Henry Reed's poem of the Second World War offers a studied, ironic catalogue of some parts of experience silencing others. Here are observable facts, given as imperative command; knowledge of their use is for the future, rather than a possession of the present, however: one of the many things we (or you) have not got. Here also is the beauty of nature and its utter irrelevance to the human struggle. “Naming of Parts” excludes more than it includes: what is not said constantly overbears and threatens to break through what is. But the balance of information is precariously maintained, the unspeakable, the horror which is the truth of the war being disguised, expressed, and controlled in the naming of parts.

In a very different register, William Gass writes in his Habitations of the Word,

Lists, then, are for those who savor, who revel and wallow, who embrace, not only the whole of things, but all of its accounts, histories, descriptions, justifications.

For adventurous young men, the experience of the gold rush was one of transformation. The most keenly-sought transformation was from “not wealthy” to “fabulously wealthy, ” but the literature, histories and memoirs of the era point toward a much more general sense of change and disorientation. One writer noted of the new arrivals to Sacramento that as “each one steps on shore, he seems to have entered a magic circle, in which he is under the influence of new impulses. The wills of all seem under the control of some strong and hidden agency.” Joining the rush may have promised an escape from the restraints of home, but the writer here suggests an altogether more complex exchange. The “new arrival” may have been active in leaving home, but he is placed in a passive position as he is welcomed into the brotherhood of a “magic circle,” seduced or enchanted by a regulatory power of which he is scarcely aware. The experience, it seems, was familiarly fraternal, but also unsettling.

Nostalgia for an idyllic antebellum South permeated both cultivated and vernacular arts in post-Reconstruction America. Bock's popular mode, along with his fictional persona and artificial dialect, contrasts with Bagby's high-minded autobiographical voice, but both the Northern purveyor of popular ballads and the Southern man of letters look back longingly to the same idealized past. While it is not surprising that writings of the fallen Southern aristocracy should resonate with nostalgia, the nostalgic voices of Northerners pretending to be former slaves are less comprehensible. Yet both men's memories of the Old South proved marketable.

Recent accounts of Anglo-American relations in the mid-1960s revolve around the supposed existence of “deals” made between President Lyndon Johnson and Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The memoir of Edward Short, Wilson's Chief Whip, goes so far as to describe a “deal” done before the 1964 general election, whereby the US would support the pound in return for an undertaking not to devalue if a Labour Government were to be returned. Clive Ponting, Philip Ziegler and Ben Pimlott all accept that a “deal” or “secret agreement” — Pimlott's phrase — had been made by the early summer of 1965. The US would organise a multilateral rescue for the sinking pound, in return for British policies of deflation at home, retention of overseas military commitments, and (limited) support for the Vietnam war. The 1965 “deal” appears to have been reinforced during the sterling crisis of July 1966, only to come adrift in 1967. Wilson's own account has him rejecting the excessive demands accompanying an American sterling rescue in 1967, and devaluing as — in effect — an assertion of British sovereignty.

Contemporary culture seems to be increasingly preoccupied with the millennium. “Endism,” the cult of the end, casts a familiar shadow. As memories of the cold war fade and the threat of nuclear apocalypse recedes, concerns about the environment and the disturbing activities of millenarian sects provide new sources of anxiety. Academic texts, like Robert Sinai's The Decadence of the Modern World (1978) and Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992), echo this apocalyptic atmosphere. One of the most striking versions of the endist thesis is offered by Alain Mine who, in Le Nouveau Moyen Âge (1993), suggests that modernity's dream of a “clean, well-lighted place” is being supplanted by a new medievalism, a period characterised by doubt, fear and superstition. This entropic zeigeist is sustained by a series of obvious comparisons between the anxieties of the contemporary period and those of the last fin de siècle. Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle details some of the points of comparison and produces an argument which identifies a strong image of the past in her vision of the present.

The aftermath of civil strife, note some historians, can change perceptions of gender. Particularly for males, the effect of exhaustive internal wars and the ensuing collapse of the warrior ideal relegates the soldier/hero to a marginal iconological status. Linda L. Carroll has persuasively argued, for instance, that, following the Italian wars, one finds the “damaged” images of males in Renaissance art: bowed heads, display of stomach, presentation of buttocks. In fact, male weakness and “effeminacy” can, notes Linda Dowling, follow on the military collapse of any collective state. Arthur N. Gilbert argues, in contrast, that historically in wartime, male weakness in the form of “sodomites” was rigorously persecuted. From 1749 until 1792, for instance, there was only one execution for sodomy in France, while, during the Napoleonic Wars, the period of 1803–14, seven men were executed. Such analysis suggests that, in the aftermath of civil wars, cultural attitudes toward effeminate or homosexual men shifted from suppression or persecution during martial crisis to one of latitude and perhaps tolerance in periods following the breakdown of the military collective.

The aftermath of America's Civil War, the decades of the 1870s and 1880s, provides a testing ground to examine attitudes toward the soldier/hero and toward the effeminate male in a time of social and cultural disarray. At this time, an art “craze,” the Aesthetic Movement, captured popular culture. Aestheticism, seen in the eighteenth century as a “sensibility,” had, by the nineteenth century, an institutional base and a social reform ideology.

The Progressive movement's confrontation with big business was dominated by a paradox. Reformers constantly warned about large corporations, denouncing their capacity to abuse workers, cheat consumers, brutalise competitors and undermine the democratic system. But, despite such rhetoric, the movement did little to diminish the social, political and economic power of big business. This discrepancy has, of course, attracted many historians' attention. For some, Progressivism's “failure” stemmed from reformers' ambivalent attitude towards big business and industrialisation: while angry about the malignant results of big business, Progressives agreed that any campaign to reverse the process of industrialisation would be futile and potentially harmful. For New Left historians, such as Gabrial Kolko, Martin Sklar and James Weinstein, the explanation for the shortcomings of Progressivism is even more straightforward. They claim that, despite their disingenuous declarations in favour of democracy and equality, most Progressive leaders never intended to challenge the power of America's corporate elite.

Although the idea may be hard for us to imagine fifty years later, especially given the historical weight of the subject, the first of the great postwar entertainment classics to come out of the American experience of World War II took shape initially as a set of comic short stories by Thomas Heggen about the backwater Pacific Navy. Gathered into a slim 1946 novel, the stories became the basis of a hit Broadway play of 1948; and that play in turn became the basis of an extraordinarily popular 1955 movie. The classic so described, of course, was Mr. Roberts, with the titular hero eventually so thoroughly identified with the actor playing him on stage and screen that by the end of the decade in question, a New York Times Reviewer would observe of the actor, Henry Fonda, “it now appears he is Mr. Roberts.”

In late March, 1977, in the midst of mocking jabs at the televised Nixon interviews, the U.S. Postal service, and genetic engineering, Chicago Tribune cartoonist Wayne Stayskal fired off one quick frame on the plight of newly elected President Jimmy Carter's hometown of Plains, Georgia. The cartoon presented a group of typically chunky, grinning Stayskal characters awkwardly bumping along with a pack of hounds before a solitary wooden shanty labeled “PLAINS.” As they jog along, the guide looks back from his straining hounds to drawl, “Hot dang… th'ar on Billy's trail ag'in folks!” Stayskal's cartoon clearly stemmed from a front page article in the Tribune of the previous day. Entitled “Tourists, Fear Rout Billy Out of Plains,” the story explained how fear for his family's safety in the suddenly popular small town had finally forced Billy Carter to move to an even more remote location several miles away. Yet while this was quite obviously the impetus behind this cartoon, the short notice of Billy's intended retreat from Plains was actually just one of many media references to the changing character of the town in the wake of his older brother's victories at the polls. Beginning in the spring of the previous year as Jimmy Carter suddenly emerged to gain the Democratic presidential nomination, Plains had risen just as rapidly to become the most famous small town in America. And at the peak of its early notoriety in 1977, Roger Brown characterized what this really meant for the town in a complex painting entitled Two Couples Viewing the Spectacle of Erosion at Providence Canyon Near Plains, Georgia (figure 1).

Among the most intensely absorbed viewers of John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) was Adolf Hitler, who knew almost nothing of the United States but who observed how degenerate the “Okies” had become. He believed that immigration had already mongrelized the general populace and, since even farmers of Anglo-Saxon stock had succumbed to racial disintegration, the Americans would be pushovers for the Wehrmacht. This particular movie-goer failed to notice the resilience and endurance also flickering on the screen; and it would be foolish to claim that his decision to declare war on the United States was based only upon a misinterpretation of The Grapes of Wrath (which he watched several times). But since no treaty obligation compelled the Third Reich to make war, after Pearl Harbor, upon an industrial power of which the Führer was so ignorant, any analysis of his motives must remain speculative. It may have been a mad urge for apocalyptic destructiveness (and self-destructiveness), springing from subterranean depths that the psychobiographer can fathom more readily than the military or diplomatic historian. Perhaps Hitler's miscalculation was not utterly irrational: with Holland's surrender in 1940, its place as the world's nineteenth largest army was ceded to the Americans.

Alfred Kinsey has long been recognized for his crucial role in the history of American sexual science. Kinsey's massive studies of American sexual behavior changed the way social scientists studied sexuality by breaking from the accepted social hygienic, psychoanalytic, psychiatric and physiological approaches. Scholars have noted that Kinsey's efforts paved the way for the work of Masters and Johnson and contributed to a postwar climate of “openness” about sexual behavior. In effect, Kinsey's studies signaled the final triumph of scientific candor over the nineteenth century “conspiracy of silence.” Furthermore, Kinsey's quantitative approach advanced what Paul Robinson has called the “modernization of sex,” and Kinsey's discussion of homosexuality inspired both the homophile movement of the 1950's and the anti-homosexual moral panic of the same decade. Yet for all of Kinsey's significance, his part in shaping the social policies of the 1950's and the “sexual revolution” of the 1960's has received surprisingly little historical analysis.

Beloved is a self-conscious examination of the possibilities and limitations of the story-making process, both for the individual and for the community. Because slavery is a highly emotive subject and because historical narratives of slavery are so controversial, the exercise is a particularly potent one. The basic problem of the novel concerns the need to transform facts of unspeakable horror into a life-giving story, for the individual, for the black community, and for the nation. It is a problem which encourages compulsive repetition and avoidance; hence the stories of slavery proliferate. On the individual level the stories are shaped by the points of view of a variety of characters; on a wider level, by the demands of different types of utterance and by the structuring power of different kinds of historical perspectives and linguistic formulations, including, most significantly, generic forms. This profusion of storytelling makes the statement at the end of the novel, that “this is not a story to pass on” exceedingly problematic, for there is no single referent for the pronoun “this”, and the article “ a ” seems singularly inappropriate in view of this profusion.

As “the American century” comes to a close provocative jeremiads have become a growth industry in the United States, with just about every leading newspaper and numerous popular magazines, books, radio and television programmes depicting a nation in serious social and economic decline. A generalised sense of crisis emerges from the myriad causes of this perceived decline at home and abroad. Domestically, commentators feed ideological debates and moral panics about problems of crime, drugs, family values, ethno-racial balkanisation and multiculturalism. Externally, the uncertain endings of the Cold War and emergent economic leadership of Asiatic nations have encouraged requiems for the American Empire. These discourses of decline evidence a public paranoia about significant economic, political and social changes which have disrupted the coherence and cohesiveness of national myths and ideologies of Americanness. One notable feature of this paranoia is that it has led to a growing recognition of whiteness as a social category and more particularly of white male selfhood as a fragile and besieged identity. I want to comment on some general features of this paranoia as a signifier of whiteness and examine how it has been treated as an issue of representation in Hollywood film.

Although this quote reads like a description of Hollywood and its celluloid environs, the author is reviewing Run With the Hunted: A. Charles Bukowski Reader, a comprehensive anthology of the poet-novelist's work. From Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail (1960), his first full-length collection of poetry, to Pulp, published shortly after his death in 1994, Bukowski chronicled the humorous, lyric, impoverished lives of prostitutes, drinkers, bums, writers, and miscreants of every description. His tales of squalor which document the starving and passionate Angeleno writer are in large measure inspired by John Fante.

Los Angeles is Buk territory. He lived in and wrote about Central Los Angeles for most of his seventy-three years. L.A. is a place where, in the realm beyond fiction, people migrate in pursuit of dreams. One category of migrant dream-seeker is the writer. Whether he/she is a neophyte seeking fortune as a screenwriter or an aging, established author reviving an endangered career, the writer confronts an industry whose interests and intents are tangential to his/her own.

Ever since gangsters first appeared on the American screen (officially with D. W. Griffith's Musketeers of Pig Alley, in 1912) they have been involved in a prolonged battle with the forces of “legitimate” culture. Having fought their fights from the wrong side of the street gangsters have continually drawn attention to the line which separates legitimate from illegitimate Americans. This has raised problems in accounting for the gangster genre's significance. In stigmatizing the ethnic urban poor as criminal, the gangster genre betrays its origins in a nativist discourse which sought to cast “hyphenated” Americans as “un-American” and in need of “ Americanization. ” Yet, as perhaps the most powerful vehicle for the nationalization and popularization of ethnic urban American life, the gangster genre overturned many aspects of its iniquitous origin, playing an important part in the re-writing of American history from the perspective (and, as I shall demonstrate, quite literally in the voice) of the ethnic urban lower class.

This contradiction is characteristic of the dynamic and changing role American popular culture artifacts play in the mediation of the nation's history. Regardless of the poetic and ideological licence gangster fictions take with the very real socio-historical problems of the ethnic urban poor, the central conflict which informs these narratives remains the question of social, economic, and cultural exclusion.