In the twenty years since Perry Miller's death there have been many new beginnings in the field he inspired. We have witnessed an impressive recovery of the Puritans' gift for metaphoric adventure, and a number of town and family studies have given us a fuller sense of Puritan life “from the bottom up.” More recently, there have appeared some sensitive explorations of “lay piety,” and of the expressive significance of artifacts, shaped space, dress, gravestones, and the like — “evidence as powerful as any sermon of the deeper values that existed in tension at the core of seventeenth-century New England culture.” Yet despite these advances and the many spirited revisions of Miller's own views on more traditional issues in intellectual history such as the precise nature of “non-separating congregationalism,” the validity of “declension” as a way of describing generational change, and the importance of Ramistic rationalism to Puritan thought, a suspicion is in the air that we may be stalled.

A conservative Republican presidential candidate committed to the “free market,” a “landslide” victory, the election of many “conservative” Democrats who had strong reservations about organized labour and a willingness to increase defence at the expense of all other federal spending: all suggested that confrontation with unions in both public and private sectors was a real possibility in 1981. A strike in the public sector there certainly was, and it was full of ironies. The union concerned was the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization [PATCO] which, under the abrasive leadership of Robert Poli, had endorsed the Reagan candidacy, offended the AFL–CIO leadership, waged its strike with little union help, and was crushed, to judge by the opinion polls, amidst considerable popular acclaim. Ronald Reagan capped a very successful seven months, spent pushing Congress into rewriting U.S. taxing and spending priorities, by sacking thousands of federal employees all over the U.S.A.

Professor Erik Erikson was more than justified in 1950 when he asserted that the work he produced on childhood and society was one concerning historicprocesses. He began by documenting certain childhood experiences which he took to be universal, and he continued by urging upon his readers speculative extrapolations that might be seen to apply to society as a whole. Erikson suggested that human beings progressed normally through a chronology of eight ages, the first of which, experienced by infants, involved a psychological dichotomy reflecting the infant's feelings of what he called “basic trust vs. basic mistrust” of the exterior world. Essentially, this early experience, as described by Erikson, was one of tension between a sense of cogency, continuity, and sustenance in the outside world, and an opposite sense that the outer world was unfaithful in its appearances and liable to aberrations in the expected order of things. This antithetical reality, he supposed, was replayed in the wider social institutions of adult life. Experiences of a positive cast, such as basic trust, were so elemental and psychologically crucial that they “bore a special relation to one of the basic elements of society,” and were, thus, re-lived by individuals through the vehicle of some contemporary institution. The past essential crisis, consequently, was eternally present, and historical developments in institutions, to a certain extent, were replays of elemental childhood experiences.

Woody Guthrie managed to capture much of Depression America in his songs. In “This Land Is Your Land” of 1940, he reflected the leftist sentiments of many thirties Americans. Singing that it was the blank side of a “Private Property” sign that “was wrote for you and me,” Guthrie echoed the conclusion that others had reached in the preceding decade — America belongs to the working masses rather than to a few wealthy owners. For all his insight, however, Guthrie missed part of the Depression experience when he set his “Private Property” sign beside a “lonesome highway.” Rather than deserted places, the nation's roadways were virtually teeming with dispossessed people. Millions of foreclosed farmers, evicted renters and unemployed workers crowded the thoroughfares, desperately searching for new lives. Despite what Woody Guthrie had to say, America's Depression highways were far from lonesome.

A certain number of those folks jamming the nation's highways were not homeless drifters. They were instead more like author Erskine Caldwell. Soon after the 1932 publication of his novel, Tobacco Road, Caldwell had taken to travelling. He continued on the road until one day in 1940 when he pulled his car into a Missouri gas station. As had been his habit for the past years, he asked the attendant not for gas or oil, but for an analysis of the state of the nation. The attendant knew Caldwell's type. For years writers had been stopping and asking him “all sorts of fool questions” without purchasing anything. Well prepared, he silently handed Caldwell a neatly printed card describing his life and thoughts, ridiculing with its detail the questions writers asked him.

If you kill for money you're a mercenary. If you kill for pleasure you're a sadist. If you kill for both you're a Green Beret. (Sign at a Special Forces Camp, Me Phuc Tay, Vietnam.) On 11 March 1983, at a provincial court at Nakhon Phanon in Thailand, Lieutenant-Colonel James Gritz, an ex-Green Beret and highly decorated Vietnam veteran, received a suspended one-year prison sentence for the illegal possession of a sophisticated radio transmitter. Gritz had been using the radio, in connection with a series of secret raids into Laos he had organized to search for some of the 2,500 American servicemen still unaccounted for at the end of the Vietnam War. Though Gritz found no trace, persistent rumour has it that some are still alive, held captive in communist prison camps in Laos, Kampuchea, and Vietnam.

The town of Concord, Massachusetts, is widely celebrated in American culture as a pastoral place. It was the home of the Minutemen, the “embattled farmers” who fought the Redcoats at the Old North Bridge and launched the War for Independence. More than a half-century later, it became the bucolic center of the American Renaissance, where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau waged their own revolutions of the spirit. In these terms, Concord readily plays its part within the longstanding American opposition between country and city, serving as the timeless small town, the symbolic guardian of that rural simplicity and love of liberty so regularly invoked in times of crisis to recall a complex urban-industrial nation to its roots. Even today, when the town numbers some 16,000 people, Concordians like to picture their community as a “climate for freedom.”

How are we to situate a movie in history? By now there must be few practitioners of American Studies who would not acknowledge that the products of Hollywood provide a rich seam waiting to be mined by social and cultural historians. As in most mining projects, the difficulty lies in developing the equipment needed to extract the ore. To treat film as a source of cultural history is by no means as simple as that old-fashioned literary approach by which an author's biography could be interwoven with a summary political or social history. The cinema has no author whose individuality can be used to gloss over the absence of method in such a procedure. Or rather, any movie has such a plethora of authors that the attempt to establish evidence of authorial intent is bound to fail, as auteurist criticism has repeatedly demonstrated. The “authors” of an entertainment commodity are not simply its director, writer, producer and studio head of production. They include front office personnel, New York executives and the advertising staff, distributors and theatre managers who “author” the product at the point of its sale to the public. In any case, the historian concerned with popular rather than elite culture is at least as interested in reception as in production, and his or her sphere of interest must extend beyond the limits of the text and its intended meaning to a concern with context and with how the movie was received and understood by its primary audience.

Interest in the historical phenomenon of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American black nationalism has been inspired by the revival of nationalist modes of thought among blacks since the 1950s. Because the placing of post-Second World War Pan-Africanism or the American Black Power movement within a historical context has been seen as an urgent task, the search for a coherent tradition has carried with it the danger of distortions in the historical treatment of the earlier movements. “Traditional” nineteenth-century black nationalism was essentially a conservative movement advocating racial self-improvement through the “civilizing” influence of Anglo-Saxon values, particularly Christianity. Taking black nationalism to mean the assertion of group identity for political purposes (which need not be separatist), its nature clearly changed during the period 1914–1929 as the nature of the American black community changed. For the first time in American history there existed a sizeable number of black intellectuals and a literate audience for them; the rapid growth in the number of black newspapers and magazines reflected these facts. These intellectuals were responsive to new ideas like socialism, yet the transformation of black nationalist thought during this period did not constitute a complete break with the past. This essay attempts to illustrate continuities with the nineteenth century along with those elements of radicalism that presaged modern black nationalism.

Two discontinuities between modern and “traditional” black nationalism constitute essential reference points for the analysis of black nationalist thought during this period. The first relates to who is perceived as being the principal agent or vanguard of the nationalist movement.

The Marble Faun's plot is alleged to be “Gothic” and impenetrable, its topography and history “guide-book,” its author external to his subject, too foreign (that is, American), too old (fifty-five), tired and ill to have had anything but a tourist's or artists' colony view of the Roman and Tuscan setting. Anyway, this charge runs, Hawthorne wrote Romances, fictions distanced from actuality and history, not outward-referring novels anchored in a context of exterior realities.

In fact Hawthorne sets the action of his Roman novel in a complex field of Italian history, past and present. There is not only an evocation of the pre-classical and imperial history of Rome and its Christian, Medieval and Renaissance periods; the status of the Papally-dominated, Frenchgarrisoned city is carefully delineated. Hawthorne mobilises not only the panoramic history which has been sensed but insufficiently discriminated but also the contemporaneous politics of the Roman, and Tuscan, states. Nor is the novel set in no particular time, but in fact on a very precise time-scale, and it may even be datable, from Monday, 5 April 1858, to Thursday, 3 March 1859 (see the Appendix at the end of this essay, pp. 403–4). The Marble Faun's contemporaneity remains unacknowledged.

When Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past was released in November 1947 it was seen by the trade press as an efficient example of an RLO medium-budget thriller. The Hollywood Reporter called it “action-packed and suspenseful” and “solidly entertaining,” suggesting “a profitable box office pay-off.” Film Daily headlined the film's “strong box office possibilities”. Yet, even allowing for this moderate enthusiasm, Variety was surprised to find Out of the Past placed as high as seventh in the listing of the top ten money-making films in the United States for the month of December. This set it just below such films as Hope and Crosby's Road to Rio and the John Garfield boxing movie directed by Robert Rossen, Body and Soul.

There is no need to compile a list of past criticism to make the case that The Blithedale Romance is a fiction which has given rise to a remarkable number of interpretations and evaluations (even if judged by the strikingly high standards set by over a century of Hawthorne criticism). The text's concern with fluidity and its questionings of authoritative explanation have not made it any easier for a critical consensus to emerge.

The Blithedale Romance, I am going to suggest, may usefully be approached by looking at the ways it foregrounds the question of the difficulties of description and the (inevitably) related problems of interpretation — by beginning from the juxtaposition of two names (Coverdale and Fauntleroy) and a recognition of what those names so contrastingly and problematically signify: translation and forgery. Among the dictionary definitions given for “to translate” are: to interpret, to explain, to change, to transform. Among those for “ to forge ” are: to pretend something to have happened, to make something in fraudulent imitation of something else, to make or devise something spurious.

On 17 February 1777 John Wilkes, the controversial politician, pamphleteer, and propagandist, rose to address the House of Commons. Wilkes, renowned for his opposition to King George III and his followers, was equally regarded by Americans as a long-standing champion of their colonial rights. And it was in both of these contexts that he marshaled his oratorical skills on this occasion. The specific target of his speech was the third reading of a bill, proposed by Lord North's government, which would suspend the habeas corpus act through the remainder of the year for persons accused of high treason for actions within the American colonies, or on the high seas, or for alleged acts of piracy. Wilkes began by declaring emphatically: “I cannot continue silent while so important a Bill is pending before this house.” He then attacked the proposed act as “tyrannical, arbitrary, ambiguous, unconstitutional,” and forecast that it would lead to expansion of the American war that had been raging for almost two years. Wilkes illustrated the oppressive, unwarrantable and alienating effects of the proposed act on Americans by citing the case of a young colonial named Ebenezer Smith Platt, then confined in London's infamous Newgate prison.

The fifth section of William Carlos Williams's Collected Earlier Poems (1951) bears the title “Della Primavera Transportata Al Morale”; this is also the title of the first poem within that section. A close look, however, reveals a slight discrepancy: “Transportata” at the head of the section is spelt “Trasportata” in the poem title on the page following. A mistake perhaps. And yet, if it is a mistake, it is certainly persistent. On the Contents page at the beginning of the volume the word is also shown as “Trasportata”. Thus of three appearances in the book, the word occurs first without an “n”, becomes “Transportata” in the sectional heading, only to contract again in the poem title to “Trasportata”: the “n” seems to ghost through the text as a flickering shape poised between presence and absence. There is insufficient evidence to decide whether this is deliberate or accidental, or even – if it is accidental – whether the anomaly began with Williams or with his printer, but the history of the poem holds so many parallel variations that it is difficult to doubt that Williams enjoyed the anomaly and wanted to preserve it.