The Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts After the Transnational Turn

In The Familiar Made Strange, twelve distinguished historians offer original and playful readings of American icons and artifacts that cut across rather than stop at the nation's borders to model new interpretive approaches to studying United States history. These leading practitioners of the "transnational turn" pause to consider such famous icons as John Singleton Copley's painting Watson and the Shark, Alfred Eisenstaedt's photograph V-J Day, 1945, Times Square, and Alfred Kinsey's reports on sexual behavior, as well as more surprising but revealing artifacts like Josephine Baker's banana skirt and William Howard Taft's underpants. Together, they present a road map to the varying scales, angles and methods of transnational analysis that shed light on American politics, empire, gender, and the operation of power in everyday life.

Introduction
by Brooke L. Blower and Mark Philip Bradley1. Watson and the Shark
by Brian DeLay2. "Oh! Susanna"
by Brian Rouleau3. "Mary Lyon, Massachusetts"
by Mary A. Renda4. William Howard Taft's Drawers
by Andrew J. Rotter5. Josephine Baker's Banana Skirt
by Matthew Pratt Guterl6. V-J Day, 1945, Times Square
by Brooke L. Blower7. The Kinsey Reports
by Naoko Shibusawa8. The Quiet American
by Fredrik Logevall9. That Touch of Mink
by Nick Cullather10. The Immigration Reform Act of 1965
by Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof11. President Jimmy Carter's Inaugural Address
by Mark Philip BradleyConclusion
by Daniel T. RodgersNotes
Contributors
Index

Brooke L. Blower is Associate Professor of History at Boston University. She is the author of Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars. Mark Philip Bradley is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Vietnam at War and Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 and coeditor of Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Transnational and International Perspectives and Truth Claims: Representations and Human Rights.

Reading The Familiar Made Strange feels like taking a walk through a well-signposted museum with halls that twist through different eras, types of archives and source material, and analytic approaches.... Students and scholars alike will be inspired by its lively prose, experimental tone, and frequent reminder that there remain 'different paths to blaze and more icons to reimagine from other angles and scales' (p. 8).

Warmly recommended to both skeptics and avid practitioners of transnational American Studies who will inevitably catch themselves pondering which other American icons and artifacts might lend themselves for a rereading in a transnational framework.