American exceptionalism, Joyce Appleby has recently reminded us, is “America's peculiar form of Eurocentrism.” Now that the multicultural history of the United States is finally being written, nothing would justify another look at American exceptionalism, except perhaps the need to examine the intellectual ways that have hidden American historical and social diversity for so long. In this essay I basically argue that a certain appropriation of the 18th-Century conception of nature as “what is” played a role also in the development of American exceptionalism. The naturalist rhetoric in American discourse in the 19th Century, I further argue, ran parallel to the most savage depredations of nature ever performed by humankind. I am particularly interested in foregrounding the discrepancy between the steady construction of that greatest of modern artifacts, the American nation, and its concomitant self-justification as a thing of nature. The other side of the commodification of America is its naturalization, an idea that I find is supported, whether critically or uncritically, by many American poets and artists. In recent times we have witnessed a number of ecological attempts at the social recovery of nature in the most advanced capitalist countries, including, of course, the United States. I am not concerned here with these developments, of which ecofeminism is arguably one of the most interesting ones.

Though the development of “public history” as a professional practice and its arrival as an academic field date back only to the mid-1970s, an emphasis on the role of historians as public actors with unique societal responsibilities has punctuated the self-reflective literature issuing forth from the profession throughout much of the 20th Century. In his 1949 presidential address to the American Historical Association (AHA), Conyers Read advised that “history has to justify itself in social terms.” In a postwar world whose grand drama shifted from the defeat of fascism to the crusade against communism, Read instructed historians in their highest role, namely, “education for democracy.” “Total war, whether it be hot or cold,” Read observed, “enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to assume his part.” Read's prescription has remained a canon in the profession. In 1986, for example, AHA former president C. Vann Woodward owned that historians have “obligations to the present.” Recognizing the problematical nature of the “relationship of history to the public realm,” AHA president William E. Leuchtenburg in like manner nonetheless recently observed that “generation after generation, a substantial corps of scholars has insisted that historians should concentrate on contributing to the solution of contemporary problems.”

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.

On May 4, 1886, a bomb was thrown into a crowded political meeting near Haymarket Square on Chicago's west side, killing one police officer and numerous civilians. This event led to one of the fiercest attacks on anarchist dissidents in this country, culminating in an unjust trial and the execution of four innocent men. Two public monuments commemorate Chicago's famous Haymarket Affair. The Haymarket Monument (Figure 1), dedicated to the memory of eight anarchists who were tried and convicted (and later exonerated) of conspiracy charges, four of whom were executed by hanging, consists of a tall granite shaft against which stand two life-sized bronze figures, a female figure holding a laurel wreath over the head of a fallen worker. Located over their gravesite in Waldheim (now Forest Home) Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, the monument has served as a site of memorial ceremonies, political meetings, and personal pilgrimages since its dedication in 1893. As an important political monument, it represents a symbol of resistance for those concerned with radical politics in general and the history of the working class in particular. Buried near and around the monument in its bucolic setting is an impressive list of historical personnages: Lucy Parsons, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Emma Goldman, to name only a few.

In 19th-century america, the bigamous marriage became a controversial subject and repeated cultural metaphor. From popular fiction to sensationalistic journalism to purity reform literature, writers repeatedly employed bigamy as a moral signpost warning readers of the sexual dangers and illicit deceptions of urban life. Middle-class Americans in particular envisioned the male bigamist as a particular type of confidence man. Like gamblers and “sporting men,” these figures prowled the parlors of respectable households in search of hapless, innocent women whom they looked to conquer and seduce, dupe and destroy. Such status-conscious social climbers deceptively passed for something they were not. Most authors depicted the practice in Manichaean terms of good versus evil, innocence versus corruption. Bigamy thus enabled writers to contrast the nostalgic, virtuous, agrarian republicanism of postrevolutionary America with the perceived urban depravity of the coarse, new metropolis. Such illegal matrimony, editorialized one newspaper, “speaks volumes for man's duplicity and woman's weakness.” Pure and simple, bigamy was “mere wickedness.”

Inventor of the hand-held stereoscope and “autocrat of the breakfast table,” the editor of the Atlantic Monthly proved himself, in an important series of articles on photography, a master of rhetoric. Behind the Epicurean touches with which he colored the “mirror with a memory” – the most “audacious, remote, improbable” discovery of human ingenuity – and through the irony of his thundering philosophical conclusions – “form is henceforth divorced from matter,” which “as a visible object is of no great use any longer” – the modern reader perceives O. W. Holmes's keen awareness of the documentary possibilities born of photography. In this essay, it is one of the first sketches of such a “Bank of Nature” that I shall examine.

If hiroshima as fact and metaphor marks a turning point of modern secular and spiritual history, what has this fact meant to American children and youth? The thinkable event with the unthinkable implications has, for four decades and more, offered unique challenges and opportunities to all sorts of writers working in popular and esoteric forms with adult audiences. One of the least esoteric but most neglected of these literary forms is children's books, written and illustrated, for the very young and for adolescents. As with works for adults, writings for children are rich sources of cultural information on and attitudes about the nuclear age. They create, vicariously but affectively, informative and imaginative encounters with earthshaking events and their aftershocks long antedating young consciousnesses but present in children's lives as adult conversations, media messsages, and significant silences. Such books often build early imaginal memories on which adult thought and feeling about the Bomb are deeply based.

“There are no masses,” Raymond Williams wisely reminds us, “there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” This idea of the social crowd, usually organic and with a mind of its own, rarely is used self-referentially; “masses” always describes others. During and immediately following World War I, American intellectuals, especially social theorists, were preoccupied with this new model for society. Authoritarian regimes abroad, America's own wartime hysteria (fueled by new communications technologies), the insistent urban context, and a consumer-based economy all made discussion of crowd behavior and mass persuasion an obvious product of new circumstances. Newer fields of sociology, psychology, and behaviorism, promised the necessary tools for understanding these “phenomena.” Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) was but the most popular and enduring in a genre that drew upon earlier native and European theorists like Gustave Le Bon, E. A. Ross, Boris Sidis, and William Trotter. By 1925, the American library on the mass mind included The Behavior of Crowds (Everett Dean Martin), Social Psychology (Floyd Henry Allport), and Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess). This new body of work distinguished “the concept of the mass, a dispersed and passive body of uprooted individuals, from the pre-World War I concept of the crowd, a physically united and active throng.” The bestremembered effect of these ideas, upon the likes of H. L. Mencken, Walter Lippman, and other leading critics, was a skepticism about democracy's survival in the face of such new knowledge. But the idea of the “masses” had another life, outside of more formal circles, among Americans who were not so quick to decry a “boobocracy,” or perhaps more important and long-lasting, in the rising industries of mass communication and popular culture.

In 1925 in The New Negro, Alain Locke announced to the world that something new, “something beyond the watch and guard of statistics,” had taken place in the racial alembic of 20th-century America. Although the “Sociologist,” the “Philanthropist,” and the “Race-leader” were not unaware of this “changeling,” this New Negro, they were unable to account for what they saw. A new awareness was needed, for these authorities were unable to see beyond the limits and assumptions of their professional interests. For this reason, it was Locke's intent, as a professor of philosophy at Howard University, to announce, to identify, and to help bring to life this renaissance of the spirit. Not unlike W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk, Locke challenged his generation to see the world with fresh eyes. But, whereas DuBois took his reader to the South, to “historic ground,” Locke looked over the terrain of a “younger generation … vibrant with a new psychology.” Harlem, not Georgia, was the center of his attention. And, unlike DuBois, Locke did not seek to reveal “the strange experience” of being a “problem” but celebrated the pride of being black in America.

We start with a crystallizing moment in Emerson's career: the famous moment, ecstatically recorded in his 1833 journal, when Emerson recognized the future shape of his work in the vast natural history displays at the Muséum d'histoire naturelle (Jardin des Plantes) in Paris. Brooding over “this bewildering series of organized forms,” Emerson found himself driven into making a vow: “I am moved by strange sympathies, I say continually, ‘I will be a naturalist’” (JMN, vol. 4, p. 200). The vow would soon be heard again in his first lyceum lecture, “The Uses of Natural History,” and many times throughout his career Emerson would remind audiences of his central calling as a “natural historian” of life, the intellect, and the soul. Emerson's vision of natural history in Paris gave definitive focus to ambitions that had found no proper outlet in his earlier life in America. The results were almost immediate: by the time he began his return trip to America, he was settled on the subject of his early lectures and was already contemplating the larger project of Nature. Emerson came back to America to found himself as an institution of private research and public presentation not unlike the Museum itself, methodically gathering specimens from the exotic frontiers of experience and setting them out, in their multiple dark affinities, on common ground.

At the inaugural 1837 meeting of the American Moral Reform Society, one of Philadelphia's many African American reform groups, William Whipper called for blacks to commit themselves to total abstinence and “temperance in all things.” The group itself offered a resolution that subsumed a number of social desires and reforms under the rubric of temperance: “Resolved, That the successful promotion of all the principles of the Moral Reform Society, viz.: Education, Temperance, Economy, and Universal Love, depends greatly upon the practical prosecution of the Temperance Reform.” But of course temperance could only go so far, and at times those blacks most committed to temperance — whether conceived narrowly in terms of drinking, or more broadly in terms of a Franklinian commitment to economy and industry — seemed to lose sight of the limits of the black temperance movement in a racist culture. At the same 1837 meeting of the American Moral Reform Society, James Forten, Jr., addressed this issue head on. While endorsing temperance as a worthy social program of black elevation, he pointed to the central reality of the black experience in America: “that the arm of oppression is laid bare to crush us; that prejudice, like the never satiated tiger, selects us as its prey; that we have felt the withering blight of tyranny sweeping from before us, in its destructive course, our homes and our property.” But despite these obstacles, Forten advised, blacks should not give up the struggle to improve their lot and, as temperate and productive citizens, “to set an example to the rising generation.” As he rhetorically put it in his concluding remarks: “What … would the cause of learning and our country have lost, if a Franklin, a Rittenhouse, a Rush, could have been made to quail before the frowning brow of persecution?”

On June 9, 1860, the publishing firm of Irving P. Beadle and Company announced in the New York Daily Tribune the publication of their first dime novel, Ann S. Stephens's Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter. The narrative was advertised as “the best story of the day,” and its writer as “the star of American authors.” Stephens, whose name is familiar today only to scholars of the dime novel, was indeed well known to the reading public around the mid-19th Century. She was on the editorial board of several magazines, including the illustrious Graham's Magazine. She had published her own journal, Mrs. Stephens Illustrated New Monthly. And she wrote for a plethora of popular magazines, among others the Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, the Ladies' Wreath, Frank Leslie's Ladies' Gazette of Fashion, and Peterson's Magazine. Her 1854 urban melodrama Fashion and Famine had to be printed three times during the first month of publication to satisfy the demand of the public, and eventlually sold a record eighty thousand copies. Her historical novels, generally of European setting, were so successful that they were systematically printed in book form by the Philadelphia publisher T. B. Peterson after they had appeared serially in Charles J. Peterson's literary monthly. And Stephens had the sanction of the critics as well as the public: already in 1848 the American Literary Magazine had eulogized her by stating that “of the numerous female writers of our country, Mrs. Stephens is deservedly classed among the first.” Charles J. Peterson had declared in the pages of Graham's Magazine that “no writer, since Sir Walter Scott, had excelled her in … power of description.” And even Edgar Allan Poe had acknowledged that Stephens could “seize adroitly on salient incidents and present them with vividness to the eye,” was “not unskillful in delineation of character,” and could, in conclusion, be granted “the effervescence of high talent, if not exactly of genius.”

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.

Edith Wharton's treatment of the artist has received considerable critical attention, particularly in light of her focus on male artists and the disparity between her early short stories that are dominated by tales about artists and her novels that center on other subjects. Some of these studies have looked at the writer as artist and Wharton's views on the art of writing. While such a focus can be justified by the numerous writers who people Wharton's fiction, it is instructive to examine other dimensions of her reference to art and artists, especially painting, as a way of illuminating the commentary on women's roles that pervades Wharton's work. Like other writers of her era, Wharton constructed many narratives around creative artists or linked her main characters to artistic endeavors in order to interrogate American culture, its materialism, its devaluation of art, and its restrictive sphere for women. It is my contention, however, that Wharton's concern with development of the female artist was subsumed in some of her novels by rhetorical techniques that used art as a sounding board for her social critiques. Specifically, she constructed pivotal scenes around paintings in the narrative and made subtle reference to prominent themes in Victorian artwork as ironic counterpoint to and illumination of the story being told. In this essay, I explore the way in which Wharton drew on artistic representations of women with deep cultural resonance for her audience that served to underscore her critique of Victorian mythology and to garner sympathy for the characters victimized by that mythology.

William alfred's verse play Hogan's Goat, recounting the four days in April and May, 1890, when Matt Stanton gets his big chance to become mayor of Brooklyn, was New York's surprise hit of 1965–66. Directed by Frederick Rolf and starring Faye Dunaway (before Bonnie and Clyde), Ralph Waite (before The Waltons), and Barnard Hughes (before Da), it opened in November, 1965, at the American Place Theatre and ran during the next eighteen months for 607 performances there and at the East 74th Street Theatre, winning the 1965–66 Theatre Club Gold Medal for best play and gaining Alfred the 1965 Drama Desk – Vernon Rice award. Selected for inclusion in Otis L. Guernsey's Best Plays yearbook (and chosen best play of 1965), it also appears in John Gassner and Clive Barnes's Best American Plays series, Harold Clurman's anthology Famous American Plays of the 1960s, and Francis Griffith and Joseph Mersand's Eight Ethnic American Plays. In 1971, the play was produced on PBS television.

As George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda nears its end, Daniel tells his friend Hans, “I shall by-and-by travel to the East and be away for some years” (DD, p. 854). This is entirely appropriate for a person named Daniel who has from the novel's first lines been placed in the role of an interpreter, and who later is likened to a prophet. Daniel Deronda says that he has “always longed for some ideal task” (DD, p. 819), and when he comes to meet Mordecai with fateful news of his heritage he seems, like that salvational figure envisioned by the biblical Book of Daniel, to be virtually trailing clouds of glory:

Yet when Deronda entered, the sight of him was like the clearness after rain: no clouds to come could hinder the cherishing beam of that moment. (DD, p. 816)

Questions of the origins and meaning of history were of special interest in England during the 1860s and in the decade following, when Eliot was engaged in writing this novel. The prophetic visions of the biblical Book of Daniel seemed crucial to Victorian exegetes in settling current debates about the British world role and by implication about the history of the whole world. One Arthur Stanley, speaking of the dreams of Daniel, wrote in 1865 that “there could be no doubt that they contain the first germs of the great idea of the succession of ages, of the continuous growth of empires and races under a law of Divine Providence, the first sketch of the Education of the world.” Eliot was fully aware of such prophetic traditions. When she sends Daniel Deronda away from England “to the East … for some years,” it is as if she would have him, a modern Daniel, describe a pattern of the world's progress for her own day.