When henry nash smith defined American Studies in 1957 as “the study of American culture past and present, as a whole,” he summarized more than two decades of a wide-ranging and self-conscious critical analysis of culture in the United States and, at the same time, initiated the search for the unified or holistic “method” through which American Studies would, finally, achieve maturity as an (interdisciplinary) discipline. The 1930s were the decade when, as Warren Susman pointed out years ago, the complexity of American culture as well as the culture concept were discovered and discussed in the wider public. We think of the work of cultural anthropology, of the studies in cultural relativism by Margaret Mead or of patterns of culture by Ruth Benedict that emphasized the unity of cultures and often were written with a self-critical look at American culture in mind. What was, however, even more important was the fact that during the 1930s American culture manifested itself as a multiculture, as a culture that was characterized even more by variety, heterogeneity, tensions, and alternative traditions than by the strong drive toward national identity and consensus. Cultural anthropologists, critics, and (“documentary”) writers such as “native anthropologist” Zora Neale Hurston, Constance Rourke, or James Agee (with photographer Walker Evans, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) worked out radical new methods and strategies of cultural critique and ethnographic writing in the study of American cultures, in the plural. Thus, historian Caroline F. Ware, writing for the American Historical Association in The Cultural Approach to History, could argue in 1940 that the “total cultural approach” does by no means imply that American culture is something like an organic unity, but that “American culture” is exactly the multiplicity of regional, ethnic, and class cultures and the interactions of these cultures in terms of rhetoric as well as of power, not some “common patterns” or the Anglo-Saxon tradition the “other” groups have to “contribute” to.

“Hue is the most beautiful city in the world,” a Vietnamese woman tells Marine Lieutenant Kramer, a central character in Robert Roth's Vietnam War novel, Sand in the Wind. Published in 1973, five years after the sweeping Tet Offensive had reduced Hue to rubble, Sand in the Wind set the city within a complex meditation upon beauty and its relation to human desire, history, the vagaries of chance, ephemerality of happiness, and ineluctability of loss. Though ambitious in intent, Sand in the Wind has not been widely acclaimed. Except for John Hellmann's close reading, it has usually been referred to passingly or overlooked. Thomas Myers dismissed it as a “sterile mural,” a static work fixed upon a wall. I prefer to think of it as “walking point” — an action Myers ascribed to Vietnam War fiction he endorsed for “cutting trails” (227). Like the pointman of a patrol who clears a path for others to follow, the Vietnam War novel, Myers argued, opened a way into tangled historic territory — the territory of war now inhabited by literature. I propose to enter this forbidding area through Sand in the Wind, for I believe that like the novels Myers lauded it too secures a way, a unique way, of engaging safely with the Vietnam War and the losses it entailed.

The lives of an estimated 5,713 soldiers, American and Vietnamese, were lost in the battle at Hue, as were almost 3,000 civilian lives. That the “longest and bloodiest” battle of the Offensive took place in Hue during the festive days of Tet was particularly shocking, for Hue was commonly considered an open city, and Tet, the lunar New Year, a time of peace and renewal. Traditionally, Tet Nguyen Dan ushered in the new year with three days of festivity, days of respite during which communal bonds were strengthened. Family members and their relatives renewed the bond of blood by gathering together for an exchange of gifts and good wishes; ancestral bonds were renewed by visits to family graves. Rice farmers plowing their paddies renewed the bond between man and nature.

In one of the brief reflections Walter Benjamin composed as part of his Arcades Project, he personified the mid-19th-century domestic interior and made it and the flaneur onfidantes: “The space winks at the flaneur: What do you think may have gone on here?” (418–19). Benjamin typically filtered much of his thought through the figure of the flaneur, a recognizable urban type that emerged during the middle third of the 19th century, one who deliberately strolled the city streets and arcades and attempted to discern the meanings of what he observed. In the fullest scholarly treatment of the subject, Anke Gleber argued that the act of walking formed an essential part of the flaneur's observational process. Discussing such works as E. T. A. Hoffman's “The Cousin's Corner-Window,” however, Gleber did acknowledge a “paradoxical variant,” the stationary flaneur (13).

A golden period of African- American music and dance nourished from the mid-1890s until the First World War. Minstrelsy had been the country's leading vernacular entertainment for half a century, but it was now in decline. Its sentimentality and nostalgia appeared passé and rustic in the more sophisticated and urbanized Gilded Age. An old order was breaking up and a new, looser, freer order taking its place, one that called for a faster beat.

Most Literary analyses of slave narratives consider them either within the context of white mainstream writing or as the beginnings of a rich literary tradition. Scholars have – in part to promote racial equality – reckoned their value in relation to the interventions the narratives have performed with white textual forms and/or as extensions of the oral tradition. Whether as propaganda for abolition or an artform in their own right, the political and rhetorical power of slave narratives cannot be exaggerated – nor can the link between their popularity and their influence on the development of U.S. literature be ignored. My goal here is to open an investigation into the nature of their impact, putting the slave narratives within the context of the history of authorship and the surrounding literary marketplace.

A recent magazine article evokes the perennial mystery of human desire by asking why a movie star who “has it all” — “a perfect body, happy marriage, wealth,” and “success” — is “not yet satisfied.” Beginning with a play of words, “Why Demi Moore Wants More,” the article ends by finding the word more “elusive.” This elusive more is the subject of my essay, which links a desire for more to determinism as a doctrine of causation common to literary naturalism, behavioral psychology, modern advertising, and consumerism. Once consumption figures in a discussion of literary naturalism, at issue in this essay, the lines of argument move centrifugally in various directions to include such seemingly far-flung and unrelated matters as the Vietnam War, kleptomania, the “packaging” of American politics, women's fashion, material culture studies, fitness diets, images of burning bodies, the commodification of books, Jane Fonda's self-transformations, and indecent proposals to Demi Moore. All these matters converge at a single point of origin where a woman character, an American literary heroine, stands and looks. The consequences of this simple, ordinary act — which leads the woman to consume and be consumed — seem to me laden with literary and cultural meanings I must necessarily condense. To do so, my first tactical move will be to leap over an entire century in order to compare Theodore Dreiser's famous novel Sister Carrie, published in 1900, with a contemporary story that leaves one shaken by its brilliance and horror. I ask the reader to imagine the gap between the two texts as an ellipsis - a dot, dot, dot - filled in by decades of turbulent historical change that have redefined what an American heroine wants but not why she wants more.

Of all the great modern innovations, the railroad probably is the one to which American artists have accorded the largest significance. The passenger railroad first appeared on the American scene in the 1830s, and it almost immediately caught the eye of several of the nation's most gifted landscape painters. By the time of the Civil War the new machine already had been incorporated into the work of Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty, Asher Durand, and John Kensett. The subject attracted their attention, for one thing, because of its newness — its radically innovative character-and, for another, because of its compelling visual properties. A steam-powered locomotive moving across the landscape is an arresting sight-so arresting, indeed, that its visual character alone might seem to account for the strong hold it so quickly took on the imagination of artists. Here, after all, was an imposing, mobile, man-made contrivance, a complicated mechanism wrought of dark metal in various shifting sharp-edged geometric forms; the engine's motive power was made visible by the train of cars it pulled, the surging puffs of smoke and steam (black or white or both) that trailed behind it, and the intermittent flashes of red when its fire box was open.

One hardly thinks of Vachel Lindsay as relevant in our times. Still, once in a while, a voice makes itself heard, talking about him as a poet that matters—somehow. Allen Ginsberg, a good many years ago, pointed to Lindsay's pertinent use of sounds and, although he probably did not make enough of what they had most in common (i.e., their belonging to an emphatically American line of bardic seers and their belief in the prophetic nature of poetry), he pulled Lindsay out of the oblivion he had fallen into among practicing poets. More recently, Jerome Rothenberg, in his introduction to Revolution of the Word, deemed part of his work worth salvaging, “the intermedia work combining poetry with dance, film, hieroglyphics”; and indeed, however restrictive and at times inaccurate this description—Lindsay never “combined poetry with film,” for example, in the strictest sense of the terms—its merit is great for it takes Lindsay out of the worn rut of “evangelistic jazz” and “rhythmic preaching” he had been pushed into by critics as little apt to discern the new and fecund in him as they were eager to corner him into a reputation that served their own purposes. The fact is that Lindsay is far from resembling his by now stereotyped image, and in the following pages I would like to consider enough elements to make more manifest one or two of the most neglected or distorted aspects and purposes of his endeavor.

Lorelei Lee, the “professional lady” who narrates her own adventures in the 1925 international bestseller Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, is not a likely alter ego for an aspiring writer. Indifferent to most books and unlikely to indulge in introspection, Lorelei makes writing far less a priority than managing social invitations and sexual conquests. Accordingly, Anita Loos, the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, went to considerable lengths to distance herself from her blonde-bombshell narrator. As if to acknowledge and enforce such distance, Loos has Lorelei remark offhandedly in the opening pages of the book, “It would be strange if I turn out to be an authoress.” The novel's first edition highlights the incongruity of Lorelei's status as author, illustrating this remark with a drawing of a wide-eyed young woman clutching a pen and bending over a ruffle-skirted vanity table. She is dressed for writing in a pair of highheeled slippers, a sheer, rose-trimmed negligee, and a frilly bed cap tied under her chin. Years later, a publicity still for the musical version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes continued to emphasize the distinction by juxtaposing a seated, conservatively clad Loos with the standing figure of Carol Channing as Lorelei Lee, elaborately gowned and dripping with diamonds. As the photograph suggests, Loos carefully positioned herself in opposition to the glamour girl whose appearance has since been labeled “the most significant event in the evolution of the dumb blonde” (Everett, 254).

Near the end of Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Thomas Jefferson offers a notably ambivalent assessment of Captain John Smith: “To his efforts principally may be ascribed [the colony's] support against the opposition of natives. He was honest, sensible, and well-informed; but his style is barbarous and uncouth. His history, however, is almost the only source from which we derive any knowledge of the infancy of the state” (177). Such ambivalence registers the degree to which late 18th-century ideologies of civility and refinement mediated historical accounts of Virginia's colonial past, and it begins to suggest an overlooked context for reconsidering the cultural meaning of the Smith–Pocahontas story during this era. For the episode traditionally has been read in terms of race and “the birth of the nation” (Jenkins, 10). While influential critics of Smith have extolled his enterprising “genius” and his “doctrine of hard work and self–reliance,” revisionist critiques of Smith's version of American heroism manage only to reproduce the same interpretive categories. Indeed, to revisionists, the Pocahontas story instances an ethnocentrism endemic to colonial encounters: Smith fails to recognize the huskanaw ceremony (whereby he is made a werowance to Powhattan); and Pocahontas's “self-abandonment” prefigures the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

In post-Darwinian times, Americans have usually thought of the national population as divided into many distinct races and ethnic groups. The notions and definitions they have used for a race and an ethnic group have varied from one age to another. Although Americans have not needed the resources of science to believe that some races and ethnic groups are superior to others, in these times science has become a powerful symbol of cultural authority. For the racist, the assistance of science has often been useful. In this essay, it is important to distinguish between the scientific discourse on race and ethnicity whose participants do not necessarily assume that groups differ in value, and that of scientific racism, whose participants might or might not be scientists, but who have consistently assumed that science proves the existence of permanent group differences and legitimates the assertion that some groups are inherently superior to others. Here we shall discuss the latter.

In a movie directed by Frank Capra toward the end of the Great Depression, an enterprising lady reporter with an eye for the photogenic persuades a down-and-out ballplayer to act the part of “John Doe,” “author” of her new syndicated front-page column, “I Protest!” The speeches that Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) pays the handsome hobo (Gary Cooper) to front are, if slightly sentimental, always provocative and immediately successful. They inveigh against the petty self-interest that in the name of rugged individualism has weakened and corrupted the cause of the common citizen in this country; they plead for a new spirit of grass-roots cooperative activism. “Tear down the fences,” John Doe implores his small-town audiences. “You're the hope of the world!”

More than half a century has passed since Charles A. Lindbergh's transatlantic flight to Paris, and we are less certain than ever how to judge its significance. The event remains so clouded by the aura of ballyhoo that even at this distance it seems to belong less to the history of aviation than to the triumph of that inflated rhetoric we have come to recognize and distrust as media hype. “Now is the most marvelous day that this old earth has ever known,” proclaimed the soon-to-be Chief Justice of the United States, Charles Evans Hughes, at a banquet for the young pilot, adding, “This is the happiest day, the happiest day of all days for America.” The official account of the flight prepared for the Boy Scouts of America called it “all things considered, the greatest feat undertaken by a single man.” A historian must back away from such eulogies, but not so far that he loses sight of their contribution to the essential character of the event.

For a jittery radio industry concerned about the future of American broadcasting in the early months after America's entry into World War II, William B. Lewis came as a godsend. As head of the Domestic Radio Division of the Office of Facts and Figures (OFF), and later the Office of War Information (OWI, June 1942), Lewis, a former vicepresident of CBS, reassured the industry that the commercial structure of American radio would remain unchanged. In his first meeting with network executives and radio sponsors and advertisers in January 1942, he outlined his pragmatic approach to radio's war effort. As he argued, “radio is valuable only because of the enormous audiences it has created.” During wartime, his government office planned to use radio's popularity without unnecessarily disrupting radio structure and schedule: “Let's not forget that radio is primarily an entertainment medium, and must continue to be if it is … to deliver the large audiences we want to reach.”

During the last decade of the 19th century, vaudeville became the nation's most popular entertainment form, drawing unprecedented numbers of spectators and appealing to members of diverse socioeconomic groups by staging a rapid succession of acrobats, comedians, legitimate theater stars, pet-tricks, and dramatic sketches. In a cultural scene that Lawrence Levine and others tell us was marked by the historical separation between legitimate and mass cultural practices, critical observers (then and since) have greeted the diversity of vaudeville's audience and the range of its performance with a mixture of surprise and liberal enthusiasm.

Rhythm—the measured flow of motion—is an essential formative aspect of reality and of our experience, and ritual is among the principal cultural resources by which we grasp and participate in those rhythms and gain some purchase upon them and the energies they embody.

On November 19, 1911, Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952), the “photohistorian” of American Indians, wrote to his friend Edmond S. Meany, Professor of History at the University of Washington, about his latest triumphs. “Dear Brother Meany,” he began, “I think we can say that my lecture entertainment ‘arrived’. I wish you could have been present at the Carnegie Hall affair. The tremendous auditorium was filled to overflowing, a sea of people from the stage to the very ‘sky’ itself.” Curtis had been introduced by Henry Fairfield Osborn, Director of the American Museum of Natural History; just before they stepped into view Osborn looked through the foliage and, according to Curtis, had remarked, ‘“Do you realise that that is almost an appalling audience, and one that few men in their life-time have the privilege of facing?’” “I think,” Curtis added, “he was a little nervous on his own account and slightly so on mine, [but] rather than causing nervousness … it gave me courage and I was absolutely certain of myself after my first two words.” “Osborn's voice,” Curtis explained, “lacks the carrying power and his slight nervousness meant a rather halting introduction. This was evidently greatly to my advantage, as the minute I spoke I reached the farther-most corners and my voice caught and held the people.”

The crucial twenty-third chapter of Melville's The Confidence-Man (1857) develops an arresting analogy between the linguistic wiles of the latest avatar of the Confidence-Man (or Devil) and the imagery of infectious atmosphere. The chapter opens with a flood of allusions to the notion of an insidious agent hidden in the air, carrying infection and threatening death: “At Cairo, the old established firm of Fever & Ague is still settling up its unfinished business; that Creole grave-digger, Yellow Jack—his hand at the mattock and spade has not lost its cunning; while Don Saturninus Typhus taking his constitutional with Death, Calvin Edson and three undertakers, in the morass, snuffs up the mephitic breeze with zest.” Eyeing from the boat rail the “swampy and squalid domain” that lies before Cairo, the Missourian, Pitch, peers through the “dubious medium” of a “dank twilight, fanned with mosquitoes, and sparkling with fire-flies” and revolves in his mind a foregoing conversation with the P.I.O. man, who, only moments before, had induced him to pay money for a promised boy servant. He begins to suspect he has been conned.

In the title of a 1903 American Journal of Sociology essay, Ernest W. Clement announces a new phenomenon: “The New Woman in Japan.” By this title, he quickly explains, he does not mean to satirically compare this Japanese sociological development to the American “parody of man” usually associated with the phrase, because “such a creature as that called the ‘new woman’ in the Occident has not yet appeared to any great extent among the Japanese.” Although sometimes in Japan “the process of the new woman's evolution may be disfigured by some accident” producing “a sickening sort of person,” Clement's interest is not in particular aberrations, but rather in “the abstract, legal new woman” created by recent changes in Japan's civil code. In this abstraction Clement sees improvement on previous Japanese laws that “relegat[ed] woman to an abnormally inferior position.” Clement thus assures readers that, although Japan's modernization hinges upon its women's legal and cultural status, female advancement in Japan will not approach the “abnormal” excesses of the United States. Quoting Alice Mabel Bacon's influential book Japanese Girls and Women to stress this point, Clement explains that Japanese men are adopting many Western habits and opinions, but they still “shrink aghast, in many cases, at the thought that their women may ever become the forward, self-assertive, half-masculine women of the West.” Yet still, many of these Japanese men express “a growing dissatisfaction with the smallness and narrowness of the lives of their wives and daughters — a growing belief that better educated women make better homes.”

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.