In the wake of the Revolution and establishment of the republic, the essayist Judith Sargent Murray anticipated consequences beyond those typically proclaimed by newly independent Americans. “I expect,” she declared, “to see our young women forming a new era in female history.” Basing her claim upon already visible changes in the education of women, Murray noted that “female academies are every where establishing.” Their presence suggested that schooling in the use of the needle, once thought all that was necessary for a woman, was now being integrated with “studies of a more elevated and elevating nature.” Murray was prescient. Established in both the North and the South during the 19th Century's opening decades, private academies and seminaries included in their curriculum subjects such as history, geography, mathematics, and the natural sciences. Nearly four hundred of these schools were founded exclusively for women between 1790 and 1830.

The late 19th Century witnessed the beginnings of a profound transformation of the political culture in the industrialized world. With the rise of reform movements concerned with labor, religion, women's rights, and a host of other matters, the winds of change blew around the globe. These crosscurrents were particularly evident in the Anglo-American environment where the ideology of reform reflected certain continuities of culture among the English-speaking countries. In particular, this period of reform saw the development of significant connections between America and New Zealand. While Peter Coleman has ably analyzed the exchanges of ideas that shaped legislation and emergent progressivism in both countries, he has not adequately addressed the complexity of the cultural and ideological dimensions of these exchanges. In considering those cultural and ideological dimensions, I will attempt to offer some insight into the political culture of reform in both countries at the end of the 19th Century.

The plot of Henry James's The Bostonians is deceptively simple. A wealthy young Boston feminist, Olive Chancellor, passionately admires and subsequently takes into her home a beautiful and malleable young girl with a gift for public speaking: Verena Tarrant. Basil Ransom, Miss Chancellor's aristocratic but impoverished Southern cousin, who is similarly struck by Verena, manages, after a long and relentless struggle, to snatch Verena from the clutches of Olive Chancellor and win her for himself.

Since its publication in 1950, Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book has Oproven a perennial favorite, the gift of choice at bridal showers, especially in the deluxe, ring-bound edition that once sold for a mere $3.95 (or $3 with premium coupons from cake-mix boxes). Second on the all-time culinary bestsellers' list-where it noses out The Joy of Cooking (1931) and The I Hate to Cook Book (1960) - the familiar red-and-white volume with the old-timey, Early American designs on the cover broke records that first year when it outsold Kon-Tiki, The Lonely Crowd, and Hubbard Cobb's Your Dream Home. In the spring of 1951, delighted General Mills executives presented the millionth copy to the American Mother of the Year and the distributer, McGraw-Hill, shipped another 950,000 units to retailers. A year later, with the book in its seventh printing, sales had passed the two million mark and there was no end in sight.

By the end of 1991, the United States had not quite completed the restoration of the prestige of its armed forces. The occasion was the triumph of American arms as part of a United Nations exercise intended to restore the territorial integrity of the sheikdom of Kuwait, which had been violated by its truculent neighbor, Iraq. Curiously, photography was at the core of the adventure. For decades, World War II had been endlessly refought on American television screens, a stream of visual nostalgia for “the good war” (as Studs Terkel had named it) made possible by archival photographic images of a quite high order. But the image of victorious Americans against Axis heavies had been sullied by the Vietnam War, “the living room war” that had suffered a terribly bad press at least in part as a result of incessant, bloody, and finally fruitless combat that appeared as daily images on the nation's TV screens.

The annals of clockmaking appear to identify but a single instance of an African American clockmaker, although there may be others who escaped the attention of historians. The number of African Americans, either as slaves or freemen, who were enabled to work in the skilled crafts was limited, and of this small number even fewer succeeded in achieving a degree of independence that enabled them to establish their own shops and clienteles.

Frederick Douglass may or may not have been the greatest African American abolitionist and orator of the 19th Century, but he was certainly the most accomplished master of self-projection. His autobiographical writings demonstrate the genius with which he seized and manipulated mainstream American symbols and values. By appropriating the Euro-American myth of the self-made man, Douglass guaranteed that his struggle would be canonized, not only within an African American tradition, but within the traditions of the mainstream as well. He manipulated the rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon manhood as skillfully as did any of his white contemporaries, including such master manipulators as Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Phineas T. Barnum. I mention Douglass along with these wily exemplars of American showmanship, not because I want to drag out embarrassing cliches about making heroes more human, but in order to address the truly monumental nature of Douglass's accomplishments. Douglass, like Lincoln, Emerson, and Barnum, was abundantly endowed with the spiderish craft and foxlike cunning that are often marks of self-made men.

Booker T. Washington's classic Up from Slavery is unquestionably the finest black autobiography ever written by a European-American. In the final sentence of the book's preface, Washington notes, “without the painstaking and generous assistance of Mr. Max Bennett Thrasher I would not have succeeded in any satisfactory degree.” This is a typical Washingtonian understatement. Thrasher wrote the book. Beginning that same paragraph, Washington has declared, “I have tried to tell a simple, straight-forward story, with no attempt at embellishment. My regret is that what I have attempted to do has been done so imperfectly.” This is either false modesty or a harsh assessment of his ghost writer. Since Thrasher remained in Washington's employ until his abrupt death (from appendicitis) in 1903, we must infer that “the Wizard” was not so displeased with their collaborative product. Washington had no peers in the use of rhetorical humility as a strategy of manipulation.

Johnny Ace, the mellow crooner of “Pledging My Love” (1955), may have been an influential transitional figure between rhythm & blues and rock ‘n’ roll, but he certainly did not die at age twenty-four playing Russian roulette with the singer Little Esther in a motel room in El Dorado, Arkansas. I heard this account from a black woman who saw him in person on the chitlin circuit, and who paid $2.50 in December of 1953 (“a hard amount to get in those days”) to attend a “Colored Only” dance featuring the Johnny Ace Band at the Elk's Rest Club in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The details she recalls of Ace's death are inaccurate, but the general story she remembers – the legend of Johnny Ace the rhythm & blues star as it exists today in the oral tradition of African-American culture – is closer to the truth in spirit than almost everything ever written about him by rock historians.

Near the end of the day on which he was assassinated, Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, left the confines of the White House for a drive. As their carriage made its way through the city of Washington, their conversation turned, ironically, to the future. They talked of the travels they hoped to make following the expiration of his second term in office. Although their plans included tours of the Western United States and Europe, one destination assumed special importance. More than any other place, it seems, the president wanted to visit the Holy Land. “But,” as his widow wrote over a year later, “a few days after this conversation, the crown of immortality was his - he was rejoicing in the presence of his Saviour, and was in the midst of the Heavenly Jerusalem.…”

I wish to tell two stories here. The first, the briefer one, centers on the opening pages of William James's “The Sentiment of Rationality,” a seminal piece that helped launch James in the direction of pragmatism. The second, the bulk of the essay, focuses on a painting by Winslow Homer, The Morning Bell (ca. 1872, Figure 1), an early work that brings together Homer's interests in working-class figures, bucolic settings, and popular culture. There is little at first glance to link these two stories. While James proceeds to reinvent the notion of rationality, lending it an instrumental inflection that fits it for work in a postmetaphysical world, Homer conjures up images of rural New England for an audience still troubled by memories of the Civil War. Neither the subject of each work, nor their respective media, nor even their intended audiences, bear much in common.

In a letter to the radical periodical, the New Masses, in October of 1930, one reader requested more satire from the artists who published in its pages, art with “greater revolutionary purpose.” The drawings of an artist like Louis Lozowick, Vern Jessup complained, were suspiciously ambiguous: “In the New Masses they're proletarian art. What do you call them when they appear in the bourgeois business magazines, as they do?” Louis Lozowick, a Russian-American avant-garde painter and a contributing editor of the New Masses, rose immediately to the challenge. In a letter of response in the December, 1930 issue, entitled, “What Should Revolutionary Artists Do Now?” he noted that leftist artists and writers go to capitalist publications and galleries with the same regularity (and uncertainty) as workers go to shops and factories — and for the same reasons. One might ask a revolutionary artist to refuse all collaboration with capitalist institutions and starve to death with his revolutionary conscience immaculate. Or one might ask him to contribute to the revolutionary movement with whatever means at his command while conceding the inevitability (as we do in the case of the factory worker) of his working in capitalist institutions.

The past two decades have seen a plethora of new information on American artist Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975). Matthew Baigell pioneered Benton studies with his monograph on the artist in 1974, and Karal Ann Marling enhanced the subject with her survey of the artist's drawings in 1985. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City developed and traveled an extensive show of Benton's paintings in the late 1980s and produced an extensive biography by curator Henry Adams. The centennial of Benton's birth generated even more material: exhibits of his prints and drawings, volumes of essays on his art and character, and a considerable number of magazine and journal articles assessing his importance in 20thcentury American culture. Even Prospects has done its part for Bentonia with essays by Marling (1981) and Barbara Ladner (1990).

By the early 1930s Edward Hopper was a major figure in the American art scene. As is well known, Hopper made no significant sales of paintings until the exhibition of his watercolors at the Rehn Gallery in 1924, by which time he was forty-four years old. However, his career takeoff in the late 1920s and early 1930s was certainly dramatic, and in 1933 Forbes Watson could describe him as a “collector's favorite.” In 1924 the standard price of Hopper's watercolors was $150, by 1925 it had risen to $200, and in 1928–29, $300–400 was the norm. In 1929 alone he sold at least fourteen drawings. Between 1924 and 1930 he also sold sixteen oils at prices ranging between $400 and $2,500 dollars. In the 1930s he was getting between $1,500 and $3,000 for an oil painting, and from 1934 to 1939 he sold several watercolors at $750 each. If, as Life reported in 1937, his receipts from sales did not usually come near $10,000 per year, he was still doing a lot better than most other artists in the Depression years.

In saul bellow's novella, Seize the Day, Tommy Wilhelm, a preposterously superfluous, suffering man, articulates a belief in truth that postmodern literary and cultural critics generally disavow. Wilhelm conceives of truth as a vaguely reified “Something” - an object of size, located in space, and accessible to the human gaze. Throughout his fateful day of reckoning, Wilhelm hotly pursues this oxymoronic reification, following small and seemingly foolish signs, like a man's hat bobbing up in a crowd, until at last he discovers the ultimate reality he has been seeking - truth simultaneously embodied and disembodied by death. This ambiguous representation affects Wilhelm profoundly, consummating “his heart's ultimate need” but sundering his physical being. His vulnerable creaturely body convulses and seems to come apart, its disjunct segments independently bending, bowing, twisting, shaking, crippling, swelling, nodding, being clutched. These bodily contortions apparently signify Wilhelm's deliverance from this world to another, a higher, freer, world of “happy oblivion” where he can forget his earthly troubles. In the novella's final tableau, an ecstatically sobbing Wilhelm enters this transcendent realm in his own perverse way: instead of rising to its heights, he sinks. Thus he completes the drowning action with which the novella begins by losing — and finding — himself in undefinable depths. There, murkily, mortality evokes self-love as the essence of truth.

The facts are these: some time on the early morning of July 20, 1976, Gary Gilmore, barely three months after his release from a twelveyear sentence for armed robbery served in the federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, drove into a gas station in Provo, Utah, robbed Max Jensen, the station attendant, and demanded that he lie facedown on the ground. Gilmore then fired twice into Jensen's head at point-blank range with an automatic pistol; Jensen died immediately. In the evening, fourteen or fifteen hours after the first murder, Gilmore drove into a motel situated next door to the house of his relatives, Vern and Ida Damico, who had given Gilmore refuge and found him a job upon his release from prison. Gilmore demanded money from Benny Bushnell, the owner of the motel, asked him to lie face-down on the floor, and then pumped one bullet into his head; Gilmore had intended to shoot him twice, but his gun jammed, and it was several hours before Bushnell would die of his wounds. One day later, Gilmore was arrested for the murder of Benny Bushnell. He was tried and found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death: his choice of death was by firing squad. Though his mother and the American Civil Liberties Union attempted to block the execution, Gilmore demanded that the state of Utah carry out the sentence. On January 17, 1977, he was shot to death by a team of four handpicked riflemen, in the first public execution to have taken place in the United States in over a decade.

September of 1961 brought welcome relief from the Berlin Crisis in the Oform of two distinctly American recreations: the World Series and the fall book season. As always, both seemed to focus on New York City, and the New York media brought excitement and suspense to fit both seasons: excitement – as Roger Maris attempted to break Babe Ruth's record of sixty home runs – and suspense, as Simon & Schuster ran eye-catching but mysterious ads for a new novel, revealing nothing more than the title – Catch-22. Everyone knew what Maris's quest meant, but no one seemed to know what “CATCH-22” meant.

John Downton Hazlett, “The American Generational Autobiography: Malcolm Cowley and Michael Rossman,” Prospects 16 (1991): 421–442

The photograph of Michael Rossman that appeared on page 432 of the article cited above was taken by Ben Tarcher. We regret the inadvertent omission of his name.