Comics in the Here and Now

This is a review of: Bill Campbell, Jason Rodriguez, and John Jennings, eds., APB: Artists against Police Brutality: A Comic Book Anthology. Greenbelt, MD: Rosarium Publishing, 2015. In an effort to provide a summary of this work, a few brief lines from the review are available below: “As a complete volume APB sparks a consideration of the contemporary politics through it pages. The public debate in the United States has evolved from the dream of “post-­‐racial” society to a more complex critique of systemic oppression infused with regressive views on race, gender, and sexuality. In the pages of this anthology, voices informed by this intersectionality have gathered to create a unique narrative. This volume captures a single moment, but it will stand the test of time, because it adds to a legacy of comics as commentary on the U.S. experience.” (Chambliss, p.97

A Question of Progress and Welfare: The Jitney Bus Phenomenon in Atlanta, 1915-1925

The article focuses on the popularity of private buses modified for passenger service known as jitneys in Atlanta, Georgia as alternatives to streetcars from 1915 to 1925. Jitneys were originated from Los Angeles, California in 1914 and became a success in Atlanta because of their low fares and convenience. Complaints are also listed in response to the venture, citing streetcar companies and city officials urging regulation of jitneys due to their competitive pressure. Commentary is also given noting the social class conflict which was manifested in the transportation policy debate

Florida: The Mediated State

In a March 2007 National Geographic article titled, Beyond Disney, writer T.D. Allman wrote, Everything happening to America today is happening here ... 1 The article went on to suggest that Orlando had become a prime example of the ascendant power of cities\u27 exurbs... While this assessment was focused on the iconic Central Florida community, the implication that Florida\u27s experience foreshadows the country\u27s future highlights a crucial role the state plays in the broader U.S. experience, a role that this special issue of the Florida Historical Quarterly aims to render. Indeed, as Anne Rowe writes in The Ideal of Florida in the American Literary Imagination, In spite of the state\u27s assimilation into the mainstream of American life, the idea of Florida-the subtropical land, idyllic, exotic paradise-continues to be a powerful seductive force. 2 In recent memory, however, the seductive Florida has been inexorably linked to nightmarish prophecy as concerns about urbanization, immigration, and environmental despoliation have exerted considerable force upon the collective mediation about Florida.3 Moreover, from presidential politics to the housing crisis, contemporary observers across the country and around the world hope to glean some greater understanding of the broader national story from Florida\u27s experience.4 Florida has been and continues to be marked by the interplay between imagined expectation and real experience. This special issue confronts the bifurcated profile Florida occupies in the popular mind with essays that explore some of the distinctive issues that shape popular understandings of Florida as both a geographic place and a symbolic space. While the recent academic works, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams and Paradise Lost? address Florida\u27s social and environmental histories, and as substantial analyses such as The New History of Florida and Florida\u27s Working Class Past explore the intersection of the state\u27s political and economic concerns, this special issue seeks to re-evaluate Florida\u27s impact on the broader cultural dialogue about the postwar transformation of the United States with essays that analyze the dynamic between popular cultural outputs and lived reality, thereby illuminating how practices of documenting Florida help shape understandings of time and historical change.

Mapping the Sonic Imaginary: Stacey Robinson’s Visual Codex

The sound of Afrofuturism, like all things connected to black speculative practice, is not easily codified. In his effort to capture the meaning of black speculative practice, Dery’s definition of Afrofuturism relied on examples drawn from comics and hip hop. In some ways, Stacey Robinson’s work and career offer a living embodiment of the transformative power of both endeavors. Stacey Robinson completed his Masters of Fine Art at the University at Buffalo and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His art speculates futures where Black people are free from colonial influences. Stacey’s collected works reside at Modern Graphics in Berlin, Bucknell University, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Race and Sport in the Florida Sun: The Rollins/Ohio Wesleyan Football Game of 1947

As the most popular sport in the United States, football occupies a central place in popular discourse. Since the early twentieth century, public engagement with football has been central to sport culture. Across the South, football provided a moment of common experience, and this was especially true of Rollins College. Being the oldest liberal arts institution in Florida, life at Rollins was linked to football for decades. Yet, as this comment suggested, the nature of the relationship could not be unaffected by the changing racial dynamic in the United States. As a small liberal arts college, the faculty and students at Rollins has long supported “progressive” racial politics. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of that history in the 1947 Rollins/Ohio Wesleyan University football game is how that racial progressiveness vie with the reality of White Supremacy. Despite notable social progress since World War II, Florida in the late 1940s remained a frontier state in terms of racial relations, since the state law still prohibited the mixed participation in any educational programs. When Ohio Wesleyan led by Branch Rickey insisted on bringing its African American player to the game, President Hamilton Holt failed to take a stand against racial injustice, fearing violence, even though the cancellation was against his personal beliefs. Notwithstanding his own limit and surrender to political pressures in the segregated South of his time, Holt ultimately was able to stand on the right side of history and made his mark on the social integration in the United States

Florida: The Mediated State

The Mediated State addresses the perceived and the real experience linked to Florida and demonstrates the state acts as a bellwether for understanding postwar America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Examining historical shifts linked to perceptions of the state, Chambliss and Cummings argue contemporary observers, like their historical antecedents, look to Florida to glean some greater understanding of the broader national experience

From Pulp Hero to Superhero: Culture, Race, and Identity in American Popular Culture, 1900-1940

Adventure characters in the pulp magazines and comic books of the early twentieth century reflected development in the ongoing American fascination with heroic figures. As established figures such as the cowboy became disconnected from everyday experiences of Americans, new popular fantasies emerged, providing readers with essentialist action heroes whose adventures stylized the struggle of the American everyman with a modern, industrialized, heterogeneous world. Popular characters such as Tarzan, Conan, the Shadow, and Doc Savage perpetuated the individualistic archetype Americans associated with the frontier cowboy and the struggles of manifest destiny while offering the fantastic adventure, exoticism, and escapism that modernity demanded. Fantasies developed further with the advent of Superman and other comic book superheroes, as confrontations with otherness transformed from frontier battles to struggles internalized within the American city. Despite these changes, the essential models of white male power provided by American heroes remained and continued to assert the racial and civil superiority of white Anglo-Saxon tradition. This paper explores the racial and civil ideas American sought to promote in early twentieth century and their evolution in the popular entertainment press

Why Open Access

An infographic exploring why open access is central to the Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop at Michigan State University for International Open Access Week. This infographic was published on Platypus: The Blog for Humanities Commons Team