The enduring success of any roman-à-clef owes to the ghost of the real world lurking, like a palimpsest, behind the storyworld. Barring a few counterfactual twists, Richard Condon's Death of a Politician follows the chequered career of a dead-ringer for Richard Milhous Nixon through the war-scam 1940s, the red scare 1950s, and the freewheeling-dealing 1960s. Square the revisionist drive of Condon's political fiction with the premise of historical veracity, and you may wonder where sober fact ends and fiction begins. How much of Nixon lies in Walter Bodmor Slurrie? How much of Nixon's banker and confidant “Bebe” Rebozo lies in Slurrie's banker and confidant “Kiddo” Cardozo? How much of the Miami mobster Mayer Lansky lies in Cardozo's boss, Miami mobster Abner Danzig? How much of their crass venality and control is the figment of Condon's imagination? Better still, how much is true? In my article I set out to answer all these questions, using Condon's roman-à-clef as a springboard for analysis of salient aspects of the Nixon presidency and of American electoral politics in general.

This article offers a revisionist reading of the aesthetic of the American modernist poet George Oppen. It seeks, in the first instance, to supplement those established readings of Oppen that have concluded that his work is most profitably understood in the discursive contexts of American literary modernism and modern European Continental philosophy by arguing that such approaches overlook a key indigenous intellectual influence upon his corpus: that body of philosophical inquiry and cultural self-reflection that has come to be known as American pragmatism. The article attempts to rectify this omission by making two simultaneous and complementary suggestions: first, that pragmatic thought opens up a number of formal and semantic questions – indeed, a number of questions about the relationship between form and meaning – that have been too little considered in recent work on American poetry; and second, that something crucial to Oppen's poetry remains unthinkable without sustained attention to the questions and claims that pragmatism places at the very heart of its endeavour. While the relationship between pragmatist thought and Oppen's poetics helps to illuminate a set of concerns that lies at the very core of his aesthetic, the paper will argue, it also reciprocally exposes the limitations of an influential genealogical vision of American literary modernism. To support this contention it examines the ways in which a certain literary version of American intellectual history has reinterpreted the pragmatism of William James in the image of an Emersonian linguistic scepticism in order to establish the historical centrality of a broadly Romantic genealogy of American modernism. The paper concludes by suggesting that a renewed attention to the specific forms and modalities of Oppen's poetry demonstrates not only the inadequacy of this version of literary history to a particular tradition of American poetics, but also promises to recover the force and distinctiveness of the American pragmatist inheritance for succeeding generations of writers.

Mobility is a significant feature of American history and culture. This is reflected in the literature and cinema of the road genre, in influential novels such as Jack Kerouac's On the Road and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, and in films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969). However, when non-Americans create road stories they tend to employ symbols and narratives that are often considered intrinsically American. These storytellers appear to have absorbed or internalized aspects of American national identity, and this is reflected in their work. This is demonstrated in The Cursed Earth, an apocalyptic road story in twenty-five parts, which was published in the British weekly comic 2000AD from May to October 1978. Written by British writer Pat Mills, with contributions from John Wagner and Chris Lowder, The Cursed Earth features the character Judge Dredd, perhaps the most popular and most recognizable icon of British comics of the last thirty years. Through close textual analysis of the Cursed Earth story, this article reveals how thematic elements of the road genre are linked to significant themes in American history and culture.

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.

This contribution focusses on the close intertwinement of Americanization, neoliberalism, and corporate globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century, on the eve of the global economic recession of 2008 and after. Many students of current globalization tend to reject the whole notion of Americanization. It is argued that these theorists have thrown the proverbial baby out with the bath water, namely an interest in America's strong influence in many domains globally. Yet it is also recognized that one has to move beyond a state-centrist approach in order to adequately grasp the significantly increased influence of transnational corporations over the past few decades. Therefore this article explores the major ways in which transnational corporations – in relation to US-dominated international governance – spread capitalist modernity worldwide. An attempt is made to explain how US business leaders and affiliated political power-holders managed to set the agenda of much of the global economy and why many of their foreign counterparts adopted similar neoliberal policies. The article concludes with a brief overview of major challenges and countermovements to the predominant form of capitalist globalization.

This essay explores growing disillusionment with the national Democratic Party in the southern United States, disillusionment that led to third-party movements such as the Dixiecrats and George Wallacism, and eventually southern allegiance to the modern Republican Party. The essay focusses on Alabama during the first half of the 1940s, where a “Great Melding” between economic conservatism and racial conservatism came to maturity. The melding resulted in a cross-class and pan-white alliance in a state that had experienced periodic plain-white challenges to business and planter elite dominance. It also resulted in the use by economic conservatives of white supremacy and allied conservative norms on gender, class, religion, and militaristic hyper-patriotism to suppress future working-class insurgency, and set the stage for a more formal southern disassociation from the Democratic Party and eventual conversion to Republicanism.

In 1980 Senator Edward Kennedy challenged incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. Kennedy's defeat has often been used as evidence of a philosophical realignment within the American electorate in the late 1970s away from Democratic liberalism, which culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan as President. However, Kennedy performed better than this interpretation suggests. His defeat was caused by historical accident: a poor campaign, international crises and Carter's use of the incumbency. The strengths of the Kennedy campaign cast doubt upon the theory of realignment and suggest that liberalism enjoyed greater support among the US electorate than has previously been considered.