During an intense firefight at the Tenaru River on Guadalcanal in August of 1942, Marine Private Al Schmid, a Philadelphia metal worker, shared a machine gun emplacement with two other young Marines: Johnny Rivers, a Native-American from rural Pennsylvania, and Lee Diamond, a Jew from Brooklyn. During many hours of night combat, as wave after wave of Japanese tried unsuccessfully to cross the Tenaru and overwhelm the thin line of American defenders, first Rivers was shot and instantly killed, and then Diamond was severely wounded. Furious over the death of his friend and fighting for his life, Schmid continued to try to ward off the enemy. Toward the end of the battle, which was to prove decisive for securing Guadalcanal, he was wounded by a grenade fragment. One of his eyes was immediately destroyed and the other was greatly damaged. Now sightless, Schmid continued, with what little aid the barely conscious Diamond could provide, to fire the machine gun. Eventually he was credited with killing two hundred Japanese before his position was relieved in the morning. Schmid spent much of the next two years in military hospitals, where unsuccessful efforts were made to save what little sight remained to him, and where he began the process of blind rehabilitation.

In an 1856 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine the literary critic and biographer T. A. Richards conducted his readers through a house tour of famous literary residences in the Hudson River Valley. His itinerary and choice of authors were typical of the time. By using the picturesque vocabulary common to antebellum travel literature, Richards offered a vicarious glimpse into the domestic arrangements of successful writers and artists. He painted an edenic picture of gentility in the midst of the Hudson Valley's natural splendor. We read, for example, of the “broad lawns and slopes of Placentia,” the Hyde Park estate of the novelist James Kirke Paulding; and the “mysterious evening shadow” of Susan Warner's home on Constitution Island, just off West Point. “Dearest to us of all,” Richards added, was Sunnyside, Washington Irving's renovated Dutch farmhouse at Tarrytown. These elegant and vaguely romantic properties seemed utterly appropriate for the literary elite of the region. Like Hawthorne's Old Manse, they were architectural spaces indelibly suited to their masters' talents and temperaments.

Twenty American military cemeteries dot the pastoral countryside of western Europe. Casualties of the Great War, numbering 31,000, are buried in eight sites: 73,000 of America's 93,000 overseas burials from the Second World War are interred in twelve European cemeteries. These “silent cities” are monuments to an enduring result of global conflict: a forceful American presence in the cultural and political landscapes of other countries. The cemeteries' standardized styles, laconic epitaphs, and their removal from the sphere of family and community erase much of the sense of individual tragedy associated with premature death. Indeed, the American burial grounds were not meant to be mere memorials; they were designed primarily as representations of the American spirit abroad and as a political “foothold in Europe,” according to one of their prominent exponents. They were planned to evoke a common national cause rather than mourn the death of young soldiers. Their foreign context, the New York Times stated, meant that they would “stand forever as symbols of America, our spirit and our aesthetic.”

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has long been recognised as one of the most influential of modern American institutions. Indeed, for some scholars at least, the relationship between the Council and the federal government has been a troubling one. A private group that is exclusive and unrepresentative in membership, funded by large corporations and foundations, highly secretive about its operations, and ensconced in the centres of state power, raises serious issues of principle for a democracy. At its crudest, the question is who “controls” whom, the state or the unofficial group? Allowing for a more complex relationship between an official policy elite and outside advisors, just what are the points of convergence or divergence between these “internal” and “external” bureaucrats, as Chadwick F. Alger has called them? Such issues draw attention to the nature of the state itself, and, whatever the proper role of the CFR in the American system of government, its existence provides an opportunity to examine a number of major ideas about power and the state.