The lines above constitute the chorus of a jaunty one-step which, its publishers hoped, would lure visitors to the St. Paul Winter Carnival of 1917. This civic celebration, first held in Minnesota's capitol city for the first twelve days of February, 1886, is still held and continues to incorporate a round of activities including parades, oratory, winter sports, mock royalty, balls and constructions of ice sculptures. Since the Carnival's inception, a variety of materials—running the gamut from promotional sheet music, programs, postcards and buttons to relics from previous carnivals—have been issued and collected to boost and commemorate the city of the Winter Carnival.

Stuckey's is almost defunct. Even the Stuckey's next door to the home office in Eastman, Georgia, is closed on Sunday. Ever since the railroad bought the chain as a tax write-off, burnt down Stuckey's haven't been replaced, and few new Stuckey's have been built. The pecan rolls at the remaining stores were made, not by Stuckey's but were, rather, bought, mass-produced, from some nameless factory. And today, it is rare to see a roof bearing the admonition to “See Seven States from Rock City.” The three-foot letters on the barn roofs which still bear the familiar advertisement are faded and the words no longer dominate the countryside. Today, the message, extended only to literate birds, is private rather than public—new invitations to Lookout Mountain's Rock City are painted on birdhouse roofs, and the bird houses are sold to grace the back yards of nostalgia souvenir seekers. Even without Stuckey's and Rock City barns, the South ain't dead for tourists; rather, it's a New South—a South to which the travelling nation looks for the finest American virtues.

No matter what karl malden says in the American Express ads, it is a camera, not a charge card, that most tourists don't want to leave home without. The camera has become the definitive symbol of tourism (Figure 1). To be a tourist without taking pictures is somehow a violation of the rules; as Paul Fussell has noted, the only people who don't bring cameras on trips are those who are playing at being “antitourists,” ostentatiously flaunting their supposed freedom from being “mere” tourists.

On May 24, 1983 Americans celebrated the Centennial of the Brooklyn Bridge's opening. On that day in New York City over two million people joined in the Rededication Day activities; millions more watched the fireworks display on television. During the months preceding Rededication Day, numerous magazines had featured articles on the Bridge; Ken Burns' award-winning documentary was broadcast on PBS; New York City museums opened exhibitions on the Bridge; the New York Academy of Sciences held a Bridge symposium; new artistic works with the Bridge as their subject were created; and a collection of Centennial souvenirs was produced. Rededication Day itself marked only the beginning of six months of Bridge-related activities. During 1983, the Brooklyn Bridge was as much “in the air” as it was in the East River. This kind of interest and affection can be described in terms applied to similar phenomena: Brooklyn Bridgephilia; Brooklyn Bridge Fever; Brooklyn Bridgemania.

In the spring of 1984 the State of Minnesota, with all the hoopla appropriate to such perilous undertakings, launched a brand new “Explore Minnesota” promotion, a media package of glossy magazine ads, films, television commercials and zippy jingles designed to send the Winnebagos and the Air-Streams and the family Fords of America coursing northward, in a mass migration to the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Those lakes were, of course, the major selling point of the campaign, and no aging starlet has ever been photographed more becomingly, under the kind, roseate glow of perpetual sunsets, with graceful loons (the State Bird) woo-hooing plaintively in the middle distance. Or, alternatively, the waters were alive with big, succulent walleye (the State Fish), seemingly bent upon leaping directly into the creels of out-of state anglers. Between these variant versions of aqueous bliss in Hiawathaland were sandwiched quick glimpses of a stage or a museum—tantalizing allusions, it would seem, to the high-cultural cachet of metropolitan Minneapolis and St. Paul. The marketability of Minnesota, then, hinged on its peculiar ability to mediate between two polar opposites: culture and refinement, on the one hand, and, on the other, the utter absence thereof—an unspoiled, untramelled wilderness, the last frontier.

Collecting souvenirs, an impulse nearly as universal as travel it-self, has spawned industries in tourist spots throughout the United States and most other nations of the world. Tourists purchase souvenirs both as commemorative artifacts, that at some future time will call to mind the experiences of the vacation and of the city visited, and as communicative artifacts. T-shirts, coffee mugs and bumper stickers proclaim, “this is where I've been” or “this is where I live” or “this is where my friends vacationed.” Some tourist spots lend themselves to this communicative function more easily than do others. Cities like San Francisco, for example, are highly imageable cities; they have a bridge or building or monument that serves as a symbol of the city consistent with the experience of visitors and residents alike.1 Minneapolis, however, lacks this kind of symbolic artifact. While any Twin Cities' resident, most Minnesotans, and many avid fans of The Mary Tyler Moore Show will recognize the Minneapolis skyline, particularly the prominent IDS building, this same site shown to a New Yorker or Californian who has never visited the area, will fail to serve as an identifiable landmark. Lacking such a symbol, creators of Minneapolis souvenirs have had to find images that represent the city and that are consistent with the sense of the place that tourists and residents experience.

In 1540, a spanish expedition led by Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado ventured out of Mexico into what is now the American Southwest in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola and the mythical Kingdom of Quivira. The Coronado expedition wandered for two years through present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and perhaps as far as Oklahoma and Kansas in search of the elusive cities of gold before returning to Mexico, bitter and disappointed. The Spanish conquistadores had set out to find the fabled treasures of Cibola, where, it was rumored, the houses were studded with jewels and the streets were paved with gold. They found instead the source of the inflated legend-the terraced mud pueblos of the Zuñi Indians. The earlier scout, Fray Marcos, had seen them from a distant hillside glittering in the sun, and his vision had been embellished by tales of riches told by the Indians he encountered en route. Finding mud instead of gold, Coronado and his expedition became seduced by tales of yet another land to the east called Quivira, whose riches were beyond imagination and where gold and silver were as common as prairie dust. The quest for the phantom gold of Quivira led Coronado east across the Rio Grande valley and perhaps as far north as present-day Kansas. He had imagined treasures to surpass even those of the Incas in Peru. What he found was another patch of dusty Indian villages, this time made of straw instead of mud. In 1542, the Coronado venture was considered by its Spanish promoters to have been a costly and somewhat embarrassing failure.

When henry thoreau published Walden in 1854, the title page was illustrated with an engraving of the modest dwelling he had built by the pond. (See Figure 1.) While the cabin seems unexceptional, it was an appropriate focal point for the book, a visible emblem of the independent, self-determined life he had made for himself and which he advocated for every American. Recognizing that the built environment expresses fundamental personal, social, and economic values, Thoreau saw that Americans in particular needed to build with a deliberation commensurate to the larger endeavor of defining their personal and national identities. Thoreau was not alone in his interest in developing a national architectural ideal; he wrote at the height of a period during which, as Gwendolyn Wright has put it, “The task of defining the American home was a national mission.” For Thoreau, the cardinal principle of housing-the first demand he made of America in its domestic architecture — was that living space must create or preserve the freedom and independence of the individual. This is the principle upon which all of his comments on housing and architecture are based and the criterion by which any particular architectural model is judged.

The family of man was an important cultural event of the 1950s. This great photographic exhibition, which drew record crowds at the Museum of Modern Art and attracted over 9,000,000 people on its sixyear, world-wide tour, was the work of Edward Steichen, who saw the opportunity for a retrospective on the history of photography as well as a comment on the perils of modern-day society. The exhibition took on a life of its own. It surpassed in popularity even the optimistic prediction of Steichen and defied the bland skepticism of other departments within the Museum. Museum workers received their first bonus because of its success. Popular magazines and newspapers from all over the world saw in the exhibition a penetratingly simple statement about the first decade of the nuclear age, and millions of people became acquainted with a photographic language to which they had not been exposed before.

In 1937, Erskine Caldwell, the noted Southern author of Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, and Margaret Bourke-White, the famous photographer for Fortune and Life magazines, published You Have Seen Their Faces. The documentary was a devastating broadside on Southern delinquencies. Right from the opening paragraph, Caldwell began painting an image of the South as a benighted region.

The concept of modernization has its roots deep in nineteenth-century German sociology, reaching back to Toennies' distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, to Weber's discussion of the process of increasing rationalization in society, and to Durkheim's contrast between organic and mechanical solidarity in different communities. One of the best descriptions of the two kinds of society envisaged by this idea of modernization has been given by the American anthropologist Robert Redfield:

One may conceive of a society, the Gemeinschaft, characterized by absolute unity derived from the intimate contacts of communal personal association and participation in common values. Here the will of the individual is spontaneous and affective. On the other hand, one may conceive of a society, the Gesellschaft, in which unity is highly individualizing and differentiating.

“O My Bergson, you are a magician,” wrote William James shortly after he had finished reading L'evolution Creatrice (1907), “and your book is a marvel.” He continued to praise the book in the letter, finding it a “pure classic in point of form,” its persistent “flavor of euphony” oddly reminding him of the “aftertaste” of Madame Bovary. If he was not in the “mood” to make any definite comment about the content of the book, James vaguely recognized certain coincident features between his “pragmatism” and what had already come to be called “Bergsonism”; and this shock of recognition was personally gratifying. (Indeed, in this respect, James was rather backward, for Bergson had read and been influenced by James' work long before the American had fully grasped the relevance of Bergson's thought to his own.) James felt they were “fighting the same fight” against what he called in the letter the great “beast,” “Intellectualism,” but which Bergson would have variously described as a pernicious Spencerian mechanism or the stubborn and habitual claims of a Platonic idealism. In any event, in James' mind, it was the much younger French philosopher who had delivered the “death wound,” and James was personally content to serve modestly “in the ranks” behind such an exquisite “commander.”

Few observers in the late summer of 1974 expected that Gerald Ford would pardon Richard Nixon, and none predicted that the action would occur as swiftly and enigmatically as it did. Yet on Sunday morning, September 8, the new Chief Executive issued “a full, free and absolute pardon” to the man he had succeeded in office less than one month before. No other act of the President's brief term would prove so singular or controversial. And few executive actions in modern times have remained more persistently elusive and unfathomable.