This essay examines three “American” magazines published in mid-nineteenth-century London: the American Miscellany (1839–40), the Great Western (1842), and the American Magazine (1851–52). These magazines staged a fantasy of a unified, national and white American culture that regional print cultures and sectional tensions over slavery rendered impossible within the United States itself. They fashioned this fantasy through dialogue with Yankee comedy (an American form constructed through transatlantic circulation); through the theatricality, materiality and composite form of the magazine; and by transforming regional texts into national culture through transatlantic reprinting. Through histories of these magazines, this essay theorizes magazine reprinting as performance, arguing that performance theory helps to conceptualize transatlantic reprinting and its cultural work, and to understand why these magazines ultimately failed as organs of national culture. Additionally, it suggests that magazines published outside the United States illuminate the relationship between periodical circulation and the development of American nationhood in the antebellum era.

Situating Edith Wharton in the context of America's accelerating petro-culture, this essay argues that her novels critique a society that takes for granted high-volume, nonrenewable energy, and specifically revolutionary new kinds of energy: petroleum, natural gas, and the fossil-fueled power stations necessary for the large-scale, continuous production of electricity. Attention to the idiom of energy in The House of Mirth and its mirror text, The Custom of the Country, along with Ida Tarbell's History of Standard Oil and Theodore Roosevelt's conservationism, sheds new light on assumptions about moral agency, personal freedom, changing modes of thought, and the environment between 1880 and World War I. The essay shows how Wharton's allegorical treatment of Lily Bart and Undine Spragg anticipates the notion of externalities or consequences of industrial activities that affect outside parties but are not reflected in the cost of production.

R. P.Warren's play about Huey Long, Proud Flesh (1937–39), is not a provisional draft of All the King's Men (1946) but a distinct work in its own right. Its conservative criticism of New Deal “common-man-ism” makes it unusual in the politicized literature of the 1930s. At the core of the play is a political symbolism of the flesh, which Warren derives from Shakespeare's representation of the Tudor doctrine of the king's two bodies. Governor Strong embodies the people through his second or immortal body, a dictatorial flesh that Warren resists by trying to articulate an existential “definition” of the self.

The appropriation of Indigenous cultures has sparked multiple controversies in the United States over the past decade. This phenomenon is not new, however. This article examines New York Times reporting on Native American art and commodities to demonstrate how trends in consuming “Indian” products contributed to the assimilationist federal Indian policy of termination, between 1950 and 1970. In this period the consumption of items perceived as “Indian” shifted from an elite art collectors’ activity to a widespread fashion trend. Nevertheless, Times reporting shows that throughout this era shopping for “Indian” items subsumed Indigenous cultures into the imagined unity of a national American identity.

During the 1950s and 1960s, conservative intellectuals in the United States described African decolonization and the civil rights movement as symptoms of a global threat to white, Western civilization. In the most influential conservative journal of the period, National Review, writers such as William F. Buckley grouped these events together as dangerous contributors to civilizational decline. In the crucible of transnational black revolt, some conservative intellectuals embraced scientific racism in the 1960s. These often-ignored features of conservative intellectual thought provided space for white supremacist ideals to continue to ferment on the American right into the twenty-first century.

For most of its existence, the Second Amendment was largely ignored by Constitutional scholars. Recently, a veritable cottage industry has developed in which two distinct camps have surfaced: so-called “Standard Modelers,” who argue that individuals have a right to bear arms for self-defense, the defense of the state, and, in the most extreme examples, to overthrow the government should it become tyrannical, and those who view the Second Amendment as a collective right vested in the state militias for the purposes of law enforcement, to protect against foreign aggression, to quell domestic insurrection, and as a check against federal overreach. Despite the enormous gulf between them, both sides agree that the right to bear arms provides a counterbalance against the federal government. This paper uses insights from game theory to shed new light on the adoption of the Second Amendment. The states suffered a commitment problem. They wished to cooperate with each other by founding a new republic, but feared the consequences of doing so: losing their freedom to a powerful government. The Second Amendment militated against the need for a large federal army, acted to counterbalance federal forces, and created the offensive means with which to confront a tyrannical government.