The poetry of Frank O'Hara (1926–66) takes place in the routes of New York City, both above and below the ground. This essay looks at the characteristics of his poetic lines, and some of the ways they invest themselves in each other, interacting complexly through rhymes and line breaks that we may struggle to negotiate. Then, broadening outwards to consider urban topographies and the experience of inhabiting the avenues of Manhattan, it discusses how the lines of a poem might relate to the lines of a subway system or street grid, and considers how O'Hara's poetry opens our attention, and our generosity, to the aspects of a cityscape that we habitually overlook.

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory” (Nothing Ever Dies, 4). Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, begins his 2016 treatise on war and memory with these words. In the deftly named Nothing Ever Dies, Nguyen identifies the excesses of war in general and most notably the excess of the war named the Vietnam War in the US and the American War in Vietnam. There was excessive violence on the battlefields, which ranged throughout Southeast Asia, exceeding the national borders identified by the naming of the war. The experience of war and the meaning of war also exceeded the official dates of the war, chronologized differently by different historical actors but nevertheless used to conveniently bound war in time. Disregarding these official dates, the perpetrators, survivors, and witnesses of war (Nguyen points out that one can belong to more than one of these categories simultaneously) carry with them the memories and violence of war. They relive and reinterpret the war, fighting it again a second time through memory and memorialization.

In the early Cold War, the US government institutionalized a national security program, centered on the investigation into the political beliefs of federal employees, to safeguard the nation from Communist subversion. Often interpreted as the result of a partisan battle between New Deal Democrats and conservative Republicans, the national security program had deeper origins, reflecting the influence of psychiatric discourse on public understandings of deviancy. Framed by a metonymical logic that linked radical political beliefs, deviant sexual behaviors, and other illicit behaviors under the category of psychopathology, the security program sought to guard against the threat posed by potentially dangerous individuals, a form of protection that necessitated the public disclosure by those deemed security risks of all aspects of their personal lives.

The American New Right that grew to prominence during the second half of the twentieth century consists of three major ideological strands – traditionalism, libertarianism, and anticommunism. The New Christian Right (NCR) that rose to prominence in the 1970s fell within the traditionalist camp. At the same time, not all theological conservatives or social traditionalists joined the NCR. The work of comic book artist Jack Chick demonstrates the phenomenon of opposition to the NCR among some theological and social conservatives. Beginning in the early 1960s, Chick published tracts and comic books that espoused extreme social conservatism while at the same time opposing government enforcement of social norms. He frequently criticized politically active or well-connected preachers such as Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham and opposed prayer in schools. Chick, along with many other fundamentalists, opposed the NCR because it involved cooperation with Roman Catholics. For Chick, doctrinal purity is more important than having a “Christian” nation. This essay concludes by noting how, as evangelicals lose ground in key battles of the culture wars, there are signs that Chick's antipolitics is gaining ground among conservative Protestants.

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W. E. B. Du Bois described African American music as a “gift” to America, contesting the tendency to regard white interest in black culture as appropriation or theft. Yet this metaphor invoked the complex circuits of indebtedness and obligation that are intrinsic to gift exchange in anthropological accounts of the practice, challenging white recipients of the gift to make adequate response. This challenge is most systematically addressed in a sequence of films that tell stories about white enthusiasm for the blues. The Blues Brothers (1980), Crossroads (1986), Blues Brothers 2000 (1998) and Black Snake Moan (2006) depict the blues as a gift and explore how whites might appropriately acknowledge and reciprocate for receiving it in a culture distorted by racial inequalities. The films develop a distinct set of narrative conventions for handling the politics of racial obligation, vacillating between seeing black music as a transracial cultural resource on the one hand and as a racially defined, inalienable possession of African Americans on the other. Using these same conventions, Honeydripper (2007) invites us to see the process of cultural exchange from a different perspective in which the problematic status of the blues as racialized property is diminished.

This article explores ideas of suburban masculinity in “My Dog Stupid” (1986), a comic novella by the critically neglected novelist and screenwriter John Fante. Placing the text within the context of the twentieth-century suburban “canon,” I argue that Fante complicates and critiques the dystopian image of American suburbia that has dominated both fictional and sociological representations of this environment over the past seventy years.

Korean War films from the US and South Korea provide one cultural site through which scholar–teachers working in American studies, and the humanities in general, can intervene in the unending Korean War. An emergent peace movement has organized around term unending Korean War in order to educate the public both about the history of the three-year period of active combat, and about the repercussions of the fact that the Armistice Agreement, signed on 27 July 1953, stopped the shooting but did not end the war. In the US context, the Korean War is described as a forgotten war. When the war is remembered, it has often been interpreted as a limited, defensive, or static war – a war fought in the trenches – a perspective that tends to occlude the air war. Through a comparative study of the Hollywood film The Bridges at Toko-Ri (Mark Robson, 1954) and the South Korean film Welcome to Dongmakgol (Park Kwang-hyun, 2005), I explore conflicting ways of representing and remembering the air war: as limited to an interdiction campaign in the former, as the cause of civilian casualties in the latter. The friction that results from viewing Welcome to Dongmakgol against the grain of The Bridges at Toko-Ri provides one starting point for a discussion of the unending Korean War, a discussion which has yet to appear in the field of transnational American studies. My hope is that greater understanding of the devastating air war can contribute to the struggle for peace on the Korean peninsula.

This article examines representations of the road in the work of independent Florida-born film director Kelly Reichardt. Reading Reichardt's so-called Oregon trilogy, Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), and Meek's Cutoff (2010), alongside radical anti-freeway and anti-automobile movements from the Pacific Northwest, I argue that Reichardt's films offer critical engagements with the subject of the American road, interrogating the freedom and emancipation from social constraint it purportedly offers.