Kingsley Bolton is Professor of English at City University of Hong Kong.Jan Olsson is Professor of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University.

• Introduction: The American Century—and now what?, Kingsley Bolton and Jan Olsson:Part I. Cinema and Americanization1. Italian Marionettes Meet Cinematic Modernity, an Olsson2. Red-Blooded America in the Early Feature Film, Joel Frykholm3. Song of the Sonic Body: Noise, the Audience, and Early American Moving Picture Culture, Meredith Ward4. Constructing the American Vernacular: The Media and Language Change, Kingsley Bolton,Part II. Americans at the Margins5. You Only Love Once: Repetitions of Crime as Desire in the Films of Sylvia Sidney, 1930–1937, Esther Sonnet6. Punks! Topicality and the 1950s Gangster Bio-Pic Cycle, Peter Stanfield7. Civil Rights on the Screen, Michael RenovPart III. American Dreams/AmericanNightmares8. Sun Yu and the Early Americanization of Chinese Cinema, Corrado Neri9. Amérique, A-mei-li-ga and métissage: Looking for America in Martinique, Gold Mountain, and the Cuban-Chinese Restaurant, Gregory Lee10. Importing Evil: The American Gangster, Swedish Cinema, and Anti-American Propaganda, Ann-Kristin WallengrenPart IV America Goes Digital11. Goodbye Rabbit Ears: Visualizing and mapping the U.S. Digital TV Transition, Lisa Parks12. Archival Transitions and Digital Propositions, Pelle Snickars13. Are Americans Human?, Evelyn Ch'ienAfterword: Rethinking American Studies, William Uricchio