After squanto taught the colonists at Plymouth in 1620 “both the manner how to set [their corn], and after how to dress and tend it,” Indians seem to have disappeared from the American pastoral scene, except as unwelcome intruders. Seventeen years later, writes William Bradford, “the Pequots fell openly on the English at Connecticut, in the lower parts of the river, and slew sundry of them as they were at work in the fields.” Mary Rowlandson opens the story of her captivity during King Philip's War similarly, describing how the Narragansetts came out of the wilderness to attack the farmsteads at Lancaster, setting fire to buildings “with flax and hemp, which they brought out of the barn,” and later celebrated by feasting on the animals they had captured: “miserable was the waste that was there made, of horses, cattle, sheep, swine, calves, lambs, roasting pigs, and fowl (which they had plundered in the town) some roasting, some lying and burning, and some boiling to feed our merciless enemies.” These accounts — in which Indians violate the pastoral scene, killing peaceful tillers of the soil and wantonly consuming the stock that had been so carefully husbanded — suggest that in the 17th Century, despite the original beneficence of Squanto, Indian “savagery” was perceived as a threat not only to the lives of individual colonists but to agriculture itself, the foundation of the colonial economy in North America. But it was the agrarian culture of the English that turned the Indians into “savages,” for the Pequot War and King Philip's War began, as Francis Jennings has demonstrated, with the colonists' hunger for land.

An Emersonian notion of originality and autonomy has over the last century and a half evolved into an enduring part of our cultural heritage. In a nation fractured by racial or class barriers, this assertive individualism continues for many to hold forth the hope of a fundamental principle overlapping our cultural divisions. Of course, this self-reliance has not gone unquestioned in an age of postmodern skepticism. If once a defiance of history and society seemed the American Adam's heroic gesture, recent critics such as Frank Lentricchia and Donald Pease have pointed out the Emersonian self s inescapable ties to the overdeterminate world of discourse. Not only have recent critics dismissed the plausibility of Emerson's idealism, they have disavowed its ideology of solipsistic independence that repudiates collective life. What I would like to do is to pose the problem of Emersonian individualism differently, to frame the terms of the debate less according to false oppositions between authenticity and culture, self and society, or freedom or fate, than in terms of complex negotiations about social authority undertaken in response to the “age of reform's” blurring of traditional distinctions between the public and private. In the second quarter of the 19th Century, the push toward state-sponsored education, specifically, was refiguring power in terms of socialization. Within his essays, Emerson acknowledges that identity is, and could only be, a social construct. Rather than trying to elude the fate of circumstances, Emerson, it might better be argued, attempts to redefine the nature and limitations of freedom in a world where, as he says in his lecture on “Culture” (March, 1851), “education” has superseded politics.

In 1865 while Whitman was preparing Drum-Taps for publication in New York, John Wilkes Booth fatally wounded Lincoln at Ford's Theater in Washington. As the nation expressed its grief in public mourning, poems, sermons, speeches, and funeral parades, Whitman paid close attention to the country's bewilderment and the “strange mixture of horror, fury, [and] tenderness” that followed the “black, black, black” of Lincoln's death. Although some volumes of Drum-Taps were bound and distributed, Whitman apparently realized that his new book needed a companion collection about Lincoln's death and the war's end. Postponing the release of Drum-Taps, Whitman began work on “a little book” (p. 23), a collection of eighteen poems titled Sequel to Drum-Taps (Since the Preceding Came from the Press). When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd. And Other Pieces. More than any other group of poems by Whitman, Lilacs and Other Pieces is a response to a moment in history; this immediacy of relation to historical discourses and events makes the volume an uncommonly suggestive example of Whitman's dialogue with his culture.

Two years after charles darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex(1871) ignited a great debate about race, culture, and sexual difference, Dr. Edward H. Clarke drew the lines in what soon became a literary war in America over the supposed differences between the sexes. In his highly appreciative review of Clarke's Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls, William Dean Howells(?) wrote that “the subject is a very delicate one to handle,” not only because it involves certain embarrassing physiological details, such as “periodicity,” but because woman is the weaker vessel in many ways, and does not always care to be reminded of it. Yet the facts of anatomy and physiology are at the bottom of many differences in the capabilities and adaptations of the two sexes for the various offices of life. The female's muscles are weaker than the male's, and she must not be expected to do so much bodily work. The female's brain is five or six ounces lighter, on the average, than the male's, and she must not be expected to do so much “cerebration” as he can do. The special relation of the female to humanity that is to be, involves many disturbances, habitual and occasional, which handicap her, often very heavily, in the race of life.

In The American Scene, Henry James's experiences of Harvard's College Yard and Philadelphia's Independence Hall offer paradigms of his relation to his natal land. I begin with these encounters with architecture to suggest how the New York City he recorded in that travel narrative is overdetermined by his manner of approaching it. John Carlos Rowe is surely correct that James's reflection on the fencing of Harvard Yard contains the central meditation on the bestowal of “margins,” James's own term for his principal aesthetic modus operandi: “The formal enclosing of Harvard Yard is comparable to his own activity of giving shape and dimension to the ‘formless,’ often chaotic world he encounters.” This aesthetic closure protects the scene - of a cultural repository - from corrupting exposure to the world of getting and spending, the ever-changing world beyond the gate. Relating the imposed order at Harvard to James's admonition at Independence Hall that one must “be ready, anywhere, everywhere, to read ‘into’ [the American scene] as much as he reads out” (p. 291), Rowe's elaboration on that counsel is crucial: “This interpenetration of man and his world transforms the social product into a cultural expression, the living record of a civilization.” The participant-observer creates an original, nonreproducible artifact by means of the critical consciousness he brings to bear on what are without this additional, but by no means superfluous, element merely the alienating products of alienated labor in industrialized America.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its popularity in 19th-century America, Ramona (1884), Helen Hunt Jackson's nostalgic novel of the California mission Indians, has seemed to offer little to academic readers. Seldom appearing on the lists of required reading for college courses in American literature, Jackson's novel has also been virtually ignored by literary and cultural scholars. Nevertheless, Ramona has had an active and influential “cultural life.” Jackson's Indian novel appealed to generations of readers from a wide variety of regions and socioeconomic classes. Published in the same year as Huckleberry Finn, Ramona first ran as a six-month serial in the Christian Union and subsequently amassed tremendous sales figures both in the United States and abroad. In 1885; for example, Ramona sold 21,000 copies as one of the year's best-sellers, and by 1900 readers had purchased more than 74,000 copies. Despite the lack of cheap, reprint editions, the novel continued to sell roughly 10,000 copies per year for most years through 1935. Held by 68 percent of U.S. libraries in 1893, it was one of only three contemporary novels held by 50 percent or more of the public libraries in the United States. Indeed, at least one of them had enormous trouble meeting public demand for the novel: in 1914 the Los Angeles Public Library was circulating 105 copies of Ramona, but it still had a waiting list; by 1946 the library had bought over a thousand copies of the novel. Never out of print, Ramona has been translated into “all known languages” and has been printed hundreds of times in dozens of editions. The popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin was phenomenal, but in Ramona Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel had a worthy rival. Clearly a powerful explanatory myth for generations of American readers, Ramona deserves serious attention from literary and cultural scholars alike.

In the 1930s, Dorothy Parker wrote to Alexander Woollcott that the “Kiss of Death has come.” She was referring, in her inimitably morbid way, to a contract from the Paramount Film Corporation, and in so doing became one of a long line of writers to establish themselves as different than and superior to the Hollywood script factories, while welcoming that vampirish — but lucrative — kiss of death. Behind Parker's remark lies an already long history of writers struggling to reconceive their authorial functions, their professional standing, and the nature of their literary work in an age of mass culture. One of the most remarkable moments in that struggle was Theodore Dreiser's suit in 1931 against Paramount-Publix Corporation, which was brought in at attempt to halt the release of an (in his opinion) “inartistic” version of An American Tragedy (1925).

With the late-19th-Century rise of the metropolis came new ways of seeing in the American city. Observers attempting to decipher the “mysteries” of an urban landscape radically transformed by industrial and mercantile capitalism responded in a variety of ways: some chose to portray the “underside” of the city, some its expansive beauty, others its vast and disorienting scale. But what these different perspectives share is an assumption that one can comprehend and order the sprawling urban scene through a knowledge and experience predicated on sight; to “see” the city is, quite literally, to understand it.

The relationship of photography and painting has greatly intrigued art historians in recent years, as has the uneasy status of photography as “art” and/or “documentation.” An in-depth study of 19th-century landscape images suggests two new premises on the subject: first, that opinions differed on photography's status as an art in the 19th Century, just as they differ today; and, second, that the landscape photograph is more closely related to the plein air oil sketch than to the finished studio easel painting. For ease of comparison, the visual material used here will consist primarily of landscapes made in and around Yosemite Valley, California, in the 1860s and 1870s; comparisons will be made among paintings by Albert Bierstadt, photographs by Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge, and works in both media by less famous artists.

By 1919, racial and class tensions coupled with the burden of post-Great War anxiety proved too heavy for many American cities to bear. In Chicago, a carefully engineered, though rigid, vision of city planning, which involved calculated racial and ethnic segregation, became an ad hoc reaction against change. As the city convulsed with demands made by new constituencies, as recent Southern migrants were pitted against more established immigrants and the old neighborhood boundaries failed to contain or restrain the burgeoning new populations, Chicago in the summer of 1919 erupted into racial conflict.

Lynching became a fact of American life after the Civil War, but it only became an important subject for writers of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and a subject for visual artists in the 1930s. During the Depression, antilynching works were first a reaction to the widespread outrage over the Scottsboro case and then part of the political and legislative efforts to make lynching a federal offense. In early 1935, both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Communist Party's John Reed Club held competing art exhibitions that not only condemned lynching but also supported their legislative objectives. After World War II, when Civil Rights legislation became the main priority, images of lynching continued primarily in the works of African-American artists. But in these later works, lynching became the prime symbol of American racism, springing from a black perspective rather than from particular political campaigns or from contemporary experience.

In 1948, a unanimous jury awarded the $40,000 first prize in the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Competition to a design team headed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen. Competitors had been charged with memorializing Thomas Jefferson, his Louisiana Purchase, and the expansion of the American nation by creating a national park and monument on the West bank of the Mississippi River at St. Louis.

The 1980s were tumultuous years for the sport that many Americans still call the “national game” or the “national pastime.” For major league baseball, it was a decade marked by increasingly hostile relations between labor and management, resulting in three strikes, including one that interrupted the 1981 season and lasted for fifty days, causing the season to be shortened and many of the year's records to be marked with an asterisk. In 1984, Peter Ueberroth, the man who miraculously made the Los Angeles Olympics turn a profit, was hired as Commissioner of Baseball, and he soon led the owners in a conspiracy to restrict the free-agent market in order to keep players' salaries down. There were a variety of lawsuits brought against major league baseball, not only because of the owners' collusive actions but also because of ostensible racial and gender-based discrimination. And there were scandals over the drug use, sexual misadventures, and gambling habits of prominent players and managers. Nevertheless, by the end of the decade, owners' profits were up, players' salaries were up, and attendance at ball games was up. Baseball's prominence in the national imagination was further bolstered by the success of the film version of The Natural (1984), which put an end to the conventional Hollywood wisdom that baseball films are box-office poison and paved the way for a spate of baseball films toward the end of the 1980s, including Bull Durham (1988), Eight Men Out (1988), Stealing Home (1988), Major League (1989), and Field of Dreams (1989). The 1980s gave new meaning to Jacques Barzun's oft-quoted declaration that “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game.” In his book Take Time for Paradise, A. Bartlett Giamatti, who succeeded Ueberroth as Commissioner of Baseball, rephrased Barzun's insight with double-edged puns that captured the ambivalences of the decade. “I believe that thinking about baseball will tell us a lot about ourselves as a people,” he wrote: “Baseball is part of America's plot, part of America's mysterious, underlying design — the plot in which we all conspire and collude, the plot of the story of our national life.”

A golden period of African- American music and dance nourished from the mid-1890s until the First World War. Minstrelsy had been the country's leading vernacular entertainment for half a century, but it was now in decline. Its sentimentality and nostalgia appeared passé and rustic in the more sophisticated and urbanized Gilded Age. An old order was breaking up and a new, looser, freer order taking its place, one that called for a faster beat.

In numerous essays Ralph Ellison highlighted the special role that musicians and big swing bands played in defining a new future for black America from the late 1920s through World War II. Led by sophisticated and glamorous Dukes and Counts, big swing bands represented a flowering of black folk culture in the new urban centers of the black migration. With New York City acting as their national capital, moreover, these bands acted as traveling representatives of the modern city as they conducted national tours, produced endless recordings, and performed live on radio for a new mass audience for jazz music. While their travels took them through the indignities of a segregated society, black bands offered release from the Depression and expressed heightened expectations for people whose lives were still bound by racial restraints. As Ellison recognized, they provided ecstasy and communion to their many followers, performed in secular rituals on the dance floor. As such, the most famous bands of the 1930s and 1940s held out an urban model of freedom that climaxed with the renewed mass migrations to Northern cities during World War II. In the big band form, folk culture and modern life were united in new ways to offer optimism tinged by hard reality in the middle of the Depression. In the process, black entertainers stood as heroes.

The straightforward account by Tao Jie of the history of Uncle Tom's Cabin in China raises questions of great interest to contemporary American Studies scholarship. To the old question - how shall we represent America's “usable past?” - is added another: “Usable to whom?” This question, now being asked by a wide variety of multiculturalists reexamining our literature and history from revisionist perspectives, is the central issue raised by Tao's essay. Here we are given a specific case study for cross-cultural comparison that allows us to contrast the America we imagine we have been exporting to the America other cultures reinvent. Equally important, Tao provides us with the opportunity to examine one of the most compelling of our cultural documents from the perspective of 20th-century Chinese history and see how, stage by stage, the translators interpreted the story to respond to changing forces in Chinese cultural history.

When president Lincoln met Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862 and remarked, “So this is the little lady that started the great big war,” he never imagined that, forty years later, this fictional attack on slavery would cause quite a stir culturally and politically on the other side of the globe, in China.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx observes, Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this timehonored disguise and this borrowed language.