Circular groups, planar groups, and the Euler class

We study groups of C^1 orientation-preserving homeomorphisms of the plane, and pursue analogies between such groups and circularly-orderable groups. We show that every such group with a bounded orbit is circularly-orderable, and show that certain generalized braid groups are circularly-orderable. We also show that the Euler class of C^infty diffeomorphisms of the plane is an unbounded class, and that any closed surface group of genus >1 admits a C^infty action with arbitrary Euler class. On the other hand, we show that Z oplus Z actions satisfy a homological rigidity property: every orientation-preserving C^1 action of Z oplus Z on the plane has trivial Euler class. This gives the complete homological classification of surface group actions on R^2 in every degree of smoothness.