In 1933, Dial Press in New York published Two Valleys, the first novel by a very young man named Howard Melvin Fast. The publisher's blurb noted that “Mr. Fast is not yet nineteen.”(He had been born in 1914.) In 1995, The Bridge Builder's Story, the most recent of Howard Fast's novels, appeared. Sixty-two years lie between Two Valleys and The Bridge Builder's Story.

Johnny Ace, the mellow crooner of “Pledging My Love” (1955), may have been an influential transitional figure between rhythm & blues and rock ‘n’ roll, but he certainly did not die at age twenty-four playing Russian roulette with the singer Little Esther in a motel room in El Dorado, Arkansas. I heard this account from a black woman who saw him in person on the chitlin circuit, and who paid $2.50 in December of 1953 (“a hard amount to get in those days”) to attend a “Colored Only” dance featuring the Johnny Ace Band at the Elk's Rest Club in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The details she recalls of Ace's death are inaccurate, but the general story she remembers – the legend of Johnny Ace the rhythm & blues star as it exists today in the oral tradition of African-American culture – is closer to the truth in spirit than almost everything ever written about him by rock historians.

Collecting souvenirs, an impulse nearly as universal as travel it-self, has spawned industries in tourist spots throughout the United States and most other nations of the world. Tourists purchase souvenirs both as commemorative artifacts, that at some future time will call to mind the experiences of the vacation and of the city visited, and as communicative artifacts. T-shirts, coffee mugs and bumper stickers proclaim, “this is where I've been” or “this is where I live” or “this is where my friends vacationed.” Some tourist spots lend themselves to this communicative function more easily than do others. Cities like San Francisco, for example, are highly imageable cities; they have a bridge or building or monument that serves as a symbol of the city consistent with the experience of visitors and residents alike.1 Minneapolis, however, lacks this kind of symbolic artifact. While any Twin Cities' resident, most Minnesotans, and many avid fans of The Mary Tyler Moore Show will recognize the Minneapolis skyline, particularly the prominent IDS building, this same site shown to a New Yorker or Californian who has never visited the area, will fail to serve as an identifiable landmark. Lacking such a symbol, creators of Minneapolis souvenirs have had to find images that represent the city and that are consistent with the sense of the place that tourists and residents experience.

Although T. S. Arthur'S extraordinary literary presence and popularity were acknowledged during the antebellum period, studies of both the American Renaissance and domestic fiction have failed to provide anything more than a passing reference to his fiction. Arthur's meager current reputation has been defined by a single work, the sensationalist temperance novel, Ten Nights in a Bar-room, And What I Saw There (1854). More generally, cultural historians have labeled Arthur as one of the “fictional eulogists of the self-made man” and a purveyor of the “rags to riches” myth. However, the magazine fiction that Arthur regularly produced for Godey's Lady's Book in the 1840s had nothing to do with either temperance or the myth of autonomous individualism. Instead, his tales focused on the relationship between behavior in the home and in the marketplace. Writing in the aftermath of the devastating Panic of 1837, Arthur sought to identify the causes of domestic disorder and economic failure. Significantly, his narratives of personal accountability asserted that failure and disorder were the inevitable results of deviations from emerging gender norms. The prospective urban merchant and domestic women who appeared prominently in his magazine fiction must learn that the management of troublesome bodies is the key to economic and domestic stability.

Just as patriot orators invoked the spirit of Puritanism in their remonstrances against British tyranny, just as the nineteenth-century cult of Pilgrimism taught all America to look back upon the Pilgrim fathers as everyone's fathers, so modern American intellectual history has proclaimed the Puritan origins of the American way. The result has been a scholarly upsurge, during the past half-century, of “Puritan legacy” studies, of which Perry Miller was the prime mover and Sacvan Bercovitch is the leading contemporary theorist. So far as the interpretation of literary history is concerned, these studies have given a new authority and depth to the old New England-centered map of American literary tradition first drawn up by the Yankee-oriented genteel intellectual establishment of the late nineteenth century that presided over the literary institutions whose prestige had been built upon the reputation of the perpetrators of the antebellum New England Renaissance. The old-fashioned interpretation of American literary history and the new-fashioned interpretation of American civil religion as a nationalized version of Puritan ideology have combined to create a strong presumption, at least for specialists in New England Romantic literature, that theirs was the key formative moment in American literary history as a whole.

In 1926 Charles Scribner's Sons published The Benson Murder Case by “S S. Van Dine,” the first book in what would become one of the most successful series in the history of American detective fiction. The volume introduced the art connoisseur and amateur sleuth Philo Vance, whose adventures were to be the subject of a dozen novels and numerous motion pictures. The initial popularity of the Van Dine series is not difficult to decipher, for The Benson Murder Case tapped many of the impulses of the 1920s: the status seeker, who had recently attended the high society comedies of Cecil B. De Mille, sought instruction from the aristocratic habits of Philo Vance; as a game, the book rivaled the mildly intellectual challenge of crossword puzzles and Mah-Jongg; the volume fascinated people of the “ballyhoo years” with its rough similarity to the murder of the famous bridge player Joseph Elwell. Also contributing to the novel's fame was the mystery of “S. S. Van Dine,” whose hidden identity allowed for considerable speculation that the author might be John Galsworthy, Vance Thompson, George Jean Nathan, H. L. Mencken, Pola Negri, or Carl Van Doren. Scribner's finally ended the suspense by admitting that Van Dine was in reality Willard Huntington Wright, who earlier in the century had distinguished himself as a critic of art and literature, only to fall from prominence after 1918 because of ill health and a mental breakdown.

In 1910, at the outset of a turbulent American decade, Annie P. Hillis reviewed the liberating social advances being made by women during the Progressive Era. Writing in the Outlook, Hillis declared that the days of “idyllic, helpless femininity” were passing. As evidence she adduced the “six-foot captain of the basket-ball team” — who “laughs outright at the slender youth who would protect her” — and the “business woman,” who “can earn her own support and would be beholden to no one.” In both adult work and children's play, she claimed, American women were achieving “independence and equality with the other sex.” But in practically her next breath Hillis makes clear that women's liberation might have reached - or perhaps surpassed - its natural limits. Protesting that it is “too soon to predict the future” even as she reaffirms progressivism's fundamental ideology (“We are in a world where there is a definite purpose running through all events, where there is a definite march forward”), Hillis retreats to a distinctly unliberating position: it is for contemporary women, she insists, to “find their place and fall in line.”

We have thought of whitman as an urban poet for so long-noticing how integral his Manhattan is to the imagery of Leaves of Grass – that we have lost sight of the deeper structure of urban popular culture lying behind the poem. As Remy G. Saisselin has recently argued, the city in the nineteenth century transformed the eye of the observer, and new kinds of urban spaces and entertainments—like the arcade, the panorama, and the department store—were created to satisfy a growing population of consumers. Saisselin affirms, moreover, that an unprecedented variety of aesthetic observer evolved along with these changes in urban experience: No longer was he “the man of taste in contemplation before a picture or a landscape. … He was the flaneur in the modern city.” And he associates this new observer with the photographer, whose urban gaze was also ubiquitous, surveying urban types and spaces. Saisselin is speaking here primarily of the European city, of Paris especially, but his observations are valuable in considering anew the sources of Whitman's art, for they point to a relationship between poetry and the urban milieu that has been generally overlooked. More specifically, they lead us to see the invention of Leaves of Grass as a way of organizing and perceiving reality that was new in the arts of the nineteenth century, yet one that was rooted in the popular urban culture of the time.

“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 quarter of 1979 I was teaching a junior-level American Studies core course that introduced our students to comparative culture study. Many of the students had taken one or two classes from me already; but I decided, nevertheless, to begin the course with an essay that would say again in a new way exactly what are the characteristics of interdisciplinary thinking. I had begun other courses in this way but not with much success. Faced with student puzzlement and confusion about what made American Studies different from disciplinary study about America, I had had to resort to naming examples for students to emulate. What we lacked was a way to talk about interdisciplinary thinking, especially a way that was accessible to undergraduates. I had read and appreciated the previous summer an essay in The CoEvolution Quarterly; so I decided to try beginning the course with that brief, breezily discursive piece. I was a bit nervous about deciding so. Gregory Bateson's essay “The Pattern Which Connects” reads much like a story and is based on a talk for a general audience in 1977. But Bateson could be “maddeningly obscure” in his writing and speaking. (I recalled my total awe and bewilderment when, sometime in 1972 or 1973, I had my only experience listening to a Bateson public lecture.) My only earlier experience teaching Bateson—two essays from Steps to an Ecology of Mind—had been a miserable failure. My worry was that “The Pattern Which Connects” would be total gibberish to the students—not an auspicious beginning for a course.

Professional historians will surely agree that the writing of history is itself an act of historical consequence. If history is, as Carl Becker argues, “the artificial extension of the social memory,” and if social identity and behavior depend in part on memory, then created versions of the past are a serious matter. They can have decisive effects on the present. Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land is an exemplary form of a creative history which extends, refines, and enlightens social memory. And it does so in a particularly significant way, by pioneering a new area for study, a new territory in the landscape of memory. It is the area of a general cultural consciousness—“the region of culture,” as Leo Marx puts it, “where literature, general ideas, and certain products of the collective imagination—we may call them ‘cultural symbols’— meet.” Henry Nash Smith himself describes as his aim to trace “the impact of the West, the vacant continent beyond the frontier, on the consciousness of Americans.” His territory is consciousness in relation to a complex historical actuality, the American West.

By 1919, racial and class tensions coupled with the burden of post-Great War anxiety proved too heavy for many American cities to bear. In Chicago, a carefully engineered, though rigid, vision of city planning, which involved calculated racial and ethnic segregation, became an ad hoc reaction against change. As the city convulsed with demands made by new constituencies, as recent Southern migrants were pitted against more established immigrants and the old neighborhood boundaries failed to contain or restrain the burgeoning new populations, Chicago in the summer of 1919 erupted into racial conflict.

This essay on the middlebrow popularization of the role and influence of psychiatric ideas in the United States suggests that the world view variously described as the secular social gospel, progressivism, or (after about 1930) liberalism can best be understood in terms of the great influence that society's popularized medical models have had upon it. That is, liberal or progressive thinkers came to conceive of society as “a patient etherized upon a table,” an organism subject to illness but able to benefit from therapy as prescribed by trained experts. The popularization of psychiatric models also offered norms of health for the individual and (often by implication) for the group based upon the degree of adjustment to a reality external to the individual and subsuming smooth interpersonal relations and a variety of social norms. The most concrete institutional expression of this popular medical model of human nature and society was the network of local, state, and national societies for mental hygiene, and I have therefore used “mental hygiene” as a shorthand term for the concepts under discussion. However, it should be obvious that the fit between ideal-typical concepts and institutions is never perfect and that there is always a mix of ideas and motives among the individuals who constitute an institution at any one time. The concern here is with ideas and their diffusion, rather than with the close evolution of institutions or the development and effectiveness of therapeutic techniques. Furthermore, while this study is written from a viewpoint somewhat critical of the popular effects of a hygienic mentality, it should not be read as imputing either conscious self-interest or “bad faith” to the advocates of popular psychiatry, who appear to have been sincere, energetic individuals convinced that the diffusion of their own beliefs would have enormous social benefit. One of the regrettable tendencies of recent revisionist history has been a vulgar imputation of a conscious selfseeking or promotion of class interests to reformers and other actors who sought to change their environment—apparently from a Utopian view of what constitutes true sincerity and disinterestedness that finds only contamination in the mixed motives and unintended consequences of action in bourgeois society. A tragic or ironic view of history, obviously, avoids this naive faith and anger by assuming that consequences are rarely exact reflections of intentions, that action is as hazardous and morally ambiguous as it is necessary.

In October 1854, a Georgia clergyman wrote to his son a circumstantial account of a death in the family. The deceased, a younger brother of the clergyman's wife, had contracted yellow fever and died in his twenty-ninth year. The letter-writer reports every detail he can remember:

We found your uncle in the shed room off the parlor pulseless, his hands blackened, the blood settling under the nails, perfectly calm and conscious when roused, then falling into sleep. He turned over and gave me his hand, saying, “What do you think of my case?” He had taken much quinine, and was then taking brandy at intervals; his hands and feet rubbed with brandy and pepper, and blisters applied on legs, thighs, stomach, breast, and arms and back of neck. Every effort made to bring on reaction. Your dear mother rubbed his hands and arms incessantly, others his feet.

A version of this essay was delivered as the Kenneth B. Murdock Memorial Lecture at Leverett House, Harvard University, March 8, 1978.

“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.

American exceptionalism, Joyce Appleby has recently reminded us, is “America's peculiar form of Eurocentrism.” Now that the multicultural history of the United States is finally being written, nothing would justify another look at American exceptionalism, except perhaps the need to examine the intellectual ways that have hidden American historical and social diversity for so long. In this essay I basically argue that a certain appropriation of the 18th-Century conception of nature as “what is” played a role also in the development of American exceptionalism. The naturalist rhetoric in American discourse in the 19th Century, I further argue, ran parallel to the most savage depredations of nature ever performed by humankind. I am particularly interested in foregrounding the discrepancy between the steady construction of that greatest of modern artifacts, the American nation, and its concomitant self-justification as a thing of nature. The other side of the commodification of America is its naturalization, an idea that I find is supported, whether critically or uncritically, by many American poets and artists. In recent times we have witnessed a number of ecological attempts at the social recovery of nature in the most advanced capitalist countries, including, of course, the United States. I am not concerned here with these developments, of which ecofeminism is arguably one of the most interesting ones.

New york city went through a period of dramatic change between 1845 and 1860. During those fifteen years New York became a complex and multiform modern city-the center of American commerce and culture, and the center as well of the new social problems that large-scale immigration and economic centralization brought. I am interested in the contemporary discourse used to describe the rapidly changing city, and I concentrate here on the convention of the panorama as used in that discourse. I will try to show that the New York panorama — as developed in popular illustration and popular fiction, in journalism and nonfiction — functioned to acknowledge a new immensity of urban scale at the same time as it created an image of the city as a single, comprehensible whole.

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.

In 1916, Mary Beard, the historian and progressive activist, advanced the thesis that women shared an equal role with men in directing the great social forces that determined the quality of life in cities. In a compendium of Woman's Work in Municipalities, she demonstrated that every action supported by women's clubs and groups, ranging from improved wages and working conditions to vice control, was a part of an effort to make the city a viable environment for carrying on family life. In describing the process that led women to take an active role in sanitation reform Mary Beard wrote:

Woman's historic function having been along the line of cleanliness, her instinct when she looks forth from her own clean windows is toward public cleanliness. Her indoor battle has been against the dirt that blew in from outside, against the dust and ashes of the streets, and the particles of germladen matter carried in from neglected refuse piles. Ultimately she begins to take an interest in that portion of municipal dusting and sweeping assigned to men; namely street cleaning.

Decadence — the literary and artistic movement that insisted on the autonomy of art, reveled in the bizarre, artificial, perverse, and arcane, and pitted the artist against bourgeois society — is most strongly associated with fin de siècle British and French culture. Rarely is it associated with America. And yet, its popularity in America may well have surpassed its popularity in either Britain or France. That decadence was among Europe's most successful cultural exports to America in the 1890s is indicated by the rash of decadent Anglophile and Francophile little magazines that emerged in America in this period. Whereas Britain and France had a handful of decadent periodicals between them, America had over one hundred and fifty little magazines in the period from 1894 to 1898, many of them inspired by European decadent periodicals. What Gelett Burgess, founder of the decadent little magazine the Lark called a “little riot of Decadence” (Epilark) erupted all over America, from major centers such as New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco to smaller centers such as Lansing, Michigan, and Portland, Maine. Described at the time variously as fadazines, fadlets, fad magazines, bibelots, ephemerals, decadents, brownie magazines, freak magazines, magazettes, dinkeys, and so on, these magazines were founded by those one contemporary, Arthur Stanwood Pier, labeled the “brilliant cognoscenti and sophisticates,” the “American Oscar Wildes and Aubrey Beardsleys” of the period (quoted in Kraus, 6).

Despite the pervasiveness of the little-magazine phenomenon of the 1890s, these magazines have been all but ignored in recent scholarship. Interest in American periodical history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries has focused largely on mass-market periodicals and the development of consumer culture as in recent studies by David Reed, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Richard Ohmann, and Helen Damon-Moore.