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The discipline of American studies was established in the early days of World War II and drew on the myth of American exceptionalism. Now that the so-called American Century has come to an end, what would a truly globalized version of American studies look like? This book offers a new standard for the field's transnational aspiration. The chapters offer a comparative, multilingual, or multisited approach to ideas and representations of America. They explore unexpected perspectives on the international circulation of American culture: the traffic of American movies within the British Empire, the reception of the film Gone with the Wind in the Arab world, the parallels between Japanese and American styles of nativism, and new incarnations of American studies itself in the Middle East and South Asia. The chapters elicit a forgotten multilateralism long inherent in American history and provide accounts of post-Revolutionary science communities, late-nineteenth century Mexican border crossings, African American internationalism, Cold War womanhood in the United States and Soviet Russia, and the neo-Orientalism of the new obsession with Iran, among others.

For more than a century, the origin story of the American film industry has been that the founders of Paramount and Fox invented the feature film, that Universal created the star system, and that these three companies (along with the heads of MGM and Warner Bros.) were responsible for developing the multi-billion-dollar business we now know as Hollywood. Unfortunately for history, this is simply not true. Andrew A. Erish's definitive history of this important but oft-forgotten studio compels a reassessment of the birth and development of motion pictures in America. Founded in 1897, the Vitagraph Company of America (later known as Vitagraph Studios) was ground zero for American cinema. By 1907, it was one of the largest film studios in America, with notable productions including the first film adaptation of Les Misérables (1909); The Military Air-Scout (1911), considered to be one of the first aviation films; and the World War I propaganda film The Battle Cry of Peace (1915). In 1925, Warner Bros. purchased Vitagraph and all of its subsidiaries and began to rewrite the history of American cinema. Drawing on valuable primary material overlooked by other historians, Erish challenges the creation myths marketed by Hollywood's conquering moguls, introduces readers to many unsung pioneers, and offers a much-needed correction to the history of commercial cinema.

In 1938, Hedda Hopper (a 52-year-old struggling actress) rose to fame and influence writing an incendiary gossip column, “Hedda Hopper's Hollywood,” that appeared in the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers throughout Hollywood's golden age. Often eviscerating moviemakers and stars, her column earned her a nasty reputation in the film industry while winning a legion of some 32 million fans, whose avid support established her as the voice of small-town America. Yet Hopper sought not only to build her career as a gossip columnist but also to push her agenda of staunch moral and political conservatism, using her column to argue against U.S. entry into World War II, uphold traditional views of sex and marriage, defend racist roles for African Americans, and enthusiastically support the Hollywood blacklist. While usually dismissed as an eccentric crank, this book argues that Hopper has had a profound and lasting influence on popular and political culture and should be viewed as a pivotal popularizer of conservatism. The first book to explore Hopper's gossip career and the public's response to her column and her politics, the book illustrates how the conservative gossip maven contributed mightily to the public understanding of film, while providing a platform for women to voice political views within a traditionally masculine public realm. It builds the case that, as practiced by Hopper and her readers, Hollywood gossip shaped key developments in American movies and movie culture, newspaper journalism and conservative politics, along with the culture of gossip itself, all of which continue to play out today.