Decentering America: the Quest for a Transnational American Studies

The planned removal of a Civil War monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the pretext for a white supremacist rally there in August 2017. It brought American fascists back into the streets, marching under the banner of a virulent nativism, of a vicious fear of being removed from the pedestal of their proper place in society. It also brought to the minds of people watching these images on TV older visual repertoires dating back to Nazi-Germany, fascist Italy, and similar racist clashes elsewhere. In such a stream of consciousness, such a chain of visual recollections, national settings—American or otherwise—are transcended. The wandering—and wondering—mind of the observer moves in a space naturally trans-national. The following essay considers the implications of such mental processes for the established forms of discourse among historians.     

Shaping Structured Out-of-School Time Use Among Youth: The Effects of Self,Family, and Friend Systems

To explore predictors of adolescent participation in structured out-of-school activities, various types of structured out-of-school time use and their correlates were examined among 454 adolescents in Grades 9–12 in a rural southeastern state. Using a developmental-ecological model as an organizing framework, four different uses of time were explored with regard to self, family, and friend systems. Regression analyses revealed that time in after-school extracurricular activities was predicted by parent endorsement of activities, ethnicity, and friend endorsement of activities, whereas time spent in nonschool clubs was predicted by peer pressure, parent endorsement, and grades. Socioeconomic status, parental monitoring of activities, school grade level, and family structure predicted time spent in volunteering, and time spent in religious-related activities was predicted by ethnicity, family structure, friend endorsement, and gender.