It was something of an accident that Hawthorne's masterpiece appeared in bifurcated form: an adultery novel — that ancient female form — preceded by a long political introduction, as masculine in tone as anything Hawthorne ever wrote, called “The Custom-House.” This introduction deals with Hawthorne's three-year tenure as surveyor of the Salem Custom House, a post he was given as a Democratic Party stalwart, and which he took on solely for its salary. He describes his fellow officials (mostly Whigs) as stupid, sluggish, lazy, animal-like, senile, and gluttonous, and himself as little better than the rest:

a row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in voices between speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labor, or any thing else but their own independent exertions … And here, some six months ago, - pacing from corner to corner, or lounging on the long-legged stool, with his elbow on the desk, and his eye wandering up and down the columns of the morning newspaper, —you might have recognized … the same individual who welcomed you into his cheery little study … on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go hither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco Surveyor. The bosom of reform has swept him out of office; and a worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets his emoluments.

In numerous essays Ralph Ellison highlighted the special role that musicians and big swing bands played in defining a new future for black America from the late 1920s through World War II. Led by sophisticated and glamorous Dukes and Counts, big swing bands represented a flowering of black folk culture in the new urban centers of the black migration. With New York City acting as their national capital, moreover, these bands acted as traveling representatives of the modern city as they conducted national tours, produced endless recordings, and performed live on radio for a new mass audience for jazz music. While their travels took them through the indignities of a segregated society, black bands offered release from the Depression and expressed heightened expectations for people whose lives were still bound by racial restraints. As Ellison recognized, they provided ecstasy and communion to their many followers, performed in secular rituals on the dance floor. As such, the most famous bands of the 1930s and 1940s held out an urban model of freedom that climaxed with the renewed mass migrations to Northern cities during World War II. In the big band form, folk culture and modern life were united in new ways to offer optimism tinged by hard reality in the middle of the Depression. In the process, black entertainers stood as heroes.

I begin with a foundational premise: that the basic beliefs about truth and morality that undergird a culture — any culture — are social and discursive constructions. I cannot establish this claim with absolute certainty, although I can provide the reasoning behind such an assertion. I can furnish models that show the explanatory power of such an assertion, and I can provide examples of people who use the premise to useful ends. But finally, the regime of truth I propose — one based on the belief that all truth is provisional and endemic to the culture that produces it — is one accepted on faith. In accepting it, I also accept as credible the rules of meaningmaking, the procedures, the heuristics, and the institutions through which the authority of truths are established in the culture(s) of which I consider myself a part. I can enter into dialogue with the community of those who, at least for the purposes of conversation, share these basic premises with me. With those who do not, I am at an impasse.

The idea that America constituted anew world that fulfilled both the divine and the natural design has been the subject of numerous studies, including the classics Virgin Land by Henry Nash Smith and The American Adam by R. W. B. Lewis. I start from these but go back instead of forward: back, or down, in that my concern with the astonishing imaginative feat that translated a new country's rise into the discovery of a new world lies in the underlying form of this vision rather than in its particular features. With the interior of the landscape already well mapped, I would like to walk its perimeter.

A 1993 article in the washington post about responses to David Brock's The Real Anita Hill argues persuasively that neither the authors nor reviewers of such books are likely to be disinterested. Yet Howard Kurtz oversimplifies when he asks, “Can reviewers fairly evaluate an investigative work that builds its case upon a mountain of disputed facts and assertions? Or must the debate be relegated to a tiny circle of experts, endlessly hashing over arcane details” as in “some modern-day Hiss case?”

The choice need not be so stark. Reviewers cannot evaluate fairly unless they consider details. If they don't read debates of the experts, they may choose to avoid the tedium of complex cases by relying on the reputation of a single expert. That seems to be what two of the best national newspapers have done in recent years about the Alger Hiss case — even while striving to report fairly.

In 1846 in Louisville, Kentucky, John Banvard, a self-taught Missouri painter, exhibited his Three-Mile Painting, a panorama of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, painted from hundreds of direct observations and sketches he had executed over a period of many years along the riverbanks. The painting was exhibited by means of a giant pair of rollers upon which the canvas was wound and unwound. Following a successful run in Louisville, the exhibition drew large crowds in Boston and New York City before Banvard capped his triumph with a European tour. In a promotional description of the painting, printed in Boston in 1847 to generate interest in the exhibit, many endorsements testified to the painting's authenticity, including one signed by over one hundred captains and other officers of steamboats who had examined the painting and declared it “correct.” That authenticity and “correctness” were measures of artistic achievement testifies to the premium placed on verisimilitude in art that served as a record of discovery and observation along the American frontier.

Documents in the Yale University archives - the papers of the presidents, deans, provosts, secretary of the university - show that Yale was no more insulated from the hot and cold of post-World War II politics than any other university. During the decade of 1945–55, the Yale authorities felt considerable pressure to take action concerning several appointees whose political views had been questioned by alumni, and most certainly by others as well. The New Haven Office of the FBI - and through it the national headquarters in Washington, D.C. - had been in close touch with university officials for some time and, during the last years of the regime of President Charles Seymour, knew of what it described as the Yale policy of inquiring into the political activities of faculty members prior to their appointment. As the Special Agent in Charge of the New Haven Office reported to J. Edgar Hoover on June 6, 1949, “The position of Yale University is apparently swinging around to the point… that it is much better to look men over and know exactly what they are before they are appointed, and that it is much easier to get rid of them by not appointing them than after they have been once appointed.”

During New York City's newly opened Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA's) fourth exhibition season of 1932–33, while director and intellectual leader Alfred H. Barr, Jr. was on sabbatical leave in Europe, interim director Holger Cahill mounted a show of 18th- and 19th-century American arts and crafts. Offered for sale in New England as antiques at the time of the show, the items on display in Cahill's American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America 1750–1900 obscured the divisions between the avant-garde and the traditional, between high art and the everyday object. In an exhibit of items not easily categorized as modern nor properly considered art, MoMA admitted such local antiques and curiosities as weather vanes and amateur paintings into spaces otherwise reserved for the likes of Cézanne and Picasso.

Simon Legree's taunting invitation to “join [his] church” reminds us that the novel routinely credited with abolishing slavery relied for part of its force on anxieties surrounding religious conversion. Although conversion as the emotional surrender to faith under one or another form of Protestantism remained the norm when Harriet Beecher Stowe was writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, as many as 700,000 Americans did join the Roman Catholic Church as converts in the 19th century. The middle third of the century also saw the arrival of nearly 3 million Catholic immigrants, whose perceived intemperance, sexual license, and conspiratorial designs on American institutions animated white Protestant preaching and political action more consistently than did the evils of slavery or racism.

Many critics of photorealism relied on the concept of nostalgia to dismiss the movement, finding in these apparently photographically accurate paintings representations of a simple past which seemed to disregard the complicated problems of the day. These critics, speaking within the constraints of a period when nostalgia experienced wider appeal than usual, offered what has become one of the accepted, and simplistic, interpretations of photorealism. Disenchanted by an apparently sentimental art popularized in mass-media photospreads and even business journals, critics of photorealism depended on a negative sense of nostalgia to dismiss these paintings as expressions of ineffective longings. However, Fredric Jameson's recent articulation of the utopian content in nostalgic yearnings affords the paradigm an affirmative element. Building on Jameson's model, I argue that Robert Bechtle's family paintings, taken as a group, display nostalgic desires for the secure families of the past even as they engage with contemporary popular and media-sustained perceptions of the breakdown of the family. In mediating conflicting or dissonant cultural pressures and desires, Bechtle's works at times display an ambivalent position toward the family as they echo fifties values for family unity while they capture seventies dissatisfactions with family tensions. Precisely because “the family” inspired controversy during the late 1960s and 1970s, it also became the site of nostalgic longings, as many Americans found images evocative of older domestic norms comforting. The family also serves as the hinge linking the present and past in Bechtle's works, displaying what I call the temporal density of nostalgia.

Warner berthoff begins The Ferment of Realism (1965), his study of American literature from 1884 to 1919, with a succinct restatement of an idea long accepted by literary critics: “The great collective event in American letters during the 1880s and 1890s was the securing of ‘realism’ as the dominant standard of value.” This is the customary interpretation of the American literary generation that included William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James; indeed, these men viewed their own historical importance in much the same terms. Thus James, in his 1879 book on Hawthorne, condescended toward the “absence in Hawthorne of that quality of realism which is now so much in fashion.” Twain's novels are laced with attacks, launched supposedly in the name of “realism,” against “romance” and the “romantic,” which is also the serious point behind the humor of such essays as “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.” And Howells, in the 1880s, emerged as the most overt American spokesman for the new standard of “realism.” “Let fiction cease to lie about life,” he demanded in Criticism and Fiction (1891); “let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know; let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires.” Twentieth-century literary historians have for the most part been content to accept and perpetuate these claims; they have told us again and again that in the works of our best fiction writers after the Civil War, American “romanticism” gave way to American “realism.”

During the last decade of the 19th century, vaudeville became the nation's most popular entertainment form, drawing unprecedented numbers of spectators and appealing to members of diverse socioeconomic groups by staging a rapid succession of acrobats, comedians, legitimate theater stars, pet-tricks, and dramatic sketches. In a cultural scene that Lawrence Levine and others tell us was marked by the historical separation between legitimate and mass cultural practices, critical observers (then and since) have greeted the diversity of vaudeville's audience and the range of its performance with a mixture of surprise and liberal enthusiasm.

American psychiatry, perhaps more so than other medical specialties, has had a troubled and ambivalent past. For much of its history its members were employed in public mental hospitals and thus lacked the autonomy and independence of their colleagues in private practice. More significantly, psychiatry was indissolubly linked with the fate of public institutions, whose image and reputation often left much to be desired.

The ambivalent character of psychiatry has given rise to two distinct and polar interpretations of its past. On the one side is a Whiggish scholarship that indentifies the evolution of psychiatry with scientific progress. The barriers to the creation of a psychiatric utopia result from the actions of malevolent or narrow-minded individuals and groups unwilling to provide appropriate resources. Furthermore, there is a presumption that psychiatric scientific and objective knowledge provided the basis for policies capable of resolving many of the troublesome problems associated with mental illness. On the other side are those who maintain that psychiatrists were involved with the social control of deviant and troublesome individuals. Mental hospitals, therefore, were simply institutions that confined and brutalized individuals whose only crime was their inability to conform to traditional behavioral norms. Embedded in this approach is the assumption that mental disease is a social rather than a medical category.

For a jittery radio industry concerned about the future of American broadcasting in the early months after America's entry into World War II, William B. Lewis came as a godsend. As head of the Domestic Radio Division of the Office of Facts and Figures (OFF), and later the Office of War Information (OWI, June 1942), Lewis, a former vicepresident of CBS, reassured the industry that the commercial structure of American radio would remain unchanged. In his first meeting with network executives and radio sponsors and advertisers in January 1942, he outlined his pragmatic approach to radio's war effort. As he argued, “radio is valuable only because of the enormous audiences it has created.” During wartime, his government office planned to use radio's popularity without unnecessarily disrupting radio structure and schedule: “Let's not forget that radio is primarily an entertainment medium, and must continue to be if it is … to deliver the large audiences we want to reach.”

For historians who use slave narratives to document the immediate physical and social facts of slave life, Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself offers a frustratingly low yield. Beside Solomon Northup's detailed account of living quarters, diet, work life, holidays, and family relations, Douglass's Narrative must seem spare, incomplete, even misleading in its portrayal of the slave experience—an incendiary polemic written more to fuel the abolitionist cause than to convey the nature of the slave experience. To read the Narrative from this point of view, however, is to misapprehend how Douglass's text treats slavery and to be needlessly disappointed. Unlike Northup, Douglass focuses on the linguistic significance of bondage: He tersely portrays masters and slaves almost solely in terms of their linguistic acts because, for him, the reality of slavery is a profoundly rhetorical one. He charts his own relentless progress to freedom as the acquisition of an ever deeper understanding of language use in a slave economy, and the realization of his own freedom at the Nantucket antislavery convention is preeminently a linguistic event. Douglass's perspective is an important one, for as sociolinguists have discovered, “peoples do not all everywhere use language to the same degree, in the same situations, or for the same things. … Languages, like other cultural traits, will be found to vary in the degree and nature of their integration into the societies and cultures in which they occur.” Douglass was acutely sensitive to the linguistic system of slave society, of the ways in which language was used—and withheld—by one human being to enslave another.

“Of course. It's my father's absolute favorite. He was there, you know.” Thus a friend replied when I told her I was writing about Victory at Sea, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) classic television documentary of U.S. and Allied Naval Operations in World War II. The father in question, moreover, was no ordinary judge of the material, but an old Navy Chief who had actually been there for much of it, before, during, and after. Nor was the friend – a career journalist of long acquaintance with sea stories – an uncritical interpreter of the information. Still, as regards the forms and processes of cultural mythmaking, the exchange could be said to contain a familiar parable of World War II and American remembering, about some of the particular and identifiable ways in which Americans from the generation of 1941–1945 and their successors have come to conflate the experience of the war with certain popular-culture texts achieving classic status among its postwar representations. To put it more directly, one could not help thinking that for both father and daughter, as for myself and other Americans who “remember” World War II, “there” – or at least a significant portion of it – has become Victory at Sea.

The image of the frivolous playboy clings to F. Scott Fitzgerald's reputation like a barnacle on a ship. He helped build the image himself, of course, but ita's a false one, or partially false at any rate. Most of the time Fitzgerald was a serious, committed artist. Yet people persist in thinking of him as an artist in spite of himself, a Pooh Bear of remarkable talent but lamentably little brain.

“Technology Spurs Decentralization Across the Country.” So reads a 1984 New York Times article on real-estate trends in the United States. The contemporary revolution in information processing and transmittal now allows large businesses and other institutions to disperse their offices and other facilities across the country, even across the world, without loss of the policy- and decision-making abilities formerly requiring regular physical proximity. Thanks to computers, word processors, and the like, decentralization has become a fact of life in America and other highly technological societies.

In the winter of 1942, only a year removed from the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and nearly seven months into his internment at the Gila River Relocation Project in Arizona, a young Japanese American named Charles Kikuchi recounts an afternoon's passing conversation in his diary. “I was walking over by the Butte this afternoon and I stopped to talk about the camp with a Negro workman who was digging postholes for the fence which is going around the place,” writes Kikuchi. The young African American asks the young Nisei (that is, second-generation Japanese American) about the loyalty of other Japanese Americans and is disappointed to discover Nisei allegiance to the United States. The workman responds, “Boy, you are making a mistake. Why should you be loyal to a country that don't want you? … This is a white man's country and all the colored peoples of this world has got to change this so that I can get a good job just like a white man and I don't have to dig post holes to lock you Japanese up who are born in California. You help this country out and they will turn around and give you a kick in the pants afterwards.”