American Cultural History Research Articles

The War on Terror Espionage Thriller, and the Imperialism of Human Rights

�� ��� This essay describes the war on terror espionage thriller as a popular literary form which legitimates human rights abuses by the West, particularly statesanctioned torture, by depicting the West, rhetorically, as the virtuous bringer of rights. This neoconservative refi t of imperialist mythologies on which the Euro-American empires of the nineteenth century were built and defended was widely heard after 9/11, not least in the reasons given by American and British elites for waging war on Iraq. The thriller was not alone in its willingness to debate the legitimacy of human rights abuse as a virtuous weapon of war. Indeed, one of the more striking trends in American cultural history after 9/11 was the speed with which torture imagery pervaded contemporary culture, from the elite paradigms of the international art world—see Richard Serra’s Stop Bush (2004) or the Inconvenient Evidence exhibition staged at the International Center of Photography, New York (2004) and the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2004‐5)—to popular TV drama like 24 or Lost . It is partly through such simple repetition in diverse cultural forms, even if this representation is sometimes skeptical or oppositional in tone, that shifts in the political ethics of any age become normative (that is, capable of shaping political and ethical subjectivity, or of assisting in this process, by making torture imagery banal or unsurprising, part of the routine run of things in everyday life). The espionage thriller is just one of countless molecular instances of this normative procedure at work in contemporary culture, but because of its generic welding of stories about state power to the novel’s traditional interest in the moral consciousness of protagonists, the thriller has often looked like a privileged instance

I Feel Love: Disco and Its Discontents

Is there an intellectual history of disco? If there is or will one day be, such history will surely not neglect Tim Lawrence's 2003 study, Loves Saves the Day.1 Nestled within what is broadly billed as a history of American culture in the 1970s—a phrasing that cannily duplicates the industry's own code-switching from to dance music at the end of the decade whose history Lawrence charts—is story at once more generi cally precise and geographically diffuse. It is the story of scene, style, and mode of self-fashioning whose suddenness of apogee and rapidity of fall has not been since repeated except, perhaps on smaller scale, by the premil lennial advent of rave culture. As with that latter nightlife movement (or was it moment?), the backlash against disco was so immediate it felt premeditated. The fear and loathing of disco seemed to result from the industry's determination to force an unwilling contact between the underground and mainstream in the name of crossover that, it turned out, only succeeded in crossing out the flavors most valued by those in the know, while failing to rid itself entirely of that odor most noxious to outsiders: the pungency of gender, racial, and sexual difference. The un happy hybridity of disco is still evinced in the uneasy status of its foremost cultural avatars—the Bee Gees and John Travolta, playing Tony Manero— white men occupying vocal registers and striking choreographic poses that usurp the disco diva and the gay man while at the same time infringing

The man who adores the Negro: race and American folklore

Drawing on over thirty-five years of fieldwork, Patrick B. Mullen considers how African American cultural representations in folklore relate to racial dynamics in the United States. Providing insight into white folklorists’ relationships with black consultants, The Man Who Adores the Negro describes the personal experiences of both fieldworkers and ethnographic subjects. Mullen explores how folklorists such as John Lomax, Newbell Niles Puckett, Alan Lomax, and Roger Abrahams have been implicated in creating the popular concept of African Americans as folk and how this depiction has created notions of blackness and whiteness. Illuminating central aspects of African American cultural history, the author discusses a wide range of folklore that includes work songs, hymns, voodoo rituals, animal tales, jokes, toasts, and children's games and rhymes. In relating folkloric research to white mimicry of black style in such expressions as blues, rock and roll, and hip-hop culture, Mullen contends that both folk performers and folklorists participate in ongoing cultural change when they mix received values and attitudes in producing new interpretations.

The Asian American Comparative Collection: A Unique Resource for Archaeologists and Historians

The Asian American Comparative Collection (AACC) is an exceptional repository containing artifacts, images, and documentary materials essential for understanding Asian American archaeological sites, economic contributions, and cultural history. It serves as an information clearinghouse for identifying artifacts made in China and Japan and for researching Asian American topics.

Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Antebellum Reform (review)

Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Antebellum Reform. By Scott Gac. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. 328. Cloth, $45.00.)Reviewed by Matthew Warner OsbornIf Elvis Costello is right that talking about music is like dancing about architecture, Scott Gac shows that music nevertheless provides a fasci- nating window into American cultural history. Focused mostly on the decade of the 1840s, Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Antebellum Reform offers a detailed and admiring account of the abolitionist quartet's rise to fame, along with broader observations on reform, religion, and popular music. Placing the group's career in the context of the political history of the antislavery movement, Gac argues that the Hutchinson Family Singers' tremendous mass appeal illustrates the cultural space created by waves of reform pulsating through the United States (4). The Hutchinsons adopted familiar melodies from church hymns and blackface minstrelsy and added their own innovative vocal harmonies and lyrics that drew their power from evangelical religion and moral reform. Gac describes how this musical amalgamation marked the emergence of a newly distinctive and commercially successful identity for American musicians, enabling them to challenge the long-standing prominence of European performers. Further, the successful commercialization of abolitionist music represented nothing less than a technological transformation of antislavery, generating mass appeal and energy for the formally staid movement (68).Both an accomplished musician and academic historian, the author has a highly developed appreciation for music that shapes the study in several ways. Antebellum historians have often reduced the history of music to socioeconomic developments; for instance, linking musical literacy and parlor pianos to the social aspirations of the middle class. By contrast, the content of the Hutchinson Family Singers' music plays a central role in Gac's story. Fans flocked to their concerts, he writes, because the music was vibrant and uplifting. This fact is vividly illustrated in an anecdote about Henry Alexander Wise, a proslavery congressman from Virginia, who eagerly shook the hands of the Hutchinson singers after a performance, apparently unaware of the antislavery meaning of their lyrics (175). Gac's musical training may also explain his choice to adopt a complex structure of thematic chapters, and label them according to the of a musical score. Preceded by a prelude, four parts are divided into various expositions, developments, and themes, interrupted by an intermission and followed by a finale. Part First, for instance, consists of two scenes, juxtaposing moments in the Hutchinsons' career. The first scene offers an extended meditation on the significance of an 1893 reunion of antislavery activists, and the second documents the process and significance of the Hutchinsons' choice in 1843 to sing in support of abolition.Singing for Freedom presents an original and revealing account of the market imperatives that American musicians faced in the mid nineteenth century. Tracing the group's rise from obscurity in rural New Hampshire to international fame, Gac portrays the Hutchinson singers as highly principled but savvy entrepreneurs. What made them unique was their combining of social reform, music, and tremendous popularity (14), Gac argues, beginning a tradition in American popular music that continues today. …

Catholics in the movies

Catholicism was all over movie screens in 2004. Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was at the center of a media firestorm for months. A priest was a crucial character in the Academy Award-winning Million Dollar Baby. Everyone, it seemed, was talking about how religious stories should be represented, marketed, and received. Catholic characters, spaces, and rituals have been stock features in popular films since the silent era. An intensely visual religion with a well-defined ritual and authority system, Catholicism lends itself to the drama and pageantry of film. Moviegoers watch as Catholic visionaries interact with the supernatural, priests counsel their flocks, reformers fight for social justice, and bishops wield authoritarian power. Rather than being marginal to American popular culture, Catholic people, places, and rituals are all central to the world of the movie. Catholics in the Movies begins with an introductory essay that orients readers to the ways that films appear in culture and describes the broad trends that can be seen in the movies' hundred-year history of representing Catholics. Each chapter is written by a noted scholar of American religion who concentrates on one movie engaging important historical, artistic, and religious issues. Each then places the film within American cultural and social history, discusses the film as an expression of Catholic concerns of the period, and relates the film to others of its genre. Tracing the story of American Catholic history through popular films, Catholics in the Movies should be a valuable resource for anyone interested in American Catholicism and religion and film.

"On Imperialism, see...": Ghosts of the Present in Cultures of United States Imperialism

I begin with a quotation: “On imperialism, see Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism.” This language represents a now familiar endnote found in literary criticism and American studies scholarship that references the emergence of academic interest in empire, borders, transnationalism, neocolonialism, and war. This or similar phrasing surfaces in an endnote in Siobhan Somerville's Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (2000) to cement the connections between white supremacy at home and US interventionism abroad (1, 199); in David Leverenz's Paternalism Incorporated: Fables of American Fatherhood, 1865–1940 (2004) to explain the sway of imperialist romance (11, 207); in Rodrigo Lazo's Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (2005) to describe “the relationship of culture to U.S. imperialism” (15, 199); and in Antoinette Burton's introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities (1999) to identify “the cultures of American imperialism” (3, 14). This unscientific gathering of citations starts us on the path of discerning the legacy and impact of Kaplan and Pease's intervention. How does Anglo-American professional culture engage the culture of US imperialism? What are the politics of citation, in particular, citations to an entire volume that collectively spans 26 separate essays and several hundred years of American cultural history? What are we remembering—and, of course, any question about remembering is also a provocation to think about forgetting—about literature and history when we reference Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993)?

Oz Frankel.States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States.:States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth‐Century Britain and the United States.(New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History.)

Oz Frankel has written a strenuously empirical, theoretically informed study that reaches across a wide range of subjects, geographies, and politics to examine how official knowledge was created in the nineteenth century. It argues that this knowledge project was vitally important to liberal democracies that were replacing older, hierarchal structures of rule with civil societies capable of governing themselves. Frankel's eight chapters explore various efforts to organize the categories of life and so make life more governable. These include the birth of parliamentary commissions in Great Britain (assigned with investigating the plight of the poor, or the use of child labor, or factory conditions, or the system of education), American Congressional reports (including, of course, land surveys), narrative accounts of expeditions of discovery and exploration (that were inseparable from American continental expansion and railroad building), the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission (seeking to discover a “black subjectivity” that would then become the basis for integrating the former slaves into the body politic), and a burgeoning anthropological interest in Indian life, under the partial aegis of the new Smithsonian Institution and invariably invested in questions of the nation's manifest destiny. These investigations were related to the formal apparatus of government in different ways, but all contributed to the state's redefinition of itself for a liberal age. As such, they addressed political and ontological issues concerning government and population, the “culture of the social fact,” the market's role in the production and dissemination of information, the construction of national memory, the creation of a reading public, and the relationship between authorship and authority, and between publicity and the public.

The origins of American photography: from daguerreotype to dry-plate, 1839-1885

Origins of American Photography chronicles the emergence of a new visual paradigm, from the introduction of the daguerreotype in 1839 through the Civil War and the exploration of the West to the rise of popular photography in the 1880s. Beautifully designed and produced, with over 600 reproductions in tritone and four-colour, this important volume features works by all the leading practitioners of the time and by others who remain unknown. Many of these images are published here for the first time; all are from the acclaimed Hallmark Photographic Collection at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. In a detailed and authoritative text, Keith Davis examines photography's social history and aesthetic development in an era of rapid national growth. He demonstrates how key themes and genres - including the business of daguerreian portraiture, the markets for Civil War images, and the art of Western landscape photography - reflected the concerns and values of 19th-century society. Photographers of this era expressed a new national consciousness while at the same time they helped to shape it. The visual language of a radically new medium was also open to exploration, and they laid the foundation for all of photography's subsequent history. This essential book will be the most definitive study of this period in American photographic history. It will be of interest to all scholars and enthusiasts of the medium, and to anyone interested in the visual history of 19th-century American culture. This book accompanies an exhibition at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 16 June 2007-January 2008.

Bryan Waterman.Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature.:Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature.(New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History.)

Bryan Waterman.<i>Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature</i>.:Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature.<i>(New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History.)</i>

&lt;i&gt;Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins Janet Gabler-Hover Daughter of the Revolution: The Major Nonfiction Works of Pauline E. Hopkins. Edited and with an introduction by Ira Dworkin. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007. 406 pp. $70.00 cloth/$34.95 paper. Ira Dworkin has given us a useful compilation of the prolific prose of late nineteenth-century black literary artist and political activist Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, most often recognized as the author of Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South and for her publications within and relationships with the Colored American Magazine. Successful in its broad circulation and wide-ranging scope but besieged by money troubles, the Colored American Magazine ultimately was destroyed by political forces, Dworkin explains. In his substantive introduction to Hopkins's nonfiction, he provides an unequivocal and transparent account of the political intrigue involved in Booker T. Washington's firing of Hopkins from the periodical. The stealth and determination of Washington's strategies reveal just how politically powerful he thought Hopkins was or might possibly be. According to Dworkin, Washington was driven by his animus for Hopkins's political activism, her cautionary view of his program for industrial education, and her conviction that women should figure more broadly in the workings of society. Once Hopkins was dismissed, the periodical became a tool of Washington's propaganda, and it never recovered its popularity. Some of Hopkins's most overt political convictions can be seen, Dworkin argues, in the neglected prose she wrote for the magazine. By compiling Hopkins's nonfictional prose works, he shows how methodically Hopkins used nonfiction to express such convictions. Dworkin's collation of "Famous Men of the Negro Race" and "Famous Women of the Negro Race," for example, draws our attention to the coherence and thematic continuities within the series. Most of the volume's ten parts are organized around the series, although several are grouped otherwise (such as "Juvenilia" and "The Colored American Magazine Controversy"). [End Page 339] Dworkin points out that his collation lacks the materialist aspects of periodical publication. In particular, he discusses what he convincingly argues is the ideological significance of the visual apparatus in the Colored American Magazine. While Hopkins edited the magazine, it exhibited cover portraits of successful African American women, cameos of Philis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, and lush borders of elegant flowers and leaves. All disappeared after Hopkins's dismissal. As a concession to the lack of material features in his reprints, Dworkin provides his reader with facsimiles, including a handwritten copy of Hopkins's youthful, award-winning essay on temperance and covers from the Colored American Magazine and the New Era, another periodical to which Hopkins contributed. Dworkin's volume allows readers insight into the rich history of African American culture, since Hopkins's words and references reveal the vital social fabric and extensive network of African American intellectuals, philanthropists, and other notables who have been erased from, or were never made present in, American cultural memory. Central to Dworkin's volume are bounteous identifications of Hopkins's allusions. Taking on the multitude of historical, political, literary, and philosophical sources she references was quite a task, since Hopkins's attributions are often sketchy or nonexistent. Dworkin reveals himself to be an ingenious sleuth and a formidable scholar, providing readers with a vision of the depth and breadth of Hopkins's reading. Scholars will also find ample sources for their continuing work on Hopkins. For example, Dworkin's references show that Hopkins found an organizing principle and guiding argument for her race politics in Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. In the volume, Carlyle argues that heroes sculpt great civilizations—Rome, Egypt, or Ethiopia—that fall into oblivion when heroes are killed or oppressed. Hopkins's apparent influences include her documentations of African American heroes. She argues that black American civilization should be judged by these standards, pointing out that white racists have barred most blacks from the simple privileges that constitute self-development and have perpetuated race hatred and race oppression by judging blacks by unfair standards, comparing them to those with many privileges...

Permeable Borders and American Prisons: Malcolm Braly’s &lt;i&gt;On the Yard&lt;/i&gt;

Permeable Borders and American Prisons: Malcolm Braly’s On the Yard Katy Ryan Malcolm Braly’s fourth novel begins simply enough: “Society Red was the first man on the yard that morning” (3). An account of men living slow days in San Quentin in the 1960s—their fantasies, interactions, supreme boredom—On the Yard (1967) continues in this direct, unembellished style for well over three hundred pages. Braly’s novel is, as Jonathan Lethem notes in his fine introduction to the most recent edition, as -ical as its title” (vii). Our need to have “prisons be one simple thing — either horrific zoos for the irretrievably demented and corrupt, or inhumane machines which grind down innocent men” —is unsatisfied by Braly’s writing (Lethem, vii). Praised by critics and declared by Kurt Vonnegut “the great American prison novel,” On the Yard has been out of print twice and has received little scholarly attention.1 In 2002 the New York Review of Books republished the novel as part of its lost classics series. Braly, who spent much of his adult life in prison for burglary and armed robbery convictions, composed three novels while incarcerated: Felony Tank (1961), Shake Him Till He Rattles (1963), and It’s Cold Out There (1966). After his final release from San Quentin, published, in addition to On the Yard, an autobiography, False Starts: A Memoir of San Quentin and Other Prisons (1976), and another novel, The Protector (1979). At the time of his death in 1980, he was, according to H. Bruce Franklin, “beginning to attain recognition as one of the finest novelists to emerge from America’s prisons” (Prison Writing, 217). On the Yard emerges at a critical moment in U.S. American literary history. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published in 1965, marks the beginning of what Franklin calls “an unprecedented surge of prison literature” (Prison Writing, 12). Among the more well-known of these works are Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967), Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968), George Jackson’s Soledad, Brother (1970), Robert Beck’s The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim (1971), Manuel Piñero’s Short Eyes (1972), Huey P. Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide (1973), James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could [End Page 285] Talk (1974), and Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974). Franklin identifies the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s as the motivating context for this literature; Dylan Rodriguez develops his theory of “radical prison praxis” from the same time period; and Michael Hames-García engages with this body of literature in order to theorize and put into practice its ethical and moral insights. Yet Braly’s novel is not political in the way much of this writing is. It does not provide an exposé or analysis of the dire failings of the criminal judicial system. Nor does it attempt to explain, or even represent, the disproportionate impact of mass incarceration on racial minorities. In a 1971 New York Times op-ed piece on George Jackson, Braly expressed his impatience with “the mistaken assumptions, exaggerations, and, sometimes, outright lies on which liberals and radical writers base their current outrage at prison conditions” (35). Braly maintained that there was no “systematic political prejudice” against black Americans in the justice system, though he admitted individual instances of bias in the California prison system. His inaccurate assessments of both the role race plays in judicial processes and the cultural significance of black liberation struggles arguably interfere with his ability to tell a reliable tale about U.S. American prisons.2 Franklin summarizes, “Because his vision did not encompass the historical significance of the changes going on both in the prison and on the outside, Malcolm Braly remained limited in range as a novelist, despite all his profound insights” (Prison Literature, 206).3 What contributions, then, can Braly make to American literary and cultural history? It was to the novel that Braly first turned, a genre utilized less often by writers dealing with prison than autobiography, poetry, oratory, and essay. And it is precisely the dialogic structure of On the Yard that generates its most important social commentary. Franklin credits the artistic success of On the Yard to...

Balancing Inspiration and Education at George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens

Review Article| November 01 2007 Balancing Inspiration and Education at George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens DENISE D. MERINGOLO DENISE D. MERINGOLO Assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, specializing in American social and cultural history and public history. She coordinates the public history track, offered to students seeking an M.A. in Historical Studies. Dr. Meringolo is also a practicing public historian who has most recently worked for the Accokeek Foundation at Piscataway Park in Accokeek, Maryland, and just across the Potomac River from Mount Vernon. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2007) 29 (4): 129–135. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2007.29.4.129 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation DENISE D. MERINGOLO; Balancing Inspiration and Education at George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens. The Public Historian 1 November 2007; 29 (4): 129–135. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2007.29.4.129 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The rediscovered writings of Rose Wilder Lane: literary journalist

Through numerous short stories, novels such as Free Land, and political writings such as Credo, Rose Wilder Lane forged a literary career that would be eclipsed by the shadow of her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose Little House books Lane edited. Lane's fifty-year career in journalism has remained largely unexplored. This book recovers journalistic work by an American icon for whom scholarly recognition is long overdue. Amy Mattson Lauters introduces readers to Lane's life through examples of her journalism and argues that her work and career help establish her not only as an author and political rhetorician but also as a literary journalist. Lauters has assembled a collection of rarely seen nonfiction articles that illustrate Lane's talent as a writer of literary nonfiction, provide on-the-spot views of key moments in American cultural history, and offer sharp commentary on historical events. Through this collection of Lane's journalism, dating from early work for Sunset magazine in 1918 to her final piece for Woman's Day set in 1965 Saigon, Lauters shows how Lane infused her writing with her particular ideology of Americanism and individualism, self-reliance, and freedom from government interference, thereby offering stark commentary on her times. Lane shares her experiences as an extra in a Douglas Fairbanks movie and interviews D.W. Griffith. She reports on average American women struggling to raise a family in wartime and hikes over the Albanian mountains between the world wars. Her own maturing conservative political views provide a lens through which readers can view debates over the draft, war, and women's citizenship during World War II, and her capstone piece brings us again into the culture torn by war in Southeast Asia. These writings have not been available to the reading public since they first appeared. They encapsulate important moments for Lane and her times, revealing the woman behind the text, the development of her signature literary style, and her progression as a writer. Lauters' introduction reveals the flow of Lane's life and career, offering key insights into women's history, the literary journalism genre, and American culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Through these works, readers will discover a writer whose cultural identity was quintessentially American, middle class, midwestern, and simplistic - and who assumed the mantle of custodian to Americanism through women's arts. The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary Journalist traces the extraordinary relationship between one woman and American society over fifty pivotal years and offers readers a treasury of writings to enjoy and discuss.

Music and American Culture

AbstractScholars in American cultural history, ethnic studies, folklore, and musicology have increasingly placed music in its social and cultural context. This article surveys recent scholarship on popular music, country music and classical music, with an interest in determining how race and ethnicity, gender, and class have influenced the performance and production of music. This interdisciplinary research has illuminated issues as diverse as ethnic and regional identity, the degree of agency among artists, and Cold War politics. Despite some shortcomings in its application, such research continues to offer scholars much material regarding the many connections between music and American culture.

JEROLD S. AUERBACH. Explorers in Eden: Pueblo Indians and the Promised Land. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2006. Pp. 205. $34.95

At the end of this book, Jerold S. Auerbach reveals that on his first morning in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he felt transported to another place: Jerusalem, “a strangely familiar foreign land, with deep historical and personal resonance” (p. 168). That information explained this book's genesis and interesting, but somewhat misguided, argument. Auerbach, whose previous work includes Are We One? Jewish Identity in the United States and Israel (2001), maintains that Anglo-American “explorers” and other visitors to the Southwest repeatedly used biblical imagery to describe the Pueblos. This, in turn, connected to a long-standing American tradition of looking for the Promised Land, or Eden, in America. The Hebrew Bible framed the way Americans explained their supposedly unique historical experience. The Southwest, by the late nineteenth century, became “the last best hope of return to the wellspring of American distinctiveness as a chosen people” (p. 1). From the Puritans' city upon a hill, revolutionary references to George Washington as an American Moses, and the Mormons' belief that they descended from the Israelites, American cultural history is replete with biblical metaphors and Holy Land references. Starting with Frank Hamilton Cushing, who first came to Zuni Pueblo in 1879 as part of a U.S. Bureau of Ethnology team, Anglo-Americans renewed this impulse through the 1920s. They imposed upon Pueblos, with their supposed organic unity, spiritual and moral integrity, and pastoral existence, a belief that these communities offered America's final chance for regeneration. Of course, this represented the Anglos' hopes and yearnings. It had nothing to do with the complicated reality of Pueblo life. Others who engaged in this process included ethnographer Matilda Coxe Stevenson, journalist Charles Fletcher Lummis, photographer Edward Curtis, tourism entrepreneur Fred Harvey, and the influential cluster of women who came to New Mexico following World War I such as salon hostess and writer Mabel Dodge Luhan, anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons, and some of anthropologist Franz Boas's women students. The Pueblos also proved “useful” to Anglo men and women wrestling with the nation's growing unease regarding changing gender roles. For some men the Pueblos' example offered encouraging reminders that separate spheres were appropriate. Feminists believed Indian models challenged patriarchy.

Harriet Martineau's Exceptional American Narratives: Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, and the "Redemption of Your National Soul"

This essay argues for British writer and reformer Harriet Martineau’s importance to mid-nineteenth century American cultural and literary history. Martineau maintained long and deep relationships with key American figures during this period, especially those surrounding the abolitionist movement. Using her writing about John Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe as a catalyst, I will analyze Martineau’s importance to this period, especially her influence on anti-slavery writing and her efforts to define a particular kind of American exceptionalism. Martineau’s commentary on Stowe and Brown reveals the key elements of her methods as an abolitionist writer and serves as an example of how she encouraged her readers on both sides of the Atlantic to come to a particular understanding of America itself. My analysis of this commentary can serve as a model for additional consideration of Martineau’s valuable contributions to American studies.

Key Concepts in American Cultural History: From the Colonial Period to the End of the 19th Century, ed. Bernd Engler & Oliver Scheiding

Article Key Concepts in American Cultural History: From the Colonial Period to the End of the 19th Century, ed. Bernd Engler & Oliver Scheiding was published on August 1, 2007 in the journal Anglia (volume 125, issue 1).

Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915 (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915 Ann L. Ardis Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895–1915. Martha H. Patterson . Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Pp. xii + 230. $35.00 (cloth). Cultural historians and literary critics have used the term "New Woman" exclusively to describe white, well-educated, politically progressive activists and realistic women writers at the turn of the twentieth century. In her richly archival study, Martha Patterson emphasizes instead "the important regional, ethnic, and political differences of the American New Woman" as an icon of modernity (16), as figured in the work of seven American women writers: Margaret Murray Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Edith Wharton, Sui Sin Far, Mary Johnston, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather. A chapter on Charles Dana Gibson's popular illustrations establishes "the rhetorical and visual context" within which Patterson interprets these writers' "literary production" (22). Taking important cues from Dale Bauer's work on cultural dialogics and Judith Butler's on the performativity of gender, Patterson explores how these turn-of-the-century writers reconfigure the dominant trope of the New Woman by reading "that discourse in relationship to the other circulating 'new' tropes" (22)—that of the "New Negro," the "New Negro Woman," the "New China," the "New South"—which they alternately "co-opted, rejected, transformed, and/or reiterated" (26). Demonstrating how "a seemingly celebratory term like the New Woman" can emblematize not only "progressive reform, consumer power, and transgressive femininity" but also "racial and ethnic taxonomies, social Darwinism, and imperialist ambitions" (26), Patterson productively complicates the American New Woman's literary and cultural history, reinforcing the "important shift in New Woman criticism" first registered in the efforts of scholars such as Kathy Peiss, Susan Glenn, and Marjorie Wheeler to give the term "New Woman" "essential class, ethnic, and regional specificity" (18). While Patterson does not herself stress this point, her study lends support to the argument Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham have recently made about both "the importance of the periodical press in the New Woman phenomenon" and the instrumental role that New Woman writers and the New Woman debates played "in developing the periodical press in all its diversity and polyvocality" at the turn of the twentieth century.1 As noted above, Patterson describes her project's focus as being on the "literary production" of these writers, and this study does indeed include extensive close readings of novels and short fiction. Yet one of the most interesting aspects of this book is its treatment of these writers' contributions to a fascinatingly diverse array of national, regional, and local periodicals and both highbrow and middlebrow mass circulation magazines as they engaged in contemporary debates regarding the various sociopolitical trends that "signaled hope for and anxiety about political and economic change in a new century" (22). If, for example, Sui Sin Far's "attitude toward the Chinese New Woman" is "necessarily … vexed because each word in the phrase is at the center of a contested sociopolitical debate" (24), it is also vexed because she is negotiating a complexly fragmented public sphere, writing for regional journals such as Walter Blackburn Harte's Lotus (Kansas City) and The Land of Sunshine: An Illustrated Monthly of Southern California, as well as for progressive, nationally syndicated periodicals such as The Independent. In the case of a writer like Willa Cather, the articles and literary reviews that reveal so much about her ambivalent fascination with the power and danger of a figure associated at once with "modernity, 'degeneracy,' professionalism, education, 'downright grit,' and gender transgression" (154) were collected and edited in the 1970s—and thus have been readily available to students and scholars for some time. By contrast, although Hopkins' "magazine novels" have recently been collected and edited, her writings for the Colored [End Page 168] American Magazine have not. This study's wealth of references to uncollected periodical press writings speaks volumes about the complex staging of "a public sphere that is not one."2 In this regard, though revisionary public sphere theory remains just beyond Patterson's explicit horizon of interests in this study, her research complements the arguments that scholars such as Todd...

What Makes a Quotation Familiar?

This is the debut of an occasional column exploring topics outside the purview of Reference & User. Services Quarterly's regular columns.--Editor The ideal college is Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and a student at the other. This quotation--or something close to it--has become virtually a slogan among advocates of a liberal education. Even if you don't know who Mark Hopkins was--and I used this quotation for years without knowing anything about him--you get the point with this homely image: Hopkins is the kind of professor who takes the time to really get close to his students. He's not just chatting with students; he's sitting on a log with them. Those of us who like this quotation use it because it has the appeal of a rich, seemingly historical tradition: even if the tete-a-tete between student and teacher took place a long time ago, the symbolic force of the image is still pertinent today: Mark Hopkins sitting on a log with a student seems to combine the grandeur of myth with the homespun quality of a folktale. It also suggests a parable--quintessentially American--about what a real education should be. Even if Mark Hopkins did not in actual fact sit on a log with a student, we want the story to be true. This aphorism is often used by humanists to criticize penurious educationists who are more concerned with academic infrastructure than with people. The idyllic image of the log, student, and teacher is rhetorically very effective--we are churlish if we think a genuine college education requires anything more than the basic ingredients of a teacher and a student. Mark Hopkins and a presumably attentive student thus serve as an ideal symbolic image of an egalitarian, rustic, albeit rather sentimentalized, vision of a college education. Am I reading too much into this simple image? I don't think so. That's what memorable quotations are all about: they resonate with associations. I think we can argue that the parable I have imagined functions as a significant, albeit minor, work of American cultural and intellectual history. When the ideal professor-student relationship is pictured so compellingly, who wouldn't want to have a one-on-one with an illustrious scholar-teacher like Mark Hopkins? It turns out that documented history gives credence to the tale I've imagined. Hopkins was a classics professor who was also president of Williams College from 1836 to 1872. This proverbial log image was apparently coined by James Abram Garfield, himself a professor of classics, and later the twentieth president of the United States. Until I looked up the quotation recently, I did not know exactly who Hopkins was, let alone that Garfield apparently was the author of it. I had read this quotation and even used it once, with what I thought was considerable rhetorical success, at a convention of academic librarians. I stood up as a member of the audience in the question-and-answer period after a panel presentation proposing that librarians act as tutors to students. It pleased me to tell the panel that the innovative tutorial system they thought they were originating had already been invented years ago by Mark Hopkins when he sat on a log with a student. At that time my rhetorical point was made, not because I knew anything about who the real Mark Hopkins was, but simply because the quotation I remembered had the lofty-but-homely associations I've just described. (Oh, yes, it helped my cause that I said the words in a way strongly suggesting I did know what I was talking about.) I now can claim to know a little more about this quotation and about the real Mark Hopkins. It turns out that there are some interesting differences between the actual Mark Hopkins and the imaginary one I have just described. The real Mark Hopkins published a number of books about ethics as well as being a teacher of Greek and Latin, but he was not a renowned scholar. His reputation both as teacher and president of Williams College centered on his conviction that education of the spirit was more important than education of the intellect. …