Scholars now generally acknowledge that Nathaniel Hawthorne was no deeply secluded artist, but a man and citizen keenly aware of contemporary social and political issues. Over three decades ago, Arlin Turner maintained that Hawthorne wrote in response not only to his extensive reading in American history but to the burgeoning nationalism of the 1820s and 1830s. We cannot fail to note the growing ascendancy during this period of that one moral issue which would soon come to eclipse all others and draw the nation into its bloodiest conflict — that of slavery. Moreover, the very seedbed of the antislavery movement in these 1830s, the home and headquarters of its fiery central leader, lay but a few miles from Hawthorne's doorstep.

In 1846 in Louisville, Kentucky, John Banvard, a self-taught Missouri painter, exhibited his Three-Mile Painting, a panorama of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, painted from hundreds of direct observations and sketches he had executed over a period of many years along the riverbanks. The painting was exhibited by means of a giant pair of rollers upon which the canvas was wound and unwound. Following a successful run in Louisville, the exhibition drew large crowds in Boston and New York City before Banvard capped his triumph with a European tour. In a promotional description of the painting, printed in Boston in 1847 to generate interest in the exhibit, many endorsements testified to the painting's authenticity, including one signed by over one hundred captains and other officers of steamboats who had examined the painting and declared it “correct.” That authenticity and “correctness” were measures of artistic achievement testifies to the premium placed on verisimilitude in art that served as a record of discovery and observation along the American frontier.

In 1910, at the outset of a turbulent American decade, Annie P. Hillis reviewed the liberating social advances being made by women during the Progressive Era. Writing in the Outlook, Hillis declared that the days of “idyllic, helpless femininity” were passing. As evidence she adduced the “six-foot captain of the basket-ball team” — who “laughs outright at the slender youth who would protect her” — and the “business woman,” who “can earn her own support and would be beholden to no one.” In both adult work and children's play, she claimed, American women were achieving “independence and equality with the other sex.” But in practically her next breath Hillis makes clear that women's liberation might have reached - or perhaps surpassed - its natural limits. Protesting that it is “too soon to predict the future” even as she reaffirms progressivism's fundamental ideology (“We are in a world where there is a definite purpose running through all events, where there is a definite march forward”), Hillis retreats to a distinctly unliberating position: it is for contemporary women, she insists, to “find their place and fall in line.”

In the ten years since Scribner's published The Garden of Eden, critics have come to recognize that the book's editor, Tom Jenks, had a heavy hand in its composition — despite his and Charles Scribner Jr.'s comments to the contrary. E. L. Doctorow was among the first to suggest that the publisher's note disclaiming editorial interference in the production of The Garden of Eden is more fictional than the novel itself. Stating that “some cuts” have been made to Hemingway's “manuscript” but nothing added, this note concludes that “in every significant respect the work is all the author's.” Given that the published novel is one-third the length of the longest manuscript, a “cut” of approximately 130,000 words, one would have to agree with Doctorow that the phrase “some cuts” is disingenuous (44).

In the fall of 1931, William Carlos Williams wrote to e. e. cummings, requesting poetry for a little magazine he was editing with Nathanael West. It was called Contact. (Actually, the magazine was a revival of a previous publication that Williams had put out in the early 1920s with Robert McAlmon.) The response Williams received from cummings accurately, albeit somewhat parodically, characterized the magazine's ambitions. If Contact was to be more than merely another magazine devoted to “good writing,” the editors felt – in a decidedly less ironic vein – that it had to be “redblooded,” “stark,” “fearlessly obscene.”

In a 1961 letter to his cousin Harriet Winslow, Robert Lowell, reflecting on the Cold War crises of the period, particularly the erection of the Berlin Wall, wrote

The world's really strange isn't it? I mean the world of the news and the nations and the bomb testings. I feel it this fall and wonder, if it's just being forty three. Under a certain calm, there seems to be a question that must be answered. If one could think of the question. (Papers)

Though this passage illustrates Lowell's tendency to read the world in autobiographical terms, it also displays his sensitivity to the role of language in crisis situations. The rhetorical, public, and communal problem of voicing the required question may be the key to “the world of the news,” yet asking that question is not only beyond Lowell but beyond everyone else (the uncharacteristically impersonal “one”). By the end of the 1950s, voicing the need to ask such a question had become an intrinsic part of Lowell's poetics, most clearly formulated in “For the Union Dead,” a poem completed in 1960 in which the public and the personal dimensions powerfully cohere. However, Lowell's work of the previous decade, collected in Life Studies (1959), in a subtle way had already explored the clichés, aporia, rhetorical corruption, and general verbal difficulties of the first decade of the television era.

Part German-American and part Chippewa, Louise Erdrich has described the “mixed blood's” quest as a search for parentage, an attempt to understand self by interrogating genealogy. In the opening paragraphs of Tracks, a novel set on a North Dakota Chippewa reservation in the early 20th century, Erdrich reveals that the investigation of background necessarily entails an entrance into the world of ghosts. When the narrator Nanapush addresses the young woman listening to his unfolding account of her familial and tribal past as a “child of the invisible, the ones who disappeared,” he simultaneously connects an awareness of the ghostly presence of the dead with the discovery of identity and the creation of history. The narrator's conjuring of “invisible ancestors and “ghosts” (2) who inhabit tribal woods introduces haunting as Erdrich's central metaphor for the way the past shapes and is shaped by the present.

The authors of these passages share more than a belief in the efficacy of the category of “race” and a need to assert pride in their African-American heritage. Both have, of late, experienced notable recognition and affirmation from constituencies that typically evince little interest in black Americans and their culture. Zora Neale Hurston is one of only three or four 20th-century writers who have achieved canonical status, with the result that her works invariably appear in courses offered in American literature or American Studies, not just in more narrowly de-fined courses, such as African-American Writers or American Women Writers. Clarence Thomas, as the second black Supreme Court Justice, holds the highest position in government ever held by an African American. Arguably, his judicial position and her supreme reputation are the result of the affirmative action and desegregation programs (and in his case, the “multicultural” mandate) they oppose. Perhaps their opposition to these programs is what fits them for this crossover appeal. In effect, they deny the reality of the effects of segregation – unequal funding, and therefore poorer education and continuing secondary employment, housing, and so on – on most black Americans.

When Frederick L. Olmstead came face to face with slavery in his travels through the South, he wrote that it was “difficult” to treat a human as property, but “embarrass[ing]” to treat property as human. Olmstead's dilemma encapsulates the difficulties that white slaveholders had in objectifying their slaves. American slaveholders tried to treat the slave as property, but couldn't consistently maintain that stance because they understood all along that the slave was human. Furthermore, the owners had to exploit that humanity in daily practice in order to manage the slave as property. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this conflict in action when he visited the South and witnessed the treatment of slaves: “Not wishing to raise them to their own level, [the owners] keep them as close to the beasts as possible” (emphasis added). Tocqueville's qualification is important. The masters do not succeed in turning the slaves into beasts; they can only approximate doing so. (The “almost” that Tocqueville includes in the epigraph quotation above further suggests this key gap.) Tocqueville's phrasing shows that he sees slaves as people who are being degraded to the status of objects — but who are nonetheless not objects. Moreover, Tocqueville's use of “we” suggests that he is not the only one who sees them as people. For Tocqueville and others unnamed, the slaves retain their human connection. They are not things, but people who are being uneasily forced into the category of “thing.”

The ways American prairie landscapes have been used and understood, since the first Euro-American encounters with them in the early 19th century, are inseparable from how they have been seen and described. The converse is no less true for pictorial depictions and verbal accounts. Far from being disassociated, the differing actions of perception and utilization are in fact interdependent, and as such have had far-reaching consequences for human interaction with the prairie landscape itself and for the subject of prairies as it is presented in literature and art. Although it is not often acknowledged, aesthetics lie at the heart of any discussion of the landform, even in policy debates over agricultural practices or proposals to restore a tract to native grasses. And just as critical, the land's use (or disuse) directly informs its representation in written or visual portrayals, whether these concern virgin territory or cultivated terrain.

In the art of the American West, women have traditionally occupied a minor position. Compared to a surfeit of depictions of cowboys, braves, soldiers, miners, Indian chiefs, scouts, trappers, and traders, there are relatively few images of women; and when considering women who were not native to the plains and prairies, the field narrows still farther. Although literature and popular culture have given us numerous female types of the trans-Mississippi West (saloon and dance-hall girls, frontier mothers, helpless captives, schoolteachers, renegade female outlaws, wild-west-show women), art has virtually ignored all but the emigrant woman who traveled west in a covered wagon to establish a home on the prairie.

Up in Bienville Parish, through piney hills rolling toward the Ozarks, the road winds down a sweeping curve, rises abruptly, and enters Arcadia, Louisiana. Main Street parallels an abandoned railroad spur and runs along eighty yards of brick-faced storefronts. The usual concerns flourish: a flower shop, an insurance agency, the pharmacy, and a secondhand furniture store. There is also a Baptist revival hall, but people point it out for another reason. Years before it was a house of the Lord, the building was a home for the dead, a funeral parlor, and as such, briefly, the focal point of national attention. That was in 1934 when, shortly after the sheriff sprang his trap, the corpses of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were fetched back to town and propped on slabs leaning in the undertaker's window. Tellers of the tale usually smile at the irony, but it is not the only one Arcadians can claim. Across the street and down the block from the morgue cum revival hall stands a United States post office built during the Great Depression. It conforms to the standard floor plan then in vogue, and at one end of the main hall, over the postman's door, hangs a mural whose warm pastels depict an abundant cotton harvest. Black pickers dot the field, sacks filled to bursting. A white driver crests the hill in a wagon brimming over with the yield and descends a road leading toward the mill. Surrounding hills stretch beyond (Figure 1).

In July 1930, Charles A. Lindbergh appeared before a select group of reporters to announce that he would no longer “cooperate” with five New York newspapers. These papers, he claimed, had repeatedly violated his privacy. Lindbergh's decision marked the culmination of a bitter and well-publicized feud between the aviator and reporters for the tabloid press. For all intents and purposes, Lindbergh had ceased cooperating with the tabloids a year earlier, when he and Anne Morrow had wed in a secret ceremony and had eluded reporters for more than a week during their honeymoon. Therefore, no one was especially surprised by his announcement, which elicited a chorus of cheers among writers for “respectable” newspapers and magazines who shared his disgust for the tabloids' “contemptible” practices. Lindbergh's views on tabloid journalism, a writer for the Nation observed, “raise him still higher in our respect and admiration, something that we hardly felt possible in view of his great modesty, his dignity, and his refusal to let himself be ruined by the unparalleled publicity and popularity which have been his.”

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.”

Reading Tom Wolfe's nonfiction across its grain, for the manner by which its chameleon narrators and its historical author reverberate and intersect, is to enter a sustained fantasy of escape and recapture. For not only are Wolfe's fugitive plots – a psychedelic novelist on the lam in Mexico, a test pilot reeled to earth after eluding the clutches of the Mach One barrier, even his fictional Master of the Universe wriggling in a tangled web of transgression and punishment – the stuff of rights and wrongs, but for nearly a third of a century Tom Wolfe has made a habit of breaking every established rule and then denying he has done so.

America's ubiquitous supermarket tabloids are a relatively recent invention. Sensational and hyperbolic, they nonetheless offer through their distinctive style and content a unique narrative that is focused quite specifically on the lived experience of many working-class American women. Indeed, because of this focus, the working-class feminine-gender role found in America's supermarket tabloids offers a unique vantage point in contemporary culture for understanding the ideological intersection of categories of class and gender. Perhaps because they are predominantly read by women, the tabloids are often ignored as part of American mass culture, but they deserve attention because they offer both a voice for some women who are rarely heard, and a unique perspective on the mass-culture debate that centers on the question of whether within Western capitalist societies mass-culture forms contain any possibility of resistance to commodification and exploitation.

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.

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 1994, Margaret Olin, reviewing the fourth volume of Meyer Schapiro's Selected Papers, observed that Schapiro “only seldom addressed [his] Jewish heritage”. Surely, she suggests, it must have influenced his practice of art history and criticism. But she is at a loss to say how. Olin notes that Schapiro's neglect of the issue is all the more conspicuous in view of the fact that his contemporaries, the Jewish-American art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, openly viewed modern art from a Jewish perspective. While it was one among several heuristic gambits, they often privileged it as the most revelatory: the perspective that could disclose what is most at stake or immanent in modern art.