This piece provides a detailed engagement with Don DeLillo's depiction of the 2003 Iraq War in his latest novel, Point Omega. Framed through both formal aesthetic signposting of the interrelations between modernist and postmodernist practice and also through explicit thematic comparison between the conflicts, I trace DeLillo's treatment of Iraq in Point Omega back to his earlier writing on the Cold War in Underworld and focus upon the ways in which this comparative historical metaphor can be read with particular emphasis upon its implications for the nation-1state.

In a 1992 interview, Art Spiegelman described the genealogy of Maus, his acclaimed comic-book treatment of the Holocaust. He was inspired to write Maus, he stated, when asked to contribute to a commix anthology called Funny Aminals; the only restriction on his creativity was that the story must somehow involve anthropomorphized animals. “At the time I was trying to figure this out,” Spiegelman reports, I went to sit in on some classes of a friend of mine, Ken Jacobs, a filmmaker and very wonderful teacher at SUNY Binghamton, who was showing some old animated cartoons in his class with cats and mice romping around, and then he was showing some racist cartoons from the same period, and it became clear that there was a connection between the two, that Al Jolson was Mickey Mouse without the ears. At that point I said, “I have it: I'll do a comic-book story about the Ku Klux Kats, and a lynching of some mice, and deal with racism in America using cats and mice as the vehicle.” And that lasted about ten minutes before I realized that I just didn't have enough background and knowledge to make this thing happen well, that it would just come across as well intended liberal slop. And instantly the synapses connected, and I realized that I had a metaphor of oppression much closer to my own past in the Nazi Project. (Spiegelman CD-ROM)

Exploring some of the key tenets of neoliberal American culture, this article examines the historical forces behind the meteoric rise of interactive “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) children's books in the 1980s. Despite selling over 250 million copies worldwide and becoming the fourth most popular children's series of all time, the CYOA phenomenon has yet to be placed in its larger social, economic, historical or cultural context. When explaining the rise of interactive narratives, previous literature has mostly focussed on technological change – namely the invention of video games, computer consoles and hypertext narratives. Moving away from such claims, this article demonstrates how the incredible success of solely text-based CYOA books stemmed largely from the cultural ascent of individual market choice to the heart of American notions of agency, liberty, subjectivity and selfhood in the 1970s and 1980s.

If you kill for money you're a mercenary. If you kill for pleasure you're a sadist. If you kill for both you're a Green Beret. (Sign at a Special Forces Camp, Me Phuc Tay, Vietnam.) On 11 March 1983, at a provincial court at Nakhon Phanon in Thailand, Lieutenant-Colonel James Gritz, an ex-Green Beret and highly decorated Vietnam veteran, received a suspended one-year prison sentence for the illegal possession of a sophisticated radio transmitter. Gritz had been using the radio, in connection with a series of secret raids into Laos he had organized to search for some of the 2,500 American servicemen still unaccounted for at the end of the Vietnam War. Though Gritz found no trace, persistent rumour has it that some are still alive, held captive in communist prison camps in Laos, Kampuchea, and Vietnam.

During the 1950s and 1960s, conservative intellectuals in the United States described African decolonization and the civil rights movement as symptoms of a global threat to white, Western civilization. In the most influential conservative journal of the period, National Review, writers such as William F. Buckley grouped these events together as dangerous contributors to civilizational decline. In the crucible of transnational black revolt, some conservative intellectuals embraced scientific racism in the 1960s. These often-ignored features of conservative intellectual thought provided space for white supremacist ideals to continue to ferment on the American right into the twenty-first century.

In Ghosts, the second part of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, a private eye called Blue is hired by a certain White to shadow a man called Black. Black lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn; Blue moves into an equally small apartment just across the street from Black. He is alarmed to discover that Black spends most of his time at his desk by the window, writing in a notebook with a red fountain-pen. In the evenings Black reads, and through his binoculars Blue can just make out the title of Black's book: Walden, by Henry David Thoreau.

Accordingly Blue obtains his own copy of Walden – a 1942 edition published, by coincidence, by one Walter J. Black – thinking it might help him solve the mystery of his assignment. But, like almost every reader of Walden, from Emerson to Stanley Cavell to Auster himself, Blue finds reading this book is “not a simple business”:

Whole chapters go by, and when he comes to the end of them he realizes that he has not retained a thing. Why would anyone want to go off and live alone in the woods? What's all this about planting beans and not drinking coffee or eating meat? Why all these interminable descriptions of birds? Blue thought that he was going to get a story, or at least something like a story, but this is no more than blather, an endless harangue about nothing at all.

The next day Blue tries the book again, and finally comes across a sentence he can understand: “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.” Blue realizes that “the trick is to go slowly, more slowly than he has ever gone with the words before.” Nevertheless, he still finds the whole business excruciatingly painful, and curses Black for torturing him in this way. “What he does not know,” the anonymous narrator remarks, “is that were he to find the patience to read the book in the spirit in which it asks to be read, his entire life would begin to change, and little by little he would come to a full understanding of his situation – that is to say, of Black, of White, of the case, of everything that concerns him.” Instead, Blue throws the book aside in disgust and goes out for a walk, not realizing “that this is the beginning of the end.”

The credit crisis of 2007–8 prompted a Manichean discourse that labeled finance the flighty and unreal other of the solidity of the real economy. Almost overnight the “speculative finance” shifted from a descriptive term to an evaluative one, with freewheeling finance singled out as the main cause of the crisis. The fictionality of finance is, of course, a fiction itself. Not only is finance a part of the real economy but since the 1970s it has played an increasingly significant part in it. This essay aligns with recent work in critical finance studies that puts pressure on the idea that finance can be separated from the real economy. Supplementing the world-historical scale at which this work often remains, this essay theorizes the real abstraction of finance through its lived social experience. The year 1973 was replete with financial events: the end of the Bretton Woods agreement and the gold standard, the Middle East oil crisis, the creation of the Chicago options exchange, and the invention of the Black–Scholes equation governing derivatives. It also saw the birth of the financial thriller with Paul Erdman’s The Billion Dollar Sure Thing. Seizing upon a formulaic genre and opening it up to a flood of real events from the trading floor, the financial thriller acts as a dynamic interface and sensitive seismograph for theorizing the fictionality of finance. This essay opens with a reading of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) as an example of a work that renders real abstraction in an explicitly social way. Rather than viewing the novel as a hyperbolically postmodern reflection of abstract financial maneuvers, I argue that it is thickly embedded within the historically specific financial cityscape of 1980s Manhattan. I then turn to a comparative reading of recent financial thrillers written in response to the twenty-first-century credit collapse. Unlike Ellis’s novel, these thrillers strive to keep the unreality of finance segregated from the real economy at the level of plot, while also making use of generic strategies to do so at the level of form, pushing financial data into footnotes, descriptive asides, and a different tonal register of narrative. By reading these thrillers alongside American Psycho, a book written before the shock of terminal economic crisis, I offer a more historically nuanced reading of their attempts to salvage a workable economy out of the mess of the twenty-first-century American economy.

One of the most curiously overlooked publishing phenomena of the 1950s was the appearance of the comic book Mad in October 1952 which “burst forth full blown from nowhere on an unsuspecting comic book reading public” into the midst of the domestic Cold War. In 1959 Newsweek observed that “Mad each month sticks a sharp-pronged fork into some part of the social anatomy” while Gloria Steinem recalled: “There was a spirit of satire and irreverence in Mad that was very important, and it was the only place you could find it in the '50s.” And even Marshall McLuhan considered Mad worthy of mention in his influential study, Understanding Media. Noting its “sudden eminence,” he attributed this to its “ludicrous and cool replay of the forms of the hot media of photo, radio, and film.” Surprisingly, very little attention has been paid towards Mad beyond its own retrospective publications, one book, and several short articles. This is unfortunate since the comic provides a sharply satiric, yet extremely perceptive insight into many aspects of Cold War America during the 1950s. Furthermore, as I shall argue, those who wrote and drew for Mad formed an alternative New York intellectual circle to that which is commonly written about. Mad's critique of America was far more effective and devastating than their better-known counterparts and consequently, Mad deserves credit as one of the sources of the counterculture of the 1960s.

Using the Congressional record, press articles and the extensive literature on the theme of Americanism published in the early decades of the twentieth century, this article seeks to offer a new approach to the history of the idea of “un-Americanism” in the early years of the twentieth century, particularly in the period between the First World War and the Great Depression. It argues that a key distinction may be drawn between a procedural or “negative” concept of un-Americanism, in which the enemy is defined as the person who refuses to accept the liberal political order and therefore exempts themselves from the privileges of citizenship, and a “positive” definition of un-Americanism based on identity and status politics, in which the un-American is seen as the person who fails to meet the criteria for membership in the mythic community from which the modern nation is assumed to have been founded – usually defined in racial, ethnic and gendered terms; through religious affiliation; or by assertions of culture and character. The history of un-Americanism should therefore be understood principally in terms of the contestations that developed between these two concepts rather than as the evolution of a singular concept and shared understanding of its meaning.

The past, in the course of its ever-recurring encounters with the demands inflicted on it by the present, enjoys one inestimable advantage: it cannot answer, it is not even listening. ‘We ask and ask, thou smilest and art still’, we might almost say, giving to Arnold's ponderous lines a touch of unintended meaning. In spite of appearances to the contrary, even the American past is in the same position. Even after the lapse (the ‘revolution’, as Gibbon would have said) of more than three and a half centuries of continuous settlement, the historian who has been educated entirely in the tradition and the environment of the United States needs rather more than his European contemporary's normal degree of subtlety if he is to free himself from the peculiarly American version of the space-time continuum.

The early political activities of the New York Intellectuals, during the 1930s and World War II, form part of the canon of twentieth century American intellectual history. Their involvement in the American Communist movement, their crucial decision to renounce Stalinism, their brief adherence to Trotskyism, and their eventual disillusionment with Communism, are all well documented. Similarly, a great deal is known about them in the 1950s, especially about the role they played in the “Cultural Cold War” as America's leading anti-Communist intellectuals, helping to launch and run such organizations as the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), and CCF's American affiliate, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF). Comparatively little, however, has been written about them in the period immediately after World War II, the second half of the 1940s. Accounts of their political evolution usually break off some time about 1945 and resume in 1949, only months before the founding of the CCF. The aim of the present study is to fill this gap in our knowledge, first by examining in some detail the history of Europe-America Groups (EAG), a political organization created by a group of New York Intellectuals during the late 1940s, second by analyzing Mary McCarthy's 1949 novel The Oasis, which contains a fictional portrayal of EAG and constitutes a revealing fictional record of the Intellectuals’ political position at this date, and third by tracing the organizational origins of the ACCF and CCF.

Benjamin Franklin's autobiography reveals his deep investment in shaping and controlling how both his contemporaries and posterity assessed his life and achievements. This essay explores Franklin's construction and presentation of his pride in his working-class origins and identity, analysing how and why Franklin sought not to hide his poor origins but rather to celebrate them as a virtue. As an extremely successful printer, Franklin had risen from working-class obscurity to the highest ranks of Philadelphia society, yet unlike other self-made men of the era Franklin embraced and celebrated his artisanal roots, and he made deliberate use of his working-class identity during the Seven Years War and the subsequent imperial crisis, thereby consolidating his own reputation and firming up the support of urban workers who considered him one of their own.

Following Elizabeth Young's 1991 analysis of the controversy surrounding the publication of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, this article discusses the efforts of the makers of the 2000 film adaptation to “rehabilitate” the novel. It explores the recognition of Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner that Patrick Bateman was constructed from the literary debris of a variety of “debased” genres, how they responded by constructing a specifically cinematic Bateman and how, in doing so, they renegotiated the “pigeonholes” of genre fiction originally used in hostile reviews to dismiss Ellis's authorial intent.

Envisioning Harlem's future served as a particularly vivid means of addressing the dilemmas posed by the prospect of desegregation. Should black peoplehood – in part a legacy of oppression and racialization – persist in a post-segregation era? This article calls for greater attention to be paid to the visions of future existence that animated, and were animated by, the black freedom struggles of the 1960s. It explores contrasting architectural reimaginings of Harlem and argues that ideas about existing black places and the nature of their built environment were important factors in shaping commitments to, and idealizations of, both integrationist and black nationalist futures.

Before he took over the management of the Economist in 1860, Walter Bagehot had not had much occasion to notice the United States, at any rate in his published writings. During the 1850s he had been too taken up with banking, and literary criticism, and expounding the value of stupidity in politics. To be sure, in 1859 he decided that the time had come to discredit the American example. The English were becoming disquietingly interested in democracy, a system as to which he had all the usual mid-Victorian doubts and a few extra. So he told the world, through the National Review (which struggling Unitarian quarterly he edited) that the vulgar American voters sent only vulgar men to Congress: “ men of refinement shrink from the House of Representatives as from a parish vestry ”; and that America was too unlike England to be a safe model. Then, just as he became editor of the Economist, the secession crisis and the Civil War erupted. It was incumbent on him to pronounce on these events, and it would have been most uncharacteristic of this sunny, self-confident man to shirk such a responsibility.

This paper examines the House Committee on Un-American Activities and Propaganda's investigation into un-American activities in the Federal Theatre Project. In particular it examines the performances of committee chairman Martin Dies and his Republican colleague J. Parnell Thomas, who led the interrogation of Federal Theatre witnesses. Relying on so-called “friendly witnesses,” usually disaffected former Federal Theatre employees or former communists, Dies and Thomas devoted three days to the testimony of Hazel Huffman, a WPA mail clerk, who never worked on the FTP, while allowing Hallie Flanagan and Ellen Woodward, the two women who directed the national theatre programme, just a few hours each. While Huffman gushed and flirted, Flanagan and Woodward refused to perform the version of femininity the committee demanded. The reordering of gendered roles that resulted was startling. The Dies Committee took to presenting itself as emasculated, a victim of masculine women and New Deal–communist conspirators, who were stripping not only them, but also America, of manhood. This paper suggests that it is only by analysing the powerful gendered performances of the key characters in this unfolding drama of un-Americana that we can understand how and why un-Americanism gained so strong a foothold in mid-century America.

In her 1986 book All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, Maya Angelou reflected on the meaning of identity among the people of the African diaspora. A rich and highly reflective memoir, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes recounted the author's experiences, relationships, and quest for a sense of individual and collective belonging throughout the African diaspora. At the core of Angelou's quest for individual and collective identity lay Africa, a continent whose geography and history loomed large in her very personal story, and in her efforts to create a sense of “kinship” among people of African descent throughout the world. Starting with Maya Angelou's All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, this essay considers the significance of “Africa” as a geographical site, political space, and constantly reimagined history in the formation of black identity in the travel writings of black diaspora authors since the 1980s. I compare Angelou's work with that of the Hawaiian-born President of the United States Barack Obama, whose Dreams from My Father (1995) offered personal self-reflections and critiques of the African diaspora from a Pacific world perspective. In Obama's rendering of African diasporic identity, Africa has become “an idea more than an actual place.” Half a decade later, and half a world away, the Caribbean-born Afro-Britain Caryl Phillips published The Atlantic Sound (2000), an account of African diasporic identity that moved between understanding, compassion, and a harsh belief that Africa cannot take on the role of a psychologist's couch, that “Africa cannot cure.” These three memoirs offer insight into the complex and highly contested nature of identity throughout the African diaspora, and present very personalized reflections on the geography, politics, and history of Africa as a source of identity and diasporic belonging. Taken together, these three personal narratives represent a challenge to the utility of a transnational black identity that Paul Gilroy suggested in his landmark book The Black Atlantic.

In February 1912 Theodore Roosevelt sought the Republican nomination for president on a radical platform of reform that had a devotion to the Constitution as its central plank. Such an analysis differs from the standard historical explanation for Roosevelt's challenge to the incumbent Republican president, William Howard Taft, which argues that, bored with private life after his return from big game hunting in Africa in 1910 and consumed by an obsessive pursuit of presidential power, he ran to seek revenge on the successor who had failed to live up to the mentor's hopes. By initiating anti-trust suits against US Steel and International Harvester, which Roosevelt had examined when president but had not filed suit against, and by letting the Republican Party be dominated by regulars rather than Progressives, Taft had earned Roosevelt's unyielding enmity; Roosevelt's response was to seek the presidency.1 This article argues that far more important than any personal motivation, however, was Roosevelt's conviction that the issue at stake in 1912 was in essence a crusade for constitutionalism.

Throughout Roosevelt's long career constitutional issues played a primary role in formulating his political views. This was particularly true of the period after he left the presidency in 1909 when his interpretation of the Constitution was used as a means to advance various political ends. The debate about the Constitution, one which had become deep rooted in the national psyche by the close of the first decade of the twentieth century, and the judiciary's role in its interpretation was central to Roosevelt's political philosophy.