettheimer salon.

The following two days proved to be equally fruitful. During a listening appointment at the Library’s Rare Books & Music Reading Room, I was able to hear Stein’s readings of “Matisse” (1911) and “If I Told Him,” in which her emphases on certain words and her overall tone clarified and reinforced my own interpretations of the portraits and how Stein positions herself as both Matisse and Picasso’s superior, judge, and maker within them. I also consulted one of Natalie Clifford Barney’s collections of memoirs—Souvenirs Indiscrets (1960)—which provided new insight into the origins of her 20 rue Jacob salon and Barney’s admiration of Sappho.

Yet, the ultimate highlight of the visit—and one of the highlights of my academic career thus far—came on the last day, when I came across the hand-drawn map of Barney’s salon in a first edition of her memoirs, Aventures de l’esprit (1929). Not only was I utterly charmed by the sheer amount of detail (the side table featuring cups of whisky, port, orangeade, and fruit was particularly appealing), but I also found great pleasure in deciphering the dozens upon dozens of names of salon guests that Barney had crammed into every spare inch. I felt as though I had been transported into that space, overwhelmed by the talent and fame of those who filled it.

Chelsea Olsen is a PhD student at the University of Sussex.

On Tuesday, 2 May, 2017 the Monroe Group at the University of Reading hosted a one-day conference to mark the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency. As well as recognising this milestone, the event also marked the launch of this research network. Comprised of figures from Reading’s Politics Department and its Department of History, the Monroe Group is dedicated to the study of history and politics in the Americas. The Reading Vice Chancellor’s Endowment Fund, as well as the British Association for American Studies generously sponsored the event.

The first event of the day was the keynote address by Professor Andrew Rudalevige of Bowdoin College (Maine, United States). Reviewing the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency, Rudalevige argued that the incumbent President has achieved short-term tangible results of little substance. In the case of his foreign policy, for example, Trump’s tough rhetoric belies that little action he has taken. Explaining this, Rudalevige speculates that Trump is hamstrung by a combination of the legacy of his predecessors and naivety on what the role of a politician entails.

Following on from this fascinating, insightful keynote was the first panel of the day, which placed Trump’s first 100 days in historical perspective. Dr Mark Shanahan (Reading) began proceedings by comparing Dwight D. Eisenhower with Trump. Professors Mark White (QMUL) and Iwan Morgan (UCL) followed, exploring the differences and similarities between Trump and John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan respectively. After the lunch break, the second panel explored the origins and motives behind Trump’s political thinking, as well as his impact on minorities in the United States. Dr Eddie Ashbee (Copenhagen Business School) placed the Trump administration in the context of the recent populist surge across the US and the wider western world. Richard Johnson (Nuffield College, Oxford), similarly, explained why so many white Midwest voters, who are typically Democrat voters, opted for Trump in November 2016. Professor Kevern Verney, finally, analysed the incumbent President’s approach to Mexican immigration, most notably his notorious proposal to erect a wall across the US-Mexico border.

The Third Panel of the day explored President Trump’s domestic policy. Professor Lee Marsden (University of East Anglia) explored the current White House administration’s ties with Alt Right figures. Likewise, Dr Clodagh Harrington (DeMontfort University) speculated on the fate of reproductive rights during the Trump Presidency. Following on from this, Dr Alex Waddan (Leicester University) undertook a broad overview of President Trump’s social policy.

The one-day event culminated with a foreign policy roundtable, involving Dr Jacob Parakilas (Chatham House), Dr Maria Ryan (Nottingham), Darius Wainwright (Reading) and Dr Mara Oliva (Reading). The participants all discussed aspects of Donald Trump’s foreign policy to date, as well as speculating on future directions the incumbent President’s diplomacy will take.

A total of 60 people attended the event. These included scholars of US presidency around the country as well as postgraduate students from Reading and other institutions. The one-day conference was also live streamed on facebook. 9,000 people followed the keynote address.

BAAS generous support allowed for 29 postgraduate students to attend the conference at a reduced rate. One of them, Richard Johnson (Oxford) also presented a paper on Trump’s electoral success.

The conference proceedings will be published by Palgrave MacMillan in September 2018, just on time for the mid-term elections. A contract was signed on 2 November 2017.

Mara Oliva is a lecturer in History at the University of Reading

In January 2017, I finally seized the opportunity to immerse myself in the unique newspaper and special collections at the British Library – a research trip I was only able to realize owing to the generous support of the British Library and the British Association for American Studies (BAAS). As a Ph.D. candidate at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at the University of Mainz in Germany, I work on a dissertation on “Network of Taste: The Early African Caribbean Press in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World” (working title). Drawing on and expanding on the work of Roderick Cave, Andrew Lewis, and Alpen Razi, my project sets out to challenge the ways in

which we still tend to historicize, anthologize, and theorize early African Caribbean print culture by turning toward two of the first Caribbean newspapers edited by free men of color prior to the abolition of slavery in 1833: Henry Loving and William Hill’s Weekly Register (1827-33) and Edward Jordon and Robert Osborn’s Watchman and Jamaica Free Press (1829-38). Complicating rigid binary oppositions that divide publics into Black and white, print agents into in- and outsiders, and markets into centers and peripheries, my dissertation proposes an Atlantic, decentralized model for conceptualizing the early Black press. The Register and the Watchman were part of a network that stretched far beyond the shores of Antigua and Jamaica and that traversed both racial and national demarcations. In fact, the editors of the two early Black papers allied with Wesleyan Methodists, benevolent societies, and abolitionists from different parts of the Atlantic world, from Britain as well as from America. What bound this more than heterogeneous collective together was neither racial nor national affiliation. Similarly, the controversy over abolition seemed to split rather than to unify the group. I argue that the Atlantic network in which the Register and the Watchman participated was based first and foremost on a set of shared tastes. Here, affiliation worked through cultivating similar aesthetic and moral sentiments. More specifically, the editors of the two periodicals had a remarkable sense of prevailing literary and print cultural tastes as well as of their distinct readerships throughout the Atlantic. They knew how to effectively employ taste, as part of a larger editorial strategy, in the times of political strife and on a highly competitive print market. For Loving, Hill, Jordon, and Osborn, to circulate a set of textual and material tastes meant to establish coalitions across national and racial boundaries that were instrumental in the struggle against the repressive plantocracy and for social, racial, and economic emancipation.

In this larger critical enterprise, my research trip to the British Library concluded the first phase of archival work, serving to build up a personal archive of relevant material, to dive into the cultural and material histories of the two Black papers, and to trace the Atlantic entanglements of the Register and the Watchman. While I was able to engage with Wesleyan Methodist print at the Library Company and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to particularize those circum-Atlantic connections, I had the chance to consult the substantial collections of early Caribbean newspapers housed at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA, dating from 1716 to 1876 and entailing not merely more than 100 issues of each the Register and the Watchman, but also comprising runs of contemporary competing planter papers such as the Jamaica Courant and the Kingston Chronicle. The holdings at the British Library allowed me to deepen the previously gained knowledge of the planter press and the respective planter editors operating in cities like Kingston and St. John’s, thereby tackling questions that are indispensable for developing a sense of the newspaper market at the time and are thus essential for the study of African Caribbean papers in the early decades of the nineteenth century: How did the local planter papers on Antigua and Jamaica, virtually monopolizing the newspaper market up until the 1820s, function, not just as texts, but as mediums, print objects, and newspaper businesses? And who were the editors, printers, publishers, and proprietors of those publications?

The special as well as the newspaper collections at the British Library have helped me to deal with the internal and external mechanisms of the planter press in abstract terms and with Augustus Hardin Beaumont more concretely. Beaumont, one of the most prominent antagonists of Edward Jordon and Robert Osborn, was a major public figure in Kingston in the late 1820s and early 1830s, when he held several political offices in Jamaica, such as elected common councilman of Jamaica, magistrate, and member of the House of Assembly for the parish of Westmoreland. At the same time, the former slave-owner founded the Public Advertiser in 1823 that, three years later, merged with the Courant and was re-launched as the Jamaica Courant and Public Advertiser. The British Library holds various printings that shed light on Beaumont as a public man and, more importantly, as a print entrepreneur in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. A printing entitled The Consolidated Slave Law from 1827 had been published for Beaumont by the Courant office and shows that Beaumont, as it was common practice for newspaper owners of the time, produced a whole range of print products at his office. A newspaper alone was rarely lucrative enough to guarantee the economic survival of a printing office. In 1826, for example, Beaumont had his treatise Compensation to Slave Owners in an Appeal to the Common Sense of the People of England published by Effingham Wilson in London. Here, Beaumont argued on the basis of individual property rights and demanded compensation, being, in his view, the precondition for emancipation: “Refuse this just – this not denied , but admitted – more than admitted – proved right to compensation, then adieu to your Plans of Reform and gradual emancipation. You may make Laws, but we will break them: You may Usurp, we will never yield our rights. Execute Justice yourselves – we will shew Mercy” (23). Concluding his pamphlet, Beaumont’s fervent appeal to the British public in general and to the British government in particular documents how a prominent representative of the Jamaican planter class lobbied aggressively for the interests of the local plantocracy.

The seditious, rebellious language used vis-à-vis the British metropolis is remarkable, especially once contrasted with the rhetoric of many free blacks in Jamaica at the time, including Edward Jordon and Robert Osborn. While many planter papers worked with a similar rhetoric to frame the concerns of a planter elite fearing both for their safety and their wealth – highly anti-British and openly revolutionary – the Watchman cultivated what Alpen Razi has aptly termed a form of “empire loyalism” (105), which was also strategic. The editors of the early African Caribbean paper positioned themselves repeatedly and explicitly as British subjects and as such claimed for themselves and for the class of free Blacks and free people of color the same set of civil rights to which all Britons are entitled qua constitution, independent of skin color. This form of strategic loyalism, the editors’ turning toward the larger Atlantic collides with the new localism of the planter lobbyists in the 1820s and early 1830s prior to emancipation in 1833. One of the precursors of this development was the Jamaica Journal, printed at the office of the Jamaica Courant. An advertisement from April 17, 1818 for the newly founded Jamaica Journal, edited and published by the educator, book author, and print entrepreneur John Rippingham, delineates the role of the planter editor in this enterprise, marketing Jamaica as a model colony, contrary to popular belief in Britain. In order to “enable the British nation to judge of Jamaica – not from assertion – but from a development and accumulation of indisputable facts” (Courant, April 17, 1818, 3), planter papers like the Journal blurred the boundaries between art and business and employed a range of genres, including, inter alia, anecdotes about “the chief family events of the Island” and allegedly “accurate and authentic” accounts of local plantations (Courant, April 17, 1818, 3). Clearly, the focus was a local one. The British Library has a copy of the first issue to appear in November 1818, including a preface setting the editorial agenda for what follows. Apart from the conventional request for subscriptions and the genre-typical performance of editorial humility, the preface features a brief but significant mission statement, focusing on the periodical’s “features of utility” (n. pag.). The Jamaica Journal, Rippingham suggests, is pragmatic and literary, useful and than entertaining, which the table of contents seems to substantiate. We find the “Introduction to a New Work on Fever” and “The Laws of Jamaica” next to original poetry and “Biographical Incidents.”

Certainly, the Caribbean material available at the British Library has enriched and complicated my perspective on the early Caribbean press in the 1820s and 1830s decidedly and my research time in London has accordingly advanced and shaped the overall project in significant ways. The inspiring, intellectually stimulating and challenging working and research environment at the British Library also contributed to the progress I made during and after my time at this unique archive. The British Library and the staff on the ground more specifically helped me to spend my limited research time as effectively and as efficiently as possible. Last but not least, the British Library facilitates a forum for scholars and researchers from all over world, allowing me for example to reconnect with a fellow I had met in Philadelphia to talk about the directions our projects are currently taking. I am grateful for this outstanding research experience and I would like to thank the British Library and its staff in general and the Eccles Centre in particular as well as the BAAS – thanks to both institutions not just for awarding me a postgraduate fellowship but for organizing and administering the overall process.

Works Cited

(1818, 3). “Mr. Rippingham having arranged.” [Ad]. Jamaica Courant 13 (92), April 17, 1818. 3. Caribbean Newspapers, Series 1, 1718-1876.

(1818, n. pag.). “.” [Table of Contents]. Jamaica Journal 1 (1), November 1818. n. pag. Copy of the British Library.

Beaumont, Augustus Hardin. Compensation to Slave Owners in an Appeal to the Common Sense of the People of England. London: Effingham Wilson, 1826. Copy of the British Library.

Cave, Roderick. “Early Printing and the Book Trade in the West Indies.” Library Quarterly 48.2 (1978): 163-92.

—. Printing and the Book Trade in the West Indies. London: Pindar Press, 1987.

Lewis, Andrew. “‘An Incendiary Press’: British West Indian Newspapers During the Struggle for Abolition.” Slavery & Abolition 16.3 (1995): 346-61.

Razi, Alpen. “‘Coloured Citizens of the World’: The Networks of Empire Loyalism in Emancipation-Era Jamaica and the Rise of the Transnational Black Press.” American Periodicals 23.2 (2013): 105-24.

Johanna Seibert

As someone based in the UK researching the connections between the Habsburg Monarchy and the American Revolution, finding the resources to conduct necessary primary research on both sides of the Atlantic can be challenging. However, the BAAS Peter Parish Award allowed me to undertake a month of archival research in Washington D.C. and Philadelphia in April 2016. Without this valuable time I would not have been able to complete the final chapters of my PhD which focus on the economic, migration and constitutional links between these seemingly two unconnected regions.

My first visit was to the Library of Congress where I was able to spend a week going through several important and relevant European collections. Foremost among them was the family papers of the Mercy-D’Argenteau family, of which Count Florimond Mercy-D’Argenteau was the Habsburg Ambassador in Paris and had the most interactions with the American representatives in Europe. His family papers contained personal letters that have not been published or consulted before now. I also had adequate time to trawl through the Photostat collection at the LoC compiled by the Carnegie Foundation in the 1920s, which collated material from across Europe which relates to the American Revolution. These documents not only gave me a broad overview but helped guide my research in Europe since then.

The most valuable part of my sponsored trip were several weeks spent in Philadelphia. There, I visited two major archives; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the American Philosophical Society archives. At the HSP I went through sources relating to the first Habsburg representative in Philadelphia, Baron Frederick Eugene de Beelen-Bertholff, which have been untouched by historians. These records were extremely rich in their description of Beelen’s role, interactions, and of his family’s life in the young republic. This complimented the research I’ve already carried out in Vienna, Austria, where a large number of Beelen’s reports were sent back to the Habsburg court. At the APS, I could comb through the Franklin correspondence more thoroughly which allowed me to construct a network of over one-hundred individuals who resided in the Habsburg Monarchy and contacted Benjamin Franklin during the time of the Revolution. These interactions and more are an illuminating light into the vast early American influence not only in the Atlantic World but also in Central Europe.

It is with great thanks that I acknowledge the generosity of the BAAS for allowing me to complete this necessary research and to continue my work into early US-Habsburg relations during the Age of Revolutions. As a result, I intend to be able to submit my doctoral thesis by the end of 2017 at the University of Edinburgh.

Jonathan Singerton is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Edinburgh.