Today few people read the works of E. Z. C. Judson, better known as “Ned Buntline”; at least one might have made that claim with confidence before the recent reprinting of his Adventures of Buffalo Bill (1870). He is now remembered as an early practitioner of Western scouting tales, the first promoter of “Buffalo Bill,” before William Cody jettisoned him as a liability, and as the inventor of long-barrelled six-guns, the “Buntline Specials.”

On June 21, 1901, Samuel and Olivia Clemens and their daughter Jean ensconced themselves for the summer at Kane Camp, a “little bijou of a dwelling-house,” Clemens called it, on the south end of Ampersand Bay on Lower Saranac Lake in upstate New York. The family nicknamed the cottage The Lair. “Everyone knows what a lair is,” Clemens said; “lairs do generally contain dangerous animals, but I bring tame ones to this one.” As we shall see, danger did lurk in The Lair that summer, in the thought and writing of Clemens himself.

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 her recollections of the 1930s, Louise Tanner helped to create an image that has stayed with us despite a number of studies that should have dissolved it by now. Thirties movies were, she insisted,

a flop as a source of Communist propaganda. Some studios – notably Warner brothers – tried to bring Father to grips with social reality. But most of the cinemoguls agreed with Louis B. Mayer that Dad got all the social significance he needed at home. The script writers of Hollywood might take the Spanish Civil War to heart but they were more concerned with a public that preferred Carole Lombard doing secretarial work in a penthouse with a white telephone. Father sitting there in the dark forgot his own plight as he watched the gods and goddesses of the screen sweeping down staircases into dining rooms with a footman behind every chair. Depression movies portrayed an America devoid of economic conflict.

The November 10, 1975, episode of “Maude” was a brilliant presentation. Bea Arthur, the star, offered a tour-de-force performance, a one-woman show, a monologue in which she revealed to her psychiatrist her deepest fears, her most profound sense of self, of personal loss, and the search for personal meaning. The psychiatrist was present; we saw the back of his nodding head, an occasional movement of his hand scratching notes on a pad. He grunted at times. Arthur moved about a large ornate set. The office was decorated in high Victorian style with drooping plants, mirrors, heavy carved furniture, oriental rugs, and the psychiatrist's high-backed chair. This decor lent depth and richness to the scene, providing contrast to the single performance, the single moving actor.

Clifford Geertz has observed that “anthropology is a science whose progress is marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate. What gets better is the precision with which we vex each other.” Geertz's observation on anthropology seems equally applicable to other disciplines interested in the study of culture, including history and American Studies. With this in mind, this essay is intended to contribute not to some “perfection of consensus” but, rather, to a “refinement of debate” by sharpening the ability of those in culture studies to vex each other more precisely. My focus of attention, as well as my major point of departure, is Clifford Geertz's Interpretation of Cultures, a book that is widely cited and that has had significant cross-disciplinary appeal.

In his trenchant essay, on “Géricault and ‘Masculinity’,’ Norman Bryson writes, “In the linkage between the male subject, the male image, and the social hierarchy, one of the key components of the political order of patriarchy may, perhaps, be found.” Bryson understands the male image implies terms of power and presentation in culture, and in American culture no less than any other. Of course, the male image is most often armed, protected, and placed on a pedestal, literally or figuratively. Yet there is need to reckon with man's image. To analyze the representation of the male in American visual culture is not necessarily to repudiate existing heroes and to enjoin any virtues of a gender. On the contrary, we may discover an old friend in a new cognizance.

The early years of the twentieth century saw the sudden flowering of a specialized form of juvenile literature, the serial novels written for and about adolescent girls. From 1900 to 1917, literally dozens of new series emerged to chronicle the adventures of teenage heroines at school, at play, at work, and in what was invariably called “The Great Outdoors.” Although they are not as well remembered as the contemporaneous sagas of boy idols like Frank Merriwell, Tom Swift, or the Rover Boys, the many-volumed adventures of Dorothy Dale, Billie Bradley, Ruth Fielding, Polly Pendleton, Aunt Jane's Nieces, and other all-American heroines that began to appear in the decades before World War I provide a fascinating record of the diverse interests and often contradictory attitudes and expectations attributed to the first generation of twentieth-century American women.

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.

This essay represents an effort to understand how members of the middle class adjusted to the emergent urban-industrial order in the nineteenth century. In particular, I wish to inquire into what changes in social behavior, in emotional regulation, ultimately in identity this order entailed. I shall pursue these issues through the study of what may at first appear an unlikely source: the multitude of American etiquette manuals published between 1830 and 1910. Such materials can substantially enlarge our understanding of how behavior and identity were shaped and the cultural and social orders adjusted and maintained, as middle-class Americans encountered the momentous changes of a new urban-industrial society. This essay will concentrate on urban experience because here the problems of adjustment were most intense; but I would argue that as the process of capitalist development and modernization advanced, the styles of life and modes of consciousness first developed in cities came to a large extent to dominate the nation as a whole.

In 1837, two years before the nation began its exuberant love affair with daguerreotype portraits, Nathaniel Hawthorne made a prophetic observation about Americans' problematic obsession with “true” likenesses. In his story, “The Prophetic Pictures,” an unnamed, colonial Boston portrait painter portrayed not merely a man's features, “but his mind and heart.” The painter, as Walter Ludlow tells his fiancée Elinor, “catches the secret sentiments and passions, and throws them upon the canvas, like sunshine – or perhaps, in the portraits of dark-souled men, like a gleam of infernal fire. It is an awful gift.” Other colonists deemed the painter's gift “an offense against the Mosaic law, and even a presumptuous mockery of the Creator,” and still others considered him “a magician, or perhaps the famous Black Man, of old witch times, plotting mischief in a new guise.”

In March 1886, twenty-four-year-old Ida B. Wells wrote in her diary: “Read all day, after going home, ‘Bricks without Straw’ by Judge Tourgée. It deals with the Reconstruction era of Negro freedom and American history, and I like it somewhat. The writer is actuated by a noble purpose and tells some startling truths.” Wells was referring to Albion W. Tourgée's 1880 novel centering around a group of North Carolina freed-people, who buy land, prosper as tobacco farmers, set up a church and school, and vote for politicians sympathetic to their interests, until Ku Klux Klan terrorism and the return to power of a white-supremacist government reduce them to neoslavery. The qualifier “somewhat” may reflect Wells's disappointment with the pessimistic ending, which leaves little room for black agency after the crushing of resistance.

In 1820, Hawthorne wrote “The Gentle Boy,” the story of Ilbrahim, who, too pure and fragile to survive the cruelties of the world, dies young. “His gentle spirit … from Heaven” chastens his “fierce and vindictive” mother, teaching her true religion. Here, in one of the earliest stories of the saintly child, we see the basic pattern for hundreds of stories that were the favorite reading of nineteenth-century America—the confrontation between an innocent child and. a corrupt society, and the demonstration of the ultimate power of innocence. For the modern reader, the saintly child stories offer a valuable insight into the tastes of our recent ancestors: they enjoyed the most heavy-handed sentimentality, the crudest pathos, a sickly religiosity, and a trumped-up mysticism. And sex, though banished from these works, frequently sneaks back into the stories—albeit unconsciously—often in incestuous forms.

As the media report instances of vanished or violated selves — of bodies that disappear and identities that are stolen; of sex changes and sexually ambiguous bodies (the adulated bodies of rock stars); raped bodies and the promise or threat of replicated bodies — the happy endings of fairy tales, and the tales themselves, seem fanciful and remote, irrelevant to our times. They may enthrall a child who is not yet playing video games, but what attraction, if any, can they have for adults coping with the complexities of a technological world in which identity is linked to an unsecured alterable body? I raise the question not to argue its irrelevance (surely a pointless undertaking), but to evoke the heuristic values attributed generally to fairy tales by folklorists and cultural critics throughout the Western world. I wish to make a specific claim: fairy tales — in particular, the changeling tale — provide unexpected and timely insights into a self increasingly vulnerable to tampering, violation, and theft. These various forms of violence are subsumable under rape in its root meaning: forcible seizure. As an assault upon women, rape raises particular issues about the body and sex, sexual difference, and power. The very meanings of these terms — how they are constituted and denned — have become a matter of contention to contemporary feminists and cultural, literary, and juridical critics. Though this essay does not engage directly in their disputes, it too finds the body, sex, and power contentious terms as they figure in a forcible exchange of identities that fairy tales represent as actual and modern fiction adumbrates as rape.

Middletown, or Muncie, is one of the most studied communities in the United States. Since the initial research was begun in 1924, the community has learned to endure the probing of many investigators, and the many reports have reflected the tensions and concerns of scholars searching for clues to the American urban experience. One might well trace the course of 20th-century American studies through the Middletown experience. In a limited way, that is what this effort purports to do.

Ironically the community was chosen largely by accident, studied by a person unqualified to do so, and the results were not what the sponsoring organization had wanted. When published, however, the report titled Middletown was an immediate success; it has remained in print since first issued, and has inspired many successors.

The symbol-myth-image generation of American Studies scholars went to school to giants, and in vital respects were giants themselves. They were tutored by the likes of F. O. Matthiessen, Perry Miller, Ralph Henry Gabriel, Samuel Eliot Morison, Arthur O. Lovejoy, Howard Mumford Jones, and they went on to create such classics in the field as Virgin Land; The Savages of America; Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age; The American Adam; The Jacksonian Persuasion; The Quest for Paradise; The Machine in the Garden.

Victorian America was a society of infinite sexual complexity. It simultaneously spawned both the loose and vigorous sexuality of the frontier and the repression of Edith Wharton's New York. It elaborated a subtle and delicate world of same-sex love among women and men. It both condemned and was fascinated by male homosexuality, while refusing to define lesbianism as deviant. It supported a multitude of communal and religious attacks on the patriarchal family, from the sexual austerity of the Shakers, through the sexual pleasures of Fanny Wright's Nashoba and Oneida's communal family, to the polygamy of the Mormons. Thousands of Americans attended Victoria Woodhull's free-love rallies and sustained without much psychic disarray the shock of the Beecher-Tildon scandal. Pornography, venereal disease rates, prostitution, and widespread abortion point to a society actively engaged in the pursuit of real and fantasized sexual pleasures, both within and outside conjugal confines.

On May 17, 1792, the story goes, twenty-four stockbrokers gathered beneath a buttonwood tree on Wall Street and signed an agreement that grew into the mighty New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). This traditional account of the founding of the NYSE is largely legendary; it distorts the reality behind the meeting of stockbrokers that long-ago day in May, and claims that the Buttonwood Agreement established the exchange are without any foundation. Yet for more than a century the Buttonwood legend has endured.