Genevieve Lakier (University of Chicago Law) examines Upsolve v. James, where a district court enjoined the application of New York state’s unauthorized practice of law statutes to the Justice Advocates that the nonprofit organization, Upsolve, planned to train, to assist low-income New Yorkers file for bankruptcy. The opinion represents a clear victory for the access-to-justice movement. But it also represents a potentially significant change in how courts understand the First Amendment to apply in unauthorized-practice-of-law cases. Although the decision may be overturned on appeal, the logic of the opinion thus makes clear the promise that what critics have sometimes described as a “Lochnerized” First Amendment holds out to access-to-justice advocates, as well as some of its perils. In this chapter, Lakier explains why the decision is significant, embeds it within a broader story of doctrinal transformation, and spells out some of the benefits and costs of using a Lochner-like First Amendment to promote access to justice.

Boulez’s conducting career developed in the United States in the mid 1960s, when he was invited by George Szell to become guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. From then until 1971, he conducted in Cleveland, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, and was the principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra during 1971–7. In later years, he conducted often with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1991–2010). In the context of these engagements, this chapter focuses on Boulez’s involvement with the music of a number of North American composers whose works he conducted, primarily in New York and Chicago. In New York, he pioneered the Prospective Encounters concerts in Greenwich Village, the Rug Concerts and a number of mini-festivals. While Elliott Carter was by far his most favoured North American composer, in Paris he conducted and recorded the work of Frank Zappa and finally in Chicago he conducted several compositions by Augusta Read Thomas.

This chapter explores the newspapers anarchists used to create and disseminate an anarchist Latinidad that was a radical, transnational, anti-capitalist, anticlerical, anti-imperial, and Spanish language-based identity forged initially by US-based migrant anarchists from Spain and Cuba. Using the anarchist press in Florida and New York, anarchists rejected the importance of identifying themselves as “Spanish” or “Cuban” and instead forged a cross-border working-class identity. In creating this identity, anarchists focused on their encounters with US capitalism and republican democracy from 1886 to 1898. Such encounters conditioned their perspectives on what an independent Cuba could look like and what it should avoid. Anarchists also debated whether or not to support the Cuban War for Independence. Was it just another nationalist project that would usher in a new, exploitative ruling elite, or could an independent, non-nationalist anarchist society be constructed? These latter debates began in mid-1891– three and a half years before the mambises launched their uprising against Spanish colonialism.

In 1991, the Abbey Theatre staged a version of The Plough and the Stars that was hailed by Desmond Rushe, then drama critic of the Irish Independent, as ‘the most revolutionary and controversial presentation ever seen of the theatre’s most performed masterpiece’. The director of this production was Garry Hynes, the new artistic director of the Abbey, who had chosen to begin her tenure with a version of O’Casey’s play. This chapter consider how and why Hynes has staged O’Casey,focusing on her productions of his work from 1991 to 2023, tracing an evolution of staging from the Abbey’s 1991 production to Hynes’ DruidO’Casey cycle of 2023.

In 1968, Martin Luther King gave his final major public speech, in which he praised the work of Sean O’Casey. This chapter highlights the way in which O’Casey’s work proved attractive to Black activists, pointing to the comments he made about race in his letters and autobiographies, and highlighting the way in which Black actors in New York began to perform in O’Casey’s drama in the mid-twentieth century. The chapter also draws attention to the way in which figures such as Harry Belafonte and Lorraine Hansberry felt inspired by the Dublin playwright’s work.

In March 1926, the USA saw its first production of an O’Casey play, when a version of Juno and the Paycock appeared at the Mayfair Theater in New York. The text was praised by two of the twentieth century’s most influential theatre reviewers, George Jean Nathan and Brooks Atkinson, who became major American supporters of O’Casey and his work. Their efforts were bolstered by the enthusiasm for O’Casey shown by the American director Paul Shyre. This chapter traces the development of O’Casey’s reputation in the USA, and examines a range of onstage versions of O’Casey’s plays in America, ranging from the introductory work of the 1920s to the 2019 O’Casey season at the Irish Repertory Theater in New York.

Eileen Carey’s books are rarely read; her acting career was forgotten during her lifetime; and her presence in literary culture has always remained in the shadow of her husband. But she provided important support for Sean O’Casey throughout the second half of his life, and there is also great prescience in her own writing. This chapter presents a new assessment of Eileen Carey’s professional career in the wake of the #MeToo (2006–) and #WakingTheFeminists (2015–16) movements, showing how she experienced and wrote about male abuse in the entertainment industry, and how she inspired her husband to write about some of those themes in his own writing.

This chapter imagines potential and as yet unexplored rapprochements between William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) and Julia de Burgos (1914–53), two contemporaneous writers on the brink of Latinx identification, as it is currently conceived. Observing their generically and linguistically diverse writing practices – marked by distinct introspections about Puerto Rican, Caribbean, pan-Hispanic, Anglo-American, and European identities – I open a discussion of the authors’ experiences of everyday spaces (the city street, the hospital ward, the intergenerational home). What I call “lyrical mobilities” constitutes the process of imagining Williams’s and de Burgos’s movements through hemispheric histories as well as geographic and linguistic spaces. It is also a critical attempt to read these two canonical authors in terms of the spaces they had in common, which, in turn, helps extend our understanding of Latinx lives across disciplines that have contained Williams and de Burgos within discrete silos.

From the 1940s into the late 1950s, juvenile delinquency was a real and potent threat to Americans. Gang violence, especially in large centres like New York, threatened the fabric of society and local communities. A series of artistic responses, from films to novels, attempted to address the problem and the reasons why teens became delinquent. Ultimately, West Side Story addressed the phenomenon for the first time in musical theatre terms, but it also galvanized original audiences with its gritty and realistic portrayal of crime in the streets. Although the musical has come to be seen as tame by today’s standards, it was cutting-edge entertainment in its time and fitted in with other contemporary portrayals of gang violence and its outcomes.

The author describes his parents’ upbringing and move to New York around the time of the Great Depression. The young Weinberg is encouraged to read widely and later takes inspiration from Norse myths from the Poetic Edda.

Chapter Four treats Rogers’ alliance with Florenz Ziegfeld, whose popular Zeigfeld Follies made him the leading entertainer in early twentieth-century America. When the Oklahoman joined the show, he served as a cowboy counterpoint to the glamorous Ziegfeld Girls and sophisticated urban dancers and comedians. Rogers’ witty observations and droll comments on the events and values of the day, delivered in a drawling voice and homespun manner, delighted city audiences and critics alike. Attired in cowboy clothes and often twirling a rope, his humorous monologues and shrewd observations sharpened his image as a plainspoken man of the people, a national star, and a celebrity.

By the middle of February, 1935, the maelstrom of publicity that greeted the Lomaxes and Ledbetter at the start of the year is waning. Hoping to raise some attention and funds, John Lomax plans an ambitious performing tour of upstate New York. His relationship with Ledbetter reaches a breaking point, however, with Lomax claiming to be in fear for his life. By the end of March, the Ledbetters are boarding a bus for Shreveport. But Lomax’s need to control Ledbetter continues, leading Huddie and Martha to suspect that they are being cheated. A battle between lawyers representing the Ledbetters and John Lomax ensues, and is not fully resolved for two years.

The ten years that Robert Lowell lived in New York City – roughly, the 1960s – were among the happiest of his life as well as some of his most fertile artistically. The city promised a more energetic and engaged life than that he and Elizabeth Hardwick had had in Boston. Lowell’s celebrity was peaking, as he was courted by the most famous political and intellectual figures of the time. Later in the decade, the influence of lithium carbonate promised at last to alleviate the emotional torment that had plagued him and his loved ones. Finally, he began to discover a new kind of writing, one that announced a style and a subject matter beyond those of his “breakthrough” book Life Studies in 1959. But from the mid-1960s onward, Lowell’s view of New York City darkens. Many of his poems and letters indicate sadness and disappointment in New York’s and the nation’s situation.

Chinese can be found in most parts of the world. The signs in this chapter are mainly from the United States. A few are from Kyrgyzstan. Signs in the diaspora contexts are distinguished by the need to negotiate between Chinese and the local language(s), as Chinese is used to represent local contents. Both meaning-based translation and sound-based transliteration are used, as well as a combination of the two. Also notable are the dialectal elements. The language of the Chinese diaspora in North American is heavily Cantonese, as the earliest immigrants were from Cantonese speaking areas of China. Cantonese has also been adopted as sort of a lingua franca. Traditional characters are used as a rule, reflecting the dominance of traditional culture. The traditional vertical and right to left text orientation coexists with that of the modern horizontal and left to right format.

The eight chapters in Part II focus on the most sedentary portion of Ilf and Petrov’s journey, the month they spent in and around New York City in fall 1935 hobnobbing with literary celebrities and immersing themselves in American popular culture. Investigating Ilf and Petrov’s encounters with renowned American artists and authors offers a way of tracing the transnational networks that connected Soviet and American cultural producers. How and what did they learn from each other? Where and why did they fail to understand one another? The role of immigrants in these networks looms large and allows consideration of how Soviet art and Russian artists become “American.” How did Ilf and Petrov make Soviet sense of American culture and American consumption?

In this chapter, we bring together motives (issues), means (gubernatorial powers), and opportunities (interest group compositions) using qualitative case studies of four states across several years: two with strong governors (New York and West Virginia) and two with weak governors (North Carolina and Vermont). The size of the budgets in these states varies, but they entail three subcategories that correspond with capture [corrections], instability [hospitals], and deadlock [welfare]. An investigation of twelve policy stories provide evidence for the mechanisms connecting governors and interest groups in periods of budgetary change. The policy stories cover similar temporal periods (2002–2004 and 2008–2010) controlling for national political context. We show that – large or small states – governors attempt to use their powers in all policy domains, but are met with much greater resistance in capture and deadlock categories.