When Edward Johnson needed to express his deepest hopes about history, he found in the Bible an encoded emblem for the destiny of America. In the proclamation from Christ's herald that begins The Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New England, he concludes with an urgent appeal to all believers:

Pray, pray, pray, pray continually with the valiant worthy Joshua that the Sun may stand still in Gibeon, and the Moone in the vally of Aijalon, for assuredly although some small battailes may be fought against the enemies of Christ, yet the great day of their finall overthrow shall not come till the bright Sonne of that one cleare truth of Christ, stands still in the Gentile Churches, that those who fight the Lords Battells may plainly discerne his enemies in all places, where they finde them, as also such as will continue fighting must have the World kept low in their eyes, as the Moon in the valley of Aijalon.

In 1776, with the Revolution faltering, Congress sent seventy-one-yearold Benjamin Franklin to France to intercede on behalf of the fledgling republic and the “New Man.” Dressed in plain homespun, wearing a frontiersman's coonskin cap instead of a powdered wig, and carrying a staff of apple wood, the sagacious Franklin played the Cultivateur Américain to the French court, a role that satisfied their Crevecouerian image of the American as both innocent and worldly wise: the noble rustic. That role was no problem for someone who “put my self as much as I could out of sight” in promoting his own projects, “put on” Father Abraham, Richard Saunders, Poor Richard, and Silence Dowood in order to instruct his audience and, in matters of diplomacy and debate, “put on the humble Enquirer and Doubter.” Putting off the audience by putting on various personae enabled Franklin, to the extent that the Autobiography was written for an English audience, to act as American colonial “father” instructing his “son,” the British monarchy. Whether portraying himself as a gawky youth, ardent young man, civic leader, sage of practical utility, worldly philosopher, or international statesman, Franklin deliberately played to please while playing with his image and his audience.

In 1791, a few miles below the town of Litchfield, Connecticut, in the parish of South Farms, the twenty-six-year-old wife of the Congregational minister died. Little is known about her apart from her familial relations to three Connecticut clergymen: she was the granddaughter of the great Joseph Bellamy of nearby Bethlehem, the daughter of the celebrated Levi Hart of Preston, and, for the last three years of her life, the wife of an obscure Calvinist named Amos Chase. Apart from these details we have only her eulogy, preached by her bereaved husband at South Farms on March 6, 1791, and published the following year at Litchfield. The text of the sermon was from Proverbs 9:14: “Houses and riches are the inheritance of fathers; and a prudent wife is from the Lord.”

Thomas Cole (1801–48), is best known for his role in placing the landscape genre in America on a secure artistic and intellectual foundation. Associating the beginnings of landscape art with the concurrent appearance of popular democracy, scholars have generally assumed that Cole shared the cultural and nationalistic premises of the native landscape school that developed under this influence. Other inaccurate assessments have followed, in particular the belief that Cole's political sympathies were democratic. To take this for granted, however, is to overlook not only the anti-Jacksonian sentiment that Cole occasionally vented in his journals and letters, but also the veiled political and topical content of his wellknown cycle, The Course of Empire. This neglect of the political content of Cole's art is part of a broader tendency to approach American landscape art as a genre lacking social or political content, as a transparent reflection of nature's central role in national culture. The reappraisal of such assumptions begins with Cole, whose ideological challenge to the next generation of painters was made in the language of landscape. This challenge will be considered briefly in my conclusion.

In the mid-1860s, with the nation immured in a devastating Civil War, two artists emerged as the premier representatives of America's Far West. Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) and Mark Twain (1835–1910) captured the nation's imagination with images that challenged ideas about the West as well as about art itself. In little more than a decade, however, Bierstadt's paintings were being ignored while Twain's name began to acquire something of its present canonical status. Unremarkable as this divergence in reputations may seem today (when “fifteen minutes of fame” has been promised to every one of us), a century ago Warhol's prediction would have been inconceivable. That in itself makes the receptions first accorded Bierstadt and Twain as interesting as the dramatic divergence later taken in their careers. What was it, one might well ask, that so appealed to contemporaries, and why should Bierstadt's success so quickly have palled while Twain's only continued to grow?

The question encourages us to transgress the boundaries that separate painting from writing, to shift attention from a given medium onto the larger process by which popularity is won. One of the questions that then emerges is whether artists acclaimed in different media make similar demands upon their audience. Do a certain set of common standards, that is, shape an artist's reception, much as they more self-consciously dictate assessments that scholars will make later on? Or is it simply a matter of being in the right artistic place at the right cultural time? Certainly, the receptions accorded Bierstadt and Twain suggest that the former is true -indeed, that in their case a forceful aesthetic logic was at work.

Despite Mark Twain's situating the story “forty to fifty years ago” and in a rural river valley, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn closely engaged daily dilemmas and concerns of a Northern, urban, middle-class audience. As Carolyn Porter has argued, the familiar comprehension of American fiction as fantasies of escape from society and history, as authorial efforts to light out for the territory, needs to be dislodged by a sensitivity to such writings as acute responses to their immediate context – a developing industrial and capitalist society and culture. Although Huck's world may appear cut off from the landscape and society of bourgeois city dwellers of the 1880s, and although there are not explicit references to industrialization or urbanization, the novel reproduces and addresses new features of daily life, alterations and stresses in private and public behavior and interaction that were being precipitated by the accelerated economic and demographic changes of the late 19th Century.

As American Studies extends its interdisciplinary mandate to the pictorial arts, a manifest destiny that might be seen by some as but a new form of cultural imperialism, it behooves us to stop this juggernaut for a moment and consider the increasingly important question of historicism. An historicism strictly applied can provide us with a rubric rooted in fact rather than in speculation, chastening a self-reflexive presentism with documentary and contextual integrity. Nowhere is this discipline of the interdisciplinary more needed than in considering the application of a problematical term like “Luminism,” itself an ex-post-facto construct of American art history that, like a typical Baby Boomer, was born in the mid-fifties, came of age in the seventies, and now is an establishment figure of the late eighties. First conceived by John I.H. Baur, Luminism was nurtured by Barbara Novak in her magisterial American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, and all but beatified in the post-Bicentennial extravaganza of John Wilmerding's American Light exhibit at the National Gallery. With the acceptance of Luminism as a viable aesthetic category, American Romantic painting itself, so long international Modernism's stepchild and poor relation, came of age and was invested with the Toga Virilis of academic respectability. In looking backwards, Americanists once anxious about vindicating their attraction to a supposedly secondhand and second-rate pictorial tradition could proudly point out that the nation had always possessed a legitimate school of artists who responded in a unified yet creative way to the idiomatic qualities of the American scene.

So wrote scholar and clergyman Samuel Osgood in “Our Lessons in Statesmanship,” one of the few essays on the Civil War published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine before Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. Osgood's subject was the peaceful election of 1864, which led him to marvel at the orderliness of America's voting men even at a time of national crisis. Surprisingly, in his apostrophe to the “character” and “manifest destiny” of Americans in the North, it was not Southern intransigence that threatened the ties binding sections together, even in 1865. He was confident that traditional affinities between free men would prevail. “But the negro,” Osgood wrote, “what shall we do with him, and how can the nation be one again, with such a barrier as those millions of blacks between the two sections, with the apparent antagonism of emancipation on one side and perpetual slavery on the other?” Only tentatively in the future he predicted for “independent, steadfast, cosmopolitan” Americans could Osgood find a role for the freed slaves whom “our people” were otherwise likely to dismiss.

In 1929, F. A. Silcox, union leader and future New Deal official, made the following observation in the Bulletin of the Taylor Society, sounding board for the principles of scientific management formulated a quarter of a century earlier by Frederick Winslow Taylor:

The acquisition of power is the primary thing that counts.… [W]ith a favorable balance of power there is only one workable course of action and that is to take all the traffic will bear when the taking is good.… [T]he ethical moralizing with oughts, shouldn'ts and don'ts is an effort to mitigate in some manner the brutality of the conflict and is a method used mostly by those who do not possess sufficient power to enforce their own will.

Since the appearance of The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen's unhappy experience at the University of Chicago has been recognized as the precipitant of its criticism of American academic life. The endeavors of John D. Rockefeller, the University's founder; William Rainey Harper, its first president; and benefactors like Charles Tyson Yerkes exemplified what Veblen denounced as “the conduct of universities by business men.” Almost two decades intervened between The Leisure Class and the fuller indictment of The Higher Learning in America, which drew also upon Veblen's disappointments at Stanford, where he taught after his dismissal from Chicago. The later book developed a manuscript critique of higher education that Veblen had written in 1904. Although he professed to feel bound “under the rule of Nihil nisi bonum” to observe a “large reticence” in speaking of the University's president, his 1916 preface mocked Harper as the “Great Pioneer in reshaping American academic policy.” The book's criticisms “necessarily drew largely on first-hand observation of the conduct of affairs at Chicago” and were largely directed at the zeal for moral regeneration that Harper would have had suffuse his campus.

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.

During the 1988 season, there was nothing unusual about seeing the Vietnam War on television. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam had appeared during the dinner hour, for the most part, in ninety-second spots showing green foliage and red dust whipped into a vivid frenzy for the camera by the blades of helicopters. But in the waning 1980s, a generation after the fall of Saigon, Vietnam moved into prime time. With vintage rock blaring on the sound track, major stars began to “hump the boonies” in picturesque jungle fatigues. Magnum P.I., aiming for a more serious dramatic tone in its final seasons, afflicted the titular hero with flashbacks to his POW days. On a nearby Hawaiian set, CBS's Tour of Duty patrol (led by Terence Knox, late of St. Elsewhere, on another network) simulated the look of news footage, circa 1968.

For Every period except the modern, we look at art as it was displayed, and as it was seen by the contemporary viewer. Who would think, for example, of medieval art without thinking also of the cathedral and church in which the spectator saw the works? Who would consider the art of ancient Egypt and China apart from the funeral tombs of the aristocracy, for whose use and delight in the afterworld much of it was destined? Who would study Roman art without looking as well at the public monuments that celebrated and demonstrated political power to the populace of the city? In all of these cases we consider art in the context in which it was viewed at the time, and we link its meaning to the material environment in which it was located.

When Brigadier General Thomas Farrell groped to describe (in an official government report) the subjective effect of the first atomic explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico, at 5:29:50 A.M. on July 16, 1945, he found himself, like many a would-be writer of the sublime before him, at a loss for adequate terms and tropes – stupefied, dwarfed, reaching for hyperbolic endterms like “doomsday” and “blasphemous” and resorting to spaced-out adjectives such as “tremendous” or “awesome” that 19thcentury Americans had reserved for more manageable spectacles of God's grandeur such as Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon. Though a military man and no poet, as Farrell registered this history-shattering event in words, he struggled to command some rhetoric of ultimacy before nuclear “effects [that] could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying”:

No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse, and mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was the beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately. Thirty seconds after the explosion came, first the air blast pressing hard against people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty. Words are inadequate tools for the job of acquainting those not present with the physical, mental, and psychological effects. It had to be witnessed to be realized.