Henry Reed's poem of the Second World War offers a studied, ironic catalogue of some parts of experience silencing others. Here are observable facts, given as imperative command; knowledge of their use is for the future, rather than a possession of the present, however: one of the many things we (or you) have not got. Here also is the beauty of nature and its utter irrelevance to the human struggle. “Naming of Parts” excludes more than it includes: what is not said constantly overbears and threatens to break through what is. But the balance of information is precariously maintained, the unspeakable, the horror which is the truth of the war being disguised, expressed, and controlled in the naming of parts.

In a very different register, William Gass writes in his Habitations of the Word,

Lists, then, are for those who savor, who revel and wallow, who embrace, not only the whole of things, but all of its accounts, histories, descriptions, justifications.

‘Ours is an era of “cases”,’ Diana Trilling wrote several years ago, ‘starting with the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the 1920s, proceeding through the Hiss and Oppenheimer cases to the Rosenberg case, the Chessman case, the Eichmann case, and [the subject of Mrs Trilling's essay]…culminating…in the Profumo case.’ We could add several since then, of course, and her chronology is misleading – the Rosenbergs having followed Hiss but preceded Oppenheimer – but Mrs Trilling's point, that such cases and others provoked within their society basic ‘confrontation(s) between opposing social principles’, remains valid. The Hiss, Rosenberg and Oppenheimer episodes were American society's most controversial post-World War II security cases. Each in turn dramatized the political and cultural impact of the Cold War for large numbers of Americans. They serve as useful paradigms, when examined together, for studying the process by which complex problems of evidence are reduced to compelling images of an event. Almost from the moment the ‘facts’ emerged in each case they congealed, first into partisan accounts and then into minor mythologies, in which each case became the subject-matter for a simple morality tale. Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Robert Oppenheimer, and the supporting caste in each drama achieved, in their own time, the status of icons in the demonologies and hagiographies of the opposing camps. Looking recently through the dreary record of trials and hearings connected with security problems during the Truman-Eisenhower era, I found certain continuities in the appraisal by intellectuals and politicians of these three otherwise singular episodes.

This article offers a revisionist reading of the aesthetic of the American modernist poet George Oppen. It seeks, in the first instance, to supplement those established readings of Oppen that have concluded that his work is most profitably understood in the discursive contexts of American literary modernism and modern European Continental philosophy by arguing that such approaches overlook a key indigenous intellectual influence upon his corpus: that body of philosophical inquiry and cultural self-reflection that has come to be known as American pragmatism. The article attempts to rectify this omission by making two simultaneous and complementary suggestions: first, that pragmatic thought opens up a number of formal and semantic questions – indeed, a number of questions about the relationship between form and meaning – that have been too little considered in recent work on American poetry; and second, that something crucial to Oppen's poetry remains unthinkable without sustained attention to the questions and claims that pragmatism places at the very heart of its endeavour. While the relationship between pragmatist thought and Oppen's poetics helps to illuminate a set of concerns that lies at the very core of his aesthetic, the paper will argue, it also reciprocally exposes the limitations of an influential genealogical vision of American literary modernism. To support this contention it examines the ways in which a certain literary version of American intellectual history has reinterpreted the pragmatism of William James in the image of an Emersonian linguistic scepticism in order to establish the historical centrality of a broadly Romantic genealogy of American modernism. The paper concludes by suggesting that a renewed attention to the specific forms and modalities of Oppen's poetry demonstrates not only the inadequacy of this version of literary history to a particular tradition of American poetics, but also promises to recover the force and distinctiveness of the American pragmatist inheritance for succeeding generations of writers.

Ode to a Spring Uniform

O believe me if all of the flagrant bright blue,

Which to many an eye has brought hurt,

Were to fade in the wash to some delicate hue,

Both the blouse and the unplaited skirt.

Thou wouldst then be more fit for the pupils to wear,

Though thy advocates boost thee sky high,

For this loud awful color is more than we'll bear

If thy shade can be changed by a dye

Marcus Garvey's ideology had special meaning to West Indian migrants because it helped their economic adjustment in the United States. Despite the relocation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association to New York City, Garvey continued to speak predominantly to West Indians at home and abroad, since he shared their colonial mentality and understood their migrant ideology – the search for economic gain abroad in order to multiply options back home. Garvey scholars have argued that black Americans benefited from Garvey rhetoric as much as West Indian migrants, but tensions between the two communities suggest that black Americans did not think so. Garveyism served to accentuate economic rivalries as black Americans suspected that migrants wanted to transfer their material success back home – indeed, Garvey openly encouraged as much.

From 2002 to 2004, the children's animated series Liberty's Kids aired on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the United States' public television network. It runs over forty half-hour episodes and features a stellar cast, including such celebrities as Walter Cronkite, Michael Douglas, Yolanda King, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Liam Neeson, and Annette Bening. Television critics generally loved it, and there are now college students who can trace their interest in the American Revolution to having watched this series when they were children. At the turn of the twenty-first century, it is the most extended and in-depth encounter with the American Revolution that most young people in the United States are likely to have encountered, and is appropriately patriotic and questioning, celebratory and chastening. Although children certainly learn a great deal about multiculturalism from popular culture, the tropes and limitations of depicting history on television trend toward personification, toward reduced complexity and, for children, toward resisting examining the darker sides of human experience. As this essay suggests, the genre's limits match the limits of a multicultural history in its attempt to show diversity and agency during a time when “liberty and justice for all” proved to be more apt as an aspiration at best and an empty slogan at worst than as an accurate depiction of the society that proclaimed it. This essay is not an effort to be, as Robert Sklar put it, a “historian cop,” policing the accuracy of the series by patrolling for inaccuracies. Rather, it is a consideration of the inherent difficulties of trying to apply a multicultural sensibility to a portrayal of the American Revolution.

Aside from William Faulkner it is difficult to think of a white twentieth-century American writer who has negotiated the issue of race in as sustained, unflinching and intelligent a fashion as Russell Banks. Whilst the impulse to produce novels on the grand scale shows little sign of diminishing, authors opting to place race at the very centre of their great American fictions remain relatively rare. With a couple of notable exceptions, most of the major works produced by white American authors over the past decade – whether by elder statesmen such as Updike, DeLillo or Pynchon or younger writers such as Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace – appear to quarantine the topic.

African American writers often express great affection for barbecue, a food many describe as “scrumptious” – to use a term that recurs throughout Bobby Seale's cookbook, Barbeque'n with Bobby (1988) – and invest with a particular capacity to lend shape and coherence to the idea of the African Diaspora. In the writings of Ntozake Shange, Albert Murray, Alice Walker, and others, barbecue seems able to reunite black communities, to gather together people dispersed across the USA or even the world. This literary use of barbecue is epitomized by Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), the concluding pages of which make the food central to a rejuvenating Diasporic optimism that stands in sharp contrast to the novel's desolate opening description of Celie's sexual abuse. Having grown up in West Africa, Adam, offspring of Celie's rape, finally meets his mother at a barbecue held in the American South. The food provides a conversation opener, a point of contact that the estranged family badly need:

Everybody make a lot of miration over Tashi. People look at her and Adam's scars like that's they business. Say they never suspect African ladies could look so good. They make a fine couple. Speak a little funny, but us gitting use to it.

This article identifies the humble beard as a device used in twenty-first-century American literature to examine the contemporary condition of American masculinity. Drawing on readings from key writers of post-9/11 fiction, such as John Updike, Moshin Hamid, and Don DeLillo, the article calls for the need to move on from the reductive rendering of the beard as an irrefutable representation of Otherness to see the beard as a device used to explore the construction of masculinities in relation to key issues such as racialization, sexuality and the queering of the Other, and nationhood in the globalized and globalizing arena of the United States. Reading Amy Waldman's nuanced engagement with the beard in The Submission (2011) alongside key works on hegemonic masculinity, whiteness, and globalized masculinities, the article underlines the power of the beard in the contradictions and complexities of a changing American masculinity now performed beyond the physical borders of “the nation” on the global stage.

This essay explores growing disillusionment with the national Democratic Party in the southern United States, disillusionment that led to third-party movements such as the Dixiecrats and George Wallacism, and eventually southern allegiance to the modern Republican Party. The essay focusses on Alabama during the first half of the 1940s, where a “Great Melding” between economic conservatism and racial conservatism came to maturity. The melding resulted in a cross-class and pan-white alliance in a state that had experienced periodic plain-white challenges to business and planter elite dominance. It also resulted in the use by economic conservatives of white supremacy and allied conservative norms on gender, class, religion, and militaristic hyper-patriotism to suppress future working-class insurgency, and set the stage for a more formal southern disassociation from the Democratic Party and eventual conversion to Republicanism.

This essay explores the formative but largely unacknowledged role played by women in shaping the material and intellectual cultural productions of the mimeograph revolution in mid-century New York City. I argue that women poets used their positions as editors of little magazines to claim space – material, textual, cultural, and metaphorical – in literary and social networks in which they faced gendered marginalization. I suggest that the varied success with which they were able to do so reveals the complexities of editing, the uneven nature of the influences of gender, the determining role of domestic spaces, and the significance of affective labor in relation to the mimeograph revolution.

This essay examines the first monument dedicated to the US oil industry, the Drake Memorial in Titusville, Pennsylvania (1899–1901), as an influential project of corporate self-representation. Commissioned by Standard Oil, the memorial shaped a public image for the petroleum industry that addressed concerns about the sustainability and social effects of oil capitalism, and established the key terms for a promotional discourse that would circulate throughout the twentieth century. This discourse, which I call “petro-primitivism,” reimagined the ultramodern oil industry as an extension of timeless practices rooted in an imagined archaic past. By shaping a primitivist spectacle that figured oil as an eternal component of the natural world and a primordial object of “human” endeavor, I argue, the Drake Memorial encouraged audiences to take the long view on oil: to adopt an expansive perspective that reconceived oil as a timelessly abundant element, and the boom-and-bust oil industry as an age-old venture. These tropes proved useful to the industry throughout the crises of the early twentieth century, reappearing in corporate displays and filtering into the rhetoric of industry advertising and publicity. Accordingly, I examine two later projects that appropriated the themes of petro-primitivism: the Sinclair Oil exhibit at the 1933–34 World's Fair, and Sun Oil's exhibit Oil Serves America at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia (1953–c.1962). Echoing the earlier Drake Memorial, these displays employed strategies drawn from public art and civic architecture to organize collective experiences around the image of oil. By examining these popular exhibits alongside the Drake Memorial, I aim to offer a new account of the promotional culture of the early petroleum industry that explores the intersections between the traditional arts and industry publicity and illuminates the vital role that cultural representations played in accommodating twentieth-century Americans to the dynamic structures of petro-capitalism.

The Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974 was the largest global gathering of evangelical Christians in the latter half of the twentieth century. Lausanne was significant, in part because of the struggle between two sets of evangelical leaders: those, led by the US, who wanted to retain a focus on “evangelism,” and the young radicals, led by Latin Americans, who demanded a broader attention to “social concern.” This essay traces the impact of the liberalizing faction, while also following the “evangelism-first” movement and its role in the rise of the religious right in the US in the 1980s.

In 1911, at the age of fifty-one, Harriet Monroe of Chicago decided to seek in that city sponsorship for a magazine devoted solely to the publication and criticism of poetry. It was a bold project, if not an unlikely one. America had never had such a journal. Chicago had a reputation as the graveyard of little magazines. There appeared to be scant supply of good new poetry and less demand. Moreover, it was doubtful that Chicago's intermittent patronage of the arts could be diverted from the publicly prestigious forums of the Art Institute and the Chicago Symphony.

Carvel Collins's collection of Faulkner's Early Prose and Poetry, containing mainly material written between 1919 and 1922, with one or two items from 1925, introduces the reader to a young author who is not only concerned with questions of his craft but also engaged by several of the dominant aesthetic, intellectual and critical arguments of his day. Let me briefly list some of those engagements: Faulkner's review of Conrad Aiken's Turns and Movies and his renderings of Symbolist poetry demonstrate his interest in the proper language of poetry; the essay ‘On Criticism’ presents him sparring with notions of what good criticism could and should achieve; in his piece on Eugene O'Neill he expresses surprise that O'Neill had chosen to write first about the sea rather than about the more familiar land, and of W. A. Percy he says ‘like every man who…ever lived, he is the victim of his age’ (p. 72)—comments which hint at thoughts on the disparity between life and art (a recurrent subject in his poems), which was a chief critical point in the feverish debates of the time between the emerging ‘literary radicals’ like Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks and the ‘new humanists’, such as Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt. Also, in ‘American Drama: Inhibitions’, Faulkner stresses the importance of native subject-matter for the American writer, taking ‘the old Mississippi river days’ and ‘the romantic growth of the railroads’ (44) as examples. In the same essay, like Brooks and H. L. Mencken before him, he points out the comparative richness of the American tongue: thus it is no surprise to learn that Mencken's The American Language (1919) is listed in the Appendix to William Faulkner's Library—A Catalogue as one of the books Phil Stone ordered with his younger friend ‘in mind’.

When William Ferguson, an English botanist and entomologist, called at the Detroit home of General Lewis Cass in June 1855, it was natural that during “ a very lengthened and interesting conversation,” the veteran American politician should mention “ the absurd books ” written by British travellers about the United States. “ They come over here,” said Cass, “ run over the country for three months, and think they understand it.” Such sentiments, of course, were commonplace by this time and Ferguson could not have been surprised by the frankness with which they were elucidated. Cass had reached political maturity during a period in which the British traveller became the focus for intense and hostile speculation in the United States. There was no more appropriate target for Jacksonian wrath, for example, than Mrs. Frances Trollope. Her Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832 and widely extracted in American newspapers, helped give broad popular legitimacy to the bitter critical dialogues which pervaded the Anglo-American intellectual community after 1815. During the Jacksonian period, therefore, the British traveller could claim an important role in the development of Atlantic perceptions and attitudes.

This is a version of a paper read to the conference of the European Association for American Studies at Rome in September 1967. The subject, which was prescribed by the organizers, is clearly too vast to admit of definitive treatment in this space, and the essay should accordingly be regarded as no more than a tentative exploration of the topic in order to stimulate discussion. As my method relies extensively on allusions and short quotations it seemed undesirable to over-burden this printed version with footnotes locating precisely the source of every such reference. I have instead indicated in the text wherever possible the title of the work cited, and it may be helpful to add here that the essays of Emerson on which I have mainly drawn are these: ‘Nature’ (1836), ‘The Transcendentalist’ (1843), and ‘The Poet’ (1844).

He is tempted to cease battling; his blood begins to chill; he hears the frost-king's lullaby. But as he is about to yield to sleep, he is startled back into militance by the cry of a titmouse, a small “scrap of valor” that “just for play/Fronts the north-wind.” The courage of the bird returns to him his own and he adopts its Emersonian doctrine that “the soul, if stout within/Can arm impregnably the skin.”

The freshness that Emerson's contemporaries found in his writings derived largely from this brisk militant quality. In an age that Emerson thought lacking in a “literature of Heroism,” his own writings were a constant call to bravery (CWE, 2, 247–48). And his most consistent image for that bravery was the soldier. Men, he said, “should calmly front the morrow” as if it were a battle-formation; they should not be “cowards fleeing before a revolution,” but instead should be “advancing on Chaos and the dark” (CWE, 2, 47, 297). One's life should be “a battle, a conquest”; one should state his convictions as boldly as if he wereopening hostilities: “Every principle is a war-note” (CWE, 9, 353). Even those in sedentary occupations should display the bravery of warriors.

Everyone agrees that the American Loyalists had a hard time of it. Not only were they on the losing side in a long and cruel war — in their case rendered particularly bitter by virtue of being a civil war — but when hostilities ended they found themselves deprived of possessions, forced into exile, severed from relations and friends, and obliged to adapt to unfamiliar customs and surroundings. For those who took refuge in what remained of British North America, as approximately half of them did — some 40,000 in all — starting over again involved special difficulties. Winters there were long and cold, and the territories in which they found themselves were mostly still in a state of nature, uncultivated, unmapped, and in some cases virtually unexplored. Indeed, how suitable these lands were for settlement was at first by no means clear. “ Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Canada,” observed William Cobbett, who visited the Maritimes shortly after the arrival of the first exiles, “ are the horns, the head, the neck, the shins and the hoof of the ox, and the United States are the ribs, the sirloin, the kidneys, and the rest of the body.” This was not entirely true, but it was a notion which must have crossed the minds of many of the refugees themselves as, wintering in their camps, they contemplated the wilderness around them.