political tradition () as a 'popular history'. It uses documents drawn from Hofstadter's personal papers, those of his publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., as well as several of his contemporaries, to pursue a detailed reconstruction of the manner in which the book was written, edited, and reviewed, and to demonstrate how it circulated within, and was defined by, the literary culture of the s and s. The article explores Hofstadter's early career conception of himself as a scholar writing for audiences outside of the academy, reframes the significance of so-called 'middlebrow' literature, and, in doing so, offers a fresh appraisal of the links between popular historical writing, liberal politics, and the role of public intellectuals in the post-war United States.* I would like to thank Jonathan Bell, Owen Dudley Edwards, Dan Geary, Simon Hall, Iwan Morgan, Michael O'Brien, Lydia Plath, Leo Ribuffo, Dan Scroop, Robin Vandome, and several anonymous reviewers for the incisive critical readings and thoughtful comments they provided as I wrote and revised this article. I am grateful to Andrew Preston for steering me through the editorial process, and to Eric Foner for generously permitting me to quote from an oral history interview about Richard Hofstadter that he recorded in . I would like to acknowledge funding I received to undertake research on the article from the US-UK Fulbright

This virtual special issue is the outcome of a project entitled Women and JAS, which was launched by the coeditors of the Journal of American Studies in October 2019 to document the involvement of women in the journal's day-to-day business from its inception in 1956 as the Bulletin of the British Association for American Studies. The project arises out of – and will hopefully contribute to – larger conversations about the progression of women scholars in academia. While the UK and US higher-education contexts (the contexts most pertinent to this discussion) differ, there are notable similarities in terms of the relationship between gender and career advancement. Both witness attrition of women from academia as they progress from undergraduate studies to PhD and beyond; both see disproportionate numbers of women scholars employed in precarious, part-time and/or teaching-only roles; both see a very low proportion of women in senior professorial roles; fewer women in both locations apply for (and are, therefore, awarded) major grants. In the UK, specifically, recent conversations around gender inequality in higher education have revolved around issues (and initiatives) such as the gender pay gap, Athena SWAN, sexual harassment and the effects of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), caring responsibilities and affective labour.

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In the past half-decade the idea of 1968 has taken on a set of diverse and contradictory political meanings. This chapter interrogates the important function played by the memory of the year’s social upheavals within the work of a range of activists and intellectuals: Paul Berman, Angela Davis, Tom Hayden, Todd Gitlin, Bill Ayers, Robert Stone and Susan Brownmiller. All of these figures participated in the events of 1968 as New Left activists in one form or another. In the intervening period, however, they have used memories of 1968 to explain both mutations and continuities in their historical and political thinking. In assessing these developments, the chapter argues that these comparable reconfigurations of the idea of 1968 highlight both the significance and the ambiguity of the year’s events for contemporary political thinking, and suggest that the binary division between New Left and New Right needs to be reconfigured into order to understand the political legacy of 1968 in and beyond the United States.