The Spenser of this essay is not the poet Edmund Spenser who wrote in mellifluous rhyme of chivalry and honor, but the wisecracking, hard-hitting, Boston-based private eye of Robert B. Parker's novels, a highly popular series in which murder produces mysteries, and ordinary words a disturbing, if common, mystification. Among these words — honor, courage, loyalty, friendship, and trust, a lexicon of moral values — one of the most mystified is honor, a cognate in the novels for coerciveness and violence. Though unremarked, this semantic slippage achieves rhetorical power as it persuades readers that virtue and violence are inseparable, and that violence and lawlessness — breaking and entering, burglary, assault, shooting to kill — are legitimate means to a moral end. Mystifications effected by an insinuating rhetoric differ from the bafflements conventional to private-eye fiction, such as the confusions created by characters who plant false clues within plots devised by mystery writers to puzzle and intrigue their readers. Typically, such crime plots end by revealing secrets concealed within a mystery's inherent darkness and within mystery novels as a literary genre. In the Spenser series, however, a melding of violence and honor produces mystifications that the narrator-hero deepens rather than dispels as he imbues familiar words with morally dubious meanings.

The dramatic rise of identity anxieties in most parts of the world — as reflected in posttraditional movements in politics and postmodernist movements in art, architecture, and social theory — calls for an explanation. Also known disparagingly as fundamentalism or neoconservatism, posttraditionalism is often a response from the peripheral sectors of the population to the onslaught of rapid modernization, often accompanied by social disequilibria, income inequities, and feelings of relative deprivation. The Bible Belt in the United States, the oriental Jews in Israel, the rural and semi–urbanized Muslims in the Islamic world, the evangelical Protestants in Latin America, and the Hindu nationalists in secular India demonstrate the rich diversity and complexity of such political religions. By contrast, postmodernist movements are primarily situated in the intellectual circles of the contemporary world. In the face of an economically globalizing and technologically accelerating history, they represent a dual response to homogenizing forces by reasserting cultural pluralism and nihilism.

In Treating Any Historical Cultural Moment, we are engaging a discourse of alterity that verifies our own being in time by drawing conclusions about others' existences at some other time. We are in the process of making history while discussing historical phenomena. In so doing, we are differentiating ourselves such that another's past is both apart from us and part of us, and the history we tell becomes our own. As Michel de Certeau has said about this process of history creation in his book, The Writing of History, we could be said to be creating intelligibility, an intelligibility “established through a relation with the other” and contingent upon a “process of selection between what can be understood and what must be forgotten in order to obtain the representation of a present” that is knowable. The history thus told is one tending to invoke a story line that itself reproduces a normative power arrangement in behalf of an already ongoing and authorized “text” of history. Some elements of the past thus discussed get silenced, while other elements are brought forward for discussion. In selecting, emending, adapting, and erasing, we are telling stories that seem to be about others but stories that are also abundantly about ourselves.

In 1820, three decades before Henry Rowe Schoolcraft would comment on the inabilities of tourists to experience the frontier without reference to European culture, he had accompanied a Gov. Lewis Cass expedition on the upper Great Lakes as mineralogist, traveling through the wilderness in a canot du maître paddled by Indians and voyageurs — while he read Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Although Schoolcraft's later relationship to Native cultures complicates any facile imperialist-other dichotomies, the Cass expedition to explore the lakes preparatory to securing more land cessions from the Indians was prophetic. When Schoolcraft returned to the East in 1841, by then a tourist attraction himself, 200,000 steamship and schooner passengers a season passed his post on Mackinac Island, crossing the upper lakes while bound for the settlements, prairies, and mineral– producing regions of the United States and Canada. Immigrants came via the Erie Canal; wealthy tourists booked passage to New Orleans, traveled up the Mississippi, and crossed to Chicago and thence through to Buffalo on palatial steamships (Ashworth, 10).

Near the end of Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Thomas Jefferson offers a notably ambivalent assessment of Captain John Smith: “To his efforts principally may be ascribed [the colony's] support against the opposition of natives. He was honest, sensible, and well-informed; but his style is barbarous and uncouth. His history, however, is almost the only source from which we derive any knowledge of the infancy of the state” (177). Such ambivalence registers the degree to which late 18th-century ideologies of civility and refinement mediated historical accounts of Virginia's colonial past, and it begins to suggest an overlooked context for reconsidering the cultural meaning of the Smith–Pocahontas story during this era. For the episode traditionally has been read in terms of race and “the birth of the nation” (Jenkins, 10). While influential critics of Smith have extolled his enterprising “genius” and his “doctrine of hard work and self–reliance,” revisionist critiques of Smith's version of American heroism manage only to reproduce the same interpretive categories. Indeed, to revisionists, the Pocahontas story instances an ethnocentrism endemic to colonial encounters: Smith fails to recognize the huskanaw ceremony (whereby he is made a werowance to Powhattan); and Pocahontas's “self-abandonment” prefigures the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

On August 25, 1681, William Penn sat down to write to James Harrison, a fellow Quaker from Lancashire, about the New World. Having received a charter from Charles II for a new North American province — Pennsylvania — five months earlier, Penn was in the midst of intense preparation to ensure the success of his endeavor. Despite the considerable time and effort that Pennsylvania was taking from him, Penn still continued his work on behalf of persecuted Friends in England; during the early years of Quakerism, he frequently used his influence in the royal government to secure the release of imprisoned Quakers. Penn himself had run afoul of the law in January of 1681, having been forced to defend himself against charges that his profession Quakerism was really a cover for “popery.” Perhaps this recent incident, only months before his letter to Harrison, reminded him of what he had long suspected: that the Society of Friends would never be free from persecution in Anglican England. Certainly, he had higher hopes for Pennsylvania.

In 1904, Teddy Roosevelt sent seven U.S. warships to Tangier to demand the release of the millionaire Ion Perdicaris, who had been captured and held for ransom by Raisuli, a sworn enemy of the Moroccan sultan. Rumors of invasion filtered into the national headlines and, at the Republican National Convention that summer, Roosevelt's secretary of state, John Hay, called for Raisuli's death. What later became known as the Perdicaris Affair stirred public outrage and rekindled memories of the nation's first postrevolutionary war when, in 1801, Thomas Jefferson sent the U.S. Navy to combat Barbary privateers. At that time, Barbary abduction was almost commonplace, and the genre of the Barbary captivity narrative flourished. While held hostage, Perdicaris wrote his own Barbary captivity narrative, which circulated widely, first in Leslie's Magazine and later in the National Geographic Magazine. The crisis, however, was soon forgotten after Roosevelt's successful reelection. The public might have altogether forgotten about Perdicaris but for John Milius's 1975 film, The Wind and The Lion. Milius, who both wrote and directed the film, based his account on Perdicaris's 1904 captivity episode and, in many ways, he preserved the popular image of the savage North African, even calling Perdicaris's captor the “Last of the Barbary Pirates.”

In countries where the history has not assumed the same didactic role in forming the national consciousness, the history of history need not burden itself with such polemical content. For example, in the United States, a country of plural memories and diverse traditions, historiographical reflection has long been part of the discipline. Different interpretations of the American Revolution or the Civil War may involve high stakes but do not threaten to undermine the American tradition because, in a sense, there is no such thing, or if there is, it is not primarily a historical construct. In France, by contrast, historiography is iconoclastic and irreverent.

In the history of American consumer society, the case of King Camp Gillette, the “Razor King,” is at once strange and typical. Gillette — named King after a friend of his father — is recognized as the inventor of the modern safety razor and the namesake of the corporation launched to produce and sell it. As a tale of individual entrepreneurial triumph, Gillette's life follows a familiar pattern: hard work, visionary zeal, ridicule and adversity, persistence, trial and error, and conspicuous success. His story also functions well as a case study in the evolution of modern corporate business practice. The commercial genius of Gillette's invention was its disposable blade, and given a product (the razor) which created its own perpetual market (for the blades), the corporation used the modern tools of patent enforcement, stock offerings, public relations, market research, distribution, technology, diversification, and especially advertising to build and maintain its market share for the last 100 years. In these respects and others, Gillette's story finds an indigenous place in business textbooks, company testimonials, and cultural mythology.

In their considerations of Chicanola border poetry and narrative, Gloria Anzaldúa, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and José David Saldívar have suggested that the cultural condition of the border writer addresses central concerns of contemporary American culture and what one can regard — as I try to do here — as its aspiring cultural outlaws. In the context of their postmodern approaches to culture the notion of the American frontier outlaw has a rather archaic ring, for such an identity recalls 19th–century constructions of self and an underlying belief in individual agency. Even in the 1930s the figure of the folkloric Tejano rebel existed in a similar historical halfway house, one in which the idea of the Mexican outlaw is both utterly anachronistic and politically relevant. Nonetheless, the traditional heroic outlaw of Tejano balladry — corridos — still has the power to signify a legacy of opposition to Anglo power, and the themes of such balladry persist today in the form of legal conflict over unresolved land claims (Verhovek), as if yesterday's outlaw has materialized from legend and taken form as lawful claimant. Thus it is valuable to see how the concerns of contemporary theory can be related to antiquated legends and to note any intermediary texts located in a moment between the late 20th-century present and the mid-19th-century past. Arguably, Américo Paredes's 1930s novel George Washington Gomez prefigures the newly lawful claims of those heir to the mythos of legendary outlaws and at the same time prefigures postmodern border theory. The novel underscores the divided character of a culture inheriting a folkloric tradition in a newly modern American context and elaborates on themes pertinent to a postmodern one.

It was a warm, dry Sunday in October, nearing noon. I parked my vehicle by the remote Calhoun County road in front of Bailey Memorial Methodist Church, in the tiny hamlet of Loyd, Mississippi; then I saw a woman with a large box in her arms walking toward the brick church's wooden doors. She introduced herself as Sarah Bailey. I asked her if I might help carry in the other boxes sitting on the hood of her car. “Thanks,” she replied. As soon as Sarah opened the doors, voices resounded — the Sacred Harp singing I had come to hear.

Associationism as a school of 19th-century psychological thought has been mentioned as an important influence on American landscape painters of that period by several authors, yet little systematic investigation of the influence of contemporaneous psychological theories on 19th-century artistic thought has been attempted. This essay explores these psychological dimensions in the writings of Henry James Sr., Justin Winsor, and John B. Brown, regular contributors to the Crayon: A Journal Devoted to the Graphic Arts and the Literature Related to Them. Published in New York from 1855 to 1861, the Crayon was unique among art publications in its theoretical emphasis. Among the philosophical problems the Crayon took up were questions that today would have been identified as psychological. The ideas of these three authors concerning perception, creativity, and reception are among the clearest and most articulate of the essays in the Crayon in terms of displaying a coherent psychology. Their psychological thought will be extracted from the texts and reconstituted within the contending psychological debates of the time. It will be shown that although associationism was an important influence on artists and critics, other psychological theories stemming from different premises were of equal or even greater importance.

From the time of its reissue in 1983, Harriet Wilson's 1859 text, Our Nig, has inspired critical discussion, much of which has concerned the matter of genre and related questions of the author's purpose and audience. When Henry Louis Gates first introduced it to contemporary readers, he called it both a “novel” and a “third–person autobiography,” further suggesting that it might be read in the context of sentimental novels, as he analyzed the book's interesting departures from Nina Baym's overplot in Woman's Fiction (“Introduction,” xi, xli–lv). Since then a number of critics have expanded upon and argued with Gates's preliminary assessment of Wilson's work and audience. Hazel Carby argues that Wilson writes to black readers, assuming that many of them would have shared her experience, whereas most other critics, including Claudia Tate and Margaret Lindgren, assume that Wilson is writing to a white audience, and negotiating the sense of difference between reader and writer. Barbara White and Eric Gardner, establishing that the actual “Bellmont” family, the Haywards, had strong abolitionist connections, suggest the complications of audience for Wilson. And Gardner, like Carby, suggests that Wilson would have assumed that her story would have been marketable only to a small group of Northern black readers, many of whom would have had similar experiences. Drawing on William Andrews's work with black autobiography, Beth Maclay Doriani describes how Wilson (and Harriet Jacobs) subvert the traditional genre of black autobiography, at the same time as they adhere to 19th–century conventions for publication and sale to white audiences. John Ernest argues that Wilson would have understood the ways in which her story would have been read and misread by proslavery forces. Drawing on William Andrews's discussion of Henry Bibb's narrative, Ernest argues persuasively for Wilson's extraordinarily complex understanding of her audience, to whom she appeals for an exchange based on a recognition of the essential mistrust of social groups.

Although T. S. Arthur'S extraordinary literary presence and popularity were acknowledged during the antebellum period, studies of both the American Renaissance and domestic fiction have failed to provide anything more than a passing reference to his fiction. Arthur's meager current reputation has been defined by a single work, the sensationalist temperance novel, Ten Nights in a Bar-room, And What I Saw There (1854). More generally, cultural historians have labeled Arthur as one of the “fictional eulogists of the self-made man” and a purveyor of the “rags to riches” myth. However, the magazine fiction that Arthur regularly produced for Godey's Lady's Book in the 1840s had nothing to do with either temperance or the myth of autonomous individualism. Instead, his tales focused on the relationship between behavior in the home and in the marketplace. Writing in the aftermath of the devastating Panic of 1837, Arthur sought to identify the causes of domestic disorder and economic failure. Significantly, his narratives of personal accountability asserted that failure and disorder were the inevitable results of deviations from emerging gender norms. The prospective urban merchant and domestic women who appeared prominently in his magazine fiction must learn that the management of troublesome bodies is the key to economic and domestic stability.

In 1891, the influential literary realist William Dean Howells stated that “the arts must become democratic” in order to have “the expression of America in art.” This vision of a democratic culture, though modified, continued to inspire American writers and artists well after the turn of the century. The idea of democracy in American culture remained an important touchstone for conservative as well as progressive-minded writers on art and literature even as modernism took hold in the second decade of the century. For James Oppenheim, for example, editor of the eclectic little magazine The Seven Arts, which published some of the most significant cultural criticism of the day, the role of democracy in American art was an unresolved yet still vital issue. “Our moderns slap democracy on the back,” he wrote in 1916, “but what are they giving it in art?” “Yes,” he goes on to state, “we have magazines that circulate in the millions: we have cities sown thick with theaters: we have ragtime and the movies.” These manifestations are signs of cultural democracy, he implies, albeit devoid of art.

“The city,” Theodore Dreiser explains at the beginning of Sister Carrie, “has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are larger forces which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective as the pervasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye” (1). Dreiser's description here echoes many early 20th-century writers' anxieties about the rise of the modern city — from social reformers like Jane Addams and Jacob Riis to journalists and novelists as varied as Stephen Crane and Jean Toomer. But it is Dreiser's depiction of the city as a seducer, as an irresistible wooer, which finally arrives at the heart of the controversy. In the age that saw an increase in the most socially diverse wage seekers — newly arrived immigrants, Southern blacks who migrated North, and single, young women from the country — the city promises, only in the heat of passion, economic and social possibilities, a chance to live out the full contract of American democracy. And the city finds no better stage for its wooing of these new generations of Americans than that of the vaudeville theater.

The Public Reception Of An Image stands as a testament to its cultural 1 and social meanings. Nevertheless, the painting Hairdresser's Window (Figure 1) by the American Realist John Sloan (1871–1951) has yet to be considered in light of its contemporary criticism. The response of Sloan's early-20th-century audience was ambivalent and thus raises questions concerning the social issues embodied in this painting. Because Hairdresser's Window contains the major motifs recurring throughout Sloan's oeuvre (for example, windows, stereotyped figures, working-class women, and the inclusion of spectators within the picture), it will be used as paradigm to explore the social relevance of his personal mode of spectatorship, a practice that had its counterpart in the public sphere and was paralleled in other works of American Realist painting.

When edwin austin abbey, with eleven other artists and all the ritual of a new male order — round table, cob pipes, stone bottles of cider — founded the Tile Club in 1877, his sobriquet was “The Chestnut.” If not boating down the Erie Canal or on holiday in Easthampton, the men would make tiles for the home, ceramic wares of Shakespeare or rustics and florals, in the style of William Morris and his decorative arts. Twenty years before Charles Eliot Norton's Society of Arts and Crafts, such Tilers as Abbey, Augustus Saint–Gaudens, and Elihu Vedder would draw on the same crafts ideal, namely, an aesthetic for hard work and the “simple” productions of artisanal labor as an antidote to urban luxury. The club would find in guild fraternalism a weekly hobby, twelve men with sardines and crackers, noms de plume and seals, to revive a handicraft seen as both republican in its ethic and fashionably medieval. If modern life meant the enervation of Veblen's foppish and leisured class, the Tile Club was an authentically male pastime.

Marian Hooper Adams, called Clover, was one of the few American women who were serious amateur photographers before the mass marketing of the Kodak in 1889. Clover first learned her craft in 1872–73 while on her honeymoon with her husband, historian Henry Adams. Henry brought along a camera to document their journey up the Nile, and Clover took up his hobby. Henry, in the tradition of expeditionary photographers, took pictures of Egyptian monuments and landscapes, whereas Clover's only extant photograph from the honeymoon portrays interior realms: it shows Henry in the stateroom of the Isis, the dahabieh that carried the couple up the Nile (Figure 1). In the image, Henry sits within a displaced parlor, casting his gaze down and directing us inward to some subjective space. But though Henry appears before the camera, he is not the subject of the image. Clover's own interior terrain, made invisible and inaccessible, is pictured here.

In the 19th century, some Russian intellectuals concluded that democracy was the country's probable future. By the middle of the century, this eventually led to the West and its democratic traditions being directly linked to images of Utopia. From that date forward, this approach to the West has had a central role in modern Russian political thought.