In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson became the first American to put history to work to create a nation. He blazed a path that historians have been following ever since. Consider the difficulty Jefferson faced. Different events were happening in thirteen intensely local and isolated colonies among people with different traditions, languages, religions, and circumstances. Jefferson turned these scattered events into a national narrative. Behind these individual acts by agents of the British Crown aimed at different colonies was a single menace, Jefferson insisted, that should inspire these isolated individuals to discover and act upon what they shared as bearers of the traditional liberties of Englishmen. To introduce his stunning attempt to fit isolated events into a single narrative, Jefferson began by boldly declaring that it was “necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds that have connected them with another.” The colonists, Jefferson proclaimed, were “one people.” Jefferson knew that the colonists were not “one people.” But in order to invent one nation, Jefferson had to invent one people, and in order to invent one people Jefferson had to invent one history that might unite that “one people.” It has been hard work ever since.

From 1776 until sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, it was possible to believe – indeed, it was hard to question – that nations were, or even should be, the embodiment of people's destinies – that nations could express their identities, solve their problems, and be entrusted with their dreams and fates. The modern practice of history was born a couple of centuries ago to serve this process, to invent narratives and persuade peoples to interpret their personal experiences within national terms and narratives.

They talked until three, from biology to organized religion, and when Amory crept shivering into bed it was with his mind aglow…

(Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise)

Readers familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald's early work might recall that in those years just before the Scopes trial he wrote of Victorians who “shuddered when they found what Mr. Darwin was about”; or that he joined in the fashionable comic attacks on people who could not accept their “most animal existence,” describing one such character as “a hairless ape with two dozen tricks.” But few would guess the extent to which his interest in evolutionary biology shaped his work. He was particularly concerned with three interrelated biological problems: (1) the question of eugenics as a possible solution to civilization's many ills, (2) the linked principles of accident and heredity (as he understood these through the lens of Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic law), and (3) the revolutionary theory of sexual selection that Darwin had presented in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). As I hope to show in the following pages, his concern with these issues underlies such well-known features in the Fitzgerald landscape as his insecurity in the “social hierarchy” (his sense of its “terrifying fluidity”), his emphasis on the element of time, his interest in “the musk of money,” his interest in Spengler and the naturalists, and his negative portraiture of male violence. The principles of eugenics, accidental heredity, and sexual selection flow together as the prevailing undercurrent in most of Fitzgerald's work before and after The Great Gatsby, producing more anxiety than love from the tangled courtships of characters he deemed both beautiful and damned.

The drive to enact a constitutional amendment requiring balanced federal budgets has been a defining issue of American politics in the final decade of the twentieth century. Supporters of this measure deemed it the only way to break the cycle of huge deficits that inflated the national debt to almost unmanageable proportions in recent years. In 1995, 1996 and 1997 only the Senate's narrow failure to deliver the requisite two-thirds majority – latterly by a single vote – prevented Congress proposing an amendment for ratification by the states. Nevertheless the balanced-budget amendment campaign is not a product of the deficit-conscious 1990s. It originated in the 1970s as a movement by the states to impose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Between 1975 and 1979 thirty states petitioned Congress for a convention to write a balanced-budget amendment. The convention method of constitutional reform had lain unused since the Founding Fathers devised it as an alternative to congressional initiative, but the support of only four more states would have provided the two-thirds majority needed for its implementation. The states' campaign stalled at this juncture in the face of opposition from the Carter administration and congressional Democrats. By then, however, it had done much to popularize the balanced-budget amendment and make it part of the nation's political agenda.

This article seeks to analyze the development of the balanced-budget amendment constitutional convention campaign and to assess its historical significance. Aside from its relevance to today's fiscal politics, the movement merits attention as an important episode in the history of the 1970s, an era when economic problems at home and defeat abroad underlined the limits of America's prosperity and power. In this troubled time, popular confidence in the nation's political leaders underwent marked decline. The Watergate scandal, failure in Vietnam and economic stagflation created doubts about their trustworthiness and competence to deal with America's problems. The budget revolt by the states was a manifestation of this anti-Washington mood. In style as well as substance, the campaign challenged conventional politics: it manifested distrust in elected leaders to manage public finances without constitutional restraint and sought to bypass establishment control of the orthodox forms of politics through adoption of an untested process of constitutional change. In many respects the drive for a balanced-budget amendment convention was an expression of the same populist impulse that was the mainspring of Jimmy Carter's campaign for president in 1976. The former Georgia governor's status as a political outsider untainted by previous connection with Washington had been his greatest electoral asset, but in office this man-of-the-people aligned himself with the nation's political establishment against the convention campaign. Analysis of Carter's response to this movement casts light on the ambiguity and complexity of his presidential politics.

Eastman Kodak was in the vanguard of those companies seeking to capitalize on newly available mass markets at home and abroad in the 1880s and 1890s. George Eastman had acute instincts for photographic innovation, cost-effective manufacturing, and the assembling of powerful corporate structures, but his greatest gift was for seizing on, and fostering, the general demand for a commodity with specious aesthetic inflections – a simple camera, together with a processing service available by mail – at a time when the appetite for such things was becoming insatiable. As Lawrence W. Levine has argued, photography

was the perfect instrument for a society with a burgeoning middle class, which could not satisfy itself with processes and images that had previously been confined to elite circles.

The aim of this article is to examine aspects of Henry James's predicament within the context of mass photography. In particular, the focus will be on “The Real Thing” (1893) and its engagement with issues of representation and reproduction in an arena forever changed by Kodak.

The arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955 provided the spark which ignited the long smouldering resentments of black Montgomerians. For 381 days they waged a boycott of the city bus lines, frustrating the opposition of white authorities and financially crippling the local transit company. More profoundly it resulted in a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on public transportation. Equally momentous was the emergence of the man who would serve as the spiritual figurehead of the civil rights movement: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott, one national black newspaper acclaimed King as “Alabama's Modern Moses.” Since the darkest days of slavery African-Americans had sought spiritual salvation by comparing their own condition to that of God's Chosen People, the Israelites of the Old Testament. Throughout their years of enslavement they prayed for the Moses who would deliver them from their suffering unto the Promised Land. During the boycott, the black citizens of Montgomery had similarly sustained their morale by singing the old slave spirituals, raising their voices at the nightly mass meetings in rousing renditions of “Go Down Moses, Way Down in Egypt Land.” “As sure as Moses got the children of Israel across the Red Sea,” King exhorted the black community, “we can stick together and win.” Others too drew the analogy between the historical experience of Jews and the contemporary predicament of African-Americans. Looking back on the boycott, white liberal activist Virginia Durr evoked the spectre of Nazi Germany in describing the strength of racist opposition.

In the late summer of 1996 Iraqi troops moved into the Kurdish “safe haven” in Northern Iraq, thereby triggering a crisis of national security for the United States. Unsurprisingly, this incident led to speculation in the media about the nature of President Clinton's response. Would he be able to meet this test of his leadership? What form would any military action take? Would it be strong enough, or would it be an overreaction? In the event, the president ordered two cruise missile strikes against Iraqi defence installations and substantially extended the no-fly zone in Southern Iraq set up after the Gulf War. These actions were the subject of debate in the United States Senate and, after some partisan wrangling, and a few rumbles of complaint about inadequate consultation, a non-binding resolution endorsing the missile strikes was approved by a vote of 96–1. But, as was noted by the press, “none of this really mattered because such ‘sense of the Senate’ resolutions have no binding effect and are largely ignored, even inside the Beltway.”

What was striking about this incident was that throughout the crisis the United States Congress was little more than a bystander. Inevitably all eyes turned to the president. It was he and not the national legislature that became the focus of public and media attention. Does he have the mettle needed? What will he do, and will his actions be sufficient to deal with the situation? These were the sort of questions being debated on the talk shows and in the press. To put it bluntly, at this moment, there was little interest in what the legislature might say or do, the mighty Congress, at this point at least, was reduced to a role comparable, dare it be said, to that of the British House of Commons. The situation called for leadership and decisive action and no one was under any illusion that the legislature could provide either, only the president was in a position to meet these needs. When it comes to the making of foreign policy, and particularly when crises of national security arise, the president, it seems, is inevitably, the main player, the senior partner.

C. Vann Woodward, who is ninety on 13 November 1998, is the author of perhaps the most famous work of history every to have rocked the Southern United States. The Strange Career of Jim Crow, first presented as the James W. Richard lectures at the University of Virginia, appeared in 1955: only one year after the Supreme Court's celebrated decision in Brown v. Board of Education, that racially segregated schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because separate facilities were “inherently unequal.” White Southern publicists and politicians stormed and raged that racial separation was in the order of nature, the segregation laws were from time immemorial, and that Chief Justice Warren ought to be impeached; and now came a soft-spoken, professionally respected historian, himself from Arkansas, to tell them, and, worse, to tell the world, that the South's universal segregation or “Jim Crow” laws in fact dated at most only from the 1890s – well within the lifetime of many who were still expressing their opinions.

The controversy was intense and prolonged. And it came to involve less politically motivated questions of historical interpretation because Woodward was often taken to have been referring more generally to the substance of race relations as well as the segregation laws. He accepted that some of his formulations required reconsideration, and the book, in constant demand, went through several revisions and four editions, the last appearing in 1974. But the core of the argument has survived to leave an enduring legacy in Southern historiography.

Leland Donald, Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, US$40). Pp. 379. ISBN 0 520 20616 9.

George W. Dorsey, The Pawnee Mythology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997, £20.95). Pp. 546. ISBN 0 8032 6603 0.

Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997, £52.50). Pp. 241. ISBN 0 8032 2166 5.

Richard G. Hardorff (ed.), Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight: New Sources of Indian-Military History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997, £9.50). Pp. 211. ISBN 0 8032 7293 6.

Michael E. Harkin, The Heiltsuks: Dialogues of Culture and History on the Northwest Coast (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997, £38). Pp. 195. ISBN 0 8032 2379 X.

Jean M. O'Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, £35, US$49.95). Pp. 224. ISBN 0 521 56172 8.

Allen W. Trelease, Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997, £15.95). Pp. 379. ISBN 0 8032 9431 X.

In the contemporary United States there are 556 American Indian groups in 400 nations. Given that survival story, the tired myths of the disappearing redman or wandering savage which have distorted our understandings of Indian history are being revised. The reasons for our nearly four-century-long gullibility are manifold. The religion of winners and losers, saints and sinners, combined effectively with the scientific racism inherent sine qua non in the secular beliefs of winners and losers expressed through Linnaean and Darwinian conceptions of order and evolution. After colonizers cast their imperial gaze through lenses made of the elastic ideology of “City Upon a Hill,” “Manifest Destiny,” “Young America,” and “White Man's Burden,” most Euro-Americans rationalized a history and present in survival of the fittest terms. By 1900, the near-holocaust of an estimated ten million Indians left only 200,000 survivors invisible in an overall population of 76 million. The 1990 census count of two million Native Americans affirms resilience not extinction.