In one of the most famous paragraphs of our most famous autobiography, Henry Adams located the precise moment when “eighteenth century troglodytic Boston” joined industrial America: “the opening of the Boston and Albany Railroad; the appearance of the first Cunard Steamers in the bay; and the telegraphic messages which carried from Baltimore to Washington the news that Henry Clay and James K. Polk were nominated for the presidency. This was May, 1844.”

When the American Studies Association chose “Boundaries of American Culture” as the theme and San Diego as the site of its 1985 biennial convention, it made a particularly appropriate match between theme and site. Seen from my hotel balcony in a hazy autumnal glow, San Diego appeared a boundary city in at least three senses of relevance to the Association's work. First, lying at the border of the United States and Mexico, it hinted at the rich possibilities available to an American Studies willing to reach imaginatively beyond national boundaries, both north and south, toward a genuinely pan-American studies. Second, as a three-block walk to the beach from the convention hotel amply confirmed, San Diego borders what several commentators have called “the Mediterranean of the future”–a major arena of the globe too long and too much neglected by most Americans and Americanists. It was stimulating to welcome to the convention distinguished visitors from a dozen Asian and South Pacific countries, and more than a few speakers expressed the hope that such interaction would significantly further the comparativist and internationalist perspectives that they believed increasingly incumbent upon a nonparochial American Studies. Certainly the heartening presence in San Diego of both long-time and new colleagues from Europe, Canada, Latin America, Asia, and the South Pacific reflected a slowly but steadily growing impulse in the Association, a concrete dramatization of the premise that ideas and values, not to mention trade and power, do not stop at a nation's borders, although they may be often slowed down or even transformed at those borders.

During the last years scholars in American Studies have become more conscious of the methodological problems of their work and have made wide-ranging use of the developments in various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. They have also discovered the importance of a critical perspective on the history of their “discipline.” But there clearly is the feeling of a loss of direction, an uneasiness about the purposes and objectives of American Studies. Often the appropriation of new methods and approaches was pursued under the old premises, and awareness of the history of the field reduced to a stereotypical periodization of “phases” characterized by dominant “key concepts” or “methods.” Whereas during the late 1960s and early 1970s the work of the so-called myth-symbol school (from H. N. Smith to Leo Marx) was criticized as methodologically unsound (by B. Kuklick) and politically conservative (or reactionary) (by Lasch et al.), more recently some of its work, particularly by Leo Marx and Richard Slotkin, has been condemned (by Kenneth Lynn) as “regressive,” “reductionist,” or simply “anti-American Studies.” This confusion about the origin, the objectives, the political implications, and the “legacy” of the early period of American Studies, from the 1930s to the 1960s, and the development and changes in literary and cultural criticism and in historiography during these decades is, it seems to me, one reason for the precarious relationship between “history” and “theory” in American Studies today.

The relationship of any single work of art to its culture is always problematic. As the act of an individual artist faced with the task of creating something on the two-dimensional surface of a canvas with line, shape, and space, with form and color, a painting belongs to the biography of the artist and to the history and criticism of art, a possible subdivision of which is the history and criticism of the art of a particular culture. Cultural critics and historians of a more comprehensive sort will examine a work for the ways in which it “reflects,” “illustrates,” or “expresses” shared experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the culture, directly or in some mediated fashion. If art historians tend at times to underestimate the interrelation between a painting and other forms of cultural expression in their preoccupation with the specialness of the medium, its tradition and methodology, the cultural critics often run the risk of ignoring or flattening out the special language of pictorial expression in their avid search for interconnections. At one extreme, they seem to posit some hypostatized notion of a “culture” in which individual acts seem almost to be assumed as automatic illustrations rather than formative shapes. To fashion a more adequate critical approach requires thus that we draw upon the strengths of both approaches while avoiding their pitfalls.

One of the great intellectual debates in the nineteenth century in the United States concerned the American preoccupation with European culture and, perhaps more important, the continued use of European critical standards to judge the quality of indigenous American culture. There is a great deal of truth in Walt Whitman's lament above, for a truly American high culture had yet to emerge, and American popular culture was still very much in its formative stages and under the influence of European trends (witness the enormous popularity of Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott). Only in the realm of folk culture had a rich, and by now Americanized, tradition emerged in the period before the Civil War. This is an interesting point, for after nearly two hundred years in the New World, American folk culture (especially folk humor) was now quite independent, whereas American high culture was still beholden to Europe for its inspiration and ideals. This clearly demonstrates that folk culture emerges from an affinity with everyday cultural expression and is closely identified with its creators, whereas high culture is based on a rigid set of (sometimes arbitrary) standards, which can be imposed from outside, with little regard for community cultural needs. Thus, the existing folklore was the result of the unique American experience, and while elements of the older European folk cultures were still visible, these had undergone the transformations caused by a new environment and were now fully integrated into the “frontier” culture of the new land.

In older downtowns the casual observer's eye can still be arrested by spectral presences from the commercial past. Where space is available on brick or stone, ancient advertising murals preside over parking lots, littered playgrounds, construction projects. Often only faintly discernible amid banks and fast-food franchises, some announce products – Uneeda Biscuit, Wilson's Whiskey; some are populated by fading fantastic characters – the Gold Dust twins, the White Rock girl. Once-banal adjuncts of everyday life, they exert more fascination as they recede from view.

America's leisure-time activities — artistic, entertaining, inlorma-tional and other — have usually been divided into elite and mass components, high culture and popular culture. However, because sociologists aim, among other things, to connect people's behavior with their social and economic origins, and because leisure-time culture is in part a reflection and an effect of class, a sociologically more accurate analysis calls for a set of cultural strata or subcultures that parallel class strata. I proposed such cultural strata in an earlier study; the purpose of this paper is to update the previous analysis. After raising some conceptual issues, I want to describe recent changes in the American class structure and therefore in American culture, concluding with some comments on the relationships between culture and class.

As American Studies extends its interdisciplinary mandate to the pictorial arts, a manifest destiny that might be seen by some as but a new form of cultural imperialism, it behooves us to stop this juggernaut for a moment and consider the increasingly important question of historicism. An historicism strictly applied can provide us with a rubric rooted in fact rather than in speculation, chastening a self-reflexive presentism with documentary and contextual integrity. Nowhere is this discipline of the interdisciplinary more needed than in considering the application of a problematical term like “Luminism,” itself an ex-post-facto construct of American art history that, like a typical Baby Boomer, was born in the mid-fifties, came of age in the seventies, and now is an establishment figure of the late eighties. First conceived by John I.H. Baur, Luminism was nurtured by Barbara Novak in her magisterial American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, and all but beatified in the post-Bicentennial extravaganza of John Wilmerding's American Light exhibit at the National Gallery. With the acceptance of Luminism as a viable aesthetic category, American Romantic painting itself, so long international Modernism's stepchild and poor relation, came of age and was invested with the Toga Virilis of academic respectability. In looking backwards, Americanists once anxious about vindicating their attraction to a supposedly secondhand and second-rate pictorial tradition could proudly point out that the nation had always possessed a legitimate school of artists who responded in a unified yet creative way to the idiomatic qualities of the American scene.

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 seventy-one song titles (see chart below) and innumerable lyrics that sprinkle his works indicate the extent of F. Scott Fitzgerald's reliance upon popular music as a source of his art. Contemporaneous descriptions of him as “laureate of the Jazz Age” need not be considered derisive; Fitzgerald was thoroughly in touch with his culture, was aware of the meaning of his sources, and was a keen analyst of the effects of popular culture on American lives. Cecilia Brady, in The Last Tycoon, admits “some of my more romantic ideas actually stemmed from pictures—42nd Street, for example, had a great influence on me. It's more than possible that some of the pictures which Stahr himself conceived had shaped me into what I was.” Fitzgerald was shaped by movies, by musical comedies, and not least by popular music. Other writers of our century were influenced in the same way, but it was Fitzgerald who acknowledged his debt to popular culture, who used it with meticulous care, and who evaluated seriously its impact, for better or worse, on the American scene.

“Inever shall forget my thrill at the phrase cover it,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Zona Gale wrote of her early newspaper work in New York City from 1901 to 1903: “When I was actually a reporter, I used to go about my work saying to myself, ‘I'm out on an assignment!’ People talked about the newspaper grind. But I was more than happy in it. I was ecstatic.”

The political agenda of William Lloyd Garrison and his adherents within the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS) can be reconstructed with the rhetoric and practices of print culture, starting with its assumption that the prospects for the slaves' emancipation waxed and waned with the proliferation of writing. In the mid-1830s, the MASS mailed antislavery publications in mass quantities to civic leaders, newspaper editors, and post offices in both the North and South. In 1837 alone, it issued 711, 277 publications, which Garrison noted were falling “thicker than raindrops … nourishing the soil of freedom.” Although their publicity campaign elicited a hostile reaction from political officials, newspaper editors, and most infamously, violent mobs, the abolitionists persisted. A typical budget for the MASS allotted far more money to printing and distribution than any other expenditure, including the remuneration of their often imperiled traveling agents.

When Brigadier General Thomas Farrell groped to describe (in an official government report) the subjective effect of the first atomic explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico, at 5:29:50 A.M. on July 16, 1945, he found himself, like many a would-be writer of the sublime before him, at a loss for adequate terms and tropes – stupefied, dwarfed, reaching for hyperbolic endterms like “doomsday” and “blasphemous” and resorting to spaced-out adjectives such as “tremendous” or “awesome” that 19thcentury Americans had reserved for more manageable spectacles of God's grandeur such as Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon. Though a military man and no poet, as Farrell registered this history-shattering event in words, he struggled to command some rhetoric of ultimacy before nuclear “effects [that] could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying”:

No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse, and mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was the beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately. Thirty seconds after the explosion came, first the air blast pressing hard against people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty. Words are inadequate tools for the job of acquainting those not present with the physical, mental, and psychological effects. It had to be witnessed to be realized.

Despite Mark Twain's situating the story “forty to fifty years ago” and in a rural river valley, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn closely engaged daily dilemmas and concerns of a Northern, urban, middle-class audience. As Carolyn Porter has argued, the familiar comprehension of American fiction as fantasies of escape from society and history, as authorial efforts to light out for the territory, needs to be dislodged by a sensitivity to such writings as acute responses to their immediate context – a developing industrial and capitalist society and culture. Although Huck's world may appear cut off from the landscape and society of bourgeois city dwellers of the 1880s, and although there are not explicit references to industrialization or urbanization, the novel reproduces and addresses new features of daily life, alterations and stresses in private and public behavior and interaction that were being precipitated by the accelerated economic and demographic changes of the late 19th Century.

In a letter to the radical periodical, the New Masses, in October of 1930, one reader requested more satire from the artists who published in its pages, art with “greater revolutionary purpose.” The drawings of an artist like Louis Lozowick, Vern Jessup complained, were suspiciously ambiguous: “In the New Masses they're proletarian art. What do you call them when they appear in the bourgeois business magazines, as they do?” Louis Lozowick, a Russian-American avant-garde painter and a contributing editor of the New Masses, rose immediately to the challenge. In a letter of response in the December, 1930 issue, entitled, “What Should Revolutionary Artists Do Now?” he noted that leftist artists and writers go to capitalist publications and galleries with the same regularity (and uncertainty) as workers go to shops and factories — and for the same reasons. One might ask a revolutionary artist to refuse all collaboration with capitalist institutions and starve to death with his revolutionary conscience immaculate. Or one might ask him to contribute to the revolutionary movement with whatever means at his command while conceding the inevitability (as we do in the case of the factory worker) of his working in capitalist institutions.

Describing their move north in an escape from slavery, William and Ellen Craft's slave narrative, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), offers a peculiar form of travel literature. The notion that slave narratives chronicle movement has not gone unrecognized. Indeed, scholarship on 20th-century African-American literature often argues the thematic importance of a journey motif that some trace to antebellum America. Blyden Jackson, for example, notes that African-American “literature bears within itself content, as well as themes and moods, reflecting the Great Migration” (xv), the period from early to mid-20th century, which Marcus E. Jones says actually began before the Civil War when blacks fled the South for the urban, industrial North (30). And Robert Stepto has identified two basic types of journeys in African-American literature: one of “ascent” in which “an ‘enslaved’ and semiliterate figure [travels] on a ritualized journey to a symbolic North,” and one of “immersion,” which is a “ritualized journey into a symbolic South” (6). Such discussions of journey motifs, however, have not yet led to an examination of slave narratives as travel literature.

Abraham Lincoln has been mythologized and deified in the American imagination, occupying a preeminent place in the collective memory of the nation. He occupies this place because he is believed to embody the ideals and values of the country and because he seemed to preside with grace, equanimity, and wisdom over one of the most destructive conflicts in America's history. In life, but even more consequently in death, his presence – as “rail splitter,” “Great Emancipator,” and “Father Abraham” – conjures up an array of events, symbols, and myths that give definition and meaning to the American nation. When he died, an unprecedented funeral celebration occurred in the Northern region of the United States that solidified his privileged place in the country's pantheon of great heroes. The series of events that took place after his assassination, as well as his emplotment in public memory since then, suggest that his death, as tragic and painful as it was, added to the cohesion, unity, and the very life of the nation when it was most seriously threatened by chaos and degeneration.

On Saturday, April 13, 1946, an unremarkable headline on page 4 of the Los Angeles Tribune, one of the area's black weeklies, read, “Fontana tragedy was accident, Kenny reports after probe.” Without a credited byline, the article proceeds to deliver the facts of the case: on December 16, 1945, a suspicious fire broke out in the partially built home of O'Day Short, an African American, in the predominantly white suburb of Fontana, fifty miles east of Los Angeles. Mr. Short, his wife, and their two children perished in the fire. Robert W. Kenny, attorney general of California, investigated the incident after “protests of ‘whitewash’ from black organizations and sympathetic white groups,” aided by the San Bernardino County Court. The article reprinted the attorney general's formal statement: “There is no evidence that the fire was of incendiary origin or indicating the identity of any person or persons as the perpetrator of a crime; to the contrary, all evidence adduced supported the conclusion that the fire was accidental.” According to the article, “Kenny's report, besides officially clearing the case of arson, also dismissed the possibility of organized vigilante activity in Fontana with its terse concluding statement, ‘No evidence of such activity has been found.’”

When the movie Panther premiered in American theaters in May 1995, it introduced a whole new generation to the rhetoric and radical politics of the Black Panther Party of a quarter-century earlier. It also sparked fierce debate about Panther fact, Panther fiction, and the power of images. Former leftie David Horowitz, now the head of the neoconservative Center for Popular Culture in Los Angeles, took out an ad in Daily Variety calling Panther a “two-hour lie.” Damning director Mario Van Peebles for glorifying the positive aspects of the black power movement — the children's breakfasts and sickle cell anemia tests the Panthers sponsored, for example — Horowitz warned that people “will die because of this film” and faxed a seven-page press release to the media condemning the Panthers as “cocaine-addicted gangsters who … committed hundreds of felonies.”