When henry nash smith defined American Studies in 1957 as “the study of American culture past and present, as a whole,” he summarized more than two decades of a wide-ranging and self-conscious critical analysis of culture in the United States and, at the same time, initiated the search for the unified or holistic “method” through which American Studies would, finally, achieve maturity as an (interdisciplinary) discipline. The 1930s were the decade when, as Warren Susman pointed out years ago, the complexity of American culture as well as the culture concept were discovered and discussed in the wider public. We think of the work of cultural anthropology, of the studies in cultural relativism by Margaret Mead or of patterns of culture by Ruth Benedict that emphasized the unity of cultures and often were written with a self-critical look at American culture in mind. What was, however, even more important was the fact that during the 1930s American culture manifested itself as a multiculture, as a culture that was characterized even more by variety, heterogeneity, tensions, and alternative traditions than by the strong drive toward national identity and consensus. Cultural anthropologists, critics, and (“documentary”) writers such as “native anthropologist” Zora Neale Hurston, Constance Rourke, or James Agee (with photographer Walker Evans, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) worked out radical new methods and strategies of cultural critique and ethnographic writing in the study of American cultures, in the plural. Thus, historian Caroline F. Ware, writing for the American Historical Association in The Cultural Approach to History, could argue in 1940 that the “total cultural approach” does by no means imply that American culture is something like an organic unity, but that “American culture” is exactly the multiplicity of regional, ethnic, and class cultures and the interactions of these cultures in terms of rhetoric as well as of power, not some “common patterns” or the Anglo-Saxon tradition the “other” groups have to “contribute” to.

Documents in the Yale University archives - the papers of the presidents, deans, provosts, secretary of the university - show that Yale was no more insulated from the hot and cold of post-World War II politics than any other university. During the decade of 1945–55, the Yale authorities felt considerable pressure to take action concerning several appointees whose political views had been questioned by alumni, and most certainly by others as well. The New Haven Office of the FBI - and through it the national headquarters in Washington, D.C. - had been in close touch with university officials for some time and, during the last years of the regime of President Charles Seymour, knew of what it described as the Yale policy of inquiring into the political activities of faculty members prior to their appointment. As the Special Agent in Charge of the New Haven Office reported to J. Edgar Hoover on June 6, 1949, “The position of Yale University is apparently swinging around to the point… that it is much better to look men over and know exactly what they are before they are appointed, and that it is much easier to get rid of them by not appointing them than after they have been once appointed.”

Anaked woman stands before an artist seated in front of his easel, the elegance of his hat and frock coat, his little Vandyke beard somewhat anachronistic for 1914 (Figure 1). Light molds the back of the woman's body, outlining her outstretched right arm and her bent right leg, accenting her discarded dress draped over the seat of the chair. The shadows, the dark places of her body, echo the partial covering of the representation of nature that hangs like a sign on the screen on the wall behind her. All of the conventions of the artist's studio are here, from the black-and-white tiles to the linking of woman both with nature and pet; but this is a photograph, and it documents without irony certain institutions and practices - a form of representation — that dominated “art” photography at the turn of the century. The tradition upon which this photograph, The Artist and His Model (1914) by Richard Polack, draws, and the ideology to which it subscribes, has to do with notions of power. The light that idealizes, the gaze that possesses, are not always gentle, as Foucault suggests, but sometimes as penetrating as the surgeon's knife. The context for photographs like this one would include Eadweard Muybridge's studies of “the geometry of bodies” of 1887, a series of figures in motion called Animal Locomotion (Figure 2), as well as a whole range of representations of naked human bodies, from what Martha Banta calls the “soft porn” of Clarence White's and Alfred Stieglitz's “genteel ‘art photography’” to E. J. Bellocq's photographs of Storyville prostitutes to anatomical documentary studies for ethnographic, military, and medical purposes.

“The american scholar” descends to us as literature, but for the more than two hundred auditors who filled the First Parish Church in Cambridge on August 31, 1837, as for the speaker himself, the address was a singular dramatic occasion. “An event without any former parallel in our literary annals,” James Russell Lowell recalled years later: “What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!” In the provincial Boston world of 1837, Lowell's “event” — a picturesque memory exhumed from the literary scrapbook and fondly patronized — gave promise of being an “event” in Michel Foucault's sense as well: “not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it.” “The young men went out” from the church, remarked Oliver Wendell Holmes, “as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’”

In these words, Tillie Olsen dedicated her book, Silences, to the women whose lives for centuries were constricted by sexual role and social custom, yet who struggled nevertheless to express themselves (pp. 42–43). She further urged women who write and women who teach to give voice to these silent women by moving beyond the novel and the published poem to the journals, letters, memoirs, and other personal utterances that “add to the authentic story of human life, human experience” (pp. 45n).

Several months after Hawthorne's “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore” appeared in the January, 1838 Democratic Review, Elizabeth Peabody brought a copy to Emerson, who recorded in his journal the next day, “I complained that there was no inside to it.” Emerson's cool reaction notwithstanding, “Foot-prints,” along with a number of Hawthorne's other sketches and extended descriptions of nature, rewards much closer reading if we are interested in his complex aesthetic and philosophical responses to landscape. In fact, Hawthorne's depictions of nature reveal a particularly “inside” view, reflecting and inviting the meditative, contemplative response to nature articulated by Kant and embodied by the group of 19th-century American painters we now know as the luminists. His notebooks are filled with detailed descriptions of landscape, clouds, and light; some are almost specific enough to sound like painters' verbal sketches to be consulted later in the studio. While he frequently mentions Claude Lorrain and the picturesque tradition, his close attention to nature betrays a profound interest in elements that were to become the focus of the luminists in the 1850s and 1860s. Prolonged consideration of a landscape or seascape seems to lead Hawthorne significantly beyond the available, almost codified aesthetic of the picturesque to a way of representing nature and the individual's relationship to it that is more subjective, meditative, and open-ended. Hawthorne's later reactions to specific paintings, especially those of J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, also suggest strongly that he would have found a far closer match to his sensibilities in many of the canvases of the luminists, especially Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett, than those of his more immediate contemporaries, Thomas Cole and the other Hudson River School painters.

Maybe it was merely the Zeitgeist. Maybe in the years of reactionary resurgence, under a government scant on social sympathy and ethical integrity, amid pitiless profiteering and a proliferation of economic theories to justify it, historians also lost the capacity and concern to connect business behavior and moral standards. Or maybe it was something more than the momentary temper of the time. Maybe it had its origin in developments far deeper and its source in dynamics far more fundamental than the souring of the American spirit in the age of Ronald Reagan.

Blackface minstrelsy is a troublesome topic in popular culture studies. Because burn-cork comedy originated and thrived in a racist society, many scholars and most nonscholars believe that minstrelsy's primary purpose was the creation and perpetuation of demeaning caricatures or untruthful portraits of African-Americans. Most studies published since the early 1960s emphasize the negative effects of blackface comedy or focus on the development of the principal stereotypes (the urban dandy and the shiftless plantation hand) rather than on the interpretive significance of blackface comedy within the broader context of American ethnic humor. While it is essential that minstrelsy's negative characteristics be explored and explained as overt manifestations of the racist attitudes many Americans shared, the narrow focus on race and/or racism as the primary feature of blackface entertainment limits the application of the interdisciplinary methods and interpretive strategies needed to understand the content and context of one of the most popular forms of American comedy. The limitations imposed by restrictive methodologies can be removed, however, if historians reconsider a few of the issues that have been bypassed in most recent studies of American minstrelsy, namely, (1) the nonracial contents of blackface comedy; (2) the treatment of nonblack ethnic groups; (3) the socializing and class-defining functions of minstrel show humor; (4) the importance of minstrel shows as evidence of American ideas about politics, work, gender differences, domestic life, courtship, and marriage; (5) the use of the burnt-cork “mask” as a vehicle for reflexive, self-deprecating humor among various social, ethnic, and economic groups; and (6) the relationships between minstrel shows and other forms of American and English theater.

“We live in an age of wonders!” exclaims a character in Henry James's The Bostonians (1886). And so it must have seemed to any American who could read the newspapers, which thrived, in the 1880s, on the business of proclaiming marvels. In The Bostonians one of the “wonders” is Miss Verena Tarrant, whose precocious and hypnotic speaking powers on the subject of women's rights — together with a pretty face and trim figure — succeeded in selling out the Boston Music Hall. Other wonders of the decade were less comely but more enduring: the lightbulb, the electric generator (which so awed Henry Adams), the telephone, the automobile, motion pictures, the linotype machine, the Kodak camera. The hawking of Verena Tarrant outside the Music Hall followed the American pattern of packaging, promoting, and generally celebrating (in a chauvinistic spirit) all manner of sensational feats, new technologies, and even writers and painters who caught the public's fancy. One of these was, of course, Mark Twain, who successfully promoted his own works through direct subscription sales. Also included among the sensational feats of the period were the trompe l'oeil (trick of the eye) still-life paintings by William Michael Harnett, who was heralded in a feature article that appeared in the New York News at the end of the decade. The headline ran as follows:

Painted Like Real Things. The Man Whose Pictures Are a Wonder and a Puzzle. How He Began and the Success He Has Met With — Poverty Forced Him to Earn a Living in the Line in Which He Excells.

“If a magazine should be published at ten cents and made light, bright, and lively,” thought publisher Frank Munsey, it would surely attain a “wide circulation.” What he meant in part, by “light, bright, and lively,” was lots of pictures. Happily for publishing entrepreneurs like Munsey, who courted “the millions” as readers during the 1890s, two innovative communications technologies came together to help make the cheap “picture” magazine possible — photography and the halftone reproduction process. With the birthing of the modern mass magazine — combining low price, increased use of halftone illustrations, an abundance of advertisements, and contents shrewdly designed to satisfy, as Hamlin Garland put it, “the appetites of the millions” by appealing “to shopgirls, tired businessmen, and others who demanded easy and exciting reading” — two revolutions were set in motion, one in perception and the other in values.

For laura riding, no one embodies “the new barbarism” more than Gertrude Stein: “No one but Miss Stein has been willing to be as ordinary as simple, as primitive, as stupid, as barbaric as successful barbarism demands.” The charge, which echoes T. S. Eliot's, attests to the efficacy with which Stein disturbs the boundaries of civilization to represent the process of acculturation during which Americans are made. Ironically, however, Riding's “barbarism” names precisely what Stein sought to depict, “gross dogmatic conventions resulting from the fear-inspired consolidation of humanity[,]. … a consolidation against the terror of numbers, each unknown, which would reign if humanity were not consolidated as humanity” (p. 135). Barbarism inheres in the civilizing process, in the very conventions that designate alterity, and it is in that sense that it is, unexpectedly, “ordinary.”

The Nation for April 17, 1935, contained an exchange of letters between Hutchins Hapgood and Theodore Dreiser entitled “Is Dreiser Anti-Semitic?” In a brief introductory note, Hapgood, who put the exchange in the Nation, explained that the question arose when he read a symposium entitled “Editorial Conference (With Wine)” in the American Spectator for September, 1933. It consisted of the record of a conversation among members of the magazine's distinguished editorial staff: drama critic George Jean Nathan, literary critic Ernest Boyd, novelist James Branch Cabell, playwright Eugene O'Neill, and Dreiser. The symposium and the controversy following it form a minor but nonetheless important chapter in American literary and cultural history.

“A recent experience has shown me how terribly hard it is for a man of Jewish birth to get a good position. I had always suspected that it was a matter worth considering, but I had not known how widespread and strong it was. While we shall be glad to do anything we can for you, therefore, I cannot help feeling that the chances are going to be greatly against you.” These words, in 1903, imputed to the chairman of the English Department at Columbia University effectively put an end to Ludwig Lewisohn's dream of becoming a professor of English. The humiliation was so severe that Lewisohn spent most of the next fifty years examining the role of the alien in a gentile country, the Jew in America. He transformed the hatred and shame he suffered into a writing career, of some forty-three volumes, remarkable for its productivity, variety, frankness, and occasional distinction. A critic, journalist, cultural analyst, scholar, translater, polemicist, drama reviewer, editor, and memorist, he perhaps delighted most in being a novelist. A few of his ten novels were celebrated, most especially The Case of Mr. Crump (1926), for which Thomas Mann provided an introduction and which Sigmund Freud hailed as a masterpiece depicting the “tyranny of sex” (as the novel was retitled after being banned in the United States for twenty years), and Island Within; (1928), for some readers as fine a novel of Jewish immigration as has been written. As a literary critic, however, Lewisohn's most significant achievement was surely Expression in America; (1932), the first fullscale psychoanalytic history of American literature, a monumental study of artistic personality and the effect of milieu, later reprinted as The Story of American Literature (1939).

On an unusually bright, faintly springlike morning in mid–February of 1919 in New York City, a huge crowd of perhaps a million people gathered along Fifth Avenue all the way from Madison Square Park to 110th Street and from there along Lenox Avenue north to 145th Street. Along with Governor Al Smith, ex-Governor Charles Whitman, Acting-Mayor Robert Moran, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War Emmett J. Scott, William Randolph Hearst, Rodman Wanamaker, and other notables, they had come to welcome home the men of the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment of New York's National Guard, who had fought so well in France as the 369th Infantry Regiment of the American Expeditionary Force (Figure 1).

In the prologue to his 1951 revision of Exile's Return, Malcolm Cowley (Figure 1) described the first edition of 1934 as “the story of the lost generation” written “while its adventures were still fresh in my mind.”He then added, “since I had shared in many of the adventures I planned to tell a little of my own story, but only as an illustration of what had happened to others.” In fact, this modest description of his method drastically understates the importance of Cowley's own life in the originalstory. In the first edition, he does combine stretches of narrative about his own life — including chapters on his childhood, high-school and college years, exile in Europe, disillusionment with bohemian life, and political conversion — with a narrative of the generation's coming of age. But even the story ofthe collective self that he means to tell — beginning with their early innocence ina pastoral, Edenic America; continuing through their exile and refuge in the religion of art and the subculture of bohemianism; and ending with their final repatriation and salvation via the political and historical insights of Marxism — is in every important respect simply his own writ large. It is a story in which the personal, individualized “I” of conventional autobiography is transformed into a collective “we.”