English

Texts reviewed: Landon Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton UP, 2012); Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Cybele Locke, Working in the Margins: Union Radicals in Postwar New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books, 2012); Donald Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (Oxford UP, 2013); Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford UP, 2013).

This paper argues that the strategic fictions of Communist insurrection circulated during the July 1877 general strike helped President Rutherford B. Hayes authorize the US Army intervention against the strikers. It reads apocalyptic telegrams sent to Hayes beside a pulp novella, The Commune in 1880; Downfall of the Republic.

Co-written with Todd Barosky

http://williamjamesstudies.org/

Introduction to Articles:
“Authentic Tidings”: What Wordsworth Gave to                                          William James (PDF) - David Leary

“The Sentiment of Rationality”: William James and                                  the Sentimental Tradition - Sean Epstein-Corbin

Character and Persuasion in William James -                        James Jiang

“A Feeling of If ”: The Experience of Grammar in James,                        Stein, and Whitehead - Maude Emerson

Adventures at the Fringe of Thought: William James,                            Modernism,  and Disability Studies - Jill Marsden

This essay reads Joaquin Miller’s 1886 novel The Destruction of Gotham for how it resonates with strands of “radical pragmatism” in William James’s thought. It argues for the ways James’s philosophy might explain political and social movements beyond liberalism, including general strikes and class revolt. The essay emphasizes the many political possibilities immanent in pluralistic pragmatism, from the “revolutionary suicide” we see in the novel’s class insurgency to the ways such collective violence also registers as an incipient mode of American fascism, or what the essay calls “bad pragmatism.”

Dangerous Grounds pairs well with Beth Bailey’s history of the transition to the all-volunteer army, but the book’s audience goes beyond historians of the GI movement and the Vietnam War. Although he doesn’t explicitly engage with the question of masculinity, Parsons’ history complements Anne Enke’s work on the creation of alternative public spaces during the rise of second-wave feminism. Twentieth century scholars of American studies interested in radical labor, black power, social movements, and even racialized policing will find it relevant. Further, it points toward projects investigating the close ties between police, military and business communities in the postwar era, in part through regional examples of what’s generalized as the military-industrial complex.

Review essay of
Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America;
The Haitian Revolution & the Early United States: Histories, Textualities, Geographies;
A Curse Upon the Nation: Race, Freedom & Extermination in America & the Atlantic World

Review of

Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and The Rise of Jim Crow, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, & Class Conflicts in the American West, by Mark A. Lause.

Tramps & Trade Union Travelers: Internal Migration and Organized Labor in Gilded Age America, 1870–1900, by Kim Moody.

When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict From 1877 to 1921, by Robert Ovetz. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2019.