By the end of the seventeenth century, the beginnings of the new world were already history. They found their historian in Cotton Mather, one of the original settlers' most prominent descendants. Mather is an important source for our understanding of that early period, but for a long time his principal role has been that of the ugly Puritan. He was, as a third-generation Mather and a representative of the Puritan establishment at the end of the seventeenth century, an irritation and an annoyance to his contemporaries. Posterity has gathered together all its charges against Puritans in general and heaped them on his head. Mather seems in fact to have been well qualified for the scapegoat's role: ambitious and sensitive, vain and extraordinarily diligent, greatly learned and fond of showing it, all the while acutely conscious of his reputation and eager for the admiration of his contemporaries. All these traits have been so many points of attack for his critics and despisers.

The idea that America constituted anew world that fulfilled both the divine and the natural design has been the subject of numerous studies, including the classics Virgin Land by Henry Nash Smith and The American Adam by R. W. B. Lewis. I start from these but go back instead of forward: back, or down, in that my concern with the astonishing imaginative feat that translated a new country's rise into the discovery of a new world lies in the underlying form of this vision rather than in its particular features. With the interior of the landscape already well mapped, I would like to walk its perimeter.

In september 1753 the American botanist John Bartram set out with his young son Billy from their farm on the banks of the Schuylkill for the Catskill Mountains for the purpose of gathering seeds and plant samples. The journey ended at the Hudson Valley home of Cadwallader Colden, surveyor-general of New York and himself a botanist of note, where the Bartrams made the acquaintance of yet another botanist, Alexander Garden of Charleston, South Carolina. The elder Bartram encouraged Garden to open correspondence with Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist to whom Bartram had been writing for years, correspondence that gives particular point to this triangular meeting on the banks of the Hudson. For the Bartrams' journey and their visit with the other two botanists may be said to epitomize the scientific Enlightenment in colonial America, an intellectual voluntarism that had as its political counterpart a formal gathering of regional representatives in nearby Albany the year following. That convention, necessitated by the hostilities soon to erupt as the French and Indian War, produced a prototype of the Constitution, and the impromptu congress that met at “Coldenhamia” in 1753, though animated by pacific purposes, was likewise a manifestation of federated and protonational design.

If students of American Studies have seen fit to mention the stereograph at all in their discussions of the Victorian era, they have tended to treat it as a toy, intent on images of another sort or on data more arcane than the parlor images so popular in the last five decades of the nineteenth century. But the production and sales figures for stereographs, the frequent advertisements for them, and the discussions about them throughout the second half of the century in such photographic journals as The Philadelphia Photographer and in cultural organs ranging from Scientific American to the Atlantic Monthly to Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper suggest that they were more than a fad. Hermann Vogel, the internationally respected German professor of photochemistry and teacher of Alfred Stieglitz, echoed one merchandiser's slogan when he declared in 1883, “I think there is no parlor in America where there is not a stereoscope.” Students of American culture should carefully consider Vogel's remark; especially in view of its unusual distinction as both an image and an artifact, the stereograph functions as a valuable tool for illuminating and evaluating the tastes of a large cross-section of our population during and after the Civil War.

In february 1927, Thomas Hart Benton visited Borger, Texas. In 1928 Benton painted Boomtoum (oil on canvas, 45 by 54 inches. Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester; Marion Stratton Gould Fund) from sketches made in Borger. Boomtown was, by the artist's retrospective admission, a milestone in his career; he called it “one of my best paintings” and “one of my best-known ‘Regionalist’ pictures.”

The relationship of any single work of art to its culture is always problematic. As the act of an individual artist faced with the task of creating something on the two-dimensional surface of a canvas with line, shape, and space, with form and color, a painting belongs to the biography of the artist and to the history and criticism of art, a possible subdivision of which is the history and criticism of the art of a particular culture. Cultural critics and historians of a more comprehensive sort will examine a work for the ways in which it “reflects,” “illustrates,” or “expresses” shared experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the culture, directly or in some mediated fashion. If art historians tend at times to underestimate the interrelation between a painting and other forms of cultural expression in their preoccupation with the specialness of the medium, its tradition and methodology, the cultural critics often run the risk of ignoring or flattening out the special language of pictorial expression in their avid search for interconnections. At one extreme, they seem to posit some hypostatized notion of a “culture” in which individual acts seem almost to be assumed as automatic illustrations rather than formative shapes. To fashion a more adequate critical approach requires thus that we draw upon the strengths of both approaches while avoiding their pitfalls.

Emily Dickinson once said that her way of looking at things was “New Englandly.” The expression has often provided her readers and critics with both a wedge into her sometimes gnomic poems and a check against their occasional temptations to fly off into interpretative fancy. What seeing “New Englandly” entailed, however, was never explained by the poet. For most readers it has come to mean in the broadest sense that her work should be interpreted in the context of and as part of New England's intellectual, religious, and literary history. But Ne England also has a social and cultural history, and it is of course only logical that Emily Dickinson should have her own place in that history, albeit an original one.

Walking in the city is as old as cities themselves. Most of the world's urban inhabitants have usually gotten around on foot and, consequently, have mainly experienced their cities as pedestrians. What Constantinos Doxiadis notes of classical Greek cities has been true of most urban life until well into the industrial era: “Man was compelled to walk through a whole complex of buildings and live within them in order to achieve his end.” This end has traditionally included not merely physical mobility but also social and cultural goals; as one urban historian recently observed, traditional streets “tend to act both literally and metaphorically as exterior rooms in the city. They function as places as well as links.” The street is, as sociologist Robert Gutman suggests, “a social, a political, and a psychological fact. … No matter what the image of the street, it has always included a set of assumptions about who should own and control it, who would live on it and use it, the purposes for which it was built, and the activities appropriate to it.” Walking in the city has thus been from the start a complex human act, no less so in American cities than elsewhere.

The image of the frivolous playboy clings to F. Scott Fitzgerald's reputation like a barnacle on a ship. He helped build the image himself, of course, but ita's a false one, or partially false at any rate. Most of the time Fitzgerald was a serious, committed artist. Yet people persist in thinking of him as an artist in spite of himself, a Pooh Bear of remarkable talent but lamentably little brain.

Force of evil was the first film Abraham Polonsky directed, and it is not without structural flaws. It is, however, a rare work of art in that it is poetical, popular, and political at the same time. Unlike other political art in which the balance between message and aesthetic form is usually uneven and the difficulties the artist had in creating an imaginative framework around his or her statement can be felt throughout, Force of Evil shows no seams. Although revealing the corruption of the capitalist system, the information it gives cannot be subtracted from its fictional, emotional impact, and although its effect on the viewer is agitational, there is no proposition for practical action.

The Child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, American Jewish ethnicity grew from a complex synthesis of Jewish immigrant and American urban life. As the historian Timothy Smith observes, “That this nation's ethnic groups, viewed structurally, were made in America by voluntary association of newcomers has long been evident.” Yet nineteenth-century German Jewish immigrants to the United States, who pioneered in developing ethnic Jewish fraternal associations, elaborated a religious definition of Jewish group identity. American Jewish ethnicity as an ideology and social reality defining Jewish group life in the United States emerged in the years preceding World War II, when a native-born generation of Jews came of age. These second-generation Jews were descendants of the massive Eastern European immigration of 1880–1920, which peaked in 1906. Seeking to become fully American, second-generation Jews climbed out of lower-class jobs and poor immigrant neighborhoods. Norman Podhoretz, who moved from a lower-class section of New York City to an upper-middle-class one, writes that “one of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan — or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan.”

In recent years American scholars have made significant progress in rethinking the history of the United States after the Civil War. Although much of their effort has come to a focus on Reconstruction, new questions and new techniques of historical analysis have combined to revitalize examination of the era as a whole. Yet-certain specialized studies notwithstanding – relatively little has been done to reconceive the intellectual history of the period. In part, this situation probably reflects the disappointing character of most of postbellum thought, which boasts few such luminaries as the era of the American Revolution or that of the so-called American Renaissance. In part, it may also reflect the fact that study of the period revived at a time when intellectual history no longer seemed to represent the cutting edge of historical inquiry. In any case, the opinions and beliefs of late Victorian America have remained a stepchild of historical research while their adopted family has flourished.