This essay examines three “American” magazines published in mid-nineteenth-century London: the American Miscellany (1839–40), the Great Western (1842), and the American Magazine (1851–52). These magazines staged a fantasy of a unified, national and white American culture that regional print cultures and sectional tensions over slavery rendered impossible within the United States itself. They fashioned this fantasy through dialogue with Yankee comedy (an American form constructed through transatlantic circulation); through the theatricality, materiality and composite form of the magazine; and by transforming regional texts into national culture through transatlantic reprinting. Through histories of these magazines, this essay theorizes magazine reprinting as performance, arguing that performance theory helps to conceptualize transatlantic reprinting and its cultural work, and to understand why these magazines ultimately failed as organs of national culture. Additionally, it suggests that magazines published outside the United States illuminate the relationship between periodical circulation and the development of American nationhood in the antebellum era.

The years following the Second World War, according to the Norwegian scholar Sigmund Skard, witnessed the “Rediscovery of America,” as European academics belatedly turned their attention to the United States at a time when its pre-eminent global role could not be ignored. In Britain some believed that the awakening was already under way, the Principal of what became Exeter University having described 1941 as the year of the British “discovery of America.” The jarring realization that the very survival of Britain depended on a close alliance with the American giant had precipitated not only frenetic governmental activity but also intense interest in the United States throughout the media. Perhaps the “discovery” or “rediscovery” of America in British consciousness cannot be dated with exact precision, but the years from the war to the mid-1960s may fairly be called the “take-off period” for the academic study of American history in Britain. This essay briefly considers the role of some of the participants in this endeavour.

This article proceeds from the observation that all of Lethem's novels subvert traditional genres in some way, and argues that the way genres mutate or evolve reflects one of his central ethical concerns – evolution itself. Many of the characters in Gun, with Occasional Music (1994) are “evolved animals” that have undergone “evolution therapy” and can now talk, walk upright, and carry weapons. As the narrator Metcalf observes, these animals are characteristically reluctant to acknowledge their animal lineage. Here one sees evolution's contradiction: it purports to be progress, but is also a melancholic forgetting of origins. In a world where a drug called Forgettol abstracts people from their own memories, it is the detective's job, though he is despised for it, to continue asking questions and remind people of shared culpability and connected narratives. Metcalf, this paper suggests, is engaged in a struggle to maintain the novel as detective fiction, to resist the encroaching sci-fi elements which symbolize the death of community through increasing dependence on an unethical science of forgetting. Amnesia Moon (1995) depicts a postapocalyptic America in which the typical “evolutionary” reaction to the unspecified catastrophe is a retreat into a blinkered regionalism which, like Forgettol or evolution therapy, encourages the individual to forget any sense of wider responsibility. The article concludes with reflections on literary influence and the evolution of Lethem's own work in subsequent novels.

“It is a great pleasure to write the word:” thus Henry James starts his 1882 essay on Venice. To write the word is to inscribe the name; to inscribe the name is to evoke the place; to evoke the place is – well, “a pleasure.” Or simply – pleasure. But what kind of pleasure? And what is the complex relationship between place, name, and word? In that essay James goes on to assert that “of all the cities of the world [Venice] is the easiest to visit without going there.” He is referring of course to his – to our, to everyone's – inescapable saturation with images and associations of Venice from books and pictures. Venice, of all cities in the western world, is the already written, the already seen. The pleasure of Venice, the pleasure which is Venice, is pre-scribed, pre-viewed. The name permanently pre-empts the place, and, as I shall suggest in relation to Proust, the word finally pre-empts the name. In the discourses with which Proust and James were familiar the word/name “Venice” was a site of semantic excess, over-filled with desires, anticipations, dreams, expectations, experiential appropriations. At the same time it was a site of semantic evacuation, disillusion, loss, deprivation, decline and declinations, experiential expropriations.

A conservative Republican presidential candidate committed to the “free market,” a “landslide” victory, the election of many “conservative” Democrats who had strong reservations about organized labour and a willingness to increase defence at the expense of all other federal spending: all suggested that confrontation with unions in both public and private sectors was a real possibility in 1981. A strike in the public sector there certainly was, and it was full of ironies. The union concerned was the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization [PATCO] which, under the abrasive leadership of Robert Poli, had endorsed the Reagan candidacy, offended the AFL–CIO leadership, waged its strike with little union help, and was crushed, to judge by the opinion polls, amidst considerable popular acclaim. Ronald Reagan capped a very successful seven months, spent pushing Congress into rewriting U.S. taxing and spending priorities, by sacking thousands of federal employees all over the U.S.A.

This essay offers close readings of films by the independent US directors Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant with a particular focus on their slow-paced representation of everyday life. Building on the work of Henri Lefebvre, the author proposes that so-called “slow cinema” can be read not simply as an aesthetic choice, but as an alternative and potentially oppositional rhythm in the era of fast capitalism.

The term “isolationism,” still used today in discussions of contemporary United States policy, is “ fittingly…identified with a revulsion against the entanglements of world war.” For analysts using this concept, isolationism means American withdrawal from political connections with the rest of the world (no treaties and permanent alliances) and idealism in foreign policy (no secret clauses or deals). They consider that it has characterized American foreign policy since the first president took office and was expressed in Washington's Farewell Address in 1796 for the first time. Although the term appeared only in 1922, it is thus applied to early American foreign policy, as Lawrence S. Kaplan does in the chapter entitled “Toward isolationism: the Rise and Fall of the Franco-American Alliance 1775–1801” of his Entangling Alliances with None: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Jefferson. According to Kaplan, this speech “became an enduring symbol of America's isolation,” and he defines early “isolationism” as follows: “…a freedom to enjoy access to all ports interested in receiving American products. It meant further a freedom from subservience to any foreign power, of the kind which had forced them into the service of a maternal economy or of dynastic wars in the past. Finally, it extended to a self-image of virtue and innocence that would be protected by advancing principles of peaceful relationships among nations.”

Even if one thinks, like Albert K. Weinberg, that “isolationism” is a “poor theory,” which “has placed the discussion of American foreign policy in a sad predicament of obfuscation,” one has to admit with him that “mere scholars can change no social habit.”

Between December 1893 and December 1895, the American Federation of Labor engaged in a running controversy over independent political action. It began at the Federation's annual convention of 1893, when T. J. Morgan proposed a political programme which was submitted to a referendum, and it ended when the New York convention of 1895 passed a resolution proposed by J. F. O'Sullivan of Boston, which banned party politics from the deliberations of the conventions. The climax was reached in the convention of 1894 at Denver, Colorado. There the political programme was debated for two days before being rejected. The Preamble of the programme committed the Federation to forming its own political party independent of the two existing parties; it was followed by eleven planks, most of which were traditional demands of labour. The sole exception was the tenth plank which demanded ‘The collective ownership by the people of all the means of production and distribution’. The debate centred on this plank, although Plank 3 (‘a legal eight-hour workday’) and Plank 4 (‘sanitary inspection of workshop, mine, and home’) were hotly discussed. In the end Plank 10 was amended to a land monopoly plank on the proposal of August McCraith, a printer, and this amendment made it clear that the convention had rejected the collectivism of the programme.

Despite all the talk of protectionism in both rich and poor countries there has probably never been a time when the idea of economic autarchy has been less popular than the 1980s. The so-called “New Protectionism” of the 1980s has several historically novel dimensions but far from being “New” the essential idea is the very ancient one of corporations encouraged by the governments of the countries in which they are domiciled attempting to gain competitive advantages over those from other countries by fair means and by foul. The traditional charges of low cost producers flooding markets with cheap, and sometimes dangerously inferior goods, the use by foreign governments of unfair incentives to exporters (export subsidies), and the imposition of quantitative import restrictions by importing countries, are flying around global commerce to a degree that has some very sober politicians, policy makers and economists publicly worried for the very future of the global system and, by implication, world security. To put it bluntly, the ideologues of “free trade” or “liberalization” as it is increasingly being labelled, argue that the “New Protectionism” if it is permitted to spread will inevitably lead to a “New Depression,” and this may well lead to global anarchy not only in commerce but also in the politico-military relations between nations.

Radical Irish nationalists attacked a musical farce, McFadden's Row of Flats, in 1902 and 1903, because of the green whiskers on the Irishman, the pigs in the Irish household, and the drunken, lascivious Irishwoman on stage. This play had been produced in Philadelphia, an Irish nationalist stronghold, for five years before Irish nationalists decided to stop the performances with direct confrontations in the theater. The timing of this decision and the style of the protest were based on competition among Irish nationalists, particularly the resurgence of Irish ethnocentrism and physical-force nationalism.

Michael Moore's 2004 film Fahrenheit 9/11 is a visual and narrative tour de force that critiques everything from the controversial conditions under which George W. Bush assumed the US presidency to President Bush's handling of his so-called “war on terror.” With its tagline “The temperature where freedom burns,” Moore stresses the dubious ethical nature of the Bush administration's post-9/11 policies, especially as they redefine the US relationship between freedom and censorship. In so doing, he challenges the Bush administration's constructions of US morality as ultimately elitist and self-serving, substituting his own populist, class-based moral America(n) in its place.

The topic of race has long enriched Shakespeare scholarship. Race scholarship remains marginalized in the broader world of Shakespeare studies. The simultaneous “truth” of these statements reveals a deeply rooted professional ambivalence. And while recent attention has been paid to its manifestation at conferences and in journals, this essay explores its challenge to black teacher–scholars in the majority-white classroom. Rethinking The Merchant of Venice as an educational play, with Portia and Shylock performing as nontraditional teachers, I develop the concept of “teacher trouble” from Judith Butler's “gender trouble” to reflect personally on the perils and liberatory potential of antiracist performative strategies.

Art of the transnational Caribbean has come to be positioned by an understanding of the African diaspora that is oriented to an American “centre,” a situation to be explored for what it reveals about the hegemonic status of the United States in the discipline of contemporary art history. The predominant uses of the diaspora concept both in art-historical narratives and in curatorial spaces are those that connect to United States-based realities, with little pertinence to a strictly transnational theorization. This has implications for how modern art and contemporary art are thought about in relation to the Caribbean and its diaspora, in a way that this article demonstrates with attention to a number of artists at multiple sites, in Trinidad, Guyana, Britain and America.

Joseph Heller's brilliant first novel, Catch-22, has the power to transform American literature, to re-invigorate a fiction which, since 1955, has tended to work over, with declining vitality, the formulae of earlier years. He combines an experimental attitude towards formal problems with a fully contemporary sense of what it means for a writer to be a radical in the current phase of American culture.

In 1828 and 1832 James Fenimore Cooper visited England. He expected hostility because he had just written Notions of the Americans which was intended to correct the erroneous statements of British travellers about the United States, but during his visits he was well received and managed to meet many leading literary and political figures. Yet everything was wrong. In 1837 he published a book based on these visits and expressed his dismay at ‘the extent of the malignancy, or the nature of the falsehood, that are industriously circulated here at the expense of America’. It was, he wrote, a country that I could fain like, but whose prejudices and national antipathies throw a chill over all my affections; a country that unquestionably stands at the head of civilization in a thousand things, but which singularly exemplifies a truth we all acknowledge, – how much easier it is to possess great and useful, and even noble qualities, than to display those that are attractive and winning; – a country that all respect, but few love.

The New York Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations was the first attempt to pursue the aims and imitate the success of the great London exhibition of 1851. The most remarkable thing about that event had been its setting, dubbed by Punch the “Crystal Palace.” Though a number of visitors from the United States had aired the notion of staging an American Crystal Palace exhibition, the first tangible plans were devised by Edward Riddle, who has served as U.S. Commissioner to the London Crystal Palace. Riddle was a Bostonian, but New York was clearly the place for such a venture, and early in 1852 the New York Board of Aldermen granted a concession on a tract just west of the Croton Reservoir (at Sixth Avenue between 40th and 42nd). Soon afterward, however, Riddle had to relinquish control of the enterprise to a new group of backers, all New Yorkers with close ties to Wall Street, Washington, and London. Included among them were August Belmont, Alexander Hamilton, Jr., William Cullen Bryant, Edward K. Collins, and members of such families as the Schuylers and the Livingstons. Their leader was Theodore Sedgwick, a well-connected lawyer with a reputation as an eminent student of judicial and political reform, and with ties to the world of letters through his friend Bryant and his aunt, the novelist Catherine Maria Sedgwick.

Kara Walker describes her book After the Deluge (2007) as “rumination” on Hurricane Katrina structured in the form of a “visual essay.” The book combines Walker's own artwork and the works of other artists into “a narrative of fluid symbols” in which the overarching analogy of “murky, toxic waters” holds the potential to “become the amniotic fluid of a potentially new and difficult birth.” This essay considers Walker's use of history within this collection of images to show how the book opens up ways to interrogate Katrina's particular significance as a wholly new, and yet eerily familiar, historical “event.” Nuancing a reading of Walker's book with reference to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), to which After the Deluge implicitly alludes, the essay examines Walker's artistic challenge to the notion that history is a narratable account of a past that precedes the present and demonstrates how that challenge encourages us to think about the potential uses of history within civil rights discourse after Katrina.

In modern life, we encounter stories of people with a frequency unfathomable even twenty years ago. In American culture, the lives of celebrities, in particular, have proven the dominant form of mainstream life-texts from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. Dynamic, volatile and open-ended, celebrity lives are useful for examining the renegotiation and revision of biographical narratives within culture over time. In this article, I will use the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to analyze a specific life-story's flow through culture. Focussing upon the intersections between multiple stories in a given historical moment, this article will demonstrate the revision such intersections prompt and the ways in which those revisions reverberate through subsequent scholarship. The article will argue that these narrative corruptions should be accounted for when we use stories of lives as a mode of cultural analysis.