Now that the Soviet empire has collapsed, it is time for a fresh look at the victims of the oppositional “Cold War criticism” that came to dominate American Studies in the 1980s. Hoping to stem the tide of the Reagan Revolution, the “New Americanists,” as Frederick Crews dubbed the academic heirs of the New Left, instigated a sweeping critique of their own discipline, charging the founders of American Studies with complicity in imperialism abroad and McCarthyism at home. Of all the founders, none was interrogated more thoroughly than F. O. Matthiessen, long regarded as the very model of a critic for whom radical politics and academic criticism were not mutually exclusive commitments. As late as the early 1980s, critics were still hailing Matthiessen as a pioneer in the development of American Marxist criticism. Frederick Stern, for example, asserted that Matthiessen's “methodology as a critic, though not in any pure sense Marxist…, comes closer to some of the distinguished efforts of the Marxist critics of Europe than does the work of just about any other major American critic of Matthiessen's time” (44). Similarly, Leo Marx argued that “in his subtle treatment of the interplay between literature and society, Matthiessen in a sense anticipated the development of a more supple Marxist cultural and literary theory since its liberation from the rigid doctrinal cast of the Stalin era” (256). Yet it was also in the early 1980s that the first blow to Matthiessen's reputation was struck in The American Renaissance Reconsidered, a collection of papers from the English Institute whose title, echoing that of Matthiessen's magnum opus, announced the beginning of an ambitious campaign to revise the history of American Studies – a campaign that proved to be quicker and easier than anyone could have expected.

The story of millennialism extends down the ages from the ancient Near East to the present. In his seminal study on the origins of millennialism, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith, Norman Cohn exclaims, “What a story it has become!”

Much theological speculation; innumerable millenarian movements, including those now flourishing so vigorously in the United States; even the appeal once exercised by Marxist-Leninist ideology – all this belongs to it. Nor is there any reason to think that the story is nearing its end. The tradition whose origins are studied in this book is still alive and potent. Who can tell what fantasies, religious or secular, it may generate in the unforseeable future?

What fantasies, indeed!

All scholars who have studied millennialism have investigated unsuccessful movements, or movements that have yet to succeed, that is, achieve the millennium. This essay explores a successful millennial movement, one that has already ushered in the messianic age. Although this achievement is restricted geographically — to a city — it is nonetheless of major significance. Not only did this millennial movement receive support from the U.S. federal government, but it also accomplished its goal prior to the turn of the millennium.

In 1837, two years before the nation began its exuberant love affair with daguerreotype portraits, Nathaniel Hawthorne made a prophetic observation about Americans' problematic obsession with “true” likenesses. In his story, “The Prophetic Pictures,” an unnamed, colonial Boston portrait painter portrayed not merely a man's features, “but his mind and heart.” The painter, as Walter Ludlow tells his fiancée Elinor, “catches the secret sentiments and passions, and throws them upon the canvas, like sunshine – or perhaps, in the portraits of dark-souled men, like a gleam of infernal fire. It is an awful gift.” Other colonists deemed the painter's gift “an offense against the Mosaic law, and even a presumptuous mockery of the Creator,” and still others considered him “a magician, or perhaps the famous Black Man, of old witch times, plotting mischief in a new guise.”

Abraham Lincoln has been mythologized and deified in the American imagination, occupying a preeminent place in the collective memory of the nation. He occupies this place because he is believed to embody the ideals and values of the country and because he seemed to preside with grace, equanimity, and wisdom over one of the most destructive conflicts in America's history. In life, but even more consequently in death, his presence – as “rail splitter,” “Great Emancipator,” and “Father Abraham” – conjures up an array of events, symbols, and myths that give definition and meaning to the American nation. When he died, an unprecedented funeral celebration occurred in the Northern region of the United States that solidified his privileged place in the country's pantheon of great heroes. The series of events that took place after his assassination, as well as his emplotment in public memory since then, suggest that his death, as tragic and painful as it was, added to the cohesion, unity, and the very life of the nation when it was most seriously threatened by chaos and degeneration.

Many have long inquired into the relationship between 19th-century U.S. literature and capitalism, and, recently, within the critical framework of “new historicism,” a complex debate has taken place as to whether it is possible to imagine any works of late-19th-century literature as anticapitalist. More particularly, the debate involves whether any of the characters who inhabit such works can be construed as resisting the particular formations of selfhood that exist in a capitalist society.

Amid rising interest in the history of consumer culture and the literary marketplace, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) gained new significance in the 1980s when scholars placed William Dean Howells, his novel, and realism as a whole in a complicated relation to 19th-century economic culture. In general, these critics found Howells retreating from an overbearing market system within which he had tried to establish realism as a truer, less sensationalized form of writing. By showing that Howells's writing was itself a market practice, their historicist readings significantly revised our understanding of American realism. At the same time, though, their interpretations tended to rely on abstract understandings of Gilded Age business culture. This essay seeks a new view of The Rise of Silas Lapham by focusing more concretely on the marketing techniques whose emergence after the Civil War benefited Howells's writing career but troubled his conscience. Howells's awareness of his contradictory relation to the market is most obviously manifest in the economic and moral quandary faced by Silas Lapham. But as I argue below, Howells imagined a solution to this dilemma in the form of Lapham's son-in-law, Tom Corey — a figure critics have mainly ignored. Not only does the genteel Bostonian represent the future of the paint business, but his anticipated role in international markets suggests both the expansionist and idealistic nature of Howells's realism.

On December 28, 1875, Henry James wrote one of his Parisian sketches and submitted it to the New York Tribune. Over two-thirds of the article was devoted to the description of the painting 1807 — Friedland by French artist Ernest Meissonier and its purchase by A. T. Stewart, an American millionaire. The painting, which was entitled 1807 by the painter, represented that famous Napoleonic episode, with delicately and meticulously treated costumes, facial types, and other details. As James reported, it had “a special claim to distinction” since it was the largest picture — a yard and a half long and three quarters of a yard high — ever produced by Meissonier, the “prince of miniaturists.” James, like a connoisseur, commented in great detail on the ingeniously rendered content of the painting.

During the last decade of the 19th century, vaudeville became the nation's most popular entertainment form, drawing unprecedented numbers of spectators and appealing to members of diverse socioeconomic groups by staging a rapid succession of acrobats, comedians, legitimate theater stars, pet-tricks, and dramatic sketches. In a cultural scene that Lawrence Levine and others tell us was marked by the historical separation between legitimate and mass cultural practices, critical observers (then and since) have greeted the diversity of vaudeville's audience and the range of its performance with a mixture of surprise and liberal enthusiasm.

In a 1900 Atlantic Monthly article, Samuel McChord Crothers mourns the decline of the leisured or, as he puts it, “gentle” reader who enjoys narrative digressions, does not mind occasional dullness, and prefers the personal tone of old-style narrators to the objectivity of the modern “expert.” This reader has given way, Crothers argues, to one obsessed with practicality and impatient with charming irrelevancies, one who parcels out his reading time carefully, going to short stories (rather than lengthier offerings) for “a literary ‘quick lunch.’” Though he acknowledges that “the habit of resorting to the printed page for information is an excellent one,” Crothers admits that it nevertheless violates his ideal terms of readerly engagement. The new-style reader, he laments, “wants something and knows where to get it. Knowledge is a commodity done up in a neat parcel” (655). Crothers's remarks suggest a troubling opposition – the pure realm of literature-as-enjoyment that supposedly used to exist outside of, or above, the marketplace versus the newly ascendant and tainted world of goods, advertisements, and department stores in which knowledge is packaged and sold to a hurried, grasping public. While other highbrow commentators of the era expressed a general concern regarding the decline of intellectualism among American readers, Crothers betrays more specific anxieties about what constitutes an appropriate means of absorbing (and disseminating) knowledge; he fears the intrusion of market values and forms – particularly the value of practicality and the form of the commodity – into the world of ideas.

One of the primary reasons I became interested in film studies was the seeming open-endedness of the field. Cinema was new, I reasoned, and would continue to be new, unlike other academic fields, and particularly those devoted to historical periods: as a scholar and a teacher, I would face the future, endlessly enthralled and energized by the transformation of the potential into the actual. That my development as a film scholar/teacher increasingly involved me in avant-garde film seemed quite natural — a logical extension of the attraction of film studies in general: Avant-garde film was the newest of the new, the sharpest edge of the present as it sliced into the promise of the future. Scholars in some fields may empathize with the attitude I describe, but scholars in all fields will smile at its self-defeating implications: of course, I can see now how typically American my assumptions were — as if one could maintain the excitement of youth merely by refusing to acknowledge the past! Obviously, film studies, like any other discipline, is only a field once its history takes, or is given, a recognizable shape.

Many critics of photorealism relied on the concept of nostalgia to dismiss the movement, finding in these apparently photographically accurate paintings representations of a simple past which seemed to disregard the complicated problems of the day. These critics, speaking within the constraints of a period when nostalgia experienced wider appeal than usual, offered what has become one of the accepted, and simplistic, interpretations of photorealism. Disenchanted by an apparently sentimental art popularized in mass-media photospreads and even business journals, critics of photorealism depended on a negative sense of nostalgia to dismiss these paintings as expressions of ineffective longings. However, Fredric Jameson's recent articulation of the utopian content in nostalgic yearnings affords the paradigm an affirmative element. Building on Jameson's model, I argue that Robert Bechtle's family paintings, taken as a group, display nostalgic desires for the secure families of the past even as they engage with contemporary popular and media-sustained perceptions of the breakdown of the family. In mediating conflicting or dissonant cultural pressures and desires, Bechtle's works at times display an ambivalent position toward the family as they echo fifties values for family unity while they capture seventies dissatisfactions with family tensions. Precisely because “the family” inspired controversy during the late 1960s and 1970s, it also became the site of nostalgic longings, as many Americans found images evocative of older domestic norms comforting. The family also serves as the hinge linking the present and past in Bechtle's works, displaying what I call the temporal density of nostalgia.

In august, 1927, Zora Neale Hurston posed with Langston Hughes and Jessie Fauset at the foot of the statue of Booker T. Washington on the campus of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. Now, after six months of collecting African-American folklore – customs, games, jokes, lies, songs, superstitions, and tales – Hurston was ready to return to New York City and to finish her Bachelor of Arts in anthropology at Barnard. She had left New York City the previous February and had spent most of her time in and around her hometown of Eatonville and Tallahassee, Florida, before driving across the Florida panhandle to Mobile, Alabama. There she interviewed Cudjo Lewis, reputed to be the only living survivor of the last ship to bring slaves from Africa to America. By chance, Hurston also met Hughes, who had just arrived in Mobile by train from New Orleans. Soon after, she and Hughes drove up to Tuskegee, joined Fauset to lecture to summer students, then continued on their way to New York City.

By the summer of 1929, Norman Rockwell was a full-fledged success. At age thirty-five, he had been creating covers for the Saturday Evening Post for thirteen years. A generation of American youth had grown up beguiled by his illustrations for Boys' Life, St. Nicholas, and the Boy Scouts' calendar. For more than a decade, Rockwell's artistry had helped sell Adams Black Jack gum, American Mutual insurance, Sun Maid raisins, and Coca-Cola. As this commercial success modulated into social success, Rockwell, whose father had risen to middle-class respectability in the offices of a New York City textile firm, found himself living the good life in the artists' colony of suburban New Rochelle. The drab apartments and boardinghouses of his youth and adolescence had been left behind. He joined the Larchmont Yacht Club, golfed in clothes from Brooks Brothers, and hosted elaborate parties worthy of Jay Gatsby.

Before estelle oldham married William Faulkner in June 1929, she had spent nearly eight years in the Pacific and Far East as a participant-observer in two American colonial cultures. In June 1918, her first marriage to the Mississippi lawyer and entrepreneur Cornell S. Franklin brought her as a new bride to what were then called the Hawaiian Territories. But despite his excellent Southern connections, the business community in the “Paradise of the East” had little room for a bright yet arrogant young man with no capital. Thus, in December 1921, Estelle Oldham Franklin, her husband, and their four-year-old daughter sailed for the more open markets in the International Settlement of Shanghai, then China's largest treaty port. Oldham hated Shanghai; she refused to continue playing the role of Southern Belle hostess she had assumed so willingly and graciously in Honolulu, and, like her husband and many other colonials, she had become an alcoholic. Summarizing her life in Shanghai, she once told her daughter, “I don't think I took a sober breath for three years.”

On the 17th of november 1924, Estelle Oldham Franklin and her two young children made a sudden and unplanned departure from Shanghai on the T.K.K. Shinyo Maru. She was bound for Oxford, Mississippi. All evidence indicates that she had no intention of returning to her husband, Cornell. In her baggage, she carried longhand versions of a novel and the short stories that she had written during the past three years. Among these manuscripts was “Star Spangled Banner Stuff.” In the trans-Pacific mail to her was the announcement of William Faulkner's first book of poems, The Marble Faun, which he had ordered sent earlier that month.

As early as 1946, Clement Greenburg was inclined to disregard Georgia O'Keeffe's significance on the grounds that her work “skipped essential stages” in the development of an abstract vocabulary. In his view, she simply got there too fast and too easily. She's famous, of course, for pictures that at first sight seem quite the opposite of abstract: challengingly labialike petals and priapic stamen, a whole painterly idiom of sexuality inscribed in representations of natural objects (Figure 1: Jack in-the-Pulpit, no. 4). As Ian McKay recently put it in Contemporary Art, O'Keeffe's early exhibitions were regarded by many contemporary critics “as the work of a pathologically sex-crazed woman who, lacking the wherewithal to control her urges, poured them out onto the canvas for public display.” The sexual interpretations that so intrigued New York Freudians of the 1920s, and now serve to validate the oeuvre in its entirety for her feminist critics, have since tended to be absorbed into formal critique with a certain charge of displaced sexual innuendo: her painterly surface is “thin,” her perspectives “flat and frontal,” her scale distorted or unfathomable.

In february 1940, Howard University political scientist Ralph Bunche, acting in his capacity as chief research assistant to Gunnar Myrdal on the Carnegie Corporation's investigation of “the Negro problem” in America that resulted in the epochal study An American Dilemma (1944), interviewed U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Hugo Black on the subject of Southern race relations. Bunche included parts of the Black interview in “The Political Status of the Negro,” one of four lengthy manuscript memoranda he wrote for Myrdal's use. Although a few selections from the interview appeared in a condensation of the memorandum that was published posthumously, the full text remained in Bunche's papers and has never before been published. The full text is presented in the Appendix at the end of this essay. The dialogue between Bunche and Black, off the record and extremely candid, is extraordinary for the rare view it provides into the evolving attitudes on racial issues of two central figures in the debate over African-American civil rights during the 1940s and 1950s.

The cover of the may 29, 1943, Saturday Evening Post depicts our most famous image of Rosie the Riveter, a name that came to symbolize women's crossover into male-dominated industrial work during World War II (Figure 1). Norman Rockwell positioned his Rosie resting during her lunch break, calmly eating a bologna sandwich while stomping on a copy of Mein Kampf with author's name, Adolf Hitler, and Nazi swastika visible under the title. It was an image meant to reassure the American public that women would get the job done on America's home front and help defeat the Axis powers. It is also an image worth examining today for it captures some of the contradictions that continue to vex us concerning the war's multifaceted representations of women and work, portrayals that contained and excluded even as they widened public perceptions of what women could do. For one thing, Rockwell's Rosie is notably “unfeminine” in that her muscular arms are unadorned with jewelry, she wears a double-banded leather watch, she has on comfortable loafers to match her denim overalls, and her ruddy complexion seems the product of exertion, not makeup. Furthermore, she is indifferent to our gaze; rather her proud stare announces absorption in a more compelling subject, symbolized by the American flag that forms the backdrop for her portrait.

“Of course. It's my father's absolute favorite. He was there, you know.” Thus a friend replied when I told her I was writing about Victory at Sea, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) classic television documentary of U.S. and Allied Naval Operations in World War II. The father in question, moreover, was no ordinary judge of the material, but an old Navy Chief who had actually been there for much of it, before, during, and after. Nor was the friend – a career journalist of long acquaintance with sea stories – an uncritical interpreter of the information. Still, as regards the forms and processes of cultural mythmaking, the exchange could be said to contain a familiar parable of World War II and American remembering, about some of the particular and identifiable ways in which Americans from the generation of 1941–1945 and their successors have come to conflate the experience of the war with certain popular-culture texts achieving classic status among its postwar representations. To put it more directly, one could not help thinking that for both father and daughter, as for myself and other Americans who “remember” World War II, “there” – or at least a significant portion of it – has become Victory at Sea.

In November 1949 the Hungarian government announced the trial for espionage of the American I.T.&T. executive Robert A. Vogeler. At the beginning of the following year Vogeler pleaded guilty and was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment. For a while his case became a cause célèbre to the extent that the U.S. government threatened to break of diplomatic relations with Hungary. Vogeler was released in 1951 after a deal between the two governments. With the case of Cardinal Mindszenty fresh in the public memory reports had been emerging that Vogeler had been subjected to a coercion tantamount to torture, which he himself confirmed in his memoir, I Was Stalin's Prisoner (1952), which was published the same year as Whittaker Chambers's Witness. This was no mere coincidence. Reviewing the latter work John Dos Passos threw out dark hints that the authenticity of both memoirs was being confirmed by a Communist-inspired smear campaign against the two writers. Vogeler had been subjected unwittingly to a process that was on the verge of being named. He recalled how he had been reduced to exhaustion and despair by sleep deprivation and by isolation from any American contacts. The result was a splintering of his consciousness into two entities: “A new personality was struggling to take command of my body, a personality that was prepared to do everything that No. 1 suggested. But my old personality — or perhaps it was merely the instinct of self-preservation — still held its ground”.