Washington, D.C., was born from the marriage of literary, economic, and political revolutions of the late 18th century, when the expansion of the marketplace, the rise of the novel, and the increased circulation of print spawned a bourgeois public sphere and, with it, the modern nation-state. Washington, D.C., was from the start an imagined city, created through the circulation of booster literature to attract investors and so solidify a rational political order. Washington, D.C., arose precisely from this need to ground the imagined landscapes of the Enlightenment, to turn the visionary into the visible and political theory into fact.

At one point in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” an essay that deals directly neither with the soul nor with socialism, Oscar Wilde quotes obliquely from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

[People] go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment. “He who would be free,” says a fine thinker, “must not conform.” And authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of over-fed barbarism among us. (267)

That Wilde was attracted to Emersonian nonconformity is not surprising, and the similarities between the two writers are striking. But my reason for citing Wilde, the ur-homosexual and model of iconoclasm, is that I want to show that Emerson is as innovative a thinker as Wilde, and that indeed on the subject of individualism and personal relationships he is far more so. In fact, Wilde can be seen as taking certain ideas of his teacher Walter Pater and giving them an Emersonian and American cast, expressing more openly Pater's cloistered Oxford radicalism. The “Socialism” essay in particular develops strong connections among aestheticism, individualism, and sociopolitical dissent, revealing a strong desire for alternatives to late-19th-century British society. And of course in the case of Pater as well as Wilde, the need for individualism and the quest for new forms of social connection have obvious links to both writers' alternative sexual orientation. What makes Emerson more radical, more, if you will, “queer,” is precisely that he is not arguing for any sexual orientation, but is attempting — many years before the Oxford aesthetes — to create a free space for alternative forms of gender and new forms of personal relationships to develop. Emerson values dis-orientation more than any orientation.

The Blithedale Romance occupies a unique position in the Haw-thorneian corpus for at least two reasons: Hawthorne's use of a first-person narrator and his decision to base, albeit loosely, the fictional Blithedale on his experiences as a resident at Brook Farm, an actual Utopian community founded by the transcendentalist minister George Ripley in 1841. If The Blithedale Romance constitutes a new point of departure for Hawthorne's fictional project, it is nevertheless a point of departure that Hawthorne, in particular in his prefaces, had contemplated all along. Hawthorne's fidelity to a new kind of fiction that more closely approximates lived experience would seem to be a betrayal of his notion of romance, which does not, like the novel, aim to be faithful to “the probable and ordinary course of man's experience,” but it is part and parcel of Hawthorne's anxieties about the transgressions of representation, transgressions peculiar to the kind of fictional project Hawthorne attempts to prosecute (Seven Gables, 1). While Hawthorne's preface to The Blithedale Romance celebrates his romances as “a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their phan-tasmagorical antics (38), his preface to The House of the Seven Gables warns that romance runs the risk of sinning unpardonably; that it commits, in other words, a “literary crime” (1). Our concern with Hawthorne as a writer seems all the more urgent, indeed necessary, given the connections Hawthorne seeks to establish between himself and his self-confessed minor poet and alter ego Miles Coverdale.

In 1928, Harold H. Scudder first demonstrated that Herman Melville's story Benito Cereno had been closely based on chapter 18 of Amasa Delano's Narrative of Voyage and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817). On the basis of the two texts' similarities, Scudder argued that Melville's story was mere reworking of Delano's account. Scudder's argument clearly overlooked Melville's ability to reframe the story in an ironic narration or to invest the details of Delano's plot with new meaning; nevertheless, readers of Delano's narrative might be amazed at how closely Melville's story follows that account. In addition to the basic sequence of events, some of the most artful and significant details of Benito Cereno seem to have taken their cues from the original story: Delano's offense at Cereno's incivility, his frustration that the valet stays constantly by Cereno's side, and his surprise that the Africans' unruly conduct is justified as the “sport of boys” are some of the materials Melville might well have found in the 1817 recollections.

The Emancipation of Slaves during the Civil War is celebrated as the pivotal event in African-American history. But this act overshadows another milestone of the war: the mass recruitment of blacks into the Union Army. Although blacks had fought alongside white soldiers since the colonial era, the Civil War was the first conflict in which blacks were enlisted in large numbers and recognized as regular soldiers in the army. By the war's end, black soldiers numbered 180,000 men and contributed crucially to the Union victory.

Most Literary analyses of slave narratives consider them either within the context of white mainstream writing or as the beginnings of a rich literary tradition. Scholars have – in part to promote racial equality – reckoned their value in relation to the interventions the narratives have performed with white textual forms and/or as extensions of the oral tradition. Whether as propaganda for abolition or an artform in their own right, the political and rhetorical power of slave narratives cannot be exaggerated – nor can the link between their popularity and their influence on the development of U.S. literature be ignored. My goal here is to open an investigation into the nature of their impact, putting the slave narratives within the context of the history of authorship and the surrounding literary marketplace.

“No Race Can Prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities,” cried Booker Taliaferro Washington, melodramatically standing on top of the center platform at the International and Cotton States Atlanta Exposition. His towering physique conservatively dressed in a grayish black suit, Washington projected a profound, yet quiet, dignity. His hands were inordinately large, and his hazel-colored eyes betrayed a difficult past, complicated by the peculiar characters of race and Southern predicament.

Although Critics Have frequently observed that Louisa May Alcott's enormously popular Little Women (1868) is a novel of education, they have not addressed just how much this is a consumer education. This essay tackles the question by placing the novel at the intersection of Victorian religious and consumer cultures. It argues that Little Women engages the emerging “spirit of modern consumerism” through traditional moral discourse, particularly Protestantism and its romantic/sentimental descendants. For not only does the book trace its young heroines' progress toward “little womanhood,” but it sets many of their ethical challenges in a Victorian “Vanity Fair.” And, much as in Bunyan's original Pilgrim's Progress, those challenges are often temptations to idolatrous materialism. In the Protestant imagination, such idolatry found crucial expression in the Roman Catholic interpretation of the sacraments. For the Protestant, the communion bread and wine were merely symbols of divine grace, a grace that only God could confer. For the Catholic, they were the transubstantiated body and blood of Christ Himself, and therefore possessed salvific power. In Little Women, this anxiety about the proper interpretation of the sacraments becomes anxiety about the proper use of material objects and the qualities they signify. Here the Catholic's belief that the consecrated host could confer grace and transform the spirit threatens Protestant integrity in a new guise, as the modern consumer's faith that fashionable goods can construct identity and deliver happiness.

As One of the primary works of American literature to be recovered by feminist archaeology, Life in the Iron Mills (1861) can also stand as the test of a theoretical blind spot of early feminist criticism – its inability to see “bad writing” – for Davis's novella is notably awkward in its conception and construction. An obvious reason for the lack is that this kind of judgment fulfills an assumption of patriarchy in regard to women's writing: “that the reason for the absence of women [in the literary canon] is that women have not written in the past – or that what they have written is not very good” (Spender, 1). In the older formalist critical dispensation, aesthetic defects had to be publicly identified and labeled, like Hester Prynne's badge of shame. I certainly do not mean to suggest that feminism (however constituted) has any obligation to reproduce this order of judgment, but not owning such effects has consequences. Davis's novella can temporarily resolve this dilemma by using feminism to expose the traditional aesthetics of judgment.

The Central concern of Thorstein Veblen's The Higher Learning in America (1918), a book that anyone concerned with the bureaucratization of the university or recent assaults on tenure would do well to scrutinize, is the scandalous porousness of boundaries between academia and business. According to Veblen, research universities contaminated themselves at the time of their formation in the late 19th century, not simply by accepting funding from capitalists, but also by mimicking the administrative structure and adopting the values of commercial culture. Although he believes the interests of education and business are “wholly divergent,” Veblen finds that “Plato's classic scheme of folly, which would have the philosophers take over the management of affairs, has been turned on its head; the men of affairs have taken over the direction of the pursuit of knowledge.” While some of the local concerns of Higher Learning differ from problems facing the university today, current interest in what Andrew Ross calls the “corporatization of the modern university” makes the book's broad claims strikingly relevant.

Recalling His Early Days in New York, Abraham Cahan declared that he “felt strongly drawn to the life of the city.” “My heart,” he wrote, “beat to its rhythm” (Marovitz, 17). Anzia Yezierska also remembers New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the century with affection in her autobiographical novel, Bread Givers. When her heroine Sarah Smolinsky is away from Hester Street, she longs for “the crowds sweeping you on like waves of a beating sea. The drive and thrill of doing things faster and faster” (129). For both of these Jewish immigrant writers, the spectacle of New York City embodied hope, liberation, and vitality, yet as they explore the immigrant's exhilarating and exasperating adaptation to urban life in America, they highlight the keen sense of loss on becoming American, on becoming modern. In their vivid depictions of late-19th-century New York life, both Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Yezier-ska's Bread Givers (1925) detail in an especially dramatic fashion a story that had not been explored before in America's urban novel: the Eastern European Jewish immigrant's adaptation to America's consumer culture. Highlighting the role of mass-produced goods and new forms of leisure in constructing a modern, middle-class American identity, both novels examine the tensions and contradictions of immigrant life as a more communal culture of scarcity gives way to an individually oriented culture of material abundance.

The Cover illustration for the May 1916 issue of the American School Board Journal presents a scene that could have taken place at most of the hundreds of high school lunchrooms recently established in the nation's larger cities. In the drawing, two well-dressed young men glance upward from their seats at a shy but fetching young woman. As she moves past them, carrying a tray of food, she returns their look.

On June 4, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave the commencement address at Howard University, the federally sponsored historic black college. In the last decade, Americans had become increasingly aware of the civil rights movement in American politics and society, and of the injection of the issues revolving around civil rights for black Americans into the national public discourse. President Johnson took a new angle of attack to the problem of discimination against black Americans. Instead of focusing on the political and legal aspects of Jim Crow legislation, or the constitutional struggles for civil rights in education and voting, or the plight of black Americans in the South, he spoke – with great passion – about the social and economic circumstances of African Americans throughout the nation, including those trapped in the large urban ghettos in the Northeast, the Middle West, and the West. “In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope,” he argued.

In 1936, the Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP, 1935–43) appointed New York City artist Charles Alston (1907–77) to be the first African American to supervise a New Deal mural project. Alston, five other artists, and their assistants designed narrative, celebratory images of Harlem, African-American life, children's fairy tales, and stories for New York's Harlem Hospital. In paired panels exploring the theme of healing, Alston depicted an African past beyond exotic and barbaric stereotypes in Magic in Medicine for the foyer of Harlem Hospital Women's Pavilion, and a racially egalitarian American present in its companion panel Modern Medicine (each 17 × 9 feet) (Figure 1). Initially, white hospital authorities rejected the works on the basis that they “contain too much Negro subject matter,” which would make them unappealing to residents of Harlem. This judgment angered Alston, since his designs were consistent with project guidelines. Because the building was a hospital in Harlem, Alston selected the theme of medicine and depicted black figures in his two panels. Yet the seeming suitability of images that looked like the people who used Harlem Hospital and referred to their collective history met with loud objections from Harlem Hospital's white administration. While it was common for muralists to base their subject matter on the local community and its history, and in fact the WPA/FAP encouraged artists to do so, officials tried to cancel Alston's commission on these very grounds. Their attempt to prevent artistic self-representation in the 1930s followed on the heels of prolonged racist hiring policies at Harlem Hospital. Alston ultimately painted his mural designs as planned; final approval of the murals did not come until 1940.

Fortune portentously announced its aim in the first issue in February 1930: “Fortune's purpose is to reflect Industrial Life in ink and paper and word and picture as the finest skyscraper reflects it in stone and steel and architecture.” The magazine's copious use of painting, literary writing, and artistic photography gave it a luxurious feel that few early reviewers failed to praise. The advertising firm Young and Rubicam, for instance, applauded the magazine's aestheticization of business: “A Toast to You Fortune … You've taken what are sometimes called ‘prosaic business’ and ‘sordid industry’ – you have viewed them with imagination, insight, and beauty … No longer is business a column of figures, or work a daily grind. Here is epic enterprise, a panorama of romance, adventure, conquest – with beauty in factories and derricks.” Upgrading the visual and textual environment of the business magazine, Fortune provided business with the elegance of the aristocracy and the allure of a Hollywood star.

In 1933, Archibald J. Motley Jr., an African-American artist from Chicago who enjoyed a moderate level of national and international renown, issued his only formal public statement concerning the relationship he perceived between his art and race. His words, resonating with confidence, assert his conviction that painting could capture the truth of race through pigment. Reproduced opposite this declaration, Blues of 1929 (Figure 1), which depicts well-coiffed men and women dancing in the Petite Cafe in Paris to tunes played by musicians seated in the foreground, would seem to reinforce Motley's point: paint transcribes the gradations of skin pigment incarnated by the various African, West Indian, and perhaps even African-American patrons of this nightspot. The color of skin, transmuted into the color of paint, identifies and catalogs race.

On June 11, 1956, Chiang Yee was led into the Sanders Theater of Harvard University, where he began delivering his Phi Beta Kappa oration, entitled “The Chinese Painter”:

The word “Chinese” in my title conveys a reference both to the birthplace of the painter and to the type of work to be expected from him; but while that is what I mean, I wish to point out that the word has not the same significance today as it would have had fifty to a hundred years ago. Then a “Chinese” painter was a painter absolutely and exclusively Chinese, differing fundamentally from the painters of all other nations and races. When I speak of a Chinese painter of today, I mean one who is basically Chinese but not exclusively so in his creation. He is not, and should not be, isolated from or independent of the rest of the world, for he has his part to play in the cultural evolution of the world. (242)

I Lived Through the sixties and in certain ways could be considered typical of the times, or at least of women of my class and calling. I might even seem to some an emblematic person worthy, perhaps, of notice. But I belong among the millions elided from the historical records of their time, their lives unnoted and unremembered. I wonder now why I could not have done what Joan Didion did to make herself memorable. Like her, I might have picked out people who seemed, so she said, “emblematic” – Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Linda Kasabian at the Manson trial – and by writing about them I could conceivably have written my self into history. For clearly, Didion intended to inscribe her self into the record of the sixties by describing people she went to see. “I went to see …,” she would write, and again: “I went to see.” She wanted to see symptoms of cultural decline, especially those connected to violence, and wherever she looked, with her selective and impounding gaze, she found what she sought – the disarray that confirmed her vision of a world “devoid of any logic” in which, as she (and Yeats) said, things fall apart. She wrote of social disorder in a stark elliptical style, her insistent parataxis representing the lack of connection that was her theme. The reportorial mode she adopted suited her intent, for personal journalism, which melded the topical with the autobiographical, allowed her to impress her self, as well as her nihilistic vision, upon the reader's consciousness. ‘I want you to know, as you read me,’ she wrote, “precisely who I am and where I am, and what is on my mind” (“In the Islands,” White Album, 133).

In March 1981, a Michigan woman wrote to the organizer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund's design competition describing her concept for the memorial: she proposed a life-sized sculpture of an American soldier and a Vietnamese child, with “one hand reaching out, tentatively, no touching, toward the soldier's drooping fingers. In this little child's sweet, innocent face I see all we tried to do in Vietnam, stark contrast to what really happened, what we expended through those long hard years, these two human beings a bridge between our hopes and dreams, and cold reality. This tender little child, hoping for help, for protection, in total trust.”

As Flower, As Edible Root nourishing Natives and wanderers, and as witness to the nation's work force and wars, Helianthus tuberosus repeatedly drew itself to the attention of Adrienne Rich as she drove across the country:

Late summers, early autumns, you can see something that binds

the map of this country together: the girasol, orange gold-petalled

with her black eye, laces the roadsides from Vermont to California runs the edges of orchards, chain-link fences

milo fields and malls, schoolyards and reservations

truckstops and quarries, grazing ranges, graveyards

of veterans, graveyards of cars hulked and sunk, her tubers the jerusalem artichoke

that has fed the Indians, fed the hobos, could feed us all.

Is there anything in the soil, cross-country, that makes for a plant so generous? (11)

Here in part IV of her impressive long poem “An Atlas of the Difficult World” (1991) Rich does not use the botanist's Latin, and she gives no further details about girasol (Jerusalem artichoke), a member of the sunflower family, all of whose varieties are native to the Americas. She (the plant) thrives everywhere, in places both mainstream and marginal, and being thus omnipresent she can feed people in all walks of life.