In a letter to Peter Collinson in 1753, Benjamin Franklin recounted his meeting with a “Transylvanian Tartar,” actually a Greek Orthodox priest, who had arrived in America in 1748 during a tour around the world. The “Tartar” asked Franklin why he thought the people of so many cultures—Tartars in Asia and Europe, Negroes in Africa, and Indians in the Americas—“continued a wandring [sic] careless Life, and refused to live in Cities, and to cultivate the arts they saw practiced by the civilized part of Mankind.” Before Franklin could respond, the “Tartar” offered his own explanation, beginning at the beginning, with Genesis and God's expulsion of Adam and his progeny from Eden. “God make man for Paradise,” Franklin quoted the “Tartar,” “he make him for to live lazy; man make God angry, God turn him out of Paradise, and bid him work; man no love work; he want to go to Paradise again, he want to live lazy; so all mankind love lazy.”

It is no secret that the American Studies movement finds itself methodologically fragmented and that definitions of its uniqueness and its relationship to other disciplines are a matter of debate within the profession. It is also no secret that attempts to move beyond the “nationalcharacter” and “myth-symbol-image” approaches have fallen short of consensus. Innovations and new directions in other disciplines include approaches and methods we have considered our province and frequently seem to move us in new directions that further fragment our movement.

And so Missouri has fallen, that great State! Certain of her children have joined the lynchers, and the smirch is upon the rest of us. That handful of her children have given us a character and labeled us with a name; and to the dwellers in the four quarters of the earth we are “lynchers,” now, and ever shall be. For the world will not stop and think – it never does, it is not its way; its way is to generalize from a single sample. It will not say “Those Missourians have been busy eighty years in building an honorable good name for themselves; these hundred lynchers down in the corner of the State are not real Missourians, they are bastards.” No, that truth will not enter its mind; it will generalize from the one or two misleading samples and say “The Missourians are lynchers.” It has no reflection, no logic, no sense of proportion. With it, figures go for nothing; to it, figures reveal nothing, it cannot reason upon them rationally; it is Brother J. J. infinitely multiplied; it would say, with him, that China is being swiftly and surely Christianized, since 9 Chinese Christians are being made every day; and it would fail, with him, to notice that the fact that 33,000 pagans are born there every day, damages the argument. It would J-J Missouri, and say “There are a hundred lynchers there, therefore the Missourians are lynchers;” the considerable fact that there are two and a half million Missourians who are not lynchers would not affect their verdict any more than it would affect Bro. J. J.'s.

From the 1820s to the 1850s, the black press, with early support from white abolitionists, published historical essays on the St. Domingue slave rebellion for new generations of readers. The purpose was to exhort free black readers to emulate the vigor of the St. Dominguan rebels in taking control of their communities and personal lives. In this essay, I address how antebellum black activist writers formulated a St. Domingue legacy to unite free black communities, to promote literacy education, and to build firm moral character.

It's remarkably simple, really.

Constructed in 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, generally referred to as the “Wall,” consists of two black granite wings, each almost 250 feet long, which meet at an obtuse angle that is submerged into the landscape of the National Mall, a green space between the Lincoln and Washington Memorials and some distance behind White House, in Washington, D.C. The form of the Wall, designed by Maya Ying Lin, is minimalist in nature, not only because it includes the right angles, hard edges, shiny surface, and repeated increments of Minimalism, but because even though it is a war memorial, unlike most, its only ornament and representation is the seemingly endless list of 58,226 names of American service men and women killed in Vietnam.

Few observers in the late summer of 1974 expected that Gerald Ford would pardon Richard Nixon, and none predicted that the action would occur as swiftly and enigmatically as it did. Yet on Sunday morning, September 8, the new Chief Executive issued “a full, free and absolute pardon” to the man he had succeeded in office less than one month before. No other act of the President's brief term would prove so singular or controversial. And few executive actions in modern times have remained more persistently elusive and unfathomable.

The Provision of improved facilities for women in domestic space and their increased participation in the design process were material aspects of the Modern movement in architecture. While initially directed toward the provision of improved conditions for lower-income families, the main outcome would occur in postwar middle-class housing, particularly in North America. This outcome was associated with a renewal of conservative suburbanization and populist capitalism. The consequences of these design and socioeconomic practices – especially as demonstrated in that significant liminal space between theorized professional production and anecdotal public consumption – for the reinscription of women's presence in domestic space was therefore of considerable import. Scholarly attention has concentrated on the architectural consequences of revised gender relations and on the activity of women designers and architectural writers. This essay seeks to advance discussion of those consequences and activities by means of a situated approach that is centered on a multivalent analysis of the supposed inscription and representation of the modern woman in the Modernist suburban home. The site is the rapidly expanding but physically, socioeconomically, and culturally discreet North Shore area of Vancouver, 1945–65. The location typifies the resuscitation of the middle-class suburb through what might be termed Automod-ernism. The extension of North American trends such as the individual family automobile and home ownership reinforced by laborsaving appliances became a distinct phenomenon of the Modern movement. The time frame corresponds with the postwar baby boom and sustained economic and demographic growth, when child rearing generally kept women, especially of middle-income families, mostly at home.

If reckoned by unkind reviewers as “one of the dullest and most vulgar productions ever published,” Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred nevertheless enjoyed prolific sales in both England and the United States because of the reputation Stowe had earned with Uncle Tom's Cabin. Given Stowe's international popularity, more charitable reviewers were reluctant to chastise her second antislavery novel too severely. The reviewer from Blackwood's, for example, spoke of “a respect due to genius; even though its wing droop in the attempt to soar” (“Dred,” 694). No deferential attitude, however, could sway this critic from his perceived duty to inform those who had not yet bought the book of its egregious flaws. Glossing over what struck him as offensive dialogue and improbable characterization, he focused attention on Stowe's apparent lack of dramatic skill. The fact that Dred's title character, a slave rebel, dies a peremptory death in an undescribed combat gave good cause for complaint. But also troubling was Stowe's substitution of cholera for insurrection as the means of dispatching Dred's antagonists, a move that the reviewer called “truly ludicrous” (695). “It is the Julius Caesar plot, minus the assassination of Caesar,” he jibed (701): “It is as if, after the meeting between Brutus and Cassius, and the scene with Portia, a herald were to announce to the conspirators that Caesar was dead, and they were not wanted” (704). From the standpoint of aesthetic unity, he was absolutely right. Dred's balked trajectory reads like an unintentional parody of more traditional plots. But to let the task of interpretation go at that is to miss the complex manner in which Stowe involved herself in the major political crisis of her time. Situated as it is on the brink of Civil War, the attenuated structure of Stowe's novel is telling — a metaphor for the failure of antebellum polemical patterns to shape a national consensus. When properly viewed as discourse, that is, a figurative running back and forth (from the Latin dis-, “in different directions,” and currere, “to run”), Dred evokes a whole field of signification where militant, sentimental, and ironic rhetorics clash, combine, and regenerate.

I suppose I can find in the details of my own biography all the contradictions of place and mobility in modern American civilization. I was raised for eighteen years in the same house in Miami Beach, one of the paradigmatically transient cities in America. I was an undergraduate in a small southern town, where people were as likely to stand up for “Dixie” as for “The Star Spangled Banner” and where a sense of place hung in the air like Spanish moss on the live oaks. I was a graduate student in Philadelphia and took my first job in Davis, California.

This short notice, entitled “When a ‘Hobo’ Works,” which appeared in the New York Times, July 13, 1912, might seem overwrought to contemporary readers in its definitive nature. The need to delineate work and nonwork, however, was quite serious business for Americans in the first decades of the 20th century. During this period, as evidenced in newspaper and journal articles, legislation, and popular culture, there was growing apprehension about the perceived differences and slippage among the ideas of the tramp, the hobo, the vagrant, the unemployed worker, and the worker. Most of this conversation was directed toward defining work and nonwork for men — specifically for white men. Tramping came to be viewed as an affliction of both mind and body, with writers, politicians, and reformers seeking to define the tramp and then theorizing how to put these newly codified bodies to work.

Some of the most complex images of joblessness from this period were produced by the Ashcan school of artists, who frequently portrayed jobless men in their paintings and drawings. The Ashcan school, a group of six realist painters who lived and worked in New York City from 1900 to the First World War, established a national reputation as radicals rebelling against what they argued was a conservative artistic community woefully out of touch with modern American life. Ashcan artists depicted what they claimed to be the realities of the city around them — busy streets, shopgirls, ethnic communities, construction workers, and prostitutes, as well as tramps. John Sloan's The Coffee Line, 1905 (Figure 1), is typical of the kinds of images that Ashcan artists produced. The scene is a snowy winter's night in New York with a band of men in line to get a free cup of coffee. Jobless men are the stars here; unwitting leads in Sloan's slice of New York City life. The painting did much to communicate nationally a visual image of the tramp in New York City; it won honorable mention in 1905 at the Carnegie Institute International Exposition and was then exhibited in Chicago; Spartanburg, South Carolina; Dallas; and Seattle.

By the time oscar wilde made his American tour in 1882, the honeymoon tradition at Niagara was firmly established. Perhaps we are as cynical about honeymoons at the Falls as Wilde; by now the idea is a thorough cliche. Yet the custom has had a remarkably long life, reaching its widest vogue in the 1920s and 1930s, and even today it is not completely defunct: Young couples still “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” and the Falls. In the late nineteenth century the association of the Falls with the wedding journey was promoted by hotel advertisements and railroad excursion pitches – a product of commercial “hype” much like the modern Poconos honeymoon. But the origin of the Niagara honeymoon seems to antedate such promotion by several decades, although it is difficult to pinpoint. Both its elusive origins and its remarkable persistence suggest a deep-seated imaginative attraction that Niagara has held for newlyweds.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx observes, Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this timehonored disguise and this borrowed language.

Fdormer Boston Celtics player and coach Bill Russell wrote, “People in all kinds of cultures are known to ‘jump for joy’ in moments of supreme happiness. Jumping is an internationally recognized expression of joy, and basketball is a sport organized around jumping.…It's possible for a player to jump because he's happy, but it's more likely that he's happy because he's jumping. I have heard players complain about almost every detail of the game — the rules, the size or color of the ball, the shape or temperature of the dressing room — but I've never heard anybody complain about the fact that the game requires jumping.”

After squanto taught the colonists at Plymouth in 1620 “both the manner how to set [their corn], and after how to dress and tend it,” Indians seem to have disappeared from the American pastoral scene, except as unwelcome intruders. Seventeen years later, writes William Bradford, “the Pequots fell openly on the English at Connecticut, in the lower parts of the river, and slew sundry of them as they were at work in the fields.” Mary Rowlandson opens the story of her captivity during King Philip's War similarly, describing how the Narragansetts came out of the wilderness to attack the farmsteads at Lancaster, setting fire to buildings “with flax and hemp, which they brought out of the barn,” and later celebrated by feasting on the animals they had captured: “miserable was the waste that was there made, of horses, cattle, sheep, swine, calves, lambs, roasting pigs, and fowl (which they had plundered in the town) some roasting, some lying and burning, and some boiling to feed our merciless enemies.” These accounts — in which Indians violate the pastoral scene, killing peaceful tillers of the soil and wantonly consuming the stock that had been so carefully husbanded — suggest that in the 17th Century, despite the original beneficence of Squanto, Indian “savagery” was perceived as a threat not only to the lives of individual colonists but to agriculture itself, the foundation of the colonial economy in North America. But it was the agrarian culture of the English that turned the Indians into “savages,” for the Pequot War and King Philip's War began, as Francis Jennings has demonstrated, with the colonists' hunger for land.

In 1853, Harriet Beecher Stowe filed a copyright suit against F. W. Thomas, a Philadelphia printer who had published an unauthorized German translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin in his newspaper, Die Freie Presse. Stowe brought suit in the federal circuit court in Philadelphia, thus ironically placing her claim in the hands of Justice Robert Grier, a notable enforcer of slaver-owners' interests under the Fugitive Slave Law. Grier found that Stowe's property rights in her novelistic plea for resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law were very narrow and that she could not prevent Thomas from publishing a translation without her authorization. In the conclusion to the court's opinion, Grier wrote,

C. Vann Woodward, in his Origins of the New South, suggestively links the economic revival in the South in the late 19th century with a literary revival, a revival that he judges as distinctly inferior to its economic counterpart: “For all the shortcomings and the comparative brevity of the revival … the Southern writers undeniably possessed solid virtues. Among them, however, one will search in vain for a realistic portrayal of their own times … the writers were too preoccupied with the quaint ‘types’ of the hinterland to notice what was going on in their own parlors” (164). Preoccupied with a nostalgic vision of region, Southern writers failed, it is generally agreed, to represent significant social changes in realistic terms. More recently, Jules Chametzky has echoed Vann Wood-ward's observation when he wrote that “local color and regionalism … became … toward the end of the nineteenth century, a strategy, largely, for ignoring or minimizing social issues of great significance” (21). Of course, not all local colorists ignored or minimized these issues – only those who I've taken to calling “weak local colorists.” Writers like Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris looked back, nostalgically, to a romanticized past; in flight from their present, they used the plantation past as a way of attempting to justify the status quo in the South at the turn of the centnry.

The task of cultural recovery, George Hutchinson writes, begins with “those moments when places where the intertwined discourses of race, culture, and nation were exposed to questioning, to skepticism, to transformation, however small and localized, and when possibilities for coalitions of cultural reformers were envisioned and exploited” (Harlem, 26). The historical record has been muddied by shifting political currents and fragmented by instances of deliberate neglect over time, yet scholars have recently begun to reconstruct the complicated story of interracial cooperation between the two world wars. More effort, however, should be devoted to discovering connections and parallels between the worlds of work and art — of labor and literature — as part of this story. One reward of such effort, I suggest, will be to reveal the hitherto hidden “lines of continuity and disruption” that James A. Miller sees connecting “the African-American literary production of the 1920s and its production in the 1930s” (87–88). That those lines often intersected lines traced by nonblack literary production and working-class history reinforces Hutchinson's point that it is necessary to rethink “American cultural history from a position of interracial marginality, a position that sees ‘white’ and ‘black’ American cultures as intimately, mutually constitutive” (Harlem, 3).

Stuckey's is almost defunct. Even the Stuckey's next door to the home office in Eastman, Georgia, is closed on Sunday. Ever since the railroad bought the chain as a tax write-off, burnt down Stuckey's haven't been replaced, and few new Stuckey's have been built. The pecan rolls at the remaining stores were made, not by Stuckey's but were, rather, bought, mass-produced, from some nameless factory. And today, it is rare to see a roof bearing the admonition to “See Seven States from Rock City.” The three-foot letters on the barn roofs which still bear the familiar advertisement are faded and the words no longer dominate the countryside. Today, the message, extended only to literate birds, is private rather than public—new invitations to Lookout Mountain's Rock City are painted on birdhouse roofs, and the bird houses are sold to grace the back yards of nostalgia souvenir seekers. Even without Stuckey's and Rock City barns, the South ain't dead for tourists; rather, it's a New South—a South to which the travelling nation looks for the finest American virtues.

In the prologue to his 1951 revision of Exile's Return, Malcolm Cowley (Figure 1) described the first edition of 1934 as “the story of the lost generation” written “while its adventures were still fresh in my mind.”He then added, “since I had shared in many of the adventures I planned to tell a little of my own story, but only as an illustration of what had happened to others.” In fact, this modest description of his method drastically understates the importance of Cowley's own life in the originalstory. In the first edition, he does combine stretches of narrative about his own life — including chapters on his childhood, high-school and college years, exile in Europe, disillusionment with bohemian life, and political conversion — with a narrative of the generation's coming of age. But even the story ofthe collective self that he means to tell — beginning with their early innocence ina pastoral, Edenic America; continuing through their exile and refuge in the religion of art and the subculture of bohemianism; and ending with their final repatriation and salvation via the political and historical insights of Marxism — is in every important respect simply his own writ large. It is a story in which the personal, individualized “I” of conventional autobiography is transformed into a collective “we.”