In recent years, New Indian History has emphasized cultural synthesis. Redirecting attention away from traditional themes of conflict and conquest, historians have examined the process by which Indians and Europeans learned to coexist. Initially, according to this literature, neither side enjoyed absolute power and authority over the other. Consequently, native people and European settlers carved out a “middle ground” between their two cultures upon which they engaged in relationships based on mutual accommodation. This mode of contact led to an exchange and intermingling of European and Indian cultural forms and practices.Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Colin G. Galloway, New Worlds For All: Indians, Europeans and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

Through significant and underscored omission, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflict, through the way writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence – one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness.Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 6.

Two men wolf-whistle at Baby Doll during the play of the same name: both of these men are positioned in the shadows. We see the one, Silva Vacarro, skulking around the dilapidated Plantation house in ghostly pursuit of Baby Doll, and the other as an anonymous male on Tiger Tail Road, part of a group of “White an’ black mixed.” Both of these men represent an encroaching dark threat to the sexual and property rights of Archie Lee. It is no coincidence that Silva's forced intrusion into Archie's house is mirrored by the sexual trespassing of the anonymous whistler, and Archie himself challenges the invisible agitator: “trespass across my property... [and] I'll blast... [you]... out of the Bayou with a shotgun... Nobody's gonna insult no woman of mine!!” (BD, 74). Neither Archie nor Baby Doll can see the identity of the invisible menacing man, and so the threat from the shadows is communicated through implicit rather than explicit dialogue. Interestingly, these shadows, hovering amidst the domestic and sexual spaces, allegorize a deeper instability permeating Southern discourse: that of the blurring of racial identities and the threat of miscegenation.

American missionary movements in the nineteenth century contributed to the increasing numbers of foreign students in the United States. Many of those foreign students came from non-western societies where American missionaries were active. The missionaries encouraged and helped young natives of other lands to come to the United States for Christian education with the belief that American education was a vital process for training indigenous leaders for Christianity. Missionaries of different denominations tended to recommend students to the educational institutions they were affiliated with. For instance, Methodist missionaries directed the students to educational institutions of the Methodist Church; the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, and the Catholics, and other denominations did likewise.William Wheeler, Henry King, and Alexander Davidson, eds., The Foreign Student in America (New York: Association Press, 1925), 270. They hoped that the students, upon completion of their studies, would go back to their homelands to assume leadership in spreading Christianity.

For most of the twentieth century, the predominant view of Edgar Allan Poe held him to be a passionate aesthete with little interest in the political and social issues of his time. However, in recent years, there have been numerous scholarly efforts to place Poe back into his cultural milieu and to illustrate that rather than an apolitical romantic Poe was indeed a man very much engaged in the major debates of his day. Much of this attempt to historicize Poe has focused on the issue of slavery and has reconstructed Poe as a typical antebellum Southerner, possessing aristocratic pretensions, racist opinions, and an overwhelming – though perhaps subconscious – fear of slaves and their potential for uprising.For a sampling of recent studies that address Poe, the South, and slavery, see Richard Gray, ‘ “I am a Virginian’: Edgar Allan Poe and the South,” in Edgar Allan Poe: The Design of Order, ed. A. Robert Lee (London: Vision, 1987), 182–201; Louis Rubin, The Edge of the Swamp: A Study of Literature and Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); John Carlos Rowe, “Poe, Antebellum Slavery, and Modern Criticism,” in Poe's Pym: Critical Explorations, ed. Richard Kopley (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 117–41; Joan Dayan, “Romance and Race,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 89–109; Dana Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading ‘Race’ in American Literature, 1638–1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Scott Bradfield, Dreaming Revolution: Transgression in the Development of American Romance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993) ; James Livingston, “Subjectivity and Slavery in Poe's Autobiography of Ambitious Love,” Psychohistory Review, 21 (1993): 175–96; Joan Dayan, “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” American Literature, 66 (1994): 239–73; Sam Worley, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the Ideology of Slavery,” ESQ, 40 (1994): 219–50; David Leverenz, “Poe and Gentry Virginia,” in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, eds. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 210–37; Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Nancy Harrowitz, “Criminality and Poe's Orangutan: The Question of Race in Detection,” in Agonistics: Arenas of Creative Conflict, eds. Janet Lungstrum and Elizabeth Sauer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 177–95; Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and Lesley Ginsberg, “Slavery and the Gothic Horror of Poe's ‘The Black cat,’ ” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, eds. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 99–128. Recently, Terence Whalen has challenged many of the assertions of these critics in Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum American (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). This body of work has convincingly illustrated the connections between Poe's often ignored views on slavery and fictional works such as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Black cat,” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” One of Poe's final stories, “Hop-Frog” (1849), a tale of an abused dwarf's violent revenge upon his cruel master, would certainly lend itself to an examination of the author's views on slavery but has never been fruitfully employed in this discussion apart from being briefly mentioned in larger discussions of Poe and slavery by Harry Levin, Louis Rubin, and, most recently, Joan Dayan, who has argued that “Hop-Frog,” Poe's “most horrible tale of retribution,” is his “envisioned revenge for the national sin of slavery.”Dayan, “Amorous Ladies,” 258. See also Dayan, “Romance and Race,” 103–04; Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1957), 122; and Rubin, The Edge of the Swamp, 183–89.

The practices of abortion and infanticide seem worthy of at least a fleeting mention in most studies of slave women in the United States, yet few historians mention the use of contraception. Those who do, usually conclude that little is known about the subject, but that it is probably not particularly significant. This article will discuss the use of contraception among slaves and will concentrate, in particular, on the use of cotton roots as a form of birth-control. Evidence that the cotton root was used for this purpose is taken mainly from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) narratives, edited by George Rawick.George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Vols. 2–41 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972–1979). As yet, the author has come across only a few references to the use of cotton roots as a form of contraception in any other source. The WPA narratives are a controversial source, but, in sifting through every single interview, the multiple references to such an intimate practice were striking and demanded attention. This article forms part of a chapter from a thesis which looks at the work of slave women in the American South.Liese M. Perrin, “Slave Women and Work in the American South” (University of Birmingham: Ph.D. diss., 1999).

A thorough reading of the WPA narratives reveals not only that slave women used contraception, but also that it may have been very effective. In the context of slave women and work, this is a significant discovery, as the evidence, which is detailed below, suggests that slave women not only understood that their childbearing capacity was seen in terms of producing extra capital, but that they were sufficiently opposed to this function to actually avoid conception. The use of contraception can be seen not only as a form of resistance, but also, more specifically, as a form of strike, since reproduction was an important work role for most slave women.

Life in the cultural shallows tested the character of American art. Where the Depression had encouraged artists to engage in social and political criticism, the early cold war years constricted and confounded them. By conflating dissent and disloyalty, the triumphant conservatism of the cold war not only shifted the frame of cultural reference dramatically to the right, it narrowed it as well. This had a profound impact on America's cultural establishment. With conservatives now in possession of the moral absolutes, the more politically progressive artists felt pressed into the position of endorsing ambivalence and moderation. The result, for many, was a quiet retreat from principle; unwilling to blindly adopt the conservatives' standard of good and evil, and yet unable to risk their own, forward-thinking artists ended up chronicling rather than challenging their age. So much of fifties art became an exploration of the ordinary – domestic comedy, social commentary, “wistful melodrama,” sermons on rootlessness or delinquency or affluence – instead of a questioning of the larger truths. Tragedy, which, by challenging certitudes, required the moral commitment of liberal writers, became, in this context, anachronistic. “We are not producing real tragedy,” observed Leonard Bernstein in 1952, because “caution prevents it, all the fears prevent it; and we are left, at the moment, with an art that is rather whiling away the time until the world gets better or blows up.” Art had adopted the Technicolor blandness of the age.B. Witham, “Appropriately Wistful: Blacklisting and the American Theatre,” Exchange (winter, 1978), 11–17; Leonard Bernstein to Irving Fine, 19 Sept. 1952, cited in H. Burton, Leonard Bernstein (New York: 1994), 229, J. Elsom makes the same point in Cold War Theatre (London: 1992), Ch.2.

Unlike Beloved (1987), the first volume in Toni Morrison's loose trilogy of novels charting the history of African Americans – and an instant entrant to the contemporary canon – the third volume, Paradise (1998), has not been given the hagiographic reception the Pulitzer-Prize-winning earlier novel was treated to. Nor, as yet, has it received the critical attention devoted to both Beloved and the second volume, Jazz (1992). Apart from some heavyweight early reviews, especially in the American press (not all favourable, by any means), and a few scrambled “first-off” essays since, a novel which strikes the present – admittedly white, male, English – critic as raising contentious historical and political issues in a most powerful and complex way has been met with relative disregard. Why?