As an outsider with a mysterious childhood, Alexander Hamilton is, as psychologists say, a good “hook” for a projective identification. For his admirers Hamilton is a source of political capital. His ideas and proposals about the debt, protectionism, and an American manufacturing base are in the news in the early twenty-first century. Although the Old Left saw Hamilton as an elitist, possibly a monarchist, and a promoter of industrial capitalism, contemporary American progressives have called attention to his explicit support for habeas corpus, his efforts on behalf of banking, and his surprisingly enlightened attitudes about race and slavery. As one of the founders of a new republic, Hamilton knew he would be in the history books, but his image, representations of his physical presence, and speculation about his private life circulate on the Internet in ways that would surely astonish him. Alexander Hamilton not only has admirers in the fields of politics and history; he also has fans.

Scholarship on the theme of Alexis de Tocqueville's changing roles in American culture constitutes a remarkably coherent discourse with distinctive conventions, structures, metaphors, and plots. Especially pronounced in the literature is a constantly repeated narrative – really a myth – that portrays Tocqueville as a vanished hero who suffered a prolonged period of oblivion and then made a celebrated return to play the role of guide to Americans as they faced the perils of the postwar world. Because of the lack of empirical support for this narrative, scholars inadvertently find themselves violating or disregarding elementary rules of evidence and logical argument when they address it. The extraordinary stability and coherence of this discourse are its most notable features: they have persisted, with no oppositional counternarrative, decade after decade for the past forty years. But all discourses have cracks and fissures. This essay reveals the ubiquity as well as the banality of the standard tragic-heroic narrative, and it provides a taxonomy of Tocqueville metaphors – Tocqueville as Orpheus, as Proteus, and as Christ. The supposed facts of Tocqueville's reception (with which these metaphoric clusters are identical) are false. There was no departure, oblivion, or triumphant return of Tocqueville. The mythic discourse advanced an account that had no support in the historical record.

My article argues for reading the novel as political allegory. America's efforts in the early and mid-nineteenth century are represented by Robert Acton trying to compete with a “European family” for international colonizing privileges. A blend of British and French empire can be seen in the person of Eugenia, the Baroness Munster – originally American by birth, who has, though her years as European nobility, adopted the policy of expansionism. To fully understand James's caustic comment on imperialistic ventures – most notably as he pits the pernicious nature of European exploits against the more humanistic pursuit of art for art's sake – we can read Eugenia's brother, Felix, as a proponent of aestheticism, committed to seeking beauty in all life pursuits. In sum, I suggest that the novel need not be dismissed (as it largely has been for so many decades) as a simplistic, insignificant part of James's oeuvre. I use historical research, literary analyses of other scholars, statements made by James in his letters, and critical statements by James in such commentaries as his biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne in order to support my views. Of course, I use the primary text, The Europeans, for much of my support.

Utilizing the work of two cartoonists who produced for newspapers outside the central establishment of the yellow press, this essay argues for the critical role of political cartoonists in shaping viewers' expectations of US involvement in the Spanish-American War of 1898. It features seventeen cartoons, arranged carefully to reflect the shifting political climate, in order to demonstrate the narrative frameworks, image selections, and paradigm shifts in their representations of war and empire. Their cartoons were emblematic of how artists nationwide harnessed typographies of gender, race, and sexuality to create compelling justifications for and against policies of war and colonial acquisition.