“The other Civil War” is how many Minnesotans think of the U.S.-Dakota Conflict of 1862, fought for six weeks in the recently established state as the Civil War raged elsewhere (Nichols). These hostilities between groups of Dakota Indians and the U.S. government were triggered by a containable incident near Acton, Minnesota, in which four hungry young Dakotas apparently challenged five white settlers over food and then killed them. But some Indians decided against containment, and the Conflict instead escalated into a contest for traditional Dakota cultural identity and cohesion. Of course, the Dakotas' sense of siege had been exacerbated for years by “the historically familiar rapacious traders, ethnocentric missionaries, white men's decimating diseases, inept Indian Bureau officials, equivocating United States government representatives, and deplorably conflicting military policies,” as well the growing number of “land-hungry settlers” (Russo, 99). When the war ended in late September 1862, about five hundred whites and a considerable, but unknown, number of Dakotas and crossbloods were dead (Anderson and Woolworth, 1). The U.S. government unilaterally abrogated treaties with the Dakotas – regardless of individuals' actual involvement in the Conflict – removed or imprisoned them, conducted hasty and illegal trials, and sent thirtyeight to the gallows in Mankato, Minnesota, on December 26, 1862. It is believed to be the largest mass execution in American history. Although little known outside the state, this short but intense war has been called “a microcosm of the tragedy of Indian–white relations in America,” and its repercussions still resonate over a century later (Nichols, 4).

In September of 1863, Thomas Nast produced a seemingly bucolic scene of children at play, The Attack on the “Home Guard,” for the lithographic firm of Currier and Ives (Figure 1). Organized around a strange confrontation, in which a dog bites at the pant leg of a little boy in a military uniform as another, nonuniformed boy stabs at the dog with a bayonettipped rifle, the print diverges from sentimental 19th-century envisionings of middle-class domestic life by including an act of violence in the normally sanctified space of the home. Not surprisingly, the unusual content and ambiguous tone of The Attack on the “Home Guard” has puzzled historians of visual culture. When read in the context of contemporaneous popular illustration, however, the elusive meaning of Nast's lithograph begins to take shape.

At times, Emily Dickinson casts her concern with consciousness in the most materially specific language available to her, declining such words as “self,” “soul,” and “mind,” and opting instead for the much more emphatically physiological word “brain.” This often seems an imagistically precise choice in the poems, inasmuch as a number of them invoke the anatomical attributes of the brain — especially its convolutions, its doubleness, and its size. At the same time, it is often a culturally specific choice, one that reflects and reflects upon various 19th-century ways of codifying the brain and of investing in its morphological attributes.

In March 1886, twenty-four-year-old Ida B. Wells wrote in her diary: “Read all day, after going home, ‘Bricks without Straw’ by Judge Tourgée. It deals with the Reconstruction era of Negro freedom and American history, and I like it somewhat. The writer is actuated by a noble purpose and tells some startling truths.” Wells was referring to Albion W. Tourgée's 1880 novel centering around a group of North Carolina freed-people, who buy land, prosper as tobacco farmers, set up a church and school, and vote for politicians sympathetic to their interests, until Ku Klux Klan terrorism and the return to power of a white-supremacist government reduce them to neoslavery. The qualifier “somewhat” may reflect Wells's disappointment with the pessimistic ending, which leaves little room for black agency after the crushing of resistance.

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.

During the interwar decades, African American artists grew in number and visibility, and a wide range of publications featured stories on so-called Negro art. Notices on Negro art exhibitions and educational initiatives appeared in the black press and the mainstream mass media, as well as in special interest publications ranging from Art News to the Club Candle (the newsletter of the New Rochelle Women's Club). Though small in number, collectively these events served as opportunities to measure the overall progress or pulse of the African American artist.

On the green slopes of Slieve Martin in County Down where the Mourne Mountains reach Carlingford Lough rests a forty-ton glacial rock called Cloughmore. According to Irish folklore, the giant Fionn M'Comhal hurled the enormous boulder at Benandonner, his Caledonian foe from Scotland, and many believe that ancient Druids chose the site for their rituals. Rain obscures the view from the stone's side some two hundred days of the year, but on a clear day, a stunning vista from Cloughmore emerges: streams trickling down to the shores of the deep Irish Sea and, amidst woods running uphill, the small village of Rostrevor.

It is rare to see a Roman Catholic nun in a habit today, but old-fashioned nuns in full dress uniform are the darlings of the novelty business. The windup doll called nunzilla (she generates sparks), the puppet nun who boxes, and Christopher Durang's Sister Mary Ignatius, who explained it all, are just a few examples of nuns in contemporary popular culture. Like most other images of nuns, each of these, to different extents, perpetuates a stereotype of women who never think for themselves, are out of touch with the real world, and are petty and downright nasty. Is this just silly stuff or does it tap into something deeper in American culture? Certainly the fascination with nuns is nothing new. Americans have often expressed strong opinions about nuns, sometimes favorable but more often not.

In October of 1904, when Edith Wharton was writing The House of Mirth and Henry James, having recently arrived in America after a twenty-two-year absence, was collecting the impressions that were to make up The American Scene, James paid a two-week visit to Wharton at the Mount, her country house in Lenox, Massachusetts. The visit consolidated their friendship and literary relationship. In the mornings, both wrote. In the afternoons, Wharton and James “motored” together, enjoying the beauty of a Western Massachusetts autumn, and they conversed deep into the evenings (Benstock, 144–45; Edel, 598). The claim that Wharton's fiction is heavily influenced by James's, frequently reiterated ever since Wharton began her career, has become a critical commonplace (Lewis, 131). But reading passages side by side from the works both writers were in the process of creating in the fall of 1904, The House of Mirth and The American Scene, yields as much evidence of Wharton's influence on James as of James's influence on Wharton, an influence established probably for the most part through their conversations. In this essay, I contend that the shared imagery in the work of the two writers — involving roses, skyscrapers, and Trinity Church, and centering on the figure of the Jew — makes most sense when the two writers are read in conjunction. Read together, the shared imagery in James and Wharton passages suggests that the two together imagined the Jew as the figure for a commercialized, industrialized, modern America, and for the impossibility of art in such an America — and that they found a mutual consolation in doing so. Wharton's later novels, two of which I consider in this essay (The Glimpses of the Moon [1922] and Hudson River Bracketed [1929]) demonstrate that her conversations about these matters with James, and their shared understanding of the Jews, remained important to her for a quarter of a century. Toward the end of her career, she attempted to forge a similar bond of shared aesthetic sensibility and mutual anti-Semitism with the younger writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, but without success.

Henry James'S first substantial engagement with matters of nation, reconciliation, and memory — and his last until the “Richmond” chapter of The American Scene in 1907 — appeared almost twenty years after the end of the Civil War. Twenty years had also passed since James's 1865 Nation review of Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps, with its caustic dismissal of the collection as “monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect,” and its final comment that the nation did not suffer through years of war “to put up with spurious poetry afterwards” (“Mr. Walt Whitman,” 626). There is an eerie foreshadowing, in the juxtaposition and the flavor of those phrases, of the trope of national reconciliation in James's novel The Bostonians (1886). Persuading the soul and the slighting of the intellect are questions of importance in that later text, but time has passed and people have changed. In this novel, the journey to the future now loops back and around, through memory and ideology, confusing and wrong-footing both political thought and emotional affinity. The difference between the James of the Whitman review and the author of The Bostonians is that the latter is no longer certain of where the spurious is located, or how the soul and the intellect — or even if such a dualistic paradigm can be maintained — should now respond to slights and persuasion. The chain of readings that has developed around the novel has itself looped back and around, from approving nods toward the sentiment of sex, through interrogations of the nature of American realism, to the unearthing of the conscious or unconscious empowerment of homoerotic passion.

Today few, if any, scholars of American literature have heard of University of Nebraska English Professor Lucius Adelno Sherman (Figure 1), and if they know of him at all, it is likely through his antagonistic association with a young Willa Cather, who had been his student in Nebraska in the 1890s (more on that relationship in the latter part of this essay). During that last decade of the 19th century, however, this Yaleeducated professor was becoming well known in his own right as a soughtafter educator and literary critic who, during his more than fifty-year career, wrote seven books on the study of literature and education and edited several others.

In December 2002, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott attended the 100th birthday celebration of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond and said something he had said many times before: that the nation “wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years” had Thurmond been elected President in 1948.

Jack Levine's Feast of Pure Reason (Figure 1) established him at the forefront of the New York art world when he was just twenty-two years old. Levine's meteoric rise in the years before the Second World War is evidenced by his inclusion in key exhibitions during that time as well as by critical acclaim in both the art magazines and the popular press. Art News went so far as to dub him the “dazzling newcomer.” In the years following the war, however, the art establishment's consensus on Levine's work went through a dramatic reversal. Just how complete was this turnaround is plainly visible in a review, also in Art News from 1955, where Levine's painting was described as “unlikable … tired, thin and lacking in wit.”

Clare Boothe Luce was arguably one of the most well-known and controversial women in midcentury America. Journalist and playwright, Connecticut Republican congresswoman and New York socialite, she was also the first American woman to be assigned to a major diplomatic post, as she was the U.S. ambassador to Italy from 1953 to 1956.

In the title of a 1903 American Journal of Sociology essay, Ernest W. Clement announces a new phenomenon: “The New Woman in Japan.” By this title, he quickly explains, he does not mean to satirically compare this Japanese sociological development to the American “parody of man” usually associated with the phrase, because “such a creature as that called the ‘new woman’ in the Occident has not yet appeared to any great extent among the Japanese.” Although sometimes in Japan “the process of the new woman's evolution may be disfigured by some accident” producing “a sickening sort of person,” Clement's interest is not in particular aberrations, but rather in “the abstract, legal new woman” created by recent changes in Japan's civil code. In this abstraction Clement sees improvement on previous Japanese laws that “relegat[ed] woman to an abnormally inferior position.” Clement thus assures readers that, although Japan's modernization hinges upon its women's legal and cultural status, female advancement in Japan will not approach the “abnormal” excesses of the United States. Quoting Alice Mabel Bacon's influential book Japanese Girls and Women to stress this point, Clement explains that Japanese men are adopting many Western habits and opinions, but they still “shrink aghast, in many cases, at the thought that their women may ever become the forward, self-assertive, half-masculine women of the West.” Yet still, many of these Japanese men express “a growing dissatisfaction with the smallness and narrowness of the lives of their wives and daughters — a growing belief that better educated women make better homes.”

Historians of the wartime removal and mass incarceration of West Coast Americans of Japanese ancestry, commonly called the Japanese American internment, have examined with care and thoroughness the actions of the government and of the anti-Japanese-American forces that instigated the signing of Executive Order 9066. Most scholars, with the exception of Robert Shaffer, have paid comparatively little attention to the writings and activities of those non-Japanese Americans who opposed the internment policy. This is no doubt a result of the fact that the number of people who publicly challenged or opposed the government was small, especially at the outset, and that they were unable to mobilize public opinion in favor of Japanese Americans. However, the study of these dissenters is vital to understanding the internment, not as an exercise in political courage or feel-good humanitarianism, but because it points up the level of general awareness of the injustice done to Japanese Americans. By revealing the existence and contours of public debate over the treatment of Japanese Americans, it both suggests, at least heuristically, the availability of possible alternatives to internment and at the same time demonstrates the limits of most people's willingness to follow such alternatives.

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.’”

As the media report instances of vanished or violated selves — of bodies that disappear and identities that are stolen; of sex changes and sexually ambiguous bodies (the adulated bodies of rock stars); raped bodies and the promise or threat of replicated bodies — the happy endings of fairy tales, and the tales themselves, seem fanciful and remote, irrelevant to our times. They may enthrall a child who is not yet playing video games, but what attraction, if any, can they have for adults coping with the complexities of a technological world in which identity is linked to an unsecured alterable body? I raise the question not to argue its irrelevance (surely a pointless undertaking), but to evoke the heuristic values attributed generally to fairy tales by folklorists and cultural critics throughout the Western world. I wish to make a specific claim: fairy tales — in particular, the changeling tale — provide unexpected and timely insights into a self increasingly vulnerable to tampering, violation, and theft. These various forms of violence are subsumable under rape in its root meaning: forcible seizure. As an assault upon women, rape raises particular issues about the body and sex, sexual difference, and power. The very meanings of these terms — how they are constituted and denned — have become a matter of contention to contemporary feminists and cultural, literary, and juridical critics. Though this essay does not engage directly in their disputes, it too finds the body, sex, and power contentious terms as they figure in a forcible exchange of identities that fairy tales represent as actual and modern fiction adumbrates as rape.

Black newspapers began to compete with the church as an institution influential in shaping black public opinion as early as 1878 in Chicago and, by World War II, according to the authors of Black Metropolis, they represented “one of the most powerful forces among Negroes in America.” The most prominent and influential of these weekly newspapers was the Chicago Defender, founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott, the “son of slaves,” who was encouraged to believe by his minister-stepfather that “a newspaper was one of the strongest weapons a Negro could have in the defense of his race.” Abbott, his biographer contends, “was one of the first Negroes in the United States to become a millionaire — and, in the process, he revolutionized the Negro press, today [1955] the greatest single force in the Negro world.” Though Abbott would have been proud of the compliment, he would not have printed it in his paper because during his lifetime the Defender was not permitted to use the terms Negro or black. Abbott preferred Race, Race men, and Race women.

On the evening Of May 1, 1925, over two thousand people crowded into Chicago's Temple Hall for the annual Workers (Communist) Party's May Day celebration. Once the majority of the crowd had made its way into the hall, the meeting opened with singing the Internationale. A contingent from the party's Junior Section of the Young Workers League, made up of young boys and girls ranging in age from seven to fourteen, marched up the center aisle and joined their adult comrades in song. Wearing red neckerchiefs and carrying red banners, the Juniors walked onto the stage and continued to lead the assembly in revolutionary hymns, helping to set the tone for the fiery speeches that were to follow.