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This book examines Asian American cultural production and its challenge to the dominant understanding of American imperialism, Cold War dynamics, and race and gender formation. The book demonstrates the degree to which Asian American literature and film critique the record of U.S. imperial violence in Asia and provides a glimpse into the imperial and gendered racial logic of the Cold War. It unfolds this particularly entangled and enduring episode in the history of U.S. global hegemony—one that, contrary to leading interpretations of the Cold War as a simple bipolar rivalry, was significantly triangulated in Asia. The Asian American works analyzed here constitute a crucial body of what the book reveals as transnational ‘Cold War compositions,’ which are at once a geopolitical structuring, an ideological writing, and a cultural imagining. Arguing that these works reframe the U.S. Cold War as a project of gendered racial formation and imperialism as well as a production of knowledge, this book offers an interdisciplinary investigation into the transnational dimensions of Asian America and its critical relationship to Cold War history.

This book explores the origins and development of the North Woods vacation landscape and experience, demonstrating how tourism altered land, people, and institutions across northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. With roots dating back more than a century, it is a story of interest to historians, geographers, landscape architects, conservation professionals, policymakers, and the general public, particularly those who live, work, and vacation in the region. The market’s intrusion into the nineteenth century countryside established connections between urban and rural worlds that exploited natural resources, altered lives, and transformed the landscape. In the twentieth century this former hinterland developed as the North Woods, drawing on urban resources and offering a place where many escaped to enjoy rejuvenation outdoors in a reforested landscape. Improved transportation, promotion, declining lumber and mining industries, and recreational land use and conservation initiatives contributed to the emergence of a vacation destination. North Woods tourist advocates, like earlier lumbermen, viewed nature as something that yielded profit. But unlike the cut and run lumbermen, they relied on nature’s regenerative forces to provide a new cash crop, a forested and lake-dotted countryside offering outdoor recreation for the masses. While often dismissed as casual and unimportant, tourism tells us much about modern America. Vacations served as a transformative leisure experience, a site of work, an emblem of worker participation in consumer culture and as a factor in America’s changing workforce and landscape.

Myths of the Rune Stone tells the story of how white Midwesterners created, adapted, and propagated a myth that Viking missionaries had visited their region and were “massacred” by local Indians prior to the explorations of Christopher Columbus. Popular enthusiasm for this story developed as a local expression of American exceptionalism that both affirmed and challenged status quo assumptions about the formation of the United States as a nation and what it means to be a “real American.” The narrative of a primordial, white, Christian sacrifice staked an exclusive claim to the landscape, shaped collective identities, and generated social power for groups that viewed themselves as “under attack.” In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, locals persisted in their belief in this Viking origin myth, using it advance their ethnic, racial, civic and religious goals. Although such myths are often thought to be the exclusive provenance of Scandinavian immigrants, Myths of the Rune Stone demonstrates their appeal to a diverse cross-section of residents, including Catholics and the descendants of Yankee pioneer settlers.