This paper seeks to accomplish three things. First, it contextualizes Ralph Waldo Emerson's political thought by demonstrating that, despite his rhetoric to the contrary and the dominant interpretation within Emersonian scholarship, his political ideas had an intellectual genealogy rooted both in his local New England context and in the broader American culture. Second, it argues that principles and tensions from the Federalist Party lingered long after the demise of the organized group, especially in response to the perceived excesses and extremes of Jacksonian America, and can even be found within a thinker as egalitarian and democratic as Emerson. And finally, the article explores how the ironies of these two previous points flesh out the paradoxical and dynamic nature of America's democratic tradition. By engaging the ironies and paradoxes within Emerson's political thought in microcosm, I argue, one gets a better view of the larger issues at stake within the broader culture.

My article focuses on the film California Dreamin’ (Endless) in order to examine the way the movie problematizes and brings in dialogue contemporary overlapping and contradictory Romanian ideologies in relation to the US. By taking the movie as a lens for the Romanian context, my paper analyzes how the US is signified and decoded in the aftermath of communism in Romania. I discuss how the movie envisions a continuous questioning and interrogation of the precommunist past and the postcommunist present upon which images, perceptions, fictions, and appropriations of “America” are predicated in the post-1989 Romanian context. My argument is that by mapping the overlapping terrain of the foreign and the domestic past and present, the film critically reconfigures the space between the US and one of its main supporters in the “New Europe.” It explores axes of local, national, and international interests, pointing to the contradictory, ambiguous sociocultural representations that accrue to “America” as it is caught up in itineraries and mis/translations across a “Second World” site. I contend that the dialogic examination Romania–US that the movie successfully achieves can become an ideal model for approaching the US in the Eastern European space.

In this essay, I examine the hyper-modern apparition with which Don DeLillo concludes Underworld alongside a “real-life” image, said to look like the Virgin Mary, which appeared in April 2005 in Chicago on the wall of a highway underpass. I argue that discussing these two apparitions together highlights how both images transform urban surfaces and waste, creating new sites around which collectivities take shape. The pairing also illustrates the mode of perception that the apparitions engender, one that makes urban realities of class dispossession and minority displacement visible. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin's notion of the wish image and Merleau-Ponty's concept of “perceptual faith,” I argue that these apparitions evoke the otherworldly but ultimately insist upon the material dimensions of urban life.

This article explores Toni Morrison's preoccupation with, and reimagining of, the landscape of the so-called New World. Drawing on scholarship that has investigated dominant discourses about freedom, bounty, and possibility located within the Americas, it identifies various counternarratives in Morrison's fiction, tracing these through the earlier Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987), but primarily arguing for their centrality to A Mercy (2008). The mapping of seventeenth-century North America in the author's ninth novel both exposes colonial relations to place and probes African American experiences of the natural world. In particular, A Mercy is found to recalibrate definitions of “wilderness” with a sharpened sensitivity to the position of women and the racially othered within them. The dynamic between the perspectives towards the environment of Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader Jacob Vaark and Native American orphan and servant Lina, is examined, as well as the slave girl Florens's formative encounters in American space. Bringing together diverse narrative views, A Mercy is shown to trouble hegemonic settler and masculinist notions of the New World and, especially through Florens's voicing, shape an alternative engagement with landscape. The article goes some way towards meeting recent calls for attention to the intersections between postcolonial approaches and ecocriticism.

This article surveys recent literature in both history and political science associated with an international and diplomatic approach to the American founding. It assesses Drew McCoy's claim that this approach, as represented by David Hendrickson's Peace Pact (2003), “may well mark an important paradigm shift in early American history.” An international approach to the Constitution may mean interpreting the document either as primarily a diplomatic treaty in its own right, or as primarily influenced in its design and adoption by diplomatic and international concerns. Several significant new studies have been published since McCoy's review, both building on and revising Hendrickson's work, but his “unionist paradigm” has had less impact on historians of the Constitution and of founding than on historians of the later early republic. David Golove and Daniel Hulsebosch in 2011 reprised an internationalist approach to the Constitution by arguing that fealty to international treaties and desire for recognition structured Federalists' approach to domestic politics. This article suggests a synthesis that would reintegrate the internationalist approach with recent domestically focussed historiography. Building on the insights of internationalist scholarship, it posits the Constitution as fundamentally oriented around sanctity of contract as a scalable principle, spanning individual, state, and international spheres.

Throughout this essay, I will show the characters of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy moving between modernism and postmodernism, and discuss the way some of them epitomize either largely modernist or postmodernist epistemologies. My purpose is to offer a reconstruction of Auster's dialogue across both, and I will resist situating the novelist in either the modern or the postmodern camp. I see him as rather watching from a distance, while his characters scour the terrain (both terrains, as a matter of fact) for him. My conclusion is that Auster seems to acknowledge the inevitability of inhabiting the cultural space of the postmodern, while staking out a claim to question, or even to challenge, some of its presumptions. While modernism still holds a powerful spell for the protagonists of City of Glass and Ghosts (less so for the latter), the narrator of The Locked Room posits the inextricability of embracing our contemporary sensibility, the postmodern, without necessarily rejecting altogether what went before. Auster associates modernism largely with the secluded, invisible, despicable Fanshawe, whose spell and influence over him the narrator of the third novel of the trilogy manages to break.

The historical thoughts and opinions of one nation regarding another are useful both for the purpose of analyzing global events and for understanding both nations. Until modern times, the Azerbaijani people did not have contact with the USA or widespread knowledge of American people, but throughout the past two centuries elite Azerbaijani thinkers and scholars have expressed interest in America from various viewpoints, including the political, scientific, and educational fields. The article reviews statements about the USA as they are documented in the publications by Azerbaijani historians, journalists, creative writers, educators, and politicians from the 1830s through to contemporary times. Using these documents, and poetry of Soviet times, the article analyzes Azerbaijani perspectives on America, which over time have wavered, both upwards and downwards, but often reflected the prevailing political ideology towards the USA, particularly during the Soviet period.

This article is a comparative study of two epic works that share a historical setting and a broad political outlook, but diverge significantly in at least one respect. Frequent and heavy alcohol consumption is a feature of both Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and John Dos Passos's USA trilogy, but the way in which these authors describe heavy drinking – and hedonistic behaviour in general – indicates fundamental differences between the modernism of Dos Passos and Pynchon's postmodernist strategies. The article contends that this aspect of Pynchon's novel represents a critique of attitudes within the twentieth-century American left towards sensuality, patriarchy and the failure of leftist aspiration within a contemporary context that invokes such subjects as the complicity of consumption, terrorism and the ethics of political assassination.

The recent historiography of American labour in the First World War pays special attention to the idea of industrial democracy. The federal government, historians argue in various ways, played a major role in defining that term and affecting how trade unionists, employers and all kinds of industrial and political reformers fought over and applied their own definitions of industrial democracy. In this article I look at one case study of wartime federal intervention in labour relations, between the Commercial Telegraphers' Union of America (CTUA) and the Western Union Telegraph Company. During the war both parties were subject to intervention from the National War Labor Board, the main federal arbitration agency, and then, after nationalization of the telegraphs, the federal Telegraph and Telephone Administration. The experience of the CTUA is more or less at odds with recent general accounts of First World War labour. In this article I argue that this experience points towards a change of emphasis regarding federal-style industrial democracy, placing greater stress on its role in leading directly to the non and antiunion industrial policies practised by many employers in the 1920s, in addition to its encouragement of trade union growth in wartime.

This article examines the attitudes of leading policymakers in the United States toward the Spanish Empire in Cuba during the Ten Years' War (1868–78). It suggests that while many in the US objected to Spanish imperial practices, concerns about trade alongside ideological predispositions regarding nonintervention and race led the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, under the direction of Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, to develop a series of policies that in effect supported colonialism in Cuba while attempting to ensure that the US would benefit from any change in rule there. The article argues that despite an apparent desire for the US to remain neutral during the conflict, the Grant administration in fact formulated its responses based on a narrow conception of Spanish colonial control that demonstrated an increasing sense of moral superiority over both colonizer and colonized.

This paper examines the attitudes of feminist activists, intellectuals and filmmakers to US intervention in Central America during the 1980s. It traces the development of mutual intellectual and political sustenance between feminism and anti-interventionism, arguing that as feminist thinking bred new ways of approaching US involvement in Central America, so anti-interventionist struggles bred new ways of thinking about women's activism. In making this point, the paper complicates narratives of the “age of Reagan” that overlook the persistence of left-wing politics during the 1980s. Instead, it argues that a specific form of international feminism enabled a community of activists to contribute to a vibrant culture of dissent that criticized conservative approaches to women's rights and, at the same time, vigorously contested the interventionist foreign policy of the Reagan administration.

This article reexamines the “Albert Maltz affair” in light of debates about art and literature in the journal New Masses (1926–48), as well as in international Marxist aesthetics. I argue for a reexamination of the “para-Marxist” theory of art he developed to clarify the role of leftist criticism and the “citizen writer.” The controversy stirred by the publication of Maltz's “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” (New Masses, 12 February 1946) is only fully appreciated through the aesthetic implications that many historians of the Hollywood Ten have overlooked. The immediate attacks on Maltz by critics like Mike Gold were motivated primarily by the view that a properly Marxist aesthetics must follow the Leninist–Zhdanovite theory of “art as a weapon.” More importantly, the support that Maltz and like-minded authors earned from New Masses readers for expressing the “Engelian” thesis that left-wing critics should evaluate art for dialectical tensions of form (and not solely for proletarian messages) suggests that this episode might be read as a beacon of salutary developments in international Marxist aesthetics rather than as an omen of American communist repression caused by the HUAC trials.

In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, US forces seized millions of documents, thousands of audio and video tapes, and hard drives and digital devices from Saddam Hussein's government ministries and other sites. In war, the seizure of enemy documents for military advantage is permissible under the laws of armed conflict. Following their capture, the materials have undergone a process of analysis, triage, exploitation, dissemination, politicization, more analysis, scholarly investigation, and postwar diplomacy. An analysis of these events reveals the scope and nature of US exploitation of enemy documents and media in the Iraq War, the limits of the laws of armed conflict regarding their custody and use, and the complications surrounding their repatriation to Iraq.