bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
American Studies—Beyond the Crisis?: Recent Redefinitions and the Meaning of Theory, History, and Practical Criticism
Authors: Lenz Guenter H.
Published: April 2011

Since its beginning, the American Studies community has been remarkably uneasy about the role and meaning theoretical thinking about its premises and objectives should have in its work. Even more than the individual disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, the American Studies movement has again and again felt compelled to justify its existence and its aims, to develop a “method” or “philosophy” for its pursuits. But these attempts at theory more often than not have resulted in a glorification of practical or substantive work, or in an identification of its rationale with a few books by its major scholars. In the most recent time of “crisis,” the traditional opposition of “theory” to “practice” seems to have been confirmed, in one way or another, not only on a national scale but in its international perspective. In a recent interview, Henry Nash Smith, using two articles by young German scholars as a starting point, endorsed the old view that “practice is much more important” in America and that, “almost by instinct, in this country we are less, far less theoretical than the Germans.” It should be mentioned that, ironically, contributions to a theoretical definition of American Studies became far more numerous in the United States just when the younger German scholars began to turn from theoretical debates to substantive work, which shows that Smith's “instinctual” distinction actually prevents us from realizing the fundamental historical differences in the development and the significance of the interaction of theory and practice in the two countries.
Emerson and the Law
Authors: Lang Amy Schrager
Published: April 2011

Professor Cornelius Felton of Harvard University, reviewing Emerson'sEssays, First Seriesin 1841, predicted that self-reliance “if acted upon, would overturn society, and resolve the world into Chaos.” Since then a long line of Emerson critics have shared Felton's concern over Emerson's radicalism. The more temperate modern version of Felton's charge is that Emerson “brought to full consciousness … the antinomianism latent in the thought of his Puritan forbears.” According to these critics, Emerson is the spiritual descendant of Anne Hutchinson. Removed outside the constraints of seventeenth-century dogma and liberated by Romantic thought, he gives free play to the antinomianism she so cautiously denied. Antinomianism, in this view, lends unity to the disparate writers of the American Renaissance and continuity to the whole of early American literature.
The Fable of the Writer in Southern Fiction
Authors: Simpson Lewis P.
Published: April 2011

No scene in Faulkner is more compelling than the one that transpires on a “long still hot weary dead September afternoon” in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, toward the end of the first decade of this century. Quentin Compson sits with Miss Rosa Coldfield in a “dim airless room” still called “the office because her father called it that,” and listens to Miss Rosa tell her version of the story of the “demon” Sutpen and his plantation, Sutpen's Hundred. As she talks “in that grim haggard amazed voice”—“vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand”—the 22-year-old Mississippi youth discovers he is hearing not Miss Rosa but the voices of “two separate Quentins.” One voice is that of the “Quentin preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous baffled ghosts.” The other voice is that of the Quentin “who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South the same as she [Miss Rosa] was.” The two Quentins talk “to one another in the long silence of notpeople, in notlanguage:It seems that this demon—his name was Sutpen—(Colonel Sutpen)—Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation”.
Charles Wimar's The Abduction of Daniel Boone's Daughter by the Indians, 1853 and 1855: Evolving Myths
Authors: Luft Martha Levy
Published: April 2011

The two versions of The Abduction of Daniel Boone's Daughter by the Indians by Charles Wimar (1828–62) reveal a remarkable alteration in conception in the span of only two years. The earlier version (Fig. 1), painted in 1853, is a rather unimaginative picture rooted in an overworked tradition. In 1855 Wimar produced a much more original painting (Fig. 2), which reflected an enlightened approach to the myths of the American West. Although the two works were painted while Wimar was studying at the Düsseldorf Academy, he gained his knowledge of Indians from firsthand experience while growing up in the frontier city of Saint Louis, to which he had emigrated from Germany at the age of fifteen. Wimar devoted the bulk of his oeuvre to Indian subjects, mostly portraits and genre scenes. A narrative subject dealing with a specific and, by that time, legendary figure such as Daniel Boone's daughter was atypical for Wimar. By probing the background and sources of this theme, both literary and pictorial, one can bring to light the aspects of frontier mythology embodied in these paintings.
Stylizing the Folk: Hall Johnson's Run, Little Chillun Photographed by Doris Ulmann
Authors: Brown Lorraine , Sundell Michael G.
Published: April 2011

The following photographs have been selected from a group of twenty-five prints by Doris Ulmann documenting the original Broadway production of Hall Johnson's musical drama Run, Little Chillun, which opened at the Lyric Theatre on March 1, 1933. The pictures provide an unusual record of the interest in regional American cultures and the resulting stylized revival of traditional regional customs characteristic of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Run, Little Chillun, named after a famous spiritual and based on the conflict between Christian and pagan religious forces in a small Southern town, was the most important black example of the folk-theater movement of the period. Doris Ulmann, a fashionable portrait photographer of New York's moneyed literary and scientific intelligentsia, was also—and more importantly—passionately devoted to documenting isolated rural communities and the efforts to preserve their cultural heritage. Despite her intense interest in the theater, this collection is probably her only extensive series based on a theatrical production that has been preserved, and it may be the only one she ever made. The collection derives from the estate of Oliver M. Sayler, the press representative for the production.
The Lonely Crowd in Minnesota: A Psychometric Approach to the Study of the Modern American Character
Authors: Barton Michael
Published: April 2011

The Historical study of the American character has been hobbled for several reasons, many of which are summarized by David Stannard in “American Historians and the Idea of National Character: Some Problems and Prospects.” Stannard emphasizes that America has always been too complex a sociocultural system to have produced a uniform national character or a typical personality. He notes that cultural anthropologists have not found psychological uniformity even in small, preliterate communities. If scholars would study the variety of the nation's psychological characteristics instead—if they would search for the modal personality (most frequently occurring type) and the distribution of other personality types rather than only the basic personality type—then, at least in Stannard's opinion, they would avoid oversimplification, the most serious conceptual error. But even this more realistic approach retains methodological problems that are so serious that he suggests historians concentrate on understanding “deeds and events” and leave the study of national character and characteristics to the social and behavioral scientists. (Philosophers of history might deny that the study of deeds and events is less troublesome than the study of national character, but that is another matter.)
Mind, Messages, and Madness: Gregory Bateson Makes a Paradigm for American Culture Studies
Authors: Mechling Jay
Published: April 2011

In the winter quarter of 1979 I was teaching a junior-level American Studies core course that introduced our students to comparative culture study. Many of the students had taken one or two classes from me already; but I decided, nevertheless, to begin the course with an essay that would say again in a new way exactly what are the characteristics of interdisciplinary thinking. I had begun other courses in this way but not with much success. Faced with student puzzlement and confusion about what made American Studies different from disciplinary study about America, I had had to resort to naming examples for students to emulate. What we lacked was a way totalk aboutinterdisciplinary thinking, especially a way that was accessible to undergraduates. I had read and appreciated the previous summer an essay inThe CoEvolution Quarterly; so I decided to try beginning the course with that brief, breezily discursive piece. I was a bit nervous about deciding so. Gregory Bateson's essay “The Pattern Which Connects” reads much like a story and is based on a talk for a general audience in 1977. But Bateson could be “maddeningly obscure” in his writing and speaking. (I recalled my total awe and bewilderment when, sometime in 1972 or 1973, I had my only experience listening to a Bateson public lecture.) My only earlier experience teaching Bateson—two essays fromSteps to an Ecology of Mind—had been a miserable failure. My worry was that “The Pattern Which Connects” would be total gibberish to the students—not an auspicious beginning for a course.
Language in Slavery: Frederick Douglass's Narrative
Authors: Kibbey Ann
Published: April 2011

For historians who use slave narratives to document the immediate physical and social facts of slave life, Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself offers a frustratingly low yield. Beside Solomon Northup's detailed account of living quarters, diet, work life, holidays, and family relations, Douglass's Narrative must seem spare, incomplete, even misleading in its portrayal of the slave experience—an incendiary polemic written more to fuel the abolitionist cause than to convey the nature of the slave experience. To read the Narrative from this point of view, however, is to misapprehend how Douglass's text treats slavery and to be needlessly disappointed. Unlike Northup, Douglass focuses on the linguistic significance of bondage: He tersely portrays masters and slaves almost solely in terms of their linguistic acts because, for him, the reality of slavery is a profoundly rhetorical one. He charts his own relentless progress to freedom as the acquisition of an ever deeper understanding of language use in a slave economy, and the realization of his own freedom at the Nantucket antislavery convention is preeminently a linguistic event. Douglass's perspective is an important one, for as sociolinguists have discovered, “peoples do not all everywhere use language to the same degree, in the same situations, or for the same things. … Languages, like other cultural traits, will be found to vary in the degree and nature of their integration into the societies and cultures in which they occur.” Douglass was acutely sensitive to the linguistic system of slave society, of the ways in which language was used—and withheld—by one human being to enslave another.
The Predicament of Progress in the Period of Transcendentalism
Authors: Gonnaud Maurice
Published: April 2011

To a degree incomprehensible today, when we have been surfeited by holocausts and are haunted by the notion of entropy, the first generation of transcendentalists – that of Emerson and Ripley, as opposed to that of Thoreau and Whitman – grew up in the certainty that progress was consubstantial with history and shared in the untroubled sureness of history's course. In 1823 Emerson noted in his journal:

The lively fancy of some men has induced them to entertain fanciful anticipations of the progress of Mankind, and of radical revolutions in their manners, passions and pursuits … But the quiet wisdom of History as she winds along her way through sixty centuries, speaks of no wonders, and of little glory … The most rapid progress of civilization in a community is so gradual that it is unmarked.
“Assume an Identity of Sentiment”: Rhetoric and Audience in Emerson's “Divinity School Address”
Authors: Railton Stephen
Published: April 2011

In “the american scholar” Emerson defines the problem of his vocation: The “duties” of the scholar are such as become Man Lecturing. His “office” is an explicitly rhetorical one: “to cheer, to raise, and to guide men.” The most requisite virtue for this task is “self-trust”; yet as Emerson elaborates on his public role, it turns out that he really means trust in the possibility of communion with his audience:

For the instinct is sure that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, – his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, – until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers; – that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest secretest presentiment, – to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself.
Prostitutes in the Art of John Sloan
Authors: Kinser Suzanne L.
Published: April 2011

It came as no surprise to John Sloan when in 1910 the National Academy of Design refused to exhibit his painting 3 a.m. (Fig. 1). Its subject matter must have appeared to the academy jury, as Sloan later said, rather “like a pair of men's drawers slipped into an old maid's laundry.” It is apparent that the critics of the day, who deemed the work “too frank and vulgar,” could hardly have overlooked the fact that the seated woman, sipping a cup of tea, is a prostitute. Indeed, the other woman, who is busily engaged in cooking her a meal, would appear to be one also. During the Progressive Era, it was common for prostitutes to share tenement flats like the one in 3 a.m., as numerous muckraking newspaper articles and tracts on the social evil were beginning to make plain. The reformist zeal for which the period is presently noted may have succeeded in closing down a number of brothels; but the world's “oldest profession” continued to flourish, as journalists were constantly reminding an apprehensive but nevertheless titillated American public. In 1910 prostitutes were more visible than ever. Operating independently out of tenements like the one in 3 a.m., they worked on the streets and out of dance halls, saloons, and cheap restaurants.
Comments on Regionalism and Ethnicity in American Literature
Authors: Yans-McLaughlin Virginia
Published: April 2011

All the essays in this group are studies in American identity. They argue persuasively that regionalism and ethnicity are integral parts of what I can at this point only hesitantly call “mainstream” American self-definitions, be they literary, academic, intellectual, or popular. Werner Sollors' essay, really a phenomenological analysis of American thought about regionalism and ethnicity, exposes the structural analogues among intellectual, academic, and popular thought on these subjects. In his analysis of Styron, Jules Chametzky, on the other hand, suggests that the strategy of exchanging and appropriating regional and ethnic identities allows writers such as Styron both to legitimize marginal identities and to enter the mainstream. By implication, Chametzky's paper, like Sollors', is also concerned with structural relationships or exchanges between European high cultural forms and the popular domain.
Putting the Past under Grass: History as Death and Cemetery Commemoration
Authors: Linden-Ward Blanche
Published: April 2011

“Our age is retrospective,” Emerson observed in 1836. “It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism.” Emerson identified a phenomenon far greater than the literary production of the New England Renaissance. He put his finger on an attitude toward the past that was quite new, yet was imitative rather than provincial and idiosyncratic. The Americans of Emerson's time developed a commemorative consciousness similar to that of the English and French. Following revolutions, all three nations attempted to redefine their pasts in material as well as literary terms. Inspired by Enlightenment philosophy, they considered the processes of nature metaphors for history, and they looked to the Arcadian periods of classical civilizations for precedents of the balanced blending of Art and Nature indicative of a certain sense of the past not associated with their own medieval histories.
“Behold a White Horse!”: The Communal Journey
Authors: Fogarty Robert S.
Published: April 2011

Writing in his diary in August 1842, Thoreau noted that “there is much to console the wayward traveller upon the dustiest and dullest road” because the “path his feet travel is so perfectly typical of human life.” As a lifelong journeyer and seeker he often used the metaphor embedded in his diary notation for that summer day: “Now climbing the highest mountains, now descending into the lowest vales. From the summits we see the heavens and the horizon, from the vales we look up to the heights again.” Thoreau sought utopia in nature and in himself at Walden by journeying westward a short distance from Concord to establish a community of one. There he found a piece of sacred earth and anchored himself in order to confront some practical problems having to do with economy, nature, and society.
Theodore Dreiser and the Tragedy of the Twenties
Authors: Elias Robert H.
Published: April 2011

An American Tragedy is by general agreement Theodore Dreiser's major accomplishment. From Stuart Pratt Sherman and Joseph Wood Krutch to Robert Penn Warren and Ellen Moers, reviewers, critics, and scholars have praised its tragic impact, its moral effect, its technical artistry, its psychological depth.
Walter White and Sinclair Lewis: The History of a Literary Friendship
Authors: Cooney Charles F.
Published: April 2011

In a long and turbulent career, Sinclair Lewis met thousands of people. Only rarely, though, did chance meetings develop into more meaningful relationships, and what few friendships Lewis formed were invariably short-lived. Perhaps the stinging rebuffs he met as a child from the “gang” his brother Claude led made him wary of becoming close to people; perhaps the reasons lie elsewhere; but Sinclair Lewis spent much of his life largely friendless. However, the friendship he formed with Walter F. White lasted for nearly a quarter of a century and to some extent was reflected in Lewis' novels.
“Putting You in the Papers” Ambrose Bierce's Letters to Edwin Markham
Authors: Slade Joseph W.
Published: April 2011

In early 1892, Oakland and San Francisco editors began receiving letters suggesting that local newspapers and journals would do well to print the poems of a young Oakland school principal, Charles Edwin Markham. Signed “George Roy Jones,” the letters pointed out that since Markham's work had already been published inHarper's, Scribner's, and theCentury, the three leading eastern magazines, it was high time that Californians took notice. The writer of the letters was Markham himself, using Walt Whitman's trick to drum up interest in his own poetry. Markham was fond of pseudonyms, having already toyed with half a dozennoms de plume, but this time he no doubt chose to disguise himself to avoid the appearance of immodesty and to conceal his frustration at the elusiveness of fame. He had published individual poems in some eminently respectable magazines, but he wanted a book to his credit. He was only a few months from his fortieth birthday and was depressed by the recent death of his mother and the collapse of a second marriage. Nothing in his personal life seemed to be going right; he was growing old, and he had failed to achieve his potential as a writer.
Faces and Places in the South in the 1930s: A Portfolio
Authors: White Robert
Published: April 2011

In the spring of 1935, while the United States was still reeling from the economic collapse of 1929, and while the Democratic administration was attempting to ward off opponents on both the Right and the Left, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established by executive order an independent governmental agency charged with the task of alleviating one of the nation's most chronic and deep-rooted social ills: widespread rural poverty. The Resettlement Administration (RA) was largely the brainchild of Rexford Guy Tugwell, a member of Roosevelt's inner circle of advisers who had been serving as Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, and Tugwell was made head of the new agency. The Resettlement Administration was not lavishly financed (its funds derived from the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of April, 1935, which specifically appropriated money “for rural rehabilitation and relief in stricken agricultural areas”), but it quickly found itself dealing with a large number of diverse and frequently intractable programs and problems. As originally set up, The Resettlement Administration had a threefold mission: (1) the establishment of a land use program that would deal with such problems as soil erosion and flood control; (2) the inception of resettlement projects in both rural and suburban areas; and (3) the establishment of a loan and grants program for impoverished farmers. Soon after it got under way, the RA was given the task of working out a program of debt consolidation and adjustment between farmers and their creditors, and it also took on the job of improving conditions in migratory labor camps.

The author is grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies for a Grant-in-Aid, which assisted in the preparation of this portfolio of photographs, and to the Library of Congress for its cooperation.
“Ethnographies”: American Culture Studies and Postmodern Anthropology
Authors: Lenz Guenter H.
Published: April 2011

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-consciouscriticalanalysis of culture in the United States and, at the same time, initiated the search for theunifiedor 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 amulticulture, 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, inLet Us Now Praise Famous Men) worked out radical new methods and strategies of culturalcritiqueand ethnographicwritingin the study of American cultures, in the plural. Thus, historian Caroline F. Ware, writing for the American Historical Association inThe 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”isexactly themultiplicityof regional, ethnic, and class cultures and the interactions of these cultures in terms of rhetoric as well as of power,notsome “common patterns” or the Anglo-Saxon tradition the “other” groups have to “contribute” to.
The American Studies Program at Yale: Lux, Veritas, et Pecunia
Authors: Diamond Sigmund
Published: April 2011

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.”
Women's Camera Work: Seven Propositions in Search of a Theory
Authors: Fryer Judith
Published: April 2011

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 calledAnimal 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 Ideological Matrix of Reform in Late-19th-Century America and New Zealand: Reading Bellamy's Looking Backward
Authors: Shor Francis
Published: April 2011

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.
Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book: The Aesthetics of American Food in the 1950s
Authors: Marling Karal Ann
Published: April 2011

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.
Holy Land, Holy People? Photography, Semitic Wannabes, and Chautauqua's Palestine Park
Authors: Davis John
Published: April 2011

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.…”
In Anxious Celebration: Lewis Hine's Men at Work
Authors: Meyer Susan
Published: April 2011

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.
Catching a Market: The Publishing History ofCatch-22
Authors: Eller Jonathan R.
Published: April 2011

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.
Pastoral Landscape with Indians: George Copway and the Political Unconscious of the American Pastoral
Authors: Sweet Timothy
Published: April 2011

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.
Musing on Medium: Photography, Painting, and thePlein AirSketch
Authors: Ogden Kate Nearpass
Published: April 2011

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 theplein airoil 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.
Baseball and the Cultural Logic of American Individualism
Authors: Patell Cyrus R. K.
Published: April 2011

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 ofThe 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, includingBull Durham(1988),Eight Men Out(1988),Stealing Home(1988),Major League(1989), andField 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 bookTake 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.”
News from the Great Wide World: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Black Popular Music, 1927–1943
Authors: Erenberg Lewis A.
Published: April 2011

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 American Family and the Little Red Schoolhouse: Historians, Class, and the Problem of Curricular Diversity
Authors: Faires Nora , Bukowczyk John J. , Harkness Bruce
Published: April 2011

Though the development of “public history” as a professional practice and its arrival as an academic field date back only to the mid-1970s, an emphasis on the role of historians aspublicactors with unique societal responsibilities has punctuated the self-reflective literature issuing forth from the profession throughout much of the 20th Century. In his 1949 presidential address to the American Historical Association (AHA), Conyers Read advised that “history has to justify itself in social terms.” In a postwar world whose grand drama shifted from the defeat of fascism to the crusade against communism, Read instructed historians in their highest role, namely, “education for democracy.” “Total war, whether it be hot or cold,” Read observed, “enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to assume his part.” Read's prescription has remained a canon in the profession. In 1986, for example, AHA former president C. Vann Woodward owned that historians have “obligations to the present.” Recognizing the problematical nature of the “relationship of history to the public realm,” AHA president William E. Leuchtenburg in like manner nonetheless recently observed that “generation after generation, a substantial corps of scholars has insisted that historians should concentrate on contributing to the solution of contemporary problems.”
Martyrs and Monuments of Chicago: The Haymarket Affair
Authors: Dabakis Melissa
Published: April 2011

On May 4, 1886, a bomb was thrown into a crowded political meeting near Haymarket Square on Chicago's west side, killing one police officer and numerous civilians. This event led to one of the fiercest attacks on anarchist dissidents in this country, culminating in an unjust trial and the execution of four innocent men. Two public monuments commemorate Chicago's famous Haymarket Affair. TheHaymarket Monument(Figure 1), dedicated to the memory of eight anarchists who were tried and convicted (and later exonerated) of conspiracy charges, four of whom were executed by hanging, consists of a tall granite shaft against which stand two life-sized bronze figures, a female figure holding a laurel wreath over the head of a fallen worker. Located over their gravesite in Waldheim (now Forest Home) Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, the monument has served as a site of memorial ceremonies, political meetings, and personal pilgrimages since its dedication in 1893. As an important political monument, it represents a symbol of resistance for those concerned with radical politics in general and the history of the working class in particular. Buried near and around the monument in its bucolic setting is an impressive list of historical personnages: Lucy Parsons, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Emma Goldman, to name only a few.
Disturbing Boundaries: Temperance, Black Elevation, and Violence in Frank J. Webb'sThe Garies and Their Friends
Authors: Levine Robert S.
Published: April 2011

At the inaugural 1837 meeting of the American Moral Reform Society, one of Philadelphia's many African American reform groups, William Whipper called for blacks to commit themselves to total abstinence and “temperance in all things.” The group itself offered a resolution that subsumed a number of social desires and reforms under the rubric of temperance: “Resolved, That the successful promotion of all the principles of the Moral Reform Society, viz.: Education, Temperance, Economy, and Universal Love, depends greatly upon the practical prosecution of the Temperance Reform.” But of course temperance could only go so far, and at times those blacks most committed to temperance — whether conceived narrowly in terms of drinking, or more broadly in terms of a Franklinian commitment to economy and industry — seemed to lose sight of the limits of the black temperance movement in a racist culture. At the same 1837 meeting of the American Moral Reform Society, James Forten, Jr., addressed this issue head on. While endorsing temperance as a worthy social program of black elevation, he pointed to the central reality of the black experience in America: “that the arm of oppression is laid bare to crush us; that prejudice, like the never satiated tiger, selects us as its prey; that we have felt the withering blight of tyranny sweeping from before us, in its destructive course, our homes and our property.” But despite these obstacles, Forten advised, blacks should not give up the struggle to improve their lot and, as temperate and productive citizens, “to set an example to the rising generation.” As he rhetorically put it in his concluding remarks: “What … would the cause of learning and our country have lost, if a Franklin, a Rittenhouse, a Rush, could have been made to quail before the frowning brow of persecution?”
Women and Art in the Fiction of Edith Wharton
Authors: Honey Maureen
Published: April 2011

Edith Wharton's treatment of the artist has received considerable critical attention, particularly in light of her focus on male artists and the disparity between her early short stories that are dominated by tales about artists and her novels that center on other subjects. Some of these studies have looked at the writer as artist and Wharton's views on the art of writing. While such a focus can be justified by the numerous writers who people Wharton's fiction, it is instructive to examine other dimensions of her reference to art and artists, especially painting, as a way of illuminating the commentary on women's roles that pervades Wharton's work. Like other writers of her era, Wharton constructed many narratives around creative artists or linked her main characters to artistic endeavors in order to interrogate American culture, its materialism, its devaluation of art, and its restrictive sphere for women. It is my contention, however, that Wharton's concern with development of the female artist was subsumed in some of her novels by rhetorical techniques that used art as a sounding board for her social critiques. Specifically, she constructed pivotal scenes around paintings in the narrative and made subtle reference to prominent themes in Victorian artwork as ironic counterpoint to and illumination of the story being told. In this essay, I explore the way in which Wharton drew on artistic representations of women with deep cultural resonance for her audience that served to underscore her critique of Victorian mythology and to garner sympathy for the characters victimized by that mythology.
William Alfred's Hogan's Goat: Power and Poetry in Brooklyn
Authors: Griffin Edward M.
Published: April 2011

William alfred's verse play Hogan's Goat, recounting the four days in April and May, 1890, when Matt Stanton gets his big chance to become mayor of Brooklyn, was New York's surprise hit of 1965–66. Directed by Frederick Rolf and starring Faye Dunaway (before Bonnie and Clyde), Ralph Waite (before The Waltons), and Barnard Hughes (before Da), it opened in November, 1965, at the American Place Theatre and ran during the next eighteen months for 607 performances there and at the East 74th Street Theatre, winning the 1965–66 Theatre Club Gold Medal for best play and gaining Alfred the 1965 Drama Desk – Vernon Rice award. Selected for inclusion in Otis L. Guernsey's Best Plays yearbook (and chosen best play of 1965), it also appears in John Gassner and Clive Barnes's Best American Plays series, Harold Clurman's anthology Famous American Plays of the 1960s, and Francis Griffith and Joseph Mersand's Eight Ethnic American Plays. In 1971, the play was produced on PBS television.
Infection and Imagination: The Atmospheric Analogy and the Problem of Romantic Culture in America
Authors: Miller David C.
Published: April 2011

The crucial twenty-third chapter of Melville'sThe 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.