The eminent Anglo-American Henry James once observed that “the flower of art blossoms only when the soil is deep... it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature”(23). By now, the US has a great deal of history. In the last 20 years alone, since the first issue of American Literary History appeared, the US has witnessed the disintegration of its sinister other, the USSR, and it has also borne witness to the birth of a world characterized by transnational drift, the triumph of global capitalism, and the re-emergence of religious fundamentalism. That, perhaps, suggests several tensions that this great deal of history of the past two decades has generated. American culture may have become internationally dominant but the US itself has been internationalized; America may be the sole remaining superpower, but it is a superpower that seems haunted by fear—fear, among other things, of its own possible impotence and potential decline. In the global marketplace, it may well be America that is now the biggest item on sale; in a postcolonial world, it equally well may be that the imagination has now been colonized by the US. But the US itself has become what Ishmael Reed has called “the first universal nation”(55), and some of our sense of what it means now to be an American can be telegraphed in a series of numbers and names that have become almost iconic and suggest the very opposite of triumphalism: 9/11, the “war on terror,” Al Quaeda, Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay.“The world is here”(56), Reed declared in “America: The Multinational Society”(1988), an essay published, in book form, in the year American Literary History first appeared. And the world is here, in the US, for two seminal reasons. The first is that particular