It is a given that the United States has been an important global power, yet it may be of at least equal significance that the nation has been an only faltering planetary power. Global is social – it implies the social relations that extend over the globe. In contrast, planetary is physical, indicating the physical planet itself. Far more historical studies have focussed on the former than on the latter; examining the history of the United States within planetary terms is only beginning to be done. One long tradition of human engagement with the whole Earth is the practice of circumnavigation, going around the world. This essay examines American circumnavigators’ accounts ecocritically, in terms of their consciousness of the natural world, in order to explain that the United States came to the tradition of going around the world belatedly and not always beneficially.

This article examines how the foreclosure crisis has been represented in a range of narrative genres: the reportage of Paul Reyes's Exiles in Eden: Life among the Ruins of Florida's Great Recession (2010), Michael Moore's documentary film Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), and Paul Auster's novel Sunset Park (2010).These narratives attempt to contextualize the human beings caught in the center of the subprime mortgage storm, but in the process each of them runs up against an opacity or obscurity, a crisis of representation. The article argues that underlying the financial crisis is an inability to recognize and comprehend deeply embedded structures of inequality, a failure common to both the financial system and the wider culture. Drawing on recent accounts of the techniques of credit scoring and mortgage securitization in the disciplines of business history, accounting, financial management, and human geography, the article concludes that subprime mortgage lending involved social relations of supremacy and subordination, as well as representational strategies which identified individuals solely in terms of credit risk, while failing to grasp the conditions of poverty and disadvantage which constituted them as a class.

This article examines the ways in which American poetic practice and thematics map a conception of private real property as it has developed uniquely on the North American continent. I explore how the Land Ordinance of 1790, the Preemption Act, the Homestead Act, and other land-use policies shaped a conception of the developing landscape as divisible into a vast agglomeration of private enterprises mediated primarily by the transfer of title deeds. The impact of private real property beliefs and practices, I argue, has shaped both the practice and the reception of American poetry (and other cultural products) for at least the last 150 years. I incorporate the insights of cultural geography – particularly the work of John B. Jackson, Carl Sauer, and Scott Freundschuh – to understand how the last century's building practices and the reorganization of the landscape, particularly in western metropolitan areas, find imaginative expression in poetry. Although mine is not a law-in-literature approach, I contend that modern/postmodern poetry operates in a way that depends on the very exchange values of the late capitalist property system it often critiques.

A combination of social and cultural changes account for the popularity of, and the narrative permutations of class and gender in, the cross-class romance films of the 1930s. The analysis is based on a sample of eighty-five cross-class romance films released in the 1929–39 period. The films deal with a dilemma evident in the choice of partners: between interests of wealth and social status and the value of romantic, disinterested love, an ideal which had spread throughout the class structure. Gender distinctions are reinforced by narratives in which the wealthy male is redeemed by the poor female so that he can perform the appropriate male gender roles. When the female is wealthy, the poor male insists on her economic dependence on him. Films with gold diggers reached a peak in the early 1930s and provided imaginary solutions to social anxieties about class and gender among both women and men.

This essay provides a case study of one man's transition from the reform-oriented liberalism of the New Deal period to the burgeoning rights-focussed liberalism of the 1960s. It contends that Bruce Catton, the most popular Civil War historian of his generation, played an influential role in forging the culture of Cold War America. He did so in his capacity as a prominent “middlebrow” intellectual who sought to instil his legions of adoring fans with a sense of moral purpose at a time when political elites were fretting about ordinary Americans' ability to fight the Cold War effectively. While his finely crafted narratives of the Civil War demonstrated the courage and conviction of nineteenth-century Americans, his many public appearances in the 1950s enabled him to disseminate further his conviction that the timeless values of American democracy remained as relevant in the disturbing present as they had been in the country's divided past. Catton's characteristically middlebrow commitment to antiracism as a contribution to the Cold War struggle was by no means unfaltering but an assessment of his writings and actions during the Civil War centennial reveals his continuing determination to render American democracy sufficiently vigorous to counter the ongoing communist threat.

This article examines the relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Hollywood film industry from 1947 to 1959. Surprisingly, the CIA was almost entirely absent from American cinema screens during this period, and their public profile in other popular media, including television and the press, was virtually nonexistent. This conspicuous lacuna of publicity coincided with what some scholars have termed the “Golden Age” of US covert action – an era of increasing CIA intervention in Italy, Iran and Guatemala, to name only the most prominent examples. How was it that the CIA managed to maintain such a low public profile and in the process evade popular scrutiny and questions of accountability during such an active period of its history? Utilizing extensive archival research in film production files and the records of the CIA themselves, this article suggests that Hollywood filmmakers adhered to the CIA's policy of blanket secrecy for three interrelated reasons. First, it suggests that the predominance of the so-called “semidocumentary” approach to the cinematic representation of US intelligence agencies during this period encouraged filmmakers to seek government endorsement and liaison in order to establish the authenticity of their portrayals. Thus the CIA's refusal to cooperate with Hollywood during this period thwarted a number of attempts by filmmakers to bring an authentic semidocumentary vision of their activities to the silver screen. Second, up until the liberalization of American defamation law in the mid-1960s, Hollywood studio legal departments advised producers to avoid unendorsed representations of US government departments and officials through fear of legal reprisal. Finally, this article suggests that the film-industry censor – the Production Code Administration – was instrumental in reinforcing Hollywood's reliance upon government endorsement and cooperation. This latter point is exemplified by Joseph Mankiewicz's controversial adaptation of Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Overturning existing scholarship, which argues that CIA officer Edward Lansdale played a decisive role in transforming the screenplay of Greene's novel, this article suggests that Mankiewicz's alterations were made primarily to appease the Production Code Administration.

In the forty years since its publication, Hunter S. Thompson's most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has received relatively little attention from scholars, in spite of its continuing popularity and acknowledged influence. Because the narrative is so thoroughly rooted in what Thompson called “this foul year of Our Lord, 1971,” the novel is generally approached (when it is discussed at all) as a historical artifact, a gonzo first draft of history, with its fortunes rising and falling with the counterculture of the 1960s. This article argues that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, far from being merely an epitaph for the 1960s, actually anticipates the more recent work of political theorists Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. Thompson's work, like Agamben's, concerns the emergence of the state of exception and the homo sacer as new paradigms for the relationship between citizen and state; and, like Hardt and Negri, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas attempts to formulate a response to the emergence of global empire.

This article pertains to the recent upsurge of interest in the politics of Thomas Pynchon. It considers Pynchon as an author very much of the 1960s counterculture, and explores the countercultural values and ideals expressed in Gravity's Rainbow, with particular emphasis on revealing the novel's attitude to the Black Panther Party. Close textual analysis suggests Pynchon's essential respect for Huey P. Newton's concept of revolutionary suicide, and his contempt for Marxist dialectical materialism, two core elements of Panther political theory. Drawing on an analogy between the BPP and Pynchon's Schwarzkommando, an assessment is made of the novel's perspective on the part played by various factors – including the Panthers’ aggressive militancy, the rise of Eldridge Cleaver through the leadership, and the subtle influence of a logic of power influenced by scientific rationalism – in bringing about the disintegration of the Panther organization by the early 1970s. Given the similarities between the paths taken by the BPP and the wider counterculture in the late 1960s, the article considers Pynchon's commentary on the Panthers to be part of a cautionary tale for future revolutionaries fighting similar forms of oppression.

This paper explores HBO television show The Wire's portrayal of inequality and injustice in terms of the neoliberal state and capitalism, while focussing on the Baltimore Police Department and the marginalized people in the show. In arguing that the neoliberal state and neoliberalism promote the systemic problems reflected in The Wire, this paper will examine the representation of the marginalized in the show in relation to Zygmunt Bauman's idea of wasted lives. In doing so, it will explore how bureaucracies in the show fail to salvage the wasted lives that Bauman defines as the collateral casualties of capitalistic globalization. After examining the show's bleak portrayal of American urban life in terms of the police department, this paper will discuss some morally complicated characters, such as Major Colvin and Detectives McNulty and Freamon, who attempt to surmount the systemic problems of the department. In examining their controversial police work, including transgressions of law, this paper aims to clarify the political implications of these police officers in terms of Jacques Rancière's ideas of politics and equality.

The third season of the HBO series True Blood, set in fictional Bon Temps, Louisiana, aired in a mediascape shaped by coverage of the BP oil spill that wreaked economic and ecological havoc on the US Gulf South during the summer of 2010. A retrospective examination of the series in this context, and against the grain of critical consensus labeling it mere escapism, demonstrates that taking True Blood seriously can yield compelling insights into the US Gulf South as a site in which convergences of the global and the local, of reality and representation, and of energy and cultural production result in the formation of a hybrid: energy/culture. Analysis of the storyline featuring the Vampire King of Mississippi shows how True Blood extends the long-standing cultural practice of making vampires screens for projecting collective desires and anxieties. Through a “camp aesthetic” that weaves into the Vampire King's maniacal pursuit of blood in various forms dire warnings about excessive consumption and environmental apocalypse, True Blood offers fictional ways to make meaning of the actual conditions and consequences of energy production and consumption brought to the surface with great urgency by the BP oil spill.

This article explores the demise of the Crompton Company, which filed for bankruptcy in October 1984, causing 2,450 workers in five states to lose their jobs. Crompton was founded in 1807 in Providence, Rhode Island and when it went out of business it was the oldest textile firm in the country, having been in continuous operation for 178 years. Despite its history, scholars have overlooked Crompton, partly because most work on deindustrialization has concentrated on heavy manufacturing industries, especially steel and automobiles. I argue that Crompton's demise throws much light on the broader decline of the American textile and apparel industry, which has lost over two million jobs since the mid-1970s, and shows that textiles deserve a more central place in the literature. Using company papers, this study shows that imports played the central role in causing Crompton's decline, although there were also other problems, including the strong dollar, declining exports, and a reluctance to diversify, which contributed to it. The paper also explores broader trends, including the earlier flight of the industry from New England to the South and the industry's unsuccessful campaign to pass import-restriction legislation, a fight in which Crompton's managers were very involved.