This introduction sets the stage, describing the evolution of the international monetary system during the 1930s and the tenets of the Tripartite Agreement, as well as providing a literature review.

This chapter describes the monetary antagonism that pervaded the world from Roosevelt's inauguration in 1933 to the development of an uneasy ceasefire by the middle of 1935. Roosevelt's departure from the gold standard fundamentally changed the monetary system, and his chaotic method of doing so exacerbated the mutual suspicion already rife in the great capitals of the world. Once Roosevelt officially devalued the dollar in January 1934, Britain and France were clueless as to what, if anything America would do next; America and France were furious as Britain refused to stabilize the pound; and the world watched France flounder as its currency increasingly came under pressure. While Britain and America reached an uneasy suspension of monetary hostilities in 1935, the precariousness of the franc meant that this superficial stability was liable to crumble at any moment.

The Abe administration had two goals with regard to historical legacy issues: to enrich national pride through historical revisionism; and to change the global narrative of Japan as perpetrator. Unfortunately, these goals were fundamentally incompatible. Further, they failed to take into account that public memorialization today is not only the purview of the state. It has democratized to include various domestic, transnational, and international actors. Through case studies of comfort women, Yasukuni Shrine, and Pearl Harbor, this chapter explores the degree of success for the Abe administration in achieving its goals in each of these areas and what the enduring challenges are that make these goals difficult to achieve.

The Abe government pursued ambitious national security reforms in response to Japan’s rapidly changing strategic environment. This chapter surveys institutional and defense policy reforms achieved, including further centralization of Japan’s policy decision-making in the executive; significant shifts to defense posture; expanded emphasis on the USA–Japan alliance as the “cornerstone” of territorial security and regional peace and stability; and more extensive security ties with third countries. In keeping with this volume’s unifying theme – whether the Abe government represents a “major turning point” in Japan’s postwar trajectory – this chapter also assesses the practical significance of reforms and identifies the enabling and constraining factors likely to shape any future adjustments.

Chapter 4 explores how the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, a theatre and library built directly on the US-Canada border and opened in 1904, has become both an exceptional and exemplary civic institution in a time of increased securitisation. This chapter considers the Haskell as a local institution that promises to ameliorate geopolitical and geoeconomic antagonisms, but from a position within these realms rather than outside them. The Haskell’s civic promise is an is an effect of political economy and historical geography, and is the result of more than a century-long process of securitisation. Its civic appeal depends not so much on its equidistance from the state and the market but on a deeply embedded relationship with them. Seen this way, the Haskell becomes a distinctively theatrical – and distinctively social – technology of political economic governance: it localises social bonds that state-secured marketisation threatens to disperse and, in doing so, it retrieves social exchange from its wholesale appropriation by the state and the market.

Divided into five sections, the introduction surveys American involvement in the First World War and provides a guide to the collection itself. The first section, “War Guilt, Disillusionment, and Beyond,” charts broadly the way the war was seen during wartime and in the postwar era up to the present. Section two, “Why the First World War Was Fought and the United States Joined,” examines briefly why the war occurred and why the United States, distant from the center of the conflict, became involved. One important aspect contributing to that involvement—the debate among American intellectuals that came largely to embrace the Allies--is the subject of section three, “The Great War and the Intellectuals.” Section four, “How the United States Built an Army, Won the War, and Lost the Peace,” considers how the US fought the war, its role in the outcome, and the ultimate defeat of Wilson’s vision of a US-led postwar world order. The final section, “How to Read This Book,” highlights its three overall aims: canvassing the diverse forms of war literature and culture; analyzing the many settings and perspectives that occasioned responses to the war, and describing the depth and durability of the war’s impact.

German scientists were troubled by the activities of antivivisectionists, with ideas imported from England, and they still struck a defensive attitude. Yet in this period, the German scientific establishment did not immediately feel compelled to organize collectively, at least not to any great extent, to protect themselves. Their defence was as ad hoc as it was incoherent, perhaps reflective of the small extent to which they were troubled. More significantly, German scientists faced accusations outside of Germany of a brutality or callousness that was specific to the German national character. They were raised, by antivivisectionists and scientists alike, as being a dangerous influence on the morals and character of scientists in other countries. If there was callousness in experimental medicine, so one of the arguments went, it was not because the experiments themselves caused it; it was because Germanness was particularly vulnerable to moral numbness. Given that the rest of the civilized world was sending its brightest hopes for the medical future to Germany for training in experimental medicine, particularly to men such as Carl Ludwig and Rudolf Virchow, this perception of personal character flaws was the cause of fear.

While US military and economic interventions in the Caribbean as well as the protectorates of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands link these regions, categorizing the writing of Caribbean immigrants to the US is less clear. Contemporary Caribbean-American writing remains an amorphous category bounded by issues of language and ethnicity. Higher education and publishing practices frequently group Caribbean writers by their linguistic heritage or former European colonizer than by their status as migrants to the US. In addition, racial or ethnic identities mean that some writers are subsumed under an established racial category, like African American, while writers with Asian ancestry fit uneasily within established frameworks for Asian American literature. Despite these divisions, Caribbean-American writing shares many commonalities including critiquing US neo-imperialism, addressing the racism experienced by immigrants, and innovative uses of form and genre.

Chapter 1 maps the new nationalism that dramatically burst into the scene in 2016. It includes a detailed account of neoliberalism, which needs to be distinguished and set apart from liberalism. While some, like Michael Mann (2013: ch.6), subscribe to a narrow view of neoliberalism as economic policy that is specific to the “Anglos” and may have long passed its peak, I take it to be a Pan-Western governing and society-making rationale of deeply transformative reach. Neoliberalism thus understood provides the context of the new nationalism, which arises both in opposition to it but, in a statist variant, may also be complementary to neoliberalism or even constituted by it. The constitutive nexus with its “neoliberal nationalism” proper points to a novel phenomenon on the nations and nationalism map that has so far not received the attention that it deserves.

The concluding chapter discusses limitations to the property rights paradigm. Neoliberal property rights are not a cure-all for rural development. There is an emerging consensus from the United Nations, World Bank, and FAO on the need for more context-specific property rights and international guidelines on how to respect, record, and strengthen such rights, especially customary rights. The conclusion then shows how the book’s theory speaks to the broader relationship between politics and markets beyond land and redistribution. States can generate new markets or enable the rise of markets, or new markets can arise organically. A government can then choose whether, and how, to delineate and protect property rights in those markets. Like with property rights in land, a country’s political institutions (democracy vs. dictatorship) as well as government coalitional dynamics (between elite factions and citizens) and foreign pressure determine property rights regimes. The conclusion applies to the evolution of subsoil property rights over oil in Mexico, subsoil mining rights for mineral natural resources in the United States, and property rights in the banking sector in Venezuela.

This chapter examines how immigration has impacted US institutions related to economic freedom throughout the country's history. We find that immigration was generally associated with smaller government and growth in government. Immigrants weakend the strength of unions during the period of free immigration prior to the 1920s and unions were often a source of agitation for socialism and bigger government. Government spending and taxation tends to be negatively correlated with immigration. During the period of the US's most restrictive immigration policy, 1920 to 1965, government growth was largest.

In addition to evoking western lands and democratic politics, the very name of America has also encouraged apocalyptic visions. The “American Dream” has not only been about the prospect of material prosperity; it has also been about the end of the world. Final forecasts constitute one of America’s oldest literary genres, extending from the eschatological theology of the New England Puritans to the revolutionary discourse of the early republic, the emancipatory rhetoric of the Civil War, the anxious fantasies of the atomic age, and the doomsday digital media of today. For those studying the history of America, renditions of the apocalypse are simply unavoidable. This collection brings together two dozen essays by prominent scholars that explore the meanings of apocalypse across different periods, regions, genres, registers, modes, and traditions of American literature and culture. It locates the logic and rhetoric of apocalypse at the very core of American literary history.

This chapter is focused on describing how systemic governance in higher education has changed in the two Northern American federal countries. To grasp the characteristics of governance and accountability in the higher education systems of Canada and the USA, the chapter shed lights on the systemic characteristics of such systems (the types of institutions are distinguished by their respective missions and ownership), on the role of and eventual changes to the state/provincial and federal governments across time, on the impact on New Public Management in the activities of the systems, and, finally, on the characteristics and roles of policy networks. By focusing on these four dimensions, it is possible to better describe and understand how systemic governance works in the USA and Canada, and how the countries have been changing by remaining quite different each other.