Introduction: The uselessness of American intellectuals
Be free!: globalism and democratic pedagogy in Henry James and Henry Adams
World War I and the origins of the national security state: Mary Antin, Randolph Bourne, and Emma Goldman
Mary McCarthy's swizzle sticks: food, drink, and consumerism in the American depression
Herman Melville's Cold War: re-reading C. L. R. James's mariners, renegades, and castaways
Turning poetry into bread: Langston Hughes, travel-writing, and the professionalization of African-American literary production
Legacies of the new left: Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, and Angela Davis
Conclusion: Thought during wartime: American public intellectuals in the twenty-first century.