European Journal of American Culture - Volume 26, Issue 3, 2008

In January 1919 Woodrow Wilson attended the Paris Peace Conference to thrash out terms for the end of the world's most bloody war to that date. Wilson arrived with a plan for a permanent end to war as a means of settling international disputes. Central to this desire was a belief in international law, which would be backed by an international police body the League of Nations. During and after the Conference, Wilson's ambitions ran into increasing opposition. When domestic considerations led to the failure of his Treaty plans, the United States entered a period of introspection and isolation. This study argues that Wilson's actions in Paris and his attempts to sell his plans to America in the following months made the passage of the 1921 Immigration Act, with its quotas on Europeans, inevitable. Where other studies have placed the War itself in the central position in the change of heart behind the limitation of European immigrants, this study sees the peace as equally important.

This article is an analysis of major debates within American evangelical feminism since its emergence in early 1970s. It examines ways in which American evangelical feminists negotiate their identity in the daily struggle between the mundane and the sacred, home setting and church practice, and their private and public lives. Through presentation of personal stories and lived experiences it argues that evangelical feminists' ambiguity is a significant and powerful force that not only forges distinctive self-awareness among evangelical feminists, but also shapes diverse understandings of evangelical feminism and shifts the boundaries of both evangelicalism and feminism in America.

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (1855)

Sensing a tangible political opportunity to bolster his and his party's minority status, Richard Nixon made an unprecedented attempt to align disaffected ethnic Americans with the Republican Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nixon possessed a keen awareness of the ethnic revival of the early 1970s and engaged with specifically ethnic issues such as parochial school aid and ethnic heritage studies, and also shaped much of his early substantive policy to appeal to ethnics, culminating in the publication of the Rosow Report on blue-collar workers in May 1970. However, Nixon's presidential style and eventual prioritisation of symbolic or ephemeral issues, notably the appointment of ethnic Americans to government positions, over more substantive policy doomed any attempt to build a new Republican majority to failure. If white ethnic voters were to realign, Nixon would need to offer enduring presidential policy that appealed to their ethnic and class interests, but his politics of symbolism subjugated his plans for a new Republican majority to quick-fix tactics for ensuring his re-election.

The image of the Maltese falcon is an American icon that has made repeated appearances in print, film and elsewhere since it was first presented in the pages of Black Mask magazine in 1929. When we return to Dashiell Hammett's text (published in novel form the following year), we find that this image actually involves a range of multiple images, the significance of which can be probed by considering a stylistic contrast between Hammett and another outstanding Black Mask author, Raymond Chandler. The contrast between Hammett and Chandler becomes especially evident in their different deployments of metaphor and metonymy. Departing from common metaphoric readings, this essay establishes the falcon's metonymic character. The point is not just to show a difference in technique between Hammett and Chandler, but also to demonstrate how Hammett's text carries cultural and political investments that entail a demystification of historical experience while disallowing the quality of redemption prized by the more romantic Chandler.