This article takes as its starting point Stephen Fredman's claim that women are “effaced” from Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude, and notes that this claim is contradictory, given the centrality of Anne Frank to the text. This article attempts to account for that contradiction by arguing that Anne Frank is enlisted in Auster's text as a means of providing consolation for the loss of Auster's father; indeed, Frank is enlisted as a figure for Auster's father. It is argued that Frank can be read, if problematically, and not entirely successfully, as a Levinasian “other” within Auster's text, something which influences the act of self-representation in The Invention of Solitude and necessitates consideration of the text as autobiography.

World War II, some scholars have argued, interrupted Americans’ “love affair” with the automobile. According to this school of thought, gasoline rationing temporarily curtailed car driving and suspended car culture before both surged in the postwar era. This essay argues that World War II strengthened, rather than interrupted, Americans’ attachment to the automobile and solidified driving as a fundamental part of American culture. Ration boards distinguished between “essential” and “nonessential” driving and justified gasoline rationing as the only method to preserve civilian driving when supplies of gasoline were low. Thus at the same time as government and private industry were encouraging Americans to limit their driving, they were sending a strong message that Americans needed to drive and that foregoing driving whenever one wanted was a true, if temporary, hardship. Advertisements and government propaganda conflated car ownership with citizenship and portrayed driving as integral to the American way of life. But this mode of citizenship was not available to all: posters, pamphlets, and advertisements portrayed the American driver almost exclusively as white and most often as male. Such depictions implied that the mobility and independence that driving afforded were the sole domain of white American men.

From his position as editor of the Nation from 1865 until 1899, E. L. Godkin steered one of the liberal standard-bearers in a transatlantic network of cosmopolitan liberals. From this position he helped define nineteenth-century cosmopolitan liberalism. However, while Godkin fitted in the mainstream of liberal thought in 1865, by the time he retired he occupied the conservative fringe. Godkin never made the transition from a nineteenth-century cosmopolitan liberalism to a newer nationalistic democratic liberalism because democracy failed him. Instead of peace, commerce, and learning, democracy created an American Empire rooted in war, protectionism, ignorance, jingoism, and plunder, culminating in the Spanish–American War. Godkin's critique of American imperialism was thus based on his pessimistic but perceptive reading of the flaws of American democracy. Godkin believed that the rise of “jingoist” democracy had doomed the American “experiment” and thought that the nation had slipped into the historical, degenerative cycle of empire. By tracing Godkin's increasingly bitter warnings about the dangers of democracy in the second half of the nineteenth century, we can catch a glimpse of a dying worldview that questioned the ability of democracy to act as a moral force in the world.

The early twentieth-century oil boom radically transformed the Osage reservation in Oklahoma, and in the early 1920s the Osages became the world's richest community because of their collective sharing of profits from mineral resources. In 1934, John Joseph Mathews, an Osage American tribal historian, published Sundown, his only work of fiction, a peculiar Bildungsroman about the life of Chal Windzer in the aftermath of oil discovery on the Osage reservation. I argue that Mathews's use of the novel of formation is a particularly important literary and intellectual intervention. First, at a time when the significance of material resources to the American economy and American national imaginary was growing, Mathews uses the generic convention of progress to narrate oil's social “formation,” alongside the tale of Chal's dissolution, his failure, that is, of the very development which the novel's genre implies. Second, Mathews's literary representation of the oil boom as the Great Frenzy – a period of widespread violence and cultural chaos – complicates traditional accounts of capitalist economic development, which define late-stage capitalism and its financial deregulation and IT boom as an era of radical cultural “fluidity” (Bauman, Sennett). By drawing attention to the material and social fluidity of oil culture and the force with which it affected the Osages, Sundown points to a specific Osage American colonial, and thus always already transnational, history of (petro)modernity. The character of modernity, Mathews shows us, is inextricably tied to the conditions under which human and natural resources are extracted and allowed to become “social.” The destabilization of reservation culture derives equally from oil discovery itself, and the technological transformations within the energy industry, from the colonialist conditions that impose capitalism upon the Osages, and from the very collectivist modes of wealth distribution that the Osages adopted in order to resist colonial exploitation. Thus Mathews's novel reveals an alternative genealogy of the destabilization of cultural forms to the one that begins with post-Bretton Woods global financial deregulation, the collapse of state institutions in the global North, and the late twentieth-century emergence of new communication technologies. For the Osages in the 1920s and for the characters in Sundown, crude oil and colonial exploitation, as well as, paradoxically, anticapitalist legal provisions of the Allotment Act's collectivizing of it, make reservation culture “liquid” and “uncertain” precisely at the time of America's entering into the presumably “solid” econo-political phase of development.

It is no secret that natural history museums strive to be archives of life, a common task grown more fraught in recent decades because of the crisis of biodiversity, the extinction of roughly 60,000 species per year. “Bio-informatics” has been a buzzword in the natural history literature of the twenty-first century, which recommends the digitization of museum collections such that global information sharing can keep scientists up to date about species loss. Some curators resent the emphasis upon information technology as the key to the continuing relevance of their collections, arguing, for instance, that “museums are the cornerstone of an object-oriented approach to the natural world.” The question of what durability means for natural history, and by extension for both “nature” and “history,” breaks around what counts as most lifelike: information or object, technology or bone. Los Angeles is a rich setting for the consideration of these questions, both because it is the world capital of the entertainment industry and because it hosts the world's largest archive of Pleistocene fossils, preserved in the asphaltum sinks that formed atop the Salt Lake Oil Field, itself the largest urban oil reserve. What petroleum means to evolving definitions of life, and thus to nature and history, has long been on display at the La Brea tar pits. What is not on display, namely micro-organisms grown up in the region's petroleum sludge, may be the saviors of our current geologic epoch and key to the renewal of the tired natural history concept.

The Cold War in the late 1940s blunted attempts by the Truman administration to extend the scope of government in areas such as health care and civil rights. In California, the combined weakness of the Democratic Party in electoral politics and the importance of fellow travelers and communists in state liberal politics made the problem of how to advance the left at a time of heightened Cold War tensions particularly acute. Yet by the early 1960s a new generation of liberal politicians had gained political power in the Golden State and was constructing a greatly expanded welfare system as a way of cementing their hold on power. In this article I argue that the New Politics of the 1970s, shaped nationally by Vietnam and by the social upheavals of the 1960s over questions of race, gender, sexuality, and economic rights, possessed particular power in California because many activists drew on the longer-term experiences of a liberal politics receptive to earlier anti-Cold War struggles. A desire to use political involvement as a form of social networking had given California a strong Popular Front, and in some respects the power of new liberalism was an offspring of those earlier battles.

David Margrett was a black missionary sent by the Countess of Huntingdon to preach to slaves in South Carolina and Georgia in 1774. Margrett did not confine his preaching in America to spiritual matters, instead speaking out against the system of slavery itself, and offering himself as a “second Moses.” Margrett's message was not well received by authorities in South Carolina, indeed he was fortunate to escape with his life. This article argues that Margrett was a product both of his evangelical training, where speaking out on important matters was encouraged, and also of his British environment, where anti-slavery voices were becoming increasingly prominent. The story of David Margrett demonstrates how black Britons received and interpreted the message of Christianity, and in particular how they used their faith as a means to attack slavery.

This essay examines the first monument dedicated to the US oil industry, the Drake Memorial in Titusville, Pennsylvania (1899–1901), as an influential project of corporate self-representation. Commissioned by Standard Oil, the memorial shaped a public image for the petroleum industry that addressed concerns about the sustainability and social effects of oil capitalism, and established the key terms for a promotional discourse that would circulate throughout the twentieth century. This discourse, which I call “petro-primitivism,” reimagined the ultramodern oil industry as an extension of timeless practices rooted in an imagined archaic past. By shaping a primitivist spectacle that figured oil as an eternal component of the natural world and a primordial object of “human” endeavor, I argue, the Drake Memorial encouraged audiences to take the long view on oil: to adopt an expansive perspective that reconceived oil as a timelessly abundant element, and the boom-and-bust oil industry as an age-old venture. These tropes proved useful to the industry throughout the crises of the early twentieth century, reappearing in corporate displays and filtering into the rhetoric of industry advertising and publicity. Accordingly, I examine two later projects that appropriated the themes of petro-primitivism: the Sinclair Oil exhibit at the 1933–34 World's Fair, and Sun Oil's exhibit Oil Serves America at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia (1953–c.1962). Echoing the earlier Drake Memorial, these displays employed strategies drawn from public art and civic architecture to organize collective experiences around the image of oil. By examining these popular exhibits alongside the Drake Memorial, I aim to offer a new account of the promotional culture of the early petroleum industry that explores the intersections between the traditional arts and industry publicity and illuminates the vital role that cultural representations played in accommodating twentieth-century Americans to the dynamic structures of petro-capitalism.

Multiple uses of the spatial deictic “here” are a notable feature of Robert Creeley's poetry. For example, the Collected Poems 1945–1975 contains five poems called “Here” and two called “Here Again,” and after only a hundred pages one has encountered at least eight uses of “here.” Similarly, Charles Altieri has noted a movement in Creeley's poetry from saying “there” to being able to say “here” as a statement of “an ideal of pure presence, of a relationship between subject and world where each is transparent to and completely adequate for the other.” In this essay, I will examine examples of Creeley's “heres” in the early poetry, up to and including Words (1967) and Pieces (1969). I will argue that while some of Creeley's uses of “here” do involve problems of location and ideal presence, other uses speak to problems of agency, form and the body. I will go on to argue that, ultimately, Creeley's “heres” map a search for location that discovers each new articulation is a disorientating reorientation. This reading of Creeley's use of “here” will be informed by a number of other sources including Jonathan Culler's pioneering work on deixis in Structuralist Poetics; J. P. Denny's comparative work on spatial adverbs in English, Eskimo and Kikuyu; Heidegger's discussion of “here” and “yonder”; and the paintings of Barnett Newman which are notable for their deictic titles. Reading these with and back into Creeley's poetry enables a greater understanding of how spatial deixis works in lyric poetry and how it relates to Creeley's reflexive lyric.

How does the problem of oil appear in documentary film? I provide an answer to this question by examining the narrative and aesthetic choices through which the problem of oil is framed in three recent “feature” documentaries: Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack's A Crude Awakening (2006), Joe Berlinger’s Crude: The Real Price of Oil (2009), and Shannon Walsh's H2Oil (2009). My aim is to understand not only the specific politics enacted through the formal and aesthetic choices made in each film, but to map out what these documentaries tell us about the social life of oil today, and the capacity for films such as these to meaningfully intervene in the looming consequences of our dependence on oil. The essay proceeds in three parts. First, by offering readings of the discursive, narrative and aesthetic strategies of these documentaries, I draw out the ways in which each comes to understand the problem of oil. In the second part, I identify the key insights that these films offer regarding the specific social contradictions and political blockages that emerge from their attempt to name and understand oil. Finally, I conclude with an exploration of the insights these films provide for addressing the antinomies that define and separate the anticapitalist and environmental movements.

James Price, Massachusetts Yankee and successful Boston merchant, visited Paris in August 1792, just when the French Revolution was entering into a new and ominous phase. On a trip designed to combine business with pleasure, he ended up witnessing the famous Journée du Dix AoÛt (Tenth of August) – dubbed the “Second French Revolution” by contemporaries – when provincial militia and national guards assaulted the Tuileries palace, massacred the king's Swiss Guards, and toppled the Bourbon monarchy from its centuries-old throne. As a fairly unbiased and certainly perspicacious observer – though with moderate revolutionary sympathies – Price must be included in the list of more famous, and more highly partisan, American witnesses of revolution, notably Thomas Jefferson, John Trumbull, and Gouverneur Morris. Specific topics addressed by Price include women during the Revolution, the dynamic between crowd action and attempts of municipal authorities at control, and the development of a Revolutionary fashion. Price's fascinating diary is not only a running account of events surrounding the fateful Tenth, but also an evaluation and commentary of an outsider, combined with a lively eyewitness description of the Revolutionary street scene. Not included in Marcel Reinhard's standard study on the Journée du Dix, Price's hour-by-hour chronology provides a valuable corroboration of and supplement to Reinhard. His account notes also provide insight into the eighteenth-century Continental travel habits of Americans on the “Grand Tour” and on business.