As Death of a Salesman opens, Willy Loman returns home “tired to the death” (p. 13). Lost in reveries about the beautiful countryside and the past, he's been driving off the road; and now he wants a cheese sandwich. But Linda's suggestion that he try a new American-type cheese — “It's whipped” (p. 16) — irritates Willy: “Why do you get American when I like Swiss?” (p. 17). His anger at being contradicted unleashes an indictment of modern industrialized America:

The street is lined with cars. There's not a breath of fresh air in the neighborhood. The grass don't grow any more, you can't raise a carrot in the back yard. (p. 17).

In the old days, “This time of year it was lilac and wisteria.” Now: “Smell the stink from that apartment house! And another one on the other side…” (pp. 17–18). But just as Willy defines the conflict between nature and industry, he pauses and simply wonders: “How can they whip cheese?” (p. 18).

The clash between the old agrarian ideal and capitalistic enterprise is well documented in the literature on Death of a Salesman, as is the spiritual shift from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Carnegie to Dale Carnegie that the play reflects. The son of a pioneer inventor and the slave to broken machines, Willy Loman seems to epitomize the victim of modern technology.

The New York Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations was the first attempt to pursue the aims and imitate the success of the great London exhibition of 1851. The most remarkable thing about that event had been its setting, dubbed by Punch the “Crystal Palace.” Though a number of visitors from the United States had aired the notion of staging an American Crystal Palace exhibition, the first tangible plans were devised by Edward Riddle, who has served as U.S. Commissioner to the London Crystal Palace. Riddle was a Bostonian, but New York was clearly the place for such a venture, and early in 1852 the New York Board of Aldermen granted a concession on a tract just west of the Croton Reservoir (at Sixth Avenue between 40th and 42nd). Soon afterward, however, Riddle had to relinquish control of the enterprise to a new group of backers, all New Yorkers with close ties to Wall Street, Washington, and London. Included among them were August Belmont, Alexander Hamilton, Jr., William Cullen Bryant, Edward K. Collins, and members of such families as the Schuylers and the Livingstons. Their leader was Theodore Sedgwick, a well-connected lawyer with a reputation as an eminent student of judicial and political reform, and with ties to the world of letters through his friend Bryant and his aunt, the novelist Catherine Maria Sedgwick.

Melville thinks he does, though he cannot speak quite so confidently of the rest of us. The Navy of Billy Budd is a heterocosm, a separate, self-contained and self-regulating world. The tale of the doomed, angelic foretopman begins with a swaggering parade. Billy enjoys his local triumph, to be followed in due course by his tragedy and his partly victorious aftermath. Neither he nor his black counterpart in the opening pages belongs to the nautical tradition of “Billy-be-Damn” (no doubt a more decorous avatar of Bollicky Bill). Their twin asexual cocksureness receives apparently sexless worship from their fellows, for whom they are first among equals. Perhaps because we see no battle action in this story, a curious passivity seems to reign. Billy is a “cynosure”: a static magnet for admiration, and later a hapless target for malevolence. Although “to deal in double-meanings and insinuations of any sort was quite foreign to his nature” and though he is hardly conscious of the pun involved when he bids farewell to his first ship, the “Rights of Man,” his creator Melville stands in for him in this function. “Indirection” is Melville's preferred mode, He exploits his impeccable hero as the locus of double dealing, innuendo, lies, ambiguity, treachery, perverted history, and finally popular legend. Simple goodness, and complex evil, may be freaks of human nature, ultimately unfathomable alike, but Melville refuses the passivity of his sailors, and intervenes to make some sense of mystery. As Polonius said to Reynaldo: “With assays of bias, By indirections find directions out.” Like God in the Portuguese proverb dear to Claudel, Melville seeks to write straight in crooked lines. Since the pun, like irony and oxymoron, is an oblique mode, he appeals to its devious resources in his search.

The naval world provides a firm basis for this weaving approach, since it is governed by clear lines of demarcation: hierarchical vetoes, territorial imperatives, disciplinary codes. “Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head; no intricate game of chess where few moves are made in straight-forwardness, and ends are attained by indirection.”

Few small bodies of men have been more carefully studied, in recent years, than Boston's upper class. Winning their first fortunes in overseas trade, then transferring their capital to textiles and railroads, that class laid the foundations of America's Industrial Revolution as well as extending its own wealth and power. From such an economic base, so modern scholars assure us, they consolidated their class through marriage, through placing their sons in family firms or in the learned professions, and through guaranteeing the continuity of their fortunes, against incompetence or the claims of creditors and daughters' husbands, by the device of the family trust. They reached out to control or create institutions, whether Harvard, the Boston Athenaeum, or Massachusetts General Hospital. They played an important part in city government. In addition, it is alleged, they sought to control the masses through charities and the public school system. If all this characterized the first half of the nineteenth century, modern scholars assure us that in the second half atrophy set in as the city's growth slowed, as investments became more conservative, as political power was lost, as defensiveness and imitation replaced creativity. It must be added that some observers in those days, inside and outside the class, took the same view.

Many of the facts are beyond dispute. Hugh M. Blaisdell, the self-made businessman in Robert Grant's novel The Chippendales, was correct in saying that Boston “hasn't a first-class fortune,” though many in the second class.

It is a common notion that American painting in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was derivative and provincial. It was an artistic period marked by failure and frustration during which the promising artist, usually after a study tour in Europe, was met with indifference or misunderstanding. He either just managed to scrape a living, often by having to compromise his talents in search of an audience, or was forced to abandon painting altogether and turn to other pursuits. The only successful American painters, in this view, were those who became established in Europe; and they somehow no longer seem to be American. The best of the group were Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, whose European careers have been consistently misunderstood, until very recently, through geographical and historical myopia. European art historians have given them short shrift because they were, after all, provincial painters with the good fortune to practise in a European capital. American art historians have neglected their European work because (from the American point of view) it was English art they practised.

Official definitions of race and ethnicity in American law reveal a great deal about public policy in an environment of ethnic pluralism. Despite some ambiguity over who is black, or Hispanic, or an Aleut, relatively few people fall between the wide cracks in the American patchwork of identity classifications. However, those cracks tell us a great deal about the ambivalence of the American polity toward ethnicity.

Laws, regulations, guidelines, and judicial opinions are social artifacts which provide evidence about how a society deals with certain perceived problems. Laws are designed to serve social purposes and change as the purposes change; the specific form they may take reflects a need for congruence between laws as instruments of policy, and the purposes of policy. A survey of laws on race and ethnicity suggests three different policy aims: (1) laws mandating separation and disparate treatment, (2) laws prohibiting disparate treatment, and (3) laws encouraging aggregate changes in ethnic representation. Each purpose had a corresponding form of definition. If the purpose of a law is to mandate diverse treatment of individuals based on race or ethnicity, the law must be quite precise about who falls into which category, because an administrator is expected to make clear distinctions in individual cases.