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The United States is a fascinating case study in the complex links between crime, punishment and inequality, standing out as it does in terms of inequality as measured by a number of economic standards; levels of serious violent crime; and rates of imprisonment, penal surveillance and post-conviction disqualifications. This chapter builds on the authors’ previous work arguing that the exceptional rise in violent crime and punishment in the US from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s can be explained by the interaction of four political and economic variables: ‘technological regime change’; ‘varieties of capitalism’ and ‘varieties of welfare state’; types of ‘political system’; and – critically and specifically – the US as a radical outlier in the degree of local democracy. Three further questions implied by the authors’ previous work are asked. First, why did such distinctive patterns of local democracy arise in America? And how is this political structure tied up with the history and politics of race? Second, what did the distinctive historical development of the US political economy in the 19th century imply for the structure of its criminal justice institutions? And third, why did the burden of crime and punishment come to fall so disproportionately on African Americans?

This chapter describes the relationship between engineering rationality and labour politics prior to 1900. It presents quantitative empirical data showing that while labour unrest intensified over time, its coverage in engineering literature gradually declined. The chapter further argues that the severity of industrial unrest was overlooked within the bounds of American Exceptionalism. Strikes were considered foreign to the American experience, anarchism was attributed to European subversive philosophies, and the possibility of class struggle was denied.

This chapter focuses on mechanical and industrial engineers — the prophets of the managerial revolution. It situates management rhetoric and practice within its engineering breeding ground, presents the historical conditions that shaped its development, and grounds the discussion within two political and cultural perspectives that dominated American society during the period 1880–1932: Progressivism and American Exceptionalism. The chapter conceptualizes engineers, their associations, and their periodicals as central agents of the ideological phase of the managerial revolution and introduces the sources upon which the empirical analyses in subsequent chapters are based.

The misconception that “exceptionalism” means American superiority stems from how Republicans turned this longstanding concept into a rhetorical weapon against Obama by accusing him of unpatriotically lacking faith in “American exceptionalism” given his “socialist” and “un-American” agenda. These accusations paralleled conspiracy theories claiming that Obama is not really American due to his fake U.S. birth certificate and Islamism. Meanwhile, intense polarization became a major dimension of American exceptionalism’s true meaning. The huge rift between conservatives and liberals under George W. Bush worsened under Obama. It may grow worse following the Clinton-Trump presidential election. Intriguingly, America and other Western nations are moving apart and closer at the same time. While liberal America is mainly evolving in the same direction as the rest of the West, conservative America is an outlier in light of its peculiar ideology, including profound anti-intellectualism, anti-governmentalism, and Christian fundamentalism. Liberal America’s worldview is not simply different from the worldview in conservative America, but also closer to the dominant worldview elsewhere in the West: Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Tellingly, universal health care is broadly supported by both liberals and conservatives in all Western nations except America, where Republicans relentlessly denounce the evils of “socialized medicine.”

Bill Clinton's presidency was nearly undone by his early embrace of a New Politics agenda. Once he reemphasized a New Democratic (centrist liberal) agenda he righted his presidency. Clinton's travails and policy successes reveal some basic verities of American political life: American Exceptionalism. Americans, unlike their West European cousins, largely embrace a classically liberal set of norms. As a result, any welfare state and collectivist impulse must heed the nation's individualist political culture.

This chapter discusses the new American Studies. It introduces the “border studies” of the interactions and intersections of the different cultures of the United States and takes note of the criticisms of “American Exceptionalism”. It looks at the fundamental reconsiderations of what constitutes “American Studies” as a field—or fields—of study. It discusses the anti-theoretical bias in American Studies and identifies the “post-nationalist” challenges to the study of the Americas. The chapter also covers the problems that surround the new American Studies and introduces the American Studies Association.

The chapter focuses on popular culture as key site for the production of constructs of geopolitical identity and practices of national security as common sense knowledge and conventional wisdom, examining popular Hollywood movies of the ‘national security cinema’ and the involvement of the Pentagon in the filmmaking process. Representations of geopolitical identity and national security are analyzed in some of the commercially most successful films in the United States released between 2009 and 2015. The chapter’s analysis testifies to the enduring popularity of key ideational themes and mythologies, such as American exceptionalism, military heroism, and external threats endangering the existence of the United States, its interests and values under the Obama presidency. The serial reproduction of these national security narratives, realized in multi-million dollar film productions, illustrates the cross-discursive leverage of American hegemony over alternative formulations of grand strategy under the Obama presidency and the popularity of a particular national security imagery of American geopolitical identity.

The chapter explores how as President of the United States, Barack Obama was in a constant exchange with both political opponents and diverging voices within his own administration over defining America’s world political role and the purpose behind American power. The chapter describes how Obama’s strategic vision not only informed the political debate and determined policy, but also represented the central hub in an intertextual network of grand strategy discourses, providing the focus for the policy advice and criticism of Washington think tanks, the reporting and commentary of the media, and the intellectual attention of academic researchers interested in the study of US foreign and security policy. The chapter examines how Obama reconfirmed a national and bipartisan consensus, -the ideational dimension of American exceptionalism, liberal hegemony, and military supremacy-, while linking this identity to a pragmatic policy course of cooperative engagement and military restraint that large segments of the Washington establishment rejected for challenging the elite consensus on liberal hegemony.

In order to show what we readers miss when their readings of nineteenth-century literary texts are circumscribed by an a priori idea about what is contained therein based on the author’s skin color or “race,” the author examines Pierre Faubert’s Ogé, ou le préjugé de couleur (1841/1856). This play is offered as a prime example of how the trope of the “colored historian” has led to an obfuscation of Faubert’s much more important contribution to what is now called critical race theory, on the one hand, and, on the other, his position as one of the first writers in what the author calls a tradition of Black Atlantic Humanism that emanated from nineteenth-century Haitian authors.

The introduction lays out the main theoretical and narrative elements of the book. Because of its failure during the Vietnam War, the US has a vested interest in highlighting its more virtuous role in evacuating and resettling refugees. But what about the refugees? We know far more about the causes of their exodus and the national guilt of the receiving country than how the uprooted collectively made sense of their experience after arriving in the United States. This chapter explains the cultural stakes of exile identity—which in this book goes by the term refugee nationalism, specifically who gets to interpret a nation’s past, who gets to be on the right of history, and who gets to be on the wrong side of history. Cold War politics presented an opportunity for Refugee Americans—most of whom fled communist countries—to freely teach and institutionalize their version of the national past at the local, state, and national level, placing themselves on the right side of history without fear of diplomatic reprisals. This chapter emphasizes the importance of local factors in shaping the look and feel of refugee nationalism, how the Orange County plays into it, and then proceeds with a summary of the next six chapters.

This chapter’s subtitle focuses on the social work performed by artists, journalists, and activists, who, during the late 1970s, comforted grieving souls through the construction of a refugee cultural identity and community, specifically as the true patriots whose flight from communism and testimony later on revealed what really happened after 1975. Beginning with the boat people exodus in the late 1970s, worldwide public opinion, which had vilified the South Vietnamese as losers of the war and obstacles to revolution, began to view the winners of the postwar. Their willingness to risk their lives on the open sea cast doubt on Hanoi’s revolutionary promises, and, through bipartisan support for the plight of the boat people, enabled the United States and Vietnamese Americans to cast themselves on the right side of history in ways never possible during the war itself.

This chapter explores the central tensions that animate hip hop diplomacy. One tension is between art and diplomacy, particularly in their distinctive approaches to process and views on outcomes. A second tensions arises because of the asymmetry of power between the United States and the countries that hip hop diplomacy programs visit. This chapter posits that hip hop diplomacy (and cultural diplomacy in general) operates in a zone of ambiguity, a state in which palpable, inescapable tensions and uncertainties hang over one’s every action. Specific examples come from hip hop diplomacy initiatives in El Salvador, India, Morocco, Senegal, and Zimbabwe. The chapter ends by offering guidelines for respectful, collaborative interactions in cultural diplomacy and cultural exchange programs.