Anne Bradstreet has come a long way since John Harvard Ellis hailed her over a century ago as “the earliest poet of her sex in America.” Today, more justly, we view Bradstreet simply as “the first authentic poetic artist in America's history” and even as “the founder of American literature.” At the same time, a more sensitive criticism is looking anew at Bradstreet's personal drama as a woman in the first years of the New England settlement: her life as a wife, as mother of eight children, as a frontier bluestocking (though still, in many critics' eyes, “restless in Puritan bonds”), and even as a feminist in the wilderness. Feminist critics in particular have revitalized our understanding of Bradstreet and her work by probing her subtle “subversion” of patriarchal traditions, both theological and poetical, and by placing her among contemporary 17th-Century women writers, making her no longer a phenomenon on the order of Doctor Johnson's dancing dog, but finally a participating voice in her age.

The crucial twenty-third chapter of Melville's The Confidence-Man (1857) develops an arresting analogy between the linguistic wiles of the latest avatar of the Confidence-Man (or Devil) and the imagery of infectious atmosphere. The chapter opens with a flood of allusions to the notion of an insidious agent hidden in the air, carrying infection and threatening death: “At Cairo, the old established firm of Fever & Ague is still settling up its unfinished business; that Creole grave-digger, Yellow Jack—his hand at the mattock and spade has not lost its cunning; while Don Saturninus Typhus taking his constitutional with Death, Calvin Edson and three undertakers, in the morass, snuffs up the mephitic breeze with zest.” Eyeing from the boat rail the “swampy and squalid domain” that lies before Cairo, the Missourian, Pitch, peers through the “dubious medium” of a “dank twilight, fanned with mosquitoes, and sparkling with fire-flies” and revolves in his mind a foregoing conversation with the P.I.O. man, who, only moments before, had induced him to pay money for a promised boy servant. He begins to suspect he has been conned.

O Pioneers! begins with the wind, which is threatening to blow away Hanover, Nebraska, a little town serving homestead settlements. On their return to the Bergson homestead, Alexandra, her brother Emil, and their neighbor Carl Linstrum pass homesteads, whose sod houses, lowslung shelters made of the land itself, crouch in hollows to survive the elements, their very materials denoting their subjection to nature. “The great fact was the land itself,” “a wild thing that had its ugly moods; and no one knew when they were likely to come, or why,” only that “the land wanted … to preserve its own fierce strength.” Nature's unpredictable impulses to self-preservation “overwhelm[ed] the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its somber wastes.” In this novel, then, Willa Cather introduces the relation between nature and culture within the sublime tradition, in which the experience of nature discloses the limits of human faculties and threatens their health and continuance.

In 1914 Josiah Royce began his address to a scientific gathering by comparing philosophy to “a sort of Cook's bureau.” “Its servants,” Royce continued, “are taught to speak various languages – all of them ill – and to know little of the inner life of the numerous foreign lands to which they guide their feet, or check the luggage of their fellow men.” Yet these agents have their use, Royce concluded, “if new comparative studies of ideas of various and widely sundered provinces of research are to be carried out at all,” and he bid his listeners to regard him, “if you wish to vary the name, as representing some bureau of university travel.”

Much has been written in recent years about 19th-century rural cemeteries. Beginning with the establishment of Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery in 1831, these rural retreats rapidly replaced existing church burial grounds and by the 1850s had led to the development of urban parks and garden suburbs as well. Like urban parks and garden suburbs, rural cemeteries were meant to provide relief from the crowding, grid-iron regularity, and grittiness of the country's rapidly expanding industrial centers by embracing the openness, spontaneity, and verdant freshness of nature. Trees, shrubs, and flowering plants punctuated and enhanced the gentle contours of the land; lakes and roadways reflected and extended nature's beauties; manmade structures, too, nestled into the undulating rhythms of the land, exhibiting a oneness with the varied and carefully orchestrated richness of the natural setting. The garden suburb and the rural cemetery shared a further distinction of being located on the periphery of existing cities and were frequently entered through imposing gates that effectively announced their separateness from the surrounding terrain. Even more fundamental, however, but not fully understood, is the fact that at the core of the creation of both the rural cemetery and the garden suburb was a desire to emphasize and consolidate the American family by providing it with a new physical setting and a new set of symbols. By the Civil War, virtually every large American city had a rural cemetery, where its dead were buried in ample family lots that were adorned with imposing family monuments, and set off from other family lots by elaborate iron fences or stone copings similar to those that edged the family home.

“Technology Spurs Decentralization Across the Country.” So reads a 1984 New York Times article on real-estate trends in the United States. The contemporary revolution in information processing and transmittal now allows large businesses and other institutions to disperse their offices and other facilities across the country, even across the world, without loss of the policy- and decision-making abilities formerly requiring regular physical proximity. Thanks to computers, word processors, and the like, decentralization has become a fact of life in America and other highly technological societies.

How do we visualize our large cities? What kinds of shapes, overall, do we imagine them to have? These questions would have brought different answers in each major period of urban change in our country's development. Each period seemed to develop a favored perspective. Eighteenth and early-19th-century New Yorkers thought of the city as it looked when one approached it by sea from the harbor. Mid-19th-century viewers imagined a city seen from a bird's eye view like that provided by the Latting Observatory on 42nd Street, stretching to the north. By the end of the century, the approach to the city by rail and road began to encourage a new perspective on the city, silhouetted against the skywhat we have come to know as the skyline view. Each of these perspectives on the city reflects something about the urban culture of the period that created and favored the perspective. In the values and meaning that have become associated with it, the skyline is no exception.

Today few people read the works of E. Z. C. Judson, better known as “Ned Buntline”; at least one might have made that claim with confidence before the recent reprinting of his Adventures of Buffalo Bill (1870). He is now remembered as an early practitioner of Western scouting tales, the first promoter of “Buffalo Bill,” before William Cody jettisoned him as a liability, and as the inventor of long-barrelled six-guns, the “Buntline Specials.”

Not so very long after John Butler Yeats prophesied that “fiddles” would be “tuning up” throughout American intellectual life in the years before World War I, the private musings of John Reed strike another, less hopeful set of notes. The lament emerges in an unpublished tale Reed wrote in 1913 entitled “Success,” about a poet named Alan Meredith, age twenty-two, who, like Reed, has just come from the country to New York to answer his vocation. “The whirling star of Literature revolves in the Big City,” Reed explains. “By force of gravitation the minor bards sooner or later fall within its orbit, and nine out of ten emit no sparks from that time forth.” Alan's project is an epic poem tentatively entitled New York, A Poem in Twelve Cantos-but he gets nowhere beyond his title. “You see,” Reed writes, “he was making the same mistake as you and I, when we heard the voice [of the city] for the first time and tried to translate it without knowing the language.” Reed elaborates:

A poet writes about the things nearest to his heart-the things he does not actually know. As soon as he gains scientific knowledge of anything, the glamour is gone, and it is not mere stuff for the imagination. The bard of green fields and blossoms and running brooks is always a city man, and he who sings the Lobster Palaces and White Lights lives in Greenwich, Conn. Never do the stars seem so beautiful as to him who looks up between brownstone houses on a breathless night; all the magic of the city lies in the glow of lights on the sky seen thirty miles away.

The characteristics that contributed in the 1930s to the fame of A Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry, the three leaders of the Regionalist art movement, were the same that led to their being condemned as Fascists in the art criticism of the 1940s. Despite differences in their artistic styles, all three artists based their paintings in the 1930s on the life and land of specific locales in the Middle West. Each artist became associated with a particular region: Wood with Iowa, Benton with Missouri, and Curry with Kansas and later with Wisconsin. In their effort to celebrate the folk and tradition of these American regions, these artists relied heavily upon figurative styles and anecdotal narratives. They eradicated from their paintings the modernist styles such as Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism with which they had experimented in the 1910s and 1920s. Modernism, they now believed, was a difficult language, inaccessible to the ordinary public. Instead, these artists embraced a plain-speaking, folksy pictorial rhetoric.

In the fall of 1929, just after the stock market crash but before its effects were widely felt, a group of radical artists and writers in New York established the John Reed Club, named after the already legendary journalist, poet, and revolutionary activist. The founders, some of them members of the Communist Party, some loosely associated with the party's cultural magazine New Masses, were committed but restless young men in search of a focus for their political energies. Soon after the club began, the artist members created an art school, organized exhibitions, and sponsored a lecture series and discussion groups with emphasis on the practice and theory of art and art history from a Marxist point of view. As the Depression deepened, with dire consequences to artists dependent on an art market in a state of collapse, the John Reed Club's approach attracted growing attention.

Early in December, 1899, an energetic, thirty-five-year-old, white woman photographer named Frances Benjamin Johnston started to work on a commission for the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia. Hampton Institute was originally an industrial arts and teachers training school for former slaves. Somewhat later it began an experiment to matriculate American Indians dispossessed of tribal land. It was founded shortly after the Civil War by the charismatic white reformer, Colonel Samuel Chapman Armstrong, former commander of the 8th and 9th U. S. Colored Troops. Armstrong intended to teach Southern blacks (also American Indians by 1878) “how to educate their own race,” as well as to “provide them with Christian values, and to equip them with agricultural and mechanical skills by which they could support themselves during the months when school was not in session. They were to abjure politics and concentrate on uplifting their race through hard work, thrift, and the acquisition of property.” The school was supported by private Northern philanthropy as well as by government funding, and it enjoyed liberal Quaker support that included the famous abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier, in whose consideration the Hampton militia unit was forbidden to drill with real rifles. Hampton opened its doors in 1868 with two white teachers and fifteen black and female students; but by the time of Miss Johnston's arrival thirty-one years later, it had grown to almost 1,000 students, 135 of them Indians, with about 100 faculty and administration members. By 1880 over 10,000 Southern black children were being taught in schools staffed by Hampton graduates; over ninety percent of Hampton's black graduates taught school, although vastly fewer Indians graduatedwith similarly usable credentials, since they returned home to reservations where teaching opportunities for native Americans were scarce.

To most people, federally-sponsored photography during the New Deal means the splendid file of images created by the Resettlement Administration–later the Farm Security Administration of the Department of Agriculture. Understandable as it is, this equation simplifies truth. By the time of Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration in March 1933, the use of photography was commonplace in the federal bureaucracy, reflecting practices that had been developing for more than half a century. Since the Civil War, federal officials had profited from the precision of photography and from its deceptive appearance of objectivity to preserve information and sometimes to influence opinion. A few government projects had resulted in compelling educational documentations that were also recognized as compelling art. Most notably, photographers like John Hillers, William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'sullivan, and Carleton Watkins, tested by the opportunity to expand the possibilities of their medium while addressing a great national theme, had compiled in their records of the exploration of the West documentations that helped to change public policy by providing images with the power to crystallize the country's sense of its identity and potential growth.

On the evening of good friday, 1878, Charles Taze Russell and a handful of followers, all clad in white robes, gathered at the Sixth Street Bridge in Pittsburgh to await the Millennial Dawn, which would provide their translation into heaven. His study of the Scriptures had convinced Russell, a haberdasher from Allegheny, Pennsylvania, that Christ had returned invisibly in 1874 and that now, three-and-a-half years later, the kingdom of God would begin, and the faithful would be summoned to heaven. Russell later denied the incident—Pittsburgh newspapers insisted otherwise-and revised his theology to accommodate this disappointment. The Kingdom of Jehovah, he said, would begin in 1914, whereupon God and Satan would rule the world jointly until the Battle of Armageddon vanquished the forces of evil and inaugurated a theocratic millennium.