Interview with Joe Street about His Recent Scholarship

Randall Stephens

The University of Florida Press has just published Senior Lecturer in History Joe Street's Dirty Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash.  In it Joe looks at the iconic antihero and asks what the popularity of the series reveals about modern America.  Dirty Harry's rogue conservatism, and machismo justice appealed to large sections of the American public.  The story also pointed to a powerful backlash against 1960s liberalism, the counterculture, and more.  The rise of Reagan-era conservatism, says Joe, owes something to this new, strident political reaction.

In Dirty Harry's America Joe writes of the 1971 film’s “representation of the counterculture, race, gender, and sexuality” that “must be approached within the context of recent San Francisco and national history. . .”(67)  At the same time Dirty Harry, Joe observes, “is far more complex than simple right-wing propaganda.”

I recently sat down with Joe to talk about why he wrote the book and how it fits into larger discussions about modern American culture.  Among other things, Joe comments on how the debates and skirmishes of two of America's most turbulent decades continue to shape the nation in powerful ways.

In the interview below Joe also discusses his more recent work on the Black Panther Party and the intersection of race and politics in the post-1960s United States.

 

Award for Documentary Film on Martin Luther King Jr's 1967 Visit to Newcastle

At the Royal Television Society Awards last week, the winner in the Best Factual Production category went to A King’s Speech, a documentary about Martin Luther King Jr’s 1967 visit to Newcastle. The documentary was based largely on research conducted by Brian Ward, Northumbria’s Professor in American Studies and a leading expert in the history of the US civil rights movement. In the early 1990s, Brian discovered long-lost footage of the unscheduled speech that King gave in Newcastle and later wrote a scholarly account of the circumstances surrounding King's visit. Thanks to the documentary, narrated by Lenny Henry and produced by David Morrison for BBC North East, public awareness of King’s trip to Newcastle and of his moving speech is growing once again.

If you want to learn more about King’s visit and about the making of this award-winning documentary Brian and BBC Senior Producer Murphy Cobbing will be discussing them at the Great North Museum at 7pm on April 24, 2015. The event will also include music, a wine reception, and screenings of the documentary and King’s speech.

Admission to A King’s Speech on Tyneside: Remembering Martin Luther King’s Historic Visit to Newcastle is free, but you will need to book a place. (For more details, see here.)

This event is part of the Journey to Justice project on the US civil rights movement and its links to struggles for social justice in the North East which will be coming to venues around Tyneside this Spring.

Introducing the Film Selma

Brian Ward

A screenshot from an original newsreel of the
1965 Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights.

It's always a nerve-wracking experience for a professional historian to watch a feature film or television drama that purports to depict real events, particularly if it’s on a topic where we like to claim some expertise. Will the drama get the basic facts and chronology right?; will the on-screen characterisations ring true?; will the film get the clothes and hair right?

As a historian of the US South and the civil rights movement, all those thoughts were rushing through my mind as I watched the Oscar-nominated Selma for the first time, especially knowing that I had been asked to deliver introductions to the film in Newcastle at special screenings at the Star and Shadow and Tyneside cinemas.

As I explained to those audiences, the good news is that Selma is a powerful, often inspirational film that only occasionally plays fast and loose with the historical record or offers up dubious interpretations of events. The film recounts the story of the historic campaign for Voting Rights in an Alabama city where a mix of white violence, intimidation, and legal chicanery meant that in 1965 only 383 of a potential black electorate of more than 15,000 were registered to vote. A series of nonviolent demonstrations met with brutal, sometimes lethal white resistance from local law enforcement agencies and vigilante groups. The protests culminated in the events of Bloody Sunday, March 7, when state troopers, some of them mounted on horseback, beat and tear-gassed marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge as they tried to walk to Montgomery, the state capital, to protest before Alabama governor and segregationist icon George Wallace. A march two days later led by Martin Luther King was aborted on what became known as Turnaround Tuesday, but a third march, attracting as many as 25,000 supporters from around the nation, eventually made it Montgomery. read more>>>

Showing of film Selma with Intro Lecture by Prof Brian Ward, January 31

The North East premiere of the new feature film Selma will take place at the Star & Shadow Cinema at 2pm on Saturday, January 31, a week before its official release.  The movie tells the story of a pivotal moment in the African-American fight for voting rights in the 1960s South. Northumbria Professor in American Studies Brian Ward will give a short introductory talk on the film before the screening.

Film critic A.O. Scott writes of the movie in a recent New York Times review:

While entirely satisfying on its own, “Selma” seems to contain the seeds of at least a dozen other movies — a reminder of how fertile the civil rights era is and how poorly it has been explored by popular culture. Spike Lee and Denzel Washington gave us a fine Malcolm X (who shows up here briefly, played by Nigel Thatch), but how long will we have to wait for a biopic devoted to Bayard Rustin (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), Amelia Boynton (Lorraine Toussaint) or Andrew Young (Andre Holland)? Or for a daring director to tackle the story of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose internal tensions and impatience with Dr. King surface here in arguments between James Forman (Trai Byers) and the future Congressman John Lewis (Stephan James)? Where is the premium-cable mini-series about Diane Nash (Ms. Thompson) and James Bevel (Common)? The Martin Luther King-Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo) buddy movie? The “Law & Order” spinoff about the career of the Justice Department lawyer John Doar (Alessandro Nivola)? They are all here, in miniature, but “Selma” made me impatient for more. . .

Edmund Pettus Bridge scene from the film.

“Selma” is not a manifesto, a battle cry or a history lesson. It’s a movie: warm, smart, generous and moving in two senses of the word. It will call forth tears of grief, anger, gratitude and hope. And like those pilgrims on the road to Montgomery, it does not rest.*

The showing of the film at the Star and Shadow will also serve as a fundraiser for the Journey to Justice/Shadow of Selma Project. In Spring 2015, J2J/SoS will bring an exhibition on the US Civil Rights Movement and its connections to struggles for social justice and democracy in the North East to the Discovery and Great North Museums, as well as running various public engagement and educational events on similar themes.

Tickets cost £10 each and are available here.

For more information on tickets and Journey to Justice, contact Bethany Elen Kirtley Coyle. For more information on the Star & Shadow, go here.

Ken Burns Premiers The Roosevelts at the US Embassy in London

Michael Patrick Cullinane

Iconic documentarian Ken Burns promoted his latest film, The Roosevelts, as “an American Downton Abbey, only true.”  On September 22 he launched

the British release of the 14-hour, 7-part series at the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square by screening a one-hour clip that, not surprisingly, detailed the wellspring of the “special relationship” and the accord between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.  After the curtain closed and applause receded, Stanley Tucci, star of The Lovely Bones and The Devil Wears Prada, asked Burns about his style and method.  To the surprise of most listeners, Burns admitted he starts with the music, before the script or the visual, to build suspense and inject emotion.  The voices come next.  An all-star cast, including Meryl Streep, Paul Giamatta, and Ed Herrmann read in place of Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor in his latest release, but Burns waxed anecdotally about Tom Hanks, Gregory Peck, and Shelby Foot in films gone-by.  It’s clear that Burns has become as much a celebrity as these figures.

The Roosevelts represent a nearly 8-year labor of love, and one written almost entirely by Geoffrey Ward, the biographer of Franklin Roosevelt and long-time collaborator with Burns.  Billed as the most influential political family in American history--no small claim given the place of the Adams’s, Kennedy’s, Bush’s, and Clinton’s--the Roosevelts are presented here as transformative figures, that brought progressive and liberal ideas such as the welfare system, universal suffrage, and direct democracy to the United States.  Burns admitted that this progressive legacy is what captivated him most and hopes the message will resonate with viewers.  Perhaps it seems an overstatement to suggest that Burns’s The Roosevelts will shape our popular memory of these historical figures for years to come, but with 9 million viewers in the United States (second only to Sunday football), it has infiltrated American households like no other film has for quite some time.

The Roosevelts will air on PBS America on October 19.  Sky 534 / Virgin 243.

Michael Patrick Cullinane is senior lecturer of US History at Northumbria University and the author of Liberty and American Anti-Imperialism, 1898-1909 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012).  He also publishes on Theodore Roosevelt's legacy in politics and pop culture and is currently writing a comprehensive posthumous biography of Roosevelt's image in public memory.

History and American Studies Featured in Humanities Video

For those of you who missed it, check out this short video that Northumbria University has produced for our Humanities Department. It includes some screen time with Brian Ward (Professor in American Studies) and James McConnel (Programme Director and Reader in History). Also featured are two 2013 History graduates Rachael Farnworth and Joe Holt.