In this comprehensive history of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), one of the oldest and most important women's organizations in United States history, Simon Wendt shows how the DAR's efforts to keep alive the memory of the nation's past were entangled with and strengthened the nation's racial and gender boundaries.Taking a close look at the DAR's mission of bolstering national loyalty, Wendt reveals paradoxes and ambiguities in its activism. While the Daughters engaged in patriotic actions long believed to be the domain of men and challenged male-centered accounts of US nation-building, their tales about the past reinforced traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, reflecting a belief that any challenge to these conventions would jeopardize the country's stability. Similarly, they frequently voiced support for inclusive civic nationalism but deliberately shaped historical memory to consolidate white supremacy.Using archival sources from across the country, Wendt focuses on the DAR's most visible work after its founding in 1890 - its commemorations of the American Revolution, western expansion, and Native Americans. He also explores the organization's post-World War II history, a time that saw major challenges to its conservative vision of America's  imagined community. This book sheds new light on the remarkable agency and cultural authority of conservative white women in the twentieth century.

The Daughters of the American Revolution and Patriotic Memory in the Twentieth Century. University Press of Florida, September 2020.

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Heroes and heroic discourse have gained new visibility in the twenty-first century. This is noted in recent research on the heroic, but it has been largely ignored that heroism is increasingly a global phenomenon both in terms of production and consumption. This edited collection aims to bridge this research void and brings together case studies by scholars from different parts of the world and diverse fields. They explore how transnational and transcultural processes of translation and adaptation shape notions of the heroic in non-Western and Western cultures alike. The book provides fresh perspectives on heroism studies and offers a new angle for global and postcolonial studies.

Ed. with Barbara Korte and Nicole Falkenhayner. Heroism as a Global Phenomenon in Contemporary Culture. Routledge, 2019.


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By focusing on how the idea of heroism on the battlefield helped construct, perpetuate, and challenge racial and gender hierarchies in the United States between World War I and the present, Warring over Valor provides fresh perspectives on the history of American military heroism. The book offers two major insights into the history of military heroism. First, it reveals a precarious ambiguity in the efforts of minorities such as African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, women, and gay men to be recognized as heroic soldiers. Paradoxically, America's heroism discourse allowed them to press their case for full membership in the nation, but doing so simultaneously validated the dichotomous interpretations of race and gender they repudiated. The ambiguous role of marginalized groups in war-related hero-making processes also testifies to this volume's second general insight: the durability and tenacity of the masculine warrior hero in U.S. society and culture. Warring over Valor bridges a gap in the historiography of heroism and military affairs.

Ed. Warring over Valor: How Race and Gender Shaped American Military Heroism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019.

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Contributions by Tunde Adeleke, Brian D. Behnken, Minkah Makalani, Benita Roth, Gregory D. Smithers, Simon Wendt, and Danielle L. Wiggins

Black intellectualism has been misunderstood by the American public and by scholars for generations. Historically maligned by their peers and by the lay public as inauthentic or illegitimate, black intellectuals have found their work misused, ignored, or discarded. Black intellectuals have also been reductively placed into one or two main categories: they are usually deemed liberal or, less frequently, as conservative. The contributors to this volume explore several prominent intellectuals, from such left-leaning leaders as W. E. B. Du Bois to conservative intellectuals like Thomas Sowell and from such well-known black feminists as Patricia Hill Collins to Marxists like Claudia Jones, to underscore the variety of black intellectual thought in the United States. Contributors also situate the development of the lines of black intellectual thought within the broader history from which these trends emerged. The result gathers essays that offer entry into a host of rich intellectual traditions.

 Ed. with Brian D. Behnken and Gregory D. Smithers. Black Intellectual Thought in Modern America: A Historical Perspective. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017.

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Als Tag der Terroranschläge auf New York und Washington ist der 11. September 2001 unvergessen. Aber war 9/11 ein Tag, der die Welt veränderte? Die AutorInnen hinterfragen bisherige historische und politologische Einordnungsversuche und zeichnen die Entwicklungen bis zum Sommer 2015 nach, um neue Forschungsdiskussionen anzustoßen und die transatlantischen Dimensionen des 11. September aufzuzeigen. Zeitenwende 9/11? strebt eine transatlantische Bilanz knapp anderthalb Dekaden nach den Ereignissen an. Es wird untersucht, welche historische Bedeutung das Datum 11. September in vergleichender transnationaler und multidisziplinärer Perspektive hat. Die Autoren bieten Antworten an auf die Frage, ob die Geschehnisse dieses Tages in der Innen- und Außenpolitik, aber auch der Medienlandschaft Europas und der USA so tiefgreifende Wandlungsprozesse angestoßen haben, dass man von einer Zeitenwende sprechen kann.

Ed. with Tobias Endler, Till Karmann, and Martin Thunert. Zeitenwende 9/11? Eine transatlantische Bilanz. Opladen: Budrich, 2016.

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Wurden Kriegshelden, politische Führerhelden und Superhelden zum Thema unzähliger Studien, hat sich die Forschung bisher kaum mit der Heroisierung gewöhnlicher Menschen auseinandergesetzt. Das Buch schließt diese Forschungslücke am Beispiel der USA, Deutschlands und Großbritanniens - es ist die erste systematische wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit Alltagshelden, die aufgrund tatsächlicher oder ihnen zugeschriebener außergewöhnlicher Taten heroisiert werden.

Ed. Extraordinary Ordinariness: Everyday Heroism in the United States, Germany, and Britain, 1800 - 2015. Frankfurt: Campus, 2016.

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Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World sheds new light on the interrelationship between gender and the nation, focusing on the role of masculinities in various processes of nation-building in the modern world between 1800 and the 1960s.

Ed. with Pablo Dominguez. Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World: Between Hegemony and Marginalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

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Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World explores ethnic and racial nationalism within a transnational and transcultural framework in the long twentieth century (late nineteenth to early twenty-first century). The contributors to this volume examine how national solidarity and identity—with their vast array of ideological, political, intellectual, social, and ethno-racial qualities—crossed juridical, territorial, and cultural boundaries to become transnational; how they altered the ethnic and racial visions of nation-states throughout the twentieth century; and how they ultimately influenced conceptions of national belonging across the globe.

Human beings live in an increasingly interconnected, transnational, global world. National economies are linked worldwide, information can be transmitted around the world in seconds, and borders are more transparent and fluid. In this process of transnational expansion, the very definition of what constitutes a nation and nationalism in many parts of the world has been expanded to include individuals from different countries, and, more importantly, members of ethno-racial communities. But crossing boundaries is not a new phenomenon. In fact, transnationalism has a long and sordid history that has not been fully appreciated. Scholars and laypeople interested in national development, ethnic nationalism, as well as world history will findCrossing Boundaries indispensable.

Ed. with Brian D. Behnken. Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in aTransnational World. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013.

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The study of lynching in US history has become a well-developed area of scholarship. However, scholars have rarely included comparative or transnational perspectives when studying the American case, although lynching and communal punishment have occurred in most societies throughout history.

Ed. with Manfred Berg. Globalizing Lynching History: Vigilantism and Extralegal Punishment from an International Perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

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Emphasizing the global nature of racism, this volume brings together historians from various regional specializations to explore this phenomenon from comparative and transnational perspectives. The essays shed light on how racial ideologies and practices developed, changed, and spread in Europe, Asia, the Near East, Australia, and Africa, focusing on processes of transfer, exchange, appropriation, and adaptation. To what extent, for example, were racial beliefs of Western origin? Did similar belief systems emerge in non-Western societies independently of Western influence? And how did these societies adopt and adapt Western racial beliefs once they were exposed to them? Up to this point, the few monographs or edited collections that exist only provide students of the history of racism with tentative answers to these questions. More importantly, the authors of these studies tend to ignore transnational processes of exchange and transfer. Yet, as this volume shows, these are crucial to an understanding of the diffusion of racial belief systems around the globe.

Ed. with Manfred Berg. Racism in the Modern World: Historical Perspectives on Cultural Transfer and Adaptation. New York: Berghahn, 2011.

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Arnold Schwarzenegger is at the center of multiple overlapping themes that have defined the United States over the past fifty years: immigration and the American Dream, body and gender, Hollywood and the star system, public images and political campaigns, and California conservatism and the challenge of green politics. In his careers as a bodybuilder, film star, and politician, Schwarzenegger both shaped and was shaped by the discourses that define how we think about American history, culture, and politics. Consequently, studying Arnold Schwarzenegger means much more than studying a famous bodybuilder, actor, or politician: it means studying America.

The contributors to this volume are scholars from the fields of history, political science, art history, media studies, film studies, cultural studies, and American studies. As they bring the concepts of "body" and "image" to bear on Schwarzenegger, they provide a unique perspective on both this cultural icon and on contemporary America.

Ed. with Michael Butter and Patrick Keller. Arnold Schwarzenegger: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Body and Image. Heidelberg: Winter, 2011., 2011.

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The Spirit and the Shotgun explores the role of armed self-defense in tandem with nonviolent protests in the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. Confronted with violent attacks by the Ku Klux Klan and other racist terrorists, southern blacks adopted Martin Luther King's philosophy of nonviolent resistance as a tactic, Wendt argues, but at the same time armed themselves out of necessity and pride. Sophisticated self-defense units patrolled black neighborhoods, guarded the homes of movement leaders, rescued activists from harm, and occasionally traded shots with their white attackers. These patrols enhanced and sustained local movements in the face of white aggression. They also provoked vigorous debate within traditionally nonviolent civil rights organizations such as SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP.

This study reevaluates black militants such as Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party and also appraises largely unknown protective agencies in Tuscaloosa, Cleveland, and other locales.

 The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Gainesville:

University Press of Florida, 2007.