When I was growing up in Southern Connecticut, my mother referred occasionally to an ancestor of ours who had killed some Indians. In 1970, I went away to college and Mom came up to Massachusetts for Parents' Weekend. Just across the river from my campus in Bradford stood a statue in the center of Haverhill's town green. My mother pointed it out to me (my sister had gone to the same school, so Mom knew her way around the area). I'd been passing this tribute to our ancestor – supposedly the first statue of a woman ever erected in this country – every time I went to town to pick up subs or hang out with the townies. Not sure whether to be proud or ashamed, my mother and I stood and looked up at the bronze woman streaked with bird droppings. Her hatchet was raised, her hefty thigh slightly raised beneath her heavy skirts; we imagined we saw a family resemblance – the square jaw and round cheeks that are distinctive in our family. At the base of the statue, bas relief plaques narrated Hannah Emerson Dustin's story: taken by Abenaki Indians from her Haverhill home along with her week-old infant and her midwife, Mary Neff, Dustin watched as her infant was killed by the Indians. She was then marched up along the Merrimack River, through swamps and woods, to a small island where the Merrimack meets the Contoocook River, in present-day New Hampshire. Shortly after her arrival at the island, Dustin – with the aid of Mary Neff and perhaps that of an English boy, Samuel Lenardson, then living with the Indians – hatcheted to death the sleeping people, scalped them, then made her way back down the Merrimack in a canoe. As I looked at the statue, I wondered many things about Dustin.

Of the many authorities Thomas McGrath rejected during his life, one of the most significant was the American Revolution, for his work explicitly questions the founders as a source of aesthetic and political creativity. “The National Past has its houses,” he writes in Letter to an Imaginary Friend, “but their fires have long gone out!” From his pronouncing the death of Virginia's deified presidents to his condemnation of the “local colorist” hunting for patriotic “HEADwaters” by which to camp, the poet's renunciation of the “false Past” amounts to a coherent commentary on the relations between American politics and modernist poetry (Letter, 315). E. P. Thompson has remarked in paving homage to his friend that “McGrath is a poet of alienation…. His trajectory has been that of willful defiance … At every point when the applause – anyone's applause, even the applause of the alienated – seemed about to salute him, he has taken a jagged fork to a wilderness of his own making.” Although his language strongly recalls that of Emerson's “Self-Reliance,” Thompson views McGrath as more than a romantic individualist. McGrath's alienation was not simply the estrangement that Marx saw afflicting all of capitalist society, nor was it a momentarily fashionable pose; rather, it was a calculated and thorough opposition to what Thompson calls “official culture” and its destruction of political, historical, and literary values. McGrath's refusal to make a “usable past” out of the American Revolution participates in this general defiance of “official culture,” as his work insistently reminds us that among the regular patrons of Monticello and Mt. Vernon were the many establishment poets well entrenched in bourgeois universities. In defying modernism's efforts to renovate the 18th century, McGrath makes a wilderness of his own, a wilderness which grows in opposition to the wellplowed fields of American empire.

In the chapter of Nature (1836) entitled “Language,” Emerson finds the “root” of words to reside in “material appearance.” The apparently opaque word “supercilious” opens itself up, gives up (imagistically, even narratively) its literal meaning: the raising of the eyebrow. The Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky calls such literalisms “internal form,” and if he engineers similar linguistic unpacking it is not simply to demonstrate etymological curiosities — why, for instance, as he argues in “The Resurrection of the Word,” a candle called “tallow,” hence one made of animal fats, should not be called in the next line of a poem a “candle of ardent wax” (42, 43). There is more at stake than pedantry; both theorists seek to return the life-stuff to a dead language — or, in the resonating metaphor of resurrection, to bring dead matter back to life. The material of art “must be alive and precious,” writes Shklovsky, and invoking that peculiar myth of the linguistic Fall, of which Derrida provides the least remediable version, he rues “the journey from poetry to prose” (“Resurrection,” 42–43, 44). Submitted to common usage, words eventually lose their formal integrity (whether the “internal form” of “image” or the “external form” of “sound”) (“Resurrection,” 41). Emerson describes a similar degradation of language: “As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry” (CW, 1: 19).

Benjamin franklin and samuel johnson, august humanists from Opposite sides of the ocean, never met on a social footing sufficiently firm enough for them to leave any first-hand impression of the other or give rise to any dramatic encounter, even though they resided for years in London proximity, carrying on lives of remarkably active social intercourse. Certainly, they knew each other by repute as intellectual forces in the age. Yet attracted as they were to mind, they did not seek out each other's intellectual company, and no mutual acquaintance (and there were a number of them) had the temerity apparently to bring them together. All the while a studied indifference seems to reign on the part of both men — although we cannot know this with any certainty — thwarting otherwise strong reasons that should have conspired to link them in some fashion. This social anomaly from our perspective is that much odder since Franklin's social route, briefly traced in section I, now and then intersects with Johnson's.

The political agenda of William Lloyd Garrison and his adherents within the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS) can be reconstructed with the rhetoric and practices of print culture, starting with its assumption that the prospects for the slaves' emancipation waxed and waned with the proliferation of writing. In the mid-1830s, the MASS mailed antislavery publications in mass quantities to civic leaders, newspaper editors, and post offices in both the North and South. In 1837 alone, it issued 711, 277 publications, which Garrison noted were falling “thicker than raindrops … nourishing the soil of freedom.” Although their publicity campaign elicited a hostile reaction from political officials, newspaper editors, and most infamously, violent mobs, the abolitionists persisted. A typical budget for the MASS allotted far more money to printing and distribution than any other expenditure, including the remuneration of their often imperiled traveling agents.

Because both parts of Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799–1800) were clearly not composed under the same creative impetus as his other novels were (critics conjecture that the novel was written in three segments within a two-year span), the novel as a whole evinces the author's propensity to improvise more than any of his other works do (Ringe, 49). Early critics, notably R. W. B. Lewis (The American Adam) and David Lee Clark (Pioneer Voice in America), choose to ignore and/or gloss over the troublesome second part. Later criticism, however, deals with both part 1 and part 2. Kenneth Bernard, for one, concisely identifies one of the novel's themes as the correlation between innocence and experience, the first part dealing with Mervyn's innocence and inexperience, and the second dealing with his experience and his cognizance because of that experience (441).

In September 1869, Harriet Beecher Stowe published “The True Story of Lady Byron's Life” in the Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan's Magazine. Public outcry was so great that less than a year later she published Lady Byron Vindicated: A History of the Byron Controversy, From Its Beginning in 1816 to the Present Time. This was a four-hundred-page volume that defended not only Lady Byron but also Mrs. Stowe. The book only fanned the flames of rebuke and debate. From 1869 to 1870, at least forty-one review articles of Stowe's work were published, including a response by Mark Twain. In the same time period, eight books were published in response, including Medora Leigh's autobiography. It announces in its subtitle that it contains “an introduction and commentary of the charges brought against Lord Byron by Mrs. Beecher Stowe” (Leigh defends the poet).

From 1993 to 1996, the first book-length monographs devoted to the Indian captivity narrative systematically began to define and explore the form's complexities, partly by expanding the very limited number of texts previously analyzed and anthologized. But paralleling the production of these book-length overviews, several studies recognized the need to elucidate individual captivities and texts by using the cultural dynamics of revelation, in particular, John Demos's book on Eunice Williams, taken in the attack on Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1704, and Susan Walsh's article on Mary Jemison, taken near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1758. Both analyses concern the difficulties but also the possibilities of contextualizing and thereby individualizing two hitherto shadowy captives who permanently crossed from Anglo to Native American culture.

Salt marshes are built by tidal action and sedimentation in estuaries where river and sea flow together, and they are thus among the most ordinary landscapes in the world. With wide, flat horizons unmodulated by hills or trees and undecorated by wildflowers, they are anything but spectacular. Moreover, the marsh's spring and summer miasma was long believed to be a source of disease. Salt marshes were rarely frequented by American artists of the last century; artists were more inclined to brush sermons about Manifest Destiny and the Transcendental spirit into their grandiose landscape paintings of the mountains, waterfalls, and rivers of the Northeast, the Rockies, or the imposing Great Plains. Yet, during the last forty years of his life, Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904) obsessively, ritualistically painted views of salt marshes along the eastern seaboard. He was unique among painters in his devotion to this theme. Though he, too, painted the landscape as cultural oratory, his message differed from the celebratory recitals of his peers, and he did not attract their audience.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, the American Polish-language press began using the term Polonia to describe the imagined community of all Polish-speaking immigrants in the United States. Local Polish American settlements already bore neighborhood names. Where the Roman Catholic hierarchy permitted an ethnic Polish parish to form, Poles often designated the surrounding area — not only the parish buildings, but the whole network of neighborhood institutions and businesses — by the parish name followed by the suffix owo. By 1895, Poles in Chicago, for example, could read about news in different parts of the city nicknamed for local Polish-language parishes located there: Stanislawowo, Wojciechowo, Jadwigowo, Jackowo, and Michalowo. When speaking of all the Poles living in a single American city, Polonia could be used with a qualifier such as Chicago Polonia, Buffalo Polonia, or Milwaukee Polonia. But Polonia by itself referred to all Polish immigrants who were bound — or should have been, the writers insisted — by a shared notion of Polishness.

For both herman melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the quin-tessence of midcentury bachelor life was found across the Atlantic. Attempting to capitalize on the phenomenal success of Donald Grant Mitchell's Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), Melville in 1855 published “The Paradise of Bachelors,” with its companion sketch, “The Tartarus of Maids,” in Harper's (during Mitchell's tenure there as editor). This diptych juxtaposed the hard labor of unmarried New England female millworkers to the leisurely pleasures of English bachelor residents of the Inns of Court. For Melville, the “quiet absorption of good living, good drinking, good feeling, and good talk” was epitomized by bachelor life in London. Hawthorne made his own entry in the bachelor sweepstakes with The Blithedale Romance (1852), which portrayed the temporary residence of the bachelor Coverdale in an American Utopian community and an urban hotel. Yet Hawthorne, like Melville, associated ideal bachelor life with London. Describing a dinner he had enjoyed at the Reform Club, Hawthorne noted in his journal that “there are rooms and conveniences for every possible purpose, and whatever material for enjoyment a bachelor may need, or ought to have, he can surely find it here.”

In one of the first and best-known collections of cultural criticism in America, Civilization in the United States (1922), Harold Stearns begins his chapter on “The Intellectual Life” with this widely quoted passage:

When Professor Einstein roused the ire of the women's clubs by stating that “women dominate the entire life of America,” and that “there are cities with a million population, but cities suffering from terrible poverty – the poverty of intellectual things,” he was but repeating a criticism of our life now old enough to be almost a cliché. Hardly any intelligent foreigner has failed to observe and comment upon the extraordinary feminization of American social life, and oftenest he has coupled this observation with a few biting remarks concerning the intellectual anaemia or torpor that seems to accompany it.

Since its inception in the mid-1960s, photorealism has been criticized by those who viewed it as a naive perpetuation of pop art, but it has received the praise of those who have recognized the contributions of photorealism and their relevance to the intellectual climate of opinion of the last few decades. Photorealism challenges our conception of reality by raising questions about the way we see things.

Despite its notorious sexual politics, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood gained considerable literary respectability when T. S. Eliot endorsed the first American edition with his Introduction. The presiding dean of Modernist letters at Faber and Faber in London, Eliot could distinguish even obscure writers with a single stroke of his editorial pen. Though his decision to publish Djuna Barnes's wildly subversive Nightwood suggests that an antic disposition lurked beneath his studied propriety, he expurgated several of the manuscript's most transgressive episodes, thus diminishing the redemptive role of sexual inversion in the novel. Eliot admits in his Introduction that “it took me, with this book, some time to come to an appreciation of its meaning as a whole” (xi), but his editorial deletions indicate he overlooked the symbolic significance of inversion as the antithesis of Aryan essentialism in the manuscript. With uncanny prescience, Nightwood forecasts the nightmare of Nazi genocide and gendercide, creating a Parisian underground of expatriate inverts in exile from the deadly cultural “hygiene” of fascism. Analysis of the deleted manuscript passages restores the full force of Barnes's antifascist polemic in which inversion ultimately wins the day.

Mary Antin was not modest in her use of the possessive case in The Promised Land — in her iterations of Mine, Mine, Mine. While still a schoolgirl, Antin asserted that everything she saw in the Boston Public Library, a “treasure house” of wisdom and art, was “Mine.” As the child of a newly naturalized American, she felt entitled to claim possession; the library and its treasured holdings were “Mine,” she said, “because I was a citizen; mine, though I was born an alien; mine … My palace — mine! … This is mine” (266, original emphasis). By the time Antin came to the soaring conclusion of The Promised Land, she had exchanged her natural (and naturalized) father for the country's Founding Father, and as the child of George Washington, she claimed as her “heritage” everything in human evolutionary history that had led to the creation of America and everything yet to be evolved. “I am the youngest of America's children,” she wrote, “and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage … Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future” (286). In swooping hyperbole, Antin equated American citizenship with possession, and possession with inheritance, property, and rights: with a treasure house in which she “had a right to be … at home” (266).

With these words, Henry Roth began Call It Sleep, a novel published in 1934 when its author was twenty-eight years old. Call It Sleep ranks among the most powerful novels of the 20th century, precisely because of the questions it does ask about the conflicts of immigrant life, the demands of assimilation, and the search for spiritual nourishment in the modern world. Roth locates his narrative in New York City during the peak years of mass migration from Europe between 1907 and 1914. At the center of Call It Sleep is David, a precocious and sensitive child at age six, who is already questioning his place in the universe and the meaning of God. Thus, Call It Sleep presents a narrative of how a small immigrant boy makes sense of his world, a world defined by both its physical and spiritual dimensions.

The task of cultural recovery, George Hutchinson writes, begins with “those moments when places where the intertwined discourses of race, culture, and nation were exposed to questioning, to skepticism, to transformation, however small and localized, and when possibilities for coalitions of cultural reformers were envisioned and exploited” (Harlem, 26). The historical record has been muddied by shifting political currents and fragmented by instances of deliberate neglect over time, yet scholars have recently begun to reconstruct the complicated story of interracial cooperation between the two world wars. More effort, however, should be devoted to discovering connections and parallels between the worlds of work and art — of labor and literature — as part of this story. One reward of such effort, I suggest, will be to reveal the hitherto hidden “lines of continuity and disruption” that James A. Miller sees connecting “the African-American literary production of the 1920s and its production in the 1930s” (87–88). That those lines often intersected lines traced by nonblack literary production and working-class history reinforces Hutchinson's point that it is necessary to rethink “American cultural history from a position of interracial marginality, a position that sees ‘white’ and ‘black’ American cultures as intimately, mutually constitutive” (Harlem, 3).

Lorelei Lee, the “professional lady” who narrates her own adventures in the 1925 international bestseller Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, is not a likely alter ego for an aspiring writer. Indifferent to most books and unlikely to indulge in introspection, Lorelei makes writing far less a priority than managing social invitations and sexual conquests. Accordingly, Anita Loos, the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, went to considerable lengths to distance herself from her blonde-bombshell narrator. As if to acknowledge and enforce such distance, Loos has Lorelei remark offhandedly in the opening pages of the book, “It would be strange if I turn out to be an authoress.” The novel's first edition highlights the incongruity of Lorelei's status as author, illustrating this remark with a drawing of a wide-eyed young woman clutching a pen and bending over a ruffle-skirted vanity table. She is dressed for writing in a pair of highheeled slippers, a sheer, rose-trimmed negligee, and a frilly bed cap tied under her chin. Years later, a publicity still for the musical version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes continued to emphasize the distinction by juxtaposing a seated, conservatively clad Loos with the standing figure of Carol Channing as Lorelei Lee, elaborately gowned and dripping with diamonds. As the photograph suggests, Loos carefully positioned herself in opposition to the glamour girl whose appearance has since been labeled “the most significant event in the evolution of the dumb blonde” (Everett, 254).

Seventy years after its publication, librarians at the New York Public Library catalogued Moby Dick with other books that explored the finer points of whaling. In making this bibliographic classification, librarians at this most American exemplar of that most American institution, the public lending library, read Melville's novel not as a great national epic but as an instance of the particular, the regional, the ethnic, the vocational. Given that American readers (not to mention critics of American literature) continue to be more interested in the particular than the epic, it is not surprising that Melville's successor, Cormac Mc-Carthy's epic Blood Meridian (1985), has failed to attract the critical attention it deserves. Writing resolutely against the contemporary grain, McCarthy treats American history and identity as if it were a continuous whole. Although revisionist, McCarthy's version of American history offers little comfort to those who would rewrite American history from the point of view of the peoples who were obliterated so that American history might fulfill its Destiny. Where a typical revisionist history might read Manifest Destiny as a story about Europeans and European values destroying local lands and cultures, McCarthy insists that this kind of history is fragmentary because it depends on a denial of the fact that we only arrive at such critical positions of moral superiority because we are the survivors and successors to this Destiny. His novel examines the burgeoning American empire of the mid-19th century not to indulge in the compensatory pleasures of self-accusation but to remind us of how particularizing versions of history necessarily deny how we have become to be who we are.

When the movie Panther premiered in American theaters in May 1995, it introduced a whole new generation to the rhetoric and radical politics of the Black Panther Party of a quarter-century earlier. It also sparked fierce debate about Panther fact, Panther fiction, and the power of images. Former leftie David Horowitz, now the head of the neoconservative Center for Popular Culture in Los Angeles, took out an ad in Daily Variety calling Panther a “two-hour lie.” Damning director Mario Van Peebles for glorifying the positive aspects of the black power movement — the children's breakfasts and sickle cell anemia tests the Panthers sponsored, for example — Horowitz warned that people “will die because of this film” and faxed a seven-page press release to the media condemning the Panthers as “cocaine-addicted gangsters who … committed hundreds of felonies.”