In 1936, Willa Cather briefly introduced her essay collection Not Under Forty with a famous proclamation: ‘The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.’ While this ambiguous break has been argued to refer to her personal life, literary history, American culture or as a key to her experiments with narrative form, I will offer a material account for this sense of rupture. Specifically, the early 1920s mark a change in how the environment was depicted and described in both image and language. Cather's fiction is a site in which the form of environment, aerial photography and the poetic image clash, disrupting realist narrative form and acting as the catalyst for her development as an experimental modernist. She described her work Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) as a ‘narrative’ rather than a novel, which has cued critics to draw contrasts between the narrative structures of her earlier novels and the work after her 1923 Pulitzer Prize-winning World War I novel One of Ours. But flagging ‘narrative’ as the crucial hinge in her work over-emphasises its role as the break between her early and late works. This has resulted in a strengthening of the binary in literary criticism between narrative and description, and backgrounds descriptive technique, particularly for presenting the environment, throughout her work. In this chapter I will compare her late novel Death Comes for the Archbishop with her second novel O Pioneers! as representative of her work before One of Ours.

While not wanting to overemphasise the definitiveness of Cather's statement, I will use the early 1920s as a point from which to track the different ways the form of environment appears in her work. The shift in her descriptions of the environment – in this case the Great Plains and the Southwest – can be tracked alongside material progress in other modes of descriptive technique: specifically, the relationship between flight, aerial photography and transportation during the rapid commercialisation and popularisation of aviation in the 1920s. But rather than construct a direct, mimetic relationship between literary representation and photography, the goal here is to tease out the basic shifts in environmental imagination that are afforded by the collision between foregrounded literary description of the environment and the form of environment it expresses.

There is a commonplace that people became bored of the moon after Apollo 11 landed on its surface. Matthew Tribbe points to ‘the fact that Americans were never as keen on the moon program as current public memory and myth suggest’ and an anecdote from a 1973 essay in the New York Times Book Review by Hugh Kenner, a conversation between himself and the owner of a science fiction bookstore:

As it is posed here, the borders of reality began to shift for fiction writers in the late 1960s and 1970s. With expert and complex technology entering popular culture in the form of a media barrage promoting the moon shot, the basic function of representation went into question. This is one of the explanations for the drift in literary fiction from modernism to postmodernism, so posed by Brian McHale's argument that there was a shift from epistemological to ontological concerns in the mid-twentieth century, an ‘ontological shock […] of recognizing that there are other worlds besides this one’. No longer was progress headed toward opening up new ways of thinking and conceptualising the expanding world (as its space had been exhausted) it was opening up actual new worlds – spaces such as the moon. Joseph Tabbi calls the literary techniques used to express this new form of the unfamiliar the ‘postmodern sublime’.

Two images that exemplify the tensions between reality and representation during this period are the Earthrise and Blue Marble photographs, two of the few unplanned artefacts of the tightly planned NASA engineering spectacle. As Richard Lewis points out in a 1974 book about the Apollo program: ‘the story of each mission was known in advance.

Chapter 3 reveals how violent individuals and a violent state are structured in the Constitution. Here, violent, White self-determination (the right of White individuals to overthrow government) and liberalism (the systemic differences central to a liberal state) mix with republicanism (a decentralization of authority that privileges violent acts of citizens, a group most often defined as propertied, White men). In Article IV, Section 4, the Second Amendment, and the Fifth Amendment, this chapter reveals the key formulations and tensions of American violence.

Beginning in the late 1920s, MGM usurped Paramount’s position as the most profitable and prestigious studio, largely as a result of the oversight of wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg. Thalberg helped develop the corporate personality of MGM – the MGM “Idea” – comprising a glamorous and slick house style, the prioritization of stars, and a system of scriptwriting that involved assigning multiple writers to work on the same project yet often unbeknownst to each other. It is in response to this last phenomenon that authors of very disparate sensibilities – F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Love of the Last Tycoon [1941]), Aldous Huxley (After Many a Summer Dies the Swan [1939]), and William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom! [1936]) – crafted narratives in a form I call “MGM Modernism”: an aestheticized and self-conscious naturalism developed in part from contact with and subordination to a corporate author.

An epilogue explores several topics regarding the future of modern air warfare. The first section offers recommendations for how the United States can better prepare for modern air warfare. The second considers air power in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations. The third anticipates the role of air power in extending deterrence to allies. The fourth demonstrates how TAP theory can assess the potential effectiveness of air power by analyzing the Russian Air Force in the Battle of Kyiv. The final section considers additional challenges facing the United States during an emerging era of great power competition.

Chapter 2 confronts the gender, race, and class composition of state violence in the American Revolution. General Washington attempted to exclude women and non-White men from the military - moves that foreshadowed similar exclusions from military work and political participation in the United States. At the same time, the work, at times violent work, of marginalized individuals in and around American military establishments was essential. The army also needed money - and the interdependence of state finance, state violence, and military discipline was key. Failed finances led to deplorable army condition. Thirty percent of Continental Army soldiers rebelled in January 1781. Washington was infuriated by the protest, but he was even more upset when political leaders negotiated with the men. Disobedient soldiers, he believed, responded best to physical chastisement. Much like recent work that highlights how American nationalism was forged in violent acts against Loyalists, so too this chapter shows how it was forged in military discipline: violent acts against Continental Army soldiers.

The centrality of slavery in the North and South, Black resistance, and the greatest shift in the domestic use and formation of federal force form the foundation of Chapter 7. Here, the likes of Robert Smalls, an enslaved boat pilot in South Carolina, the hundreds of thousands of Civil War slave fugitives, Union and Confederate military leaders, President Abraham Lincoln, President Jefferson Davis, and others address the consequences of one question: should the United States deploy its forces, its violence, in support of slaveholders or freed slaves?

The introduction outlines the systemic violence that supports liberal society in early America. Focused on the Boston Massacre, it uses the courtroom representations of John Adams in defense of British soldiers to understand how hostile racial difference organized society and how such differences opened the way for the empowerment of White individuals. Here Whiteness and racial hierarchy become key markers in the formation of how violence is deployed in America.

Chapter 1 introduces tactical air power (TAP) theory to explain why, how and when modern air power works. After World War II, two technologies changed the character of air warfare. In the Cold War the proliferation of thermonuclear weapons and the exorbitant costs anticipated from nuclear war deterred the United States and the Soviet Union. The second technology was the proliferation of radar- and infra-guided air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles, which increased the lethality of the air domain and with it the United States shifted from the bomber to tactical aircraft (tacair) as its primary combat platform. This book examines modern US air power in the Vietnam War. In Vietnam and the modern air wars that followed, US air power has been more effective in directly attacking enemy fielded forces, rather than by independent strategic bombing and air interdiction. Joint air–ground operations place the enemy on the horns of a dilemma: to mass and maneuver only to be susceptible to air attack or disperse and hide and be vulnerable to an opposed army’s attack. With the right combination of air superiority, air-to-ground capability, and a capable ground force, under the right environmental conditions, air power can disrupt an enemy’s strategy.

Chapter 7 examines the Easter Offensive and the Linebacker I & II air campaigns. When the NVA launched the offensive, the question remained whether the ARVN could incorporate air–ground coordination lessons from Lam Son 719. The ARVN held on two of three fronts but faltered along the demilitarized zone (DMZ). Effective US air power and resolute ARVN forces, coordinated by US military advisors and air liaison officers, held off further NVA advances as the ARVN regrouped to launch a counteroffensive to retake Quang Tri. In May, the United States launched Linebacker I to interdict enemy lines of communication, which failed to weaken the NVA as it fought through the summer. Instead, in September the ARVN and US air forces combined arms offensive retook Quang Tri. The decisive defeat of the NVA convinced Hanoi to accept a peace treaty. However, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Thieu, excluded from the secret talks, balked at any deal that allowed NVA troops to remain in the country. After the November 1972 election, President Nixon ordered Linebacker II, the bombing of Hanoi, which compelled the North Vietnamese to return to Paris, but only to sign an agreement they had accepted in October following their defeat in the Easter Offensive.