Clement Greenberg (1909–94) and Harold Rosenberg (1906–78) were the two art critics most closely associated with abstract expressionism in the 1940s and 1950s. Neither began their careers as art critics, however. By the mid-1980s, Rosenberg had published literary essays and poems in left-wing magazines, and Greenberg's articles and reviews first appeared at the end of that decade. During the 1940s, Greenberg began to write art criticism, and Rosenberg's essays began to appear frequently in the 1950s. By that time, both had become part of the group known informally as the New York Intellectuals, many of whom were Jewish and children of immigrant parents.

Highly verbal, vocal, argumentative, and politically left of center, they often published in magazines such as Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent. Although both Greenberg and Rosenberg ultimately rejected the more dogmatic and authoritarian aspects of leftist politics, they nevertheless supported the idea that society must move forward, but not necessarily by political means. Greenberg thought that such momentum could be maintained by the cultural elite, and Rosenberg, influenced by surrealism's concerns for the creative process, believed that individuals who were independent minded and creative could do the same. Both encouraged artists to turn from the social concerns that engaged many during the 1930s to apolitical, self-searching themes that came to characterize the art of the 1940s. In effect, they, especially Rosenberg, lionized the artist as an heroic individual. In the words of one historian, both “worked to find a safe haven for radical progress within the realm of individualistic culture.” And both, among the most perspicacious critics of their time, discovered, encouraged, and/or supported artists who ultimately became major figures, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

In the history of American consumer society, the case of King Camp Gillette, the “Razor King,” is at once strange and typical. Gillette — named King after a friend of his father — is recognized as the inventor of the modern safety razor and the namesake of the corporation launched to produce and sell it. As a tale of individual entrepreneurial triumph, Gillette's life follows a familiar pattern: hard work, visionary zeal, ridicule and adversity, persistence, trial and error, and conspicuous success. His story also functions well as a case study in the evolution of modern corporate business practice. The commercial genius of Gillette's invention was its disposable blade, and given a product (the razor) which created its own perpetual market (for the blades), the corporation used the modern tools of patent enforcement, stock offerings, public relations, market research, distribution, technology, diversification, and especially advertising to build and maintain its market share for the last 100 years. In these respects and others, Gillette's story finds an indigenous place in business textbooks, company testimonials, and cultural mythology.

Since its publication in 1950, Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book has Oproven a perennial favorite, the gift of choice at bridal showers, especially in the deluxe, ring-bound edition that once sold for a mere $3.95 (or $3 with premium coupons from cake-mix boxes). Second on the all-time culinary bestsellers' list-where it noses out The Joy of Cooking (1931) and The I Hate to Cook Book (1960) - the familiar red-and-white volume with the old-timey, Early American designs on the cover broke records that first year when it outsold Kon-Tiki, The Lonely Crowd, and Hubbard Cobb's Your Dream Home. In the spring of 1951, delighted General Mills executives presented the millionth copy to the American Mother of the Year and the distributer, McGraw-Hill, shipped another 950,000 units to retailers. A year later, with the book in its seventh printing, sales had passed the two million mark and there was no end in sight.

In 1924 van wyck brooks suffered a nervous breakdown while trying to finish a book about Emerson. For four terrifying years Brooks moved in and out of mental hospitals in Europe and America while the Emerson manuscript lay unfinished in his study, “a kind of symbol of his failure to resolve … the dialectical crisis of his own personality — so much like that of Emerson himself.” There were “manic” moments when he thought his depression had left him. In May 1925 he wrote to his good friend Lewis Mumford, “You may know I had a breakdown last spring — it really lasted about two years; and when it came to a head and burst — on May 20th, when I woke up — I felt as if I had expelled from my system the gathering poisons of years. … Everything I have done so far has been a kind of exploration of the dark side of our moon, and this blessed Emerson has led me right out into the midst of the sunny side.” Emerson had become for him a healing agent, a subject that, he told his wife Eleanor, would make him “sane again,” serving as an example of a successful American writer to contrast to his books about failures.

“I have Just come from the Gallery—my third visit,” announced a correspondent to the Boston Daily Advertiser on the second day of the Washington Allston retrospective at Harding's Gallery (Figures 1 and 2), “where I stood in the very midst… of the glowing colors and glorious subjects [of] the artist who stands alone in this his age, in this his art.” He was part of a chorus of dazzled spectators who crowded the exhibition, “filled with enthusiastic admiration” in “surveying forty-five pictures, many of which only the golden time of art could equal.” For the young Henry T. Tuckerman, who would recall it vividly in his influential Book of the Artists, the show “proved an epoch in the history of Art in the United States.” It was also the signal event of the artist's old age: a benefit exhibition that recalled the fifty-nine-year-old Allston from “a life of great seclusion” in suburban Cambridgeport, was extended from six to eleven weeks by popular demand, and fascinated some of the most critical minds in Boston.

In these words, Tillie Olsen dedicated her book, Silences, to the women whose lives for centuries were constricted by sexual role and social custom, yet who struggled nevertheless to express themselves (pp. 42–43). She further urged women who write and women who teach to give voice to these silent women by moving beyond the novel and the published poem to the journals, letters, memoirs, and other personal utterances that “add to the authentic story of human life, human experience” (pp. 45n).

In 1857, a bangor, maine, newspaper announced that a man named Phineas P. Quimby was engaged in “investigations in psychology” and that he had “discovered and in his daily practice carries out, a new principle of treatment of diseases.” A few years later, a Portland newspaper reported that Quimby's “new theory of disease” was “so contrary to the commonly received opinions” that people “hardly dare believe there can be any truth in it.” Contemporary observers found both Quimby's theory of Mind Cure and his medical practice to be highly unusual. Apparently, Quimby would “sit down beside him [the patient], and put himself en rapport with him.” He did “not use medicine or any material agency, nor call to his aid mesmerism or any spiritual influence whatever” in his treatment. Rather, observers maintained that “his power over disease arises from his subtle knowledge of the mind”.

The dramatic rise of identity anxieties in most parts of the world — as reflected in posttraditional movements in politics and postmodernist movements in art, architecture, and social theory — calls for an explanation. Also known disparagingly as fundamentalism or neoconservatism, posttraditionalism is often a response from the peripheral sectors of the population to the onslaught of rapid modernization, often accompanied by social disequilibria, income inequities, and feelings of relative deprivation. The Bible Belt in the United States, the oriental Jews in Israel, the rural and semi–urbanized Muslims in the Islamic world, the evangelical Protestants in Latin America, and the Hindu nationalists in secular India demonstrate the rich diversity and complexity of such political religions. By contrast, postmodernist movements are primarily situated in the intellectual circles of the contemporary world. In the face of an economically globalizing and technologically accelerating history, they represent a dual response to homogenizing forces by reasserting cultural pluralism and nihilism.

Recalling His Early Days in New York, Abraham Cahan declared that he “felt strongly drawn to the life of the city.” “My heart,” he wrote, “beat to its rhythm” (Marovitz, 17). Anzia Yezierska also remembers New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the century with affection in her autobiographical novel, Bread Givers. When her heroine Sarah Smolinsky is away from Hester Street, she longs for “the crowds sweeping you on like waves of a beating sea. The drive and thrill of doing things faster and faster” (129). For both of these Jewish immigrant writers, the spectacle of New York City embodied hope, liberation, and vitality, yet as they explore the immigrant's exhilarating and exasperating adaptation to urban life in America, they highlight the keen sense of loss on becoming American, on becoming modern. In their vivid depictions of late-19th-century New York life, both Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Yezier-ska's Bread Givers (1925) detail in an especially dramatic fashion a story that had not been explored before in America's urban novel: the Eastern European Jewish immigrant's adaptation to America's consumer culture. Highlighting the role of mass-produced goods and new forms of leisure in constructing a modern, middle-class American identity, both novels examine the tensions and contradictions of immigrant life as a more communal culture of scarcity gives way to an individually oriented culture of material abundance.

Jasper Cropsey's 1865 Painting, Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania, shows a pastoral scene. In the foreground on a rock are two rustic figures, one of whom stands gazing into the distance. Between the figures and the autumnal mountains and sky in the background, behind a lake, is a viaduct across which a locomotive is passing, its white plume of smoke streaming behind it. The presence of the railroad does not disrupt the tranquillity of the scene; the machine seems rather to enhance the pastoral atmosphere. Cropsey's painting is one of the last representations of a type frequent in the middle third of the 19th Century, in which rural calm and the artifacts of the new industrial age are juxtaposed. In some, such as George Inness's The Lackawanna Valley, the juxtaposition is uneasy; in many more, however, the effects of industrialism are comfortably accommodated within the framework of the pastoral world.

“O My Bergson, you are a magician,” wrote William James shortly after he had finished reading L'evolution Creatrice (1907), “and your book is a marvel.” He continued to praise the book in the letter, finding it a “pure classic in point of form,” its persistent “flavor of euphony” oddly reminding him of the “aftertaste” of Madame Bovary. If he was not in the “mood” to make any definite comment about the content of the book, James vaguely recognized certain coincident features between his “pragmatism” and what had already come to be called “Bergsonism”; and this shock of recognition was personally gratifying. (Indeed, in this respect, James was rather backward, for Bergson had read and been influenced by James' work long before the American had fully grasped the relevance of Bergson's thought to his own.) James felt they were “fighting the same fight” against what he called in the letter the great “beast,” “Intellectualism,” but which Bergson would have variously described as a pernicious Spencerian mechanism or the stubborn and habitual claims of a Platonic idealism. In any event, in James' mind, it was the much younger French philosopher who had delivered the “death wound,” and James was personally content to serve modestly “in the ranks” behind such an exquisite “commander.”

On the morning of June 20, 1951, a hundred FBI agents poured out of the Foley Square Federal Building in Manhattan at dawn, buttoned up their gray trenchcoats, and bounded into a fleet of waiting Buicks. Spreading throughout New York City in a well-orchestrated operation, they surrounded twenty private homes, burst into bedrooms, and dragged sixteen Communist Party leaders off to jail under the Smith Act charge of conspiring to teach the overthrow of the U.S. government. This was the second group of top Party functionaries to be arrested under the Act.

On the Phil Donahue show in early December 1981, Janet Dailey, the most successful romance writer in America today, explained, in answer to a question, why actual parents are usually absent in romance fiction. The form is short, it places a premium on excitement – and parents are not “interesting.” For a moment, Ms. Dailey almost lost her largely middle-aged audience. No one present thought to remind Janet Dailey that a contemporary genre of popular “thrillers” (which, by definition, aim to excite the reader) centers on parenthood. “Thriller” authors include Ira Levin, Peter Blatty, Stephen King, Lawrence Sanders, Mary Higgins Clark, Lawrence Block, V. C. Andrews, John Saul, and hundreds of lesser-known and -talented figures. It is logical, in fact, that no one mentioned in Dailey's presence what I call “family horror.” Romances and family thrillers are widely dissimilar, yet closely connected; the proverbial opposite sides of the same coin.

Much has been written in recent years about 19th-century rural cemeteries. Beginning with the establishment of Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery in 1831, these rural retreats rapidly replaced existing church burial grounds and by the 1850s had led to the development of urban parks and garden suburbs as well. Like urban parks and garden suburbs, rural cemeteries were meant to provide relief from the crowding, grid-iron regularity, and grittiness of the country's rapidly expanding industrial centers by embracing the openness, spontaneity, and verdant freshness of nature. Trees, shrubs, and flowering plants punctuated and enhanced the gentle contours of the land; lakes and roadways reflected and extended nature's beauties; manmade structures, too, nestled into the undulating rhythms of the land, exhibiting a oneness with the varied and carefully orchestrated richness of the natural setting. The garden suburb and the rural cemetery shared a further distinction of being located on the periphery of existing cities and were frequently entered through imposing gates that effectively announced their separateness from the surrounding terrain. Even more fundamental, however, but not fully understood, is the fact that at the core of the creation of both the rural cemetery and the garden suburb was a desire to emphasize and consolidate the American family by providing it with a new physical setting and a new set of symbols. By the Civil War, virtually every large American city had a rural cemetery, where its dead were buried in ample family lots that were adorned with imposing family monuments, and set off from other family lots by elaborate iron fences or stone copings similar to those that edged the family home.

The resettlement and activism of Japanese Americans in New York City during the 1940s represents a notable chapter within the large and complex history of the city's Nikkei (ethnic Japanese) community. Throughout the 20th century, the New York community has been distinctive among those in the United States. Like the larger city itself, New York's Nikkei population has been notable for demographic and occupational diversity, extraordinary cosmopolitanism, and political and artistic effervescence. At the same time, in stark contrast to its Pacific Coast counterparts, the New York community has long been marked by a lack of group cohesion, which the scattered residential pattern and transient nature of many of its members did nothing to reduce.

Both these salient community characteristics — political/artistic self-assertion and dispersion — were accentuated with the coming of World War II. The impending conflict between Washington and Tokyo led to the abrupt departure of a large proportion of the city's Nikkei residents back to Japan. However, in the weeks after Pearl Harbor, a new group of anti-Fascist Japanese Americans, largely first generation, assumed community leadership. Their group was subsequently reinforced with the arrival of second-generation intellectuals and artists from the West Coast, who had been incarcerated en masse in camps and elected to resettle in the city afterward. Although the newcomers experienced discrimination and difficulties, they joined with the city's established Japanese population to form a truly cohesive community, with its nucleus the popular activist group Japanese American Committee for Democracy. Yet this group, because of its connections with the Communist Party, demonstrated the limitations as well as the force of Japanese-American political action.

On the evening of good friday, 1878, Charles Taze Russell and a handful of followers, all clad in white robes, gathered at the Sixth Street Bridge in Pittsburgh to await the Millennial Dawn, which would provide their translation into heaven. His study of the Scriptures had convinced Russell, a haberdasher from Allegheny, Pennsylvania, that Christ had returned invisibly in 1874 and that now, three-and-a-half years later, the kingdom of God would begin, and the faithful would be summoned to heaven. Russell later denied the incident—Pittsburgh newspapers insisted otherwise-and revised his theology to accommodate this disappointment. The Kingdom of Jehovah, he said, would begin in 1914, whereupon God and Satan would rule the world jointly until the Battle of Armageddon vanquished the forces of evil and inaugurated a theocratic millennium.

In february 1927, Thomas Hart Benton visited Borger, Texas. In 1928 Benton painted Boomtoum (oil on canvas, 45 by 54 inches. Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester; Marion Stratton Gould Fund) from sketches made in Borger. Boomtown was, by the artist's retrospective admission, a milestone in his career; he called it “one of my best paintings” and “one of my best-known ‘Regionalist’ pictures.”

By the summer of 1929, Norman Rockwell was a full-fledged success. At age thirty-five, he had been creating covers for the Saturday Evening Post for thirteen years. A generation of American youth had grown up beguiled by his illustrations for Boys' Life, St. Nicholas, and the Boy Scouts' calendar. For more than a decade, Rockwell's artistry had helped sell Adams Black Jack gum, American Mutual insurance, Sun Maid raisins, and Coca-Cola. As this commercial success modulated into social success, Rockwell, whose father had risen to middle-class respectability in the offices of a New York City textile firm, found himself living the good life in the artists' colony of suburban New Rochelle. The drab apartments and boardinghouses of his youth and adolescence had been left behind. He joined the Larchmont Yacht Club, golfed in clothes from Brooks Brothers, and hosted elaborate parties worthy of Jay Gatsby.

September of 1961 brought welcome relief from the Berlin Crisis in the Oform of two distinctly American recreations: the World Series and the fall book season. As always, both seemed to focus on New York City, and the New York media brought excitement and suspense to fit both seasons: excitement – as Roger Maris attempted to break Babe Ruth's record of sixty home runs – and suspense, as Simon & Schuster ran eye-catching but mysterious ads for a new novel, revealing nothing more than the title – Catch-22. Everyone knew what Maris's quest meant, but no one seemed to know what “CATCH-22” meant.

Part German-American and part Chippewa, Louise Erdrich has described the “mixed blood's” quest as a search for parentage, an attempt to understand self by interrogating genealogy. In the opening paragraphs of Tracks, a novel set on a North Dakota Chippewa reservation in the early 20th century, Erdrich reveals that the investigation of background necessarily entails an entrance into the world of ghosts. When the narrator Nanapush addresses the young woman listening to his unfolding account of her familial and tribal past as a “child of the invisible, the ones who disappeared,” he simultaneously connects an awareness of the ghostly presence of the dead with the discovery of identity and the creation of history. The narrator's conjuring of “invisible ancestors and “ghosts” (2) who inhabit tribal woods introduces haunting as Erdrich's central metaphor for the way the past shapes and is shaped by the present.