Inventing America,again

ABSTRACT

In US intellectual and academic life, the 1940s and 1950s stand out as a period abounding with attempts to assay the characteristic and distinctive forms of ‘American culture’ and ‘American society,’ from Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and the oft-noted ‘Tocqueville revival’ to works by Harold Laski, Max Lerner, David Riesman, C. L. R. James, the ‘consensus historians,’ and the early writers in the field of American Studies. Viewed as the culmination of a half-century span (roughly 1900–1950) of cultural nation-building, this rush of ‘American’ definitions at mid-century was shot through with politics – but in complex ways that are not adequately captured by the familiar recourse to Cold War anticommunism as the presumed ideological bedrock of the time. By treating this cultural nationalism as the outcome of an uneven and combined intellectual-historical process, we see how elusive (and illusory) the enterprise of designating ‘American’ traits actually was.     

Working in High School and Adaptation in the Transition to Young Adulthood among African American Youth

Researchers have found mixed support for documenting whether work is protective or harmful during adolescence. This study examined the association between work and problem behaviors among African American youth (N = 592; 53% female; M = 14.8 years, SD = .60) followed from mid-adolescence to young adulthood over eight Waves (90% response rate over the first four Waves and a 68% response rate across all eight Waves). We explored three competing operationalizations of work: work history (never worked, worked), work intensity (no work, 20 h or less, and 21 h or over), and work trajectories (never worked, episodic work, stopped working, late starter, and consistent worker). Non-working youth reported higher marijuana use during young adulthood than their working counterparts. Nonworkers reported lower self-acceptance during young adulthood than those working greater number of hours per week. Differences in work trajectories for cigarette use, depression, and anxiety during adolescence imply that when and for how long youth work are also important factors to explore. Our findings lend tentative support to the work benefits perspective and suggest that the association between work and problem behaviors may depend on the work measure used. We discuss the implications of employing different work measures in adolescent research.

REVIEWS

Readings in Faith and Suspicion

Jean Radford, Dorothy Richardson, Harvester Wheatsheaf, £9.95 pbk.

Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, Routledge, £10.99 pbk.

Philosophical Passions

Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, Rout‐ledge, £35 hbk, £9.99 pbk.

Margaret Whitford (ed.), The Irigaray Reader, Blackwell, £12.95.

Contested Sites

Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (eds), Conflicts in Feminism, Routledge, $49.50 hbk, $15.95 pbk.

Writing Victorian Women and Victorian Women Writing

Christina Crosby, The Ends of History: Victorians and ‘The Woman Question’, Routledge, $49.95 hbk, $14.95 pbk, £10.99 pbk.

Anita Levy, Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832–1898, Princeton University Press, $35 hbk, $9.95 pbk.

Thais E. Morgan (ed.), Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, Rutgers University Press, $38 hbk, $15 pbk.

Ann Russo and Cheris Kramarae (eds), The Radical Women's Press of the 1850s, Routledge, $35.