This study investigates the causes of the American Civil War and the failure of the Reconstruction by paying special attention to the Northern and Southern senses of crisis about “the impending crisis” of the 1850s. Whereas the North had a passive attitude towards slavery because of its obsession with Unionism, the South was desperate enough to secede from the Union in defense of slavery. The Southern perception of crisis was due to their feeling of impotence in the face of apparently crumbling slavery after the election of Lincoln. This Southern urgency enabled the Confederates, even after Appomattox, to continue the war against the freed but helpless blacks, which heralded the tragedy of the Reconstruction.

In light of emerging interest in the long-overlooked figure of Afong Moy, purported to be the very first Chinese woman to set foot in the United States, this essay analyzes Lloyd's Suh's 2018 play The Chinese Lady. Widely publicized as “The Chinese Lady,” Moy performed mundane rituals of Chinese culture before the American public in numerous venues including P. T. Barnum's famous American Museum from 1834 to 1851. The Chinese Lady reconstructs the highly racialized and gendered exhibition space to interrogate the convoluted relationship between the Asian female body on display and the audience. Focusing on the play's critique of the construction of Asian womanhood in a theatrical space, this essay argues for the importance of the subversive possibilities of performative acts and alternative ways of looking that goes beyond the coercive logic of objectification and the rigid binary of subject/object embedded in spectatorship.

The historiography of the American women's suffrage movement in the nineteenth century is marked by the rise and fall of its master narrative. Since the feminist movement and women's history were established simultaneously in the 1960s, the scholarship of the women's suffrage movement has reflected specific agendas of feminist politics of each age. In the late 1960s and 1970s, feminist historians invented the master narrative by conceptualizing the suffrage movement as first-wave feminism. After the late 1970s, scholars of race and racism began retrieving African American women's contributions to the suffrage movement, and since the mid-1990s, historians have expanded the scope of the suffrage movement by rediscovering its richer traditions. This recent tendency has raised fundamental questions regarding the legitimacy of the waves metaphor as a conceptual device. Facing these questions, the master narrative is being gradually undermined in the scholarship of the suffrage movement and American women's history in general.

The politics, economy, and culture of the Cold War reshaped science in America. The federal government wielded substantial influence over scientific practices with various federal agencies, and the wartime practice continued at the military-industry-university complex. Scientists, as “manpower” for international competition, stretched their leverage in political and public realms. Public perception of science also reflected the features of Cold War science. Public schools experienced the changes caused by the enactment of federal education policies, the rise of discipline-centered education, and new textbooks written by scientists. In mass media, two major topics of Cold War science, atom and space, frequently appeared in arousing ways, sometimes deviating from the expectation of public education. Finally, science museums emphasized their mission to educate broader audiences with new subjects and pedagogy. This study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of postwar America, bridging the scholars between American Studies and the history of science.

How do presidents and political parties interact with each other? Existing literature on the American presidency has dealt with questions of active government, critical elections, political time, personality, and institutions. This study brings forth the Truman presidency during the Korean War to address a host of political dilemmas regarding democracy and war. Truman faced a choice between a world war and a limited war, a narrative reality between a come-from-behind victory and a decision to not run, a conflict between the Fair Deal and legislative veto, and the tension between being a midwesterner and pushing for internationalism. As we approach the 70th anniversary of the Korea-US alliance, it becomes all the more clear that it is no longer an option but a necessity that we fully understand the relationship between democratic polity and foreign policy in America.

This essay attempts to discuss how Elvis Presley placed himself in the rock and roll soundscape during and after the 1950s by delving into various changes that Baz Luhrman's Elvis (2022) represented through the chronicle of Elvis' music and life. It also inquires into how the racial boundary between black and white could be blurred in the music acts of rock and roll. This inquiry can raise the issue of reconfiguring Elvis as an ambivalent persona which could be brought out between music and the entertainment business. Futhermore, this personal ambivalence of Elvis goes in parallel with the ambivalence of rock and roll music. While rock and roll led to the various achievements of hard rock band music during the 1970s, it could also survive commercially by constantly evoking the nostalgic sensibility from past traces of its glory.

This study mainly examined the history of educational television in U.S. overseas territories to explore how educational television in American territories became an instrument for changes to the entire educational system. The establishment of educational television in U.S. overseas territories is critical since these provided some problems of the globalization of educational television in the Cold War era. Moreover, educational television has played a role to expand Americanization through the broadcasting of English programs to develop English proficiency for Samoan and Guamanian children. In addition, these projects helped U.S. overseas territories change their educational system through the launch of a governmental education center, educational broadcasting station, and standardized curriculum fit into the television program for teaching. These were the first examples of American educational aid projects that focused on the modernization of education in other territories that faced challenges in changing their traditional education.

In 1968, Pearl Buck published her third story about Korea, The New Year. In this work, the readers see how Korea and its people are inscribed with American “orientalist” discourse. At the same time, it makes clear that Korea's “exportation of American culture” has rendered post-war Seoul a “transnational space” of sorts (Cole and Haddad 4) and some of its people have taken on a “flexible citizenship” of a transnational subject who has multiple cultural literacies at their disposal. Thus, in my discussion of The New Year, I investigate how the competing discourses of the nation-state and the transnational are played out within the pages of this novel. I examine how Buck's narrative gestures towards the transnational just as it evokes the American nationalist discourse by which Korea and its people (especially its women) are relegated as the Oriental Other in relation to the American Self.

This paper explores the process of racialization, and the racial position, of Korean Americans revealed through the Korean-Black conflict in Leonard Chang's The Fruit 'N Food. Racial discourses such as 'model minority myth,' 'yellow peril,' and 'middleman minority theory' capture the cultural and ethnic characteristics of Asian Americans while shaping them into stereotypical racial images. Drawing on these racial discourses, this paper examines how the 1st generation characters in the novel are formed as a race group and how 2nd generation character Tom confronts the racialization process and negotiates over his Korean American identity. By examining the Korean-Black conflict within the racism and racial hierarchy of American society, this paper investigates the racial position of Korean (Asian) Americans which forms a racial triangulation between Blacks and Whites and visualizes Whiteness and White power which has been invisible throughout the novel.

Against the backdrop of the tension between objectivity and multiplicity in journalism and rhetorical studies, this paper attempts to revisit Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed (2001). In her book, Ehrenreich represents her undercover journalistic experiment that investigates whether she can(not) get by as an unskilled, low-wage worker. I first examine how the myth of journalistic objectivity has been socially constructed in twentieth-century America and how the genre of identity immersion journalism is dedicated to debunking the myth. Challenging Gebhardt's critique of Ehrenreich's book for not fitting into the genre characteristics of identity immersion journalism, I seek to redefine it as the book's strength rather than its limitation. To support this, I explore how Ehrenreich uses rhetorical and representational devices for generating multiplicity and shifting narrative distances between the author, the reader, and characters in order to provoke her readers' empathy, guilt, and shame rather than journalistic conventions of objectivity, unity, and professionalism.