When Lyndon Johnson took the United States into large-scale war in Vietnam in 1965, he did so despite deep misgivings on the part of numerous close associates, including his vice president and senior Senate Democrats, as well as key allied governments. Johnson himself frequently expressed doubts about the prospects in the struggle, even with the commitment of major US combat troops and heavy air power. Yet he took the plunge, despite the fact that some part of him suspected – correctly – that the war would ultimately be his undoing. Why he did so is harder to explain than is often suggested, but it’s not inexplicable. At each step, escalation represented the path of least political resistance for him. Thus although Johnson may have been a doubting warrior, he was also a determined one, from his first day in office to his last. He stayed the course even as domestic opposition grew in 1967 and 1968, and even as his principal subordinate on the war, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, grew disillusioned. In January 1969, Johnson left Washington, a man broken by a war he didn’t want but felt compelled to wage.

This chapter considers the ways in which Rushdie’s fiction engages with globalization, a process that intensified in the 1990s and which became a central theme in his fiction from The Moor’s Last Sigh onwards. This is especially pressing in Rushdie’s work in considerations of the global circulation of peoples, goods, and cultural productions, most pertinently explored in The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and Fury. Focusing both on the aesthetics of these novels and their wider cultural contexts, I argue that Rushdie’s post-fatwa novels showcase a shift in his view of the transglobal world, which can be traced on three levels: the portrayal of space, the role attributed to creativity, and the emotional response globalization elicits.

After the US entered WWI, federal and state governments took action to suppress or even ban the use of languages other than English through the mails, in schools, and in various public settings. Moves to require English targeted nonanglophones, whether they were born in the US or had immigrated from elsewhere, and official English became a rallying cry for those bent on reducing or eliminating immigration. But such laws have little impact on the acquisition of English, as newcomers to the US continue to acquire English at rates equal to or better than those in previous generations. Without official language legislation at the federal level, the US manages to have more monolingual speakers of the majority language than many nations that do impose language bans on their residents.

The period since the 1990s has proved, in an ironic way, the strength of Israel–US relations. In 1991, American president, George H. W. Bush, clashed with Israel, and since 1996, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had strained Israel–US relations in an unprecedented manner. In both cases, the constants that determined the course of the Israel–US relationship, religion, shared values, and history, proved to be stronger than any individual, regardless of their position. The period covered in this chapter was characterized by a close friendship and strategic partnership between the two nations. During those years, the two countries signed several memoranda of understanding which solidified the American commitment to Israel’s security and ensured its qualitative military edge, as well as expanding the cooperation on economic and cultural matters. The military-industrial cooperation as well as security cooperation between the two countries deepened. The growing Israeli attachment to American culture and values was another manifestation of the deepening relations between the two countries. The Israeli economy changed from socialist to neoliberal under the influence of American economic thinking. Neoconservatism spread across Israel’s political and intellectual elites through institutions and people, most notably Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israelis adopted many of the characteristics of American culture and economy, bringing their country closer to the United States in form and content. The ties between Israel and the Christian Zionist Evangelicals deepened as well. With the Evangelicals returning to the forefront of American politics since the mid-1970s, they became a major force in the support of Israel, a tendency that was especially encouraged by the right wing in Israel. Evangelical support for Israel has only increased during the 1990s and 2000s.

The European Union has reshaped Irish society over the past half-century, yet in Irish fiction Europe typically appears as a site of aesthetic discovery or historical trauma rather than as immediate political reality. Contemporary Irish writing belongs more to an Anglo-American than to a European literary sphere, and Irish novels in Europe often ponder the ‘Americanization’ of European and Irish modernity. Aidan Higgins’s Balcony of Europe and Deirdre Madden’s Remembering Light and Stone depict Irish expatriates exploring what it means to live between Europe and the United States. In both narratives, the protagonists are romantically involved with Americans and attached to European landscapes, yet neither émigré finds some sustaining new local or supranational sociopolitical form beyond the nation-state.

The liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet control in 1989, followed by the reunification of Germany in 1990 and the establishment of the European Union at the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, seemed to many Europeans to be the realization of the long-held dream of a Europe that was finally at one with itself. In the following decades, EU membership grew from twelve to twenty-eight, embracing many Central and Eastern European countries. In 1993, the European Union member states agreed on the “Copenhagen criteria” to determine the eligibility of nations to join the Union. There were, however, also growing pressures, with a renascent nationalism that culminated in the departure of the UK from the EU in 2020. Chapter 10 focuses on the ways in which the EU came increasingly to be seen as failing to embody the true spirit of Europe, the critique coming both from those who championed national cultures as well as from those who, while feeling that there was a “democratic deficit,” wished to see a reformed EU. The chapter considers a wide range of contemporary views from thinkers and writers across Europe, including Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Umberto Eco, Jürgen Habermas, Régis Debray, and Leili Slimani.

Following the catastrophe of the First World War, which many saw as the result of nationalist rivalries, the immediate postwar period was dominated by concerns regarding European decadence and by dreams of a united Europe that would be able to regain its geopolitical power in a new global landscape increasingly dominated by the United States of America and by Russia. The French writer Paul Valéry set the agenda by arguing for a genuinely “European spirit” that had arisen out of the confluence of classical antiquity and Christianity. He was followed in this endeavor to champion a distinctly European spirit by writers such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Hermann von Keyserling. Chapter 6 charts the development of this idea of a European spirit, as well as the various plans for a politically united Europe, most notably as Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s proposals for what he termed “Pan-Europe.” The chapter reveals the cultural supremacism that taints many of these attempts to identify a European spirit, as well as emphasis placed on the need for European to re-establish its geopolitical and geo-cultural influence.

This chapter follows the transformation of the issue of slavery in the nation’s capital into the 1830s across four sections. The first section provides the broad setting of a growing sense amongst abolitionists of the “Americanization” of slavery following the initiation of a gradual emancipation of slaves in the British Empire. Given the importance of the District for the domestic slave trade, examined in the second section, this reconceptualization was not without merit. The third section traces the ways in which immediate abolition and its reconceptualization of slavery within the District, in light of the trends discussed in the first and second sections, saw continuities but also important departures from the antislavery position on the District of Columbia in the 1820s. The final section examines the ways in which the District of Columbia grew in significance for defenders of slavery over roughly the same period.

This chapter examines the role played by Irish American Catholic novels published between 1830 and 1880 in the US nation-building project. The novels of what Charles Fanning has labelled the ‘Famine Generation’ dominate the period in question. Famine Irish American literature has been considered insular, aimed primarily at keeping alienated immigrant readers within the Catholic flock. The literature’s US nation-building role has been ignored by Americanists and Irish studies scholars alike. This chapter strives to correct that anomaly. Situating Famine Irish writing firmly within the unfolding narrative of the US racial state, it shows the ways in which the Famine generation of Irish American writers performed crucial ideological functions on behalf of the US state.

Two texts bookend the major phase of literary activity by Creoles of color in New Orleans, the first book of poetry by US citizens of African descent, Les cenelles (1845) and Nos Hommes et Notres Histoires (1911). The first – a collection of poems – evokes sexual and romantic relationships between people of different races, a notion that runs radically counter to the racial politics of the rest of the US South. The second emerged as polemic as the Jim Crow Era gained full ascendance and marginalized nonwhite people in ways that ran counter to long-standing cultural patterns in New Orleans regarding the elite Creoles of color.

This chapter argues that disciplining of bilingual education as a scholarly field served to divorce discussions of bilingual education from broader political and economic struggles in favor of the seemingly objective pursuit of the benefits of bilingual education. This disciplining of bilingual education was part of a larger discursive shift that reframed discussions of racial inequality from a focus on unequal access and the need for structural change to a focus on the deficiencies of racialized communities and the need for modifying these deficiencies. The chapter ends with a call for bilingual education scholars to situate issues of language inequality within the broader white supremacist and capitalist relations of power. This will offer bilingual education scholars tools for rejecting deficit perspectives of language-minoritized children and pointing to the broader racial stratification that makes these deficit perspectives possible to begin with.

This chapter analyzes major shifts in US educational policies toward bilingual education in California, where voters are often called on to decide policy by voting on propositions. It focuses on: how language policies have functioned as an instrument of social control; the lingering impact of the Americanization century and English-only ideologies on contemporary educational policies; the contemporary English-only movement and its impact on language minority education; and how a series of discriminatory propositions in California set the stage for language restriction in 1998. The chapter next looks at factors affecting the resurgence of bilingual education as “dual-language” education amidst discourses of globalization since 2016. The chapter concludes by noting new threats to immigrants posed by the criminalization of immigrant status and efforts to deny education as a human right. Implicit in this discussion are questions related to the relationship between language policy and racism and the salience of language policies in racial politics.