Charles Mathews (1776–1835), the outstanding British comedian of his day, toured America between September, 1822, and the following May. In addition to appearing onstage in the northeast, he collected materials for a one-man dramatic entertainment, “A Trip to America.” Nine months after he returned to England, he opened a three-and-a-half-hour performance of this dramatization, using a script that he and playwright James Smith wrote. Mathews performed this piece many times in London and the provinces, and in 1834 took it to the United States.

The lack of convenient, cheap public transport had long been a serious shortcoming of city living. This need was partially answered around 1830 by the introduction of horse-drawn omnibuses, but by the late 1850s it was clear that a better form of urban transit—the horse car—promised to lift public transportation up and out of the mud. Large, reliable, commodious cars gliding smoothly over polished rails easily outran the squat omnibuses that were left far behind to jostle over the rutted city streets. The street railway, heralded as the new wonder of the age, promised to make fortunes for prudent investors and to ease the burdens of crosstown travel for ordinary citizens.

The seventy-one song titles (see chart below) and innumerable lyrics that sprinkle his works indicate the extent of F. Scott Fitzgerald's reliance upon popular music as a source of his art. Contemporaneous descriptions of him as “laureate of the Jazz Age” need not be considered derisive; Fitzgerald was thoroughly in touch with his culture, was aware of the meaning of his sources, and was a keen analyst of the effects of popular culture on American lives. Cecilia Brady, in The Last Tycoon, admits “some of my more romantic ideas actually stemmed from pictures—42nd Street, for example, had a great influence on me. It's more than possible that some of the pictures which Stahr himself conceived had shaped me into what I was.” Fitzgerald was shaped by movies, by musical comedies, and not least by popular music. Other writers of our century were influenced in the same way, but it was Fitzgerald who acknowledged his debt to popular culture, who used it with meticulous care, and who evaluated seriously its impact, for better or worse, on the American scene.

As one of the modern forms of the classic Fool, political cartoonists tend to bully us, irritate us, delight and enrage us, yet they always enlighten us. We need our Fools, and most social groupings have at least one, in one form or another.

The November 10, 1975, episode of “Maude” was a brilliant presentation. Bea Arthur, the star, offered a tour-de-force performance, a one-woman show, a monologue in which she revealed to her psychiatrist her deepest fears, her most profound sense of self, of personal loss, and the search for personal meaning. The psychiatrist was present; we saw the back of his nodding head, an occasional movement of his hand scratching notes on a pad. He grunted at times. Arthur moved about a large ornate set. The office was decorated in high Victorian style with drooping plants, mirrors, heavy carved furniture, oriental rugs, and the psychiatrist's high-backed chair. This decor lent depth and richness to the scene, providing contrast to the single performance, the single moving actor.

Since the death of Gertrude Stein probably no major author has so consistently and explicitly reflected concern with “the making of Americans” as Norman Mailer. From his early novella A Calculus at Heaven, written while he was an undergraduate at Harvard, through his recent Marilyn, the tensions of his works have generally derived from attitudes that national myths or regional diversity have nurtured in his characters. Thus in The Naked and the Dead he subtitles the Time Machine chapter on General Cummings “A Peculiarly American Statement,” and therein he traces the general's views and conduct to the conflicts during his youth between his philistine Midwestern father and his genteel Bostonian mother, whose aesthetic ideals for her son yield to the image of tough “manhood” imposed by her authoritarian husband. Indeed, a notion of what it might mean to be an American in any inclusive national sense rarely emerges in this early novel; America instead seems to be a contentious aggregate of regional and ethnic cultures. Moreover, Mailer's authorial stance here is neither that of Dos Passos' detached naturalism nor that of Whitman's joyous acceptance of continental diversity within a national character but, rather, that of a sectionally oriented condescension toward those soldiers who lack the sophistication of his own brand of Northeastern urban culture. In fact, by 1952, Mailer had apparently adopted such slanting as a staple of his literary practice by arguing that a literary work should be shaped by the author's “prejudices, instincts, and sensitivity.” Nevertheless, Mailer's interest in American behavior has persisted over three decades as he has probed the quality of life in Hollywood or Texas or Florida or Chicago, seeking as he said of his participation in the Washington march, “to elucidate the mysterious character” of the “quintessential American event.”

Much of the excitement of nineteenth-century America probably arose from the fact that for nearly every ill some reform was hopefully put forth. Slavery was countered by abolition; alcoholism by temperance; tight lacing by the bloomer dress; indigestion by graham bread. In that spawning ground of panaceas, “every possible form of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. Bran had its prophets. Everybody had a mission.” Sex too had its prophets, who not only fulminated against rigid marriage laws and consequent injustices to women, but advocated reforms based upon highly individualized principles.

It has been noted that the great first wave of feminist fiction and plays appeared in the final decade of the nineteenth century. But because the writers of this fiction were women and feminists, they were not, on the whole, well received. In 1914, for example, G. G. Wyant complained that “indeed novel after novel has appeared dealing with the feminist question, some purely emotional in their appeal, some written obviously as propaganda.” The popular and conservative Ladies Home Journal associated feminist literature with communist propaganda:

The Red element, the Bolshevist party, as it may well be called, in the woman's movement, is sparring to-day as openly for the destruction of womanhood as the Soviet element in industry is shaking the pillars of organized economics.

The parallels in the status of women and of Blacks have been noted by social scientists and historians, and recently, by theoreticians of the women's liberation movement. It is obvious that there are similarities in the status and history of the two groups, but these are offset by important differences. The analogy between Blacks in general and women is valid and useful as long as it is confined to the psychological effect of inferior status, but not when it is extended to a general comparison between the two groups.

The final American withdrawal from Vietnam and the collapse of our client regime in Saigon marked a nodal point in American relations with East Asia. For years prior to our terminal disengagement, hawkish politicians and publicists had waxed eloquent about the bloodbath that was sure to occur when the northerners and their allies of the People's Revolutionary Government had achieved their victory. Although that sanguinary catastrophe did not occur, the presumption that it could have caused the American government to implement and execute a refugee program that brought over 125,000 Vietnamese to the United States. While it is far too early to draw up any detailed balance sheet on that refugee program, the reactions that it triggered in the United States provide a useful and convenient point of departure for a retrospective analysis of changing American attitudes toward all immigrants from Asia.

If any single motif runs through the historiography of this country, it must be: “America is different.” Even before we became a nation, observers such as Hector de St. Jean Crevocoeur commented on how this new land, with its openness, its freedom, and its innovation, contrasted with the Europe from which its settlers had come. If this motto has been so persistent for America as a whole, then, to use the Talmudic idiom, how much more so has it been for America's Jews.

During the summer of 1865, the German-American leader, Carl Schurz, undertook a fact-finding tour through five Southern states. Although he entered upon the journey at President Andrew Johnson's request, Schurz was highly critical of the administration's Reconstruction policies. Rebuffed by the White House upon his return, he insisted upon incorporating his findings in a detailed report that was printed by Congress. It was widely circulated at the time; because of the persistent popularity of the pro-Southern views of William A. Dunning and his followers, however, only recently did it receive the attention it deserves. As Michael Burlingame has pointed out in his introduction to a modern edition, it is an important historical source. It ought to be reexamined in the light of recent scholarship.

James Agee would have us honor the lives of working men and women like those pictured in this portfolio from Russell Lee's 1946 photographs for the Medical Survey of the Bituminous-Coal Industry (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947). And so we should. Yet it is neither an easy gesture nor one we can enact out of the brief and casual glance most of us give such photographs. We are continually surfeited with images of other people's lives in America. Most of these images are calculated to create the illusion that we know the lives of the people portrayed while, in fact, we know very little about them. Surface appearance retails as substantial acquaintance. The images commonly produced by television, newspapers, and magazines not only invite us to pretend knowledge we lack; they also project an essentially prosperous image of America—if everyone cannot have all he wants, still everyone possesses all he needs. Lee's photographs of miners and their families, their homes and their work, their worship and their play are uncommon images. Like all photographs they catch only a moment in a person's existence. Nonetheless, Lee made a range of images that move beyond the moment to a portrait of the round of life among mining people. The faces, the moments, even the landscape, are past, and the way of life unfamiliar. For these reasons we may look quickly and then away for we do not know what to make of what we see.

Few scholarly debates have equaled, either in emotional intensity or in linguistic acrimony, the recent controversy surrounding the publication of Robert. W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman's Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Although much of the energy of that particular dispute has been focused on the assumptions of Fogel and Engerman's quantitative methodology, the substance of many of the exchanges has been reminiscent of similar debates that have taken place among students of black American history throughout the past several decades. The issues in these debates have been large in number and diffuse in nature, but at their core has been a constantly recurring theme: the concern with the cultural source and the social viability of this or that black institution. The black family has been the institution receiving the most scholarly attention of late, but remaining unresolved are two nagging and closely related questions—that concerning the degree of African cultural survivals in the slave community and that concerning the docile or rebellious nature of slave religion.

In the September, 1869, issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Harriet Beecher Stowe published an article in which she claimed that Lord Byron, the poet, had committed incest with his half-sister. These charges had been made before and are generally accepted by Byron biographers today, but the publication of such a claim in a respectable literary journal in 1869 touched an exposed nerve of American consciousness. For weeks, Harriet Stowe was attacked in newspapers throughout the country as a liar and a fool who had sought money and notoriety by pandering to obscene and depraved tastes. The article was termed “startling in accusation, barren in proof, inaccurate in dates, infelicitous in style.” The author's literary reputation plummeted, and the Atlantic Monthly lost more than a third of its subscribers in a single year. The moral sensibilities of thousands of Americans had been outraged; this violation of a taboo unleashed resentments, which had apparently been smoldering since the end of the Civil War, against Stowe, the Beecher family, and the liberal causes with which both were identified.

That Ellen Glasgow was the grande dame of One West Main Street, Richmond, Virginia, is a fact known to everyone. That as a novelist she was from the beginning a part of the modern southern literary tradition and that she was shaped by the same fundamental impulses which went to make the “Southern Renascence” has been less widely understood. This fact has resulted in part from the circumstance that much of her work was written early in this century and that before the spectacular upheaval in southern writing which marked the 1930s, she had established a secure position, which she did not elect to desert when the winds of a newer modernism began to blow.

A tremendous amount of material has been written about the overpowering effect that America had on Henry James when he returned to this country in 1904 after twenty-years absence, which he discussed in The American Scene (1907). In particular, the effects of the New York scene, what James called the “terrible town,” are recorded in his New York Stories—“The Jolly Corner,” “Julia Bride,” “Crapy Cornelia,” and “A Round of Visits”—written between 1906 and 1909, and “The Married Son,” Chapter Seven from the composite novel, The Whole Family (1908).

Nineteen twenty-three was a momentous year in Jean Toomer's life. The publication of Cane, a cluster of thematically related sketches, stories, and poems about black people in Georgia and Washington, D.C., signaled his emergence as a talented young writer whom many associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Later in the year Toomer discovered the teachings of Georgi Gurdjieff, whose Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man was becoming internationally famous. While Cane was emerging as a minor classic during the 1920s, Toomer devoted himself to Gurdjieff, creating confusions about his loyalties that never ceased to plague him. Although his Gurdjieffian connection is well known, it is rarely taken seriously, and even today Toomer is usually discussed only as a “black” writer. Perhaps for a while he was, but his youthful fascination with race for its own sake slowly evolved into a racially conscious, then a radically unconscious, universalism. In that process, Gurdjieffian teachings were the catalyst, and it was clear to Toomer that his involvement with the “movement”—not race—was the defining quality of his life.

March 23, 1976, marked the sixty-eighth anniversary of one of literary history's most remarkable but least celebrated events—the invasion of Europe by Ezra Pound. That imaginative, excitable, and extremely talented Young Turk who stormed the gates of literary London in 1909, died in Italy in November, 1972, a calm, withdrawn, old man, living out the butt end of his life in a self-imposed vow of public silence. But if the poet's voice was stilled at last, his public's was not; fittingly enough, Pound left the literary world as he had entered it, in a swirl of bitter controversy and angry debate precipitated by the decision of the prestigeous American Academy of Arts and Sciences to deny him its coveted Emerson-Thoreau Medal. No one can say for sure whether Pound desired the prize. Many times in the past such honors seemed to have mattered greatly, but often they had been more desperately sought for him by members of that protective coterie of friends and relatives who clustered about in his Italian retreat. It is the relationship of Pound to these associates, the impact of his turbulent career upon his family and friends, and the effects of their well-meaning, if misdirected, efforts on his behalf, that need charting here; there is little need for yet another intricate route through that much surveyed ideomatic jungle he called his Cantos.