During an intense firefight at the Tenaru River on Guadalcanal in August of 1942, Marine Private Al Schmid, a Philadelphia metal worker, shared a machine gun emplacement with two other young Marines: Johnny Rivers, a Native-American from rural Pennsylvania, and Lee Diamond, a Jew from Brooklyn. During many hours of night combat, as wave after wave of Japanese tried unsuccessfully to cross the Tenaru and overwhelm the thin line of American defenders, first Rivers was shot and instantly killed, and then Diamond was severely wounded. Furious over the death of his friend and fighting for his life, Schmid continued to try to ward off the enemy. Toward the end of the battle, which was to prove decisive for securing Guadalcanal, he was wounded by a grenade fragment. One of his eyes was immediately destroyed and the other was greatly damaged. Now sightless, Schmid continued, with what little aid the barely conscious Diamond could provide, to fire the machine gun. Eventually he was credited with killing two hundred Japanese before his position was relieved in the morning. Schmid spent much of the next two years in military hospitals, where unsuccessful efforts were made to save what little sight remained to him, and where he began the process of blind rehabilitation.

When Time magazine profiled him in March 1964, John Cheever wrote an entry in his journal which imagined his daughter Susan's thoughts:

After they put Daddy's picture on the cover of Time, he seemed to lose something… I don't mean like Dorian Gray or anything but like a savage who thinks that if he is photographed he will have lost part of his image. A man came up to the house … and painted a picture of Daddy. It was painted in a definite style, a magazine cover style, and Daddy seemed to get himself mixed up with all the kings and presidents and so forth who had been on the cover before him. I mean he seemed in some way locked into the cover, fixed there, impressed on the paper. Once I lost my temper at him and said I don't think anybody's impressed by the fact that you had your face on Time magazine … They have all kinds of people; broken down ball players and crooks. It hurt his feelings, you could see.

Cheever's words give some suggestion both of the importance authors attached to the Time cover story, which at the peak of the magazine's influence was widely perceived as the apotheosis of American fame, and of their confusion over what it actually signified. This essay aims to explore this ambivalence by investigating the ways in which Time featured novelists, poets and playwrights as the subjects of its cover stories in the period from the magazine's first issue in 1923 to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it began to lose some of its status as “the National Poet Laureate.” Time owed this status to its position as champion of the “middlebrow,” being designed “for the lady from Dubuque … and for the President of the United States” and combining commercial success with semi-institutional legitimacy.

Historians have long recognized the unprecedented expansion of federal power during the Civil War. Moreover most scholars agree that the expansion of federal power manifested itself most immediately and profoundly in the abolition of slavery. In a sense, through the Emancipation Proclamation, the Republican administration injected the national government into the domain of civil rights, and by doing so imbued federal power with a distinct moral purpose. The passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments codified this expression of federal authority, rejecting the bedrock tenet in American republican thought that centralized power constituted the primary threat to individual liberty.

In an 1856 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine the literary critic and biographer T. A. Richards conducted his readers through a house tour of famous literary residences in the Hudson River Valley. His itinerary and choice of authors were typical of the time. By using the picturesque vocabulary common to antebellum travel literature, Richards offered a vicarious glimpse into the domestic arrangements of successful writers and artists. He painted an edenic picture of gentility in the midst of the Hudson Valley's natural splendor. We read, for example, of the “broad lawns and slopes of Placentia,” the Hyde Park estate of the novelist James Kirke Paulding; and the “mysterious evening shadow” of Susan Warner's home on Constitution Island, just off West Point. “Dearest to us of all,” Richards added, was Sunnyside, Washington Irving's renovated Dutch farmhouse at Tarrytown. These elegant and vaguely romantic properties seemed utterly appropriate for the literary elite of the region. Like Hawthorne's Old Manse, they were architectural spaces indelibly suited to their masters' talents and temperaments.

At the opening of a magnificent career in fiction, Henry James's first novel, Watch and Ward, has appeared gauche, bizarre and unaccountable. With its overtones of incest and paedophilia, it is hard to imagine what James can have been thinking of. Yet he wrote to Charles Eliot Norton, whose opinion he respected, apparently assuming that Norton would understand what he was trying to do. Perhaps a text offered with such optimism is not quite the anomaly it seems at first sight: it may in fact have been conceived within a context and in response to circumstances clear to its author but long since obscured.

Historians generally agree that in the 1950s and 1960s organized labour in the United States had become thoroughly bureaucratized. This is often explained as part of a general process of growth and maturity. In their lean, radical youth in the 1930s, those American unions which had launched the Congress of Industrial Organizations had aimed at two targets: to organize and bargain collectively, as promised by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act; and then to use this power to press for wider industrial democracy and social reform. By the time the CIO was reunited with the American Federation of Labor in 1955, this picture had been substantially changed. Increasingly labour cooperated with management and had become part of the white, male, liberal corporate power structure which ran the American capitalist industrial and political system. This military-industrial complex was the indispensable basis, not just for American prosperity but the whole Cold War strategy of containment of communism through the Pax Americana.

Ever since it was first staged in May 1992, Mamet's Oleanna seems, on both sides of the Atlantic, to have been perceived, publicised and reviewed almost exclusively as a manifestation of backlash sexual politics — that is, as a work characterised by outrage and hostility towards the agenda of contemporary feminism. Although the play entered the public arena too late to be addressed in Susan Faludi's 1992 study Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, its attitudes have typically been read as symptomatic of the same aggrieved and aggressive masculinity which Faludi diagnoses in such exemplary texts as Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990). The play also lends itself with deceptive ease to a comparison with one of Faludi's most alarming paradigms of backlash popular culture, the Hollywood blockbuster Fatal Attraction. Both narratives depict a fundamentally decent man, loyal to wife and family, who becomes the target of and is almost destroyed by the machinations of a vengeful single woman. In both cases the action culminates in an explosive physical assault on the offending female character. And, in performance, the violence of both denouements releases and apparently sanctions a similar surge of vicarious male aggression. Howls of “Kick her ass!” and “Kill the bitch!” were a regular occurrence at screenings of Fatal Attraction, and audience reaction to Oleanna has often followed the same pattern: Elaine Showalter reports a male acquaintance saying “I nearly climbed up on the stage to kick the shit out of the little bitch myself.”

H. L. Mencken's antagonism to women's issues seems paradoxical in a man so committed to emancipation and the reexamination of conventional social roles — the very goals for which the women's movement was fighting during the early decades of the twentieth century. The apparent discord of Mencken's attacks on suffragettes, his deprecating depictions of womanhood, and his thinly veiled vilification of women as a source of cultural mediocrity have spurred critics to explain, reformulate, or deny Mencken's disturbing prejudice. Edward A. Martin quixotically suggests that Mencken only “posed as an antifeminist,” while Charles A. Fecher wonders why “today's advocates of ‘women's liberation’ have not resurrected In Defense of Women” — Mencken's lashing satire on the female in America, grossly misread by Fecher as a tribute to women's “intelligence.” But Mencken was not “posing” as an antifeminist any more than he was pretending to be anti-Philistine. His views of women were not only consistent with his own cultural philosophy but joined a paradigm of masculinism underlying the definition of American culture during these years.

This essay does not deny Mencken's considerable contributions to the scene of American letters in the early twentieth century. Alarm at the recently published diaries — which illustrate Mencken's disposition to be “careless of the decencies” in his random remarks on African-Americans and Jews — while justified, often de-contextualizes his opinions from the wider cultural atmosphere. Regarding his views on women as well, I argue that metaphoric and broadly philosophical foundations place many of his views within a larger climate of opinion seeking to link the rise of the feminine with intellectual mediocrity.

Twenty American military cemeteries dot the pastoral countryside of western Europe. Casualties of the Great War, numbering 31,000, are buried in eight sites: 73,000 of America's 93,000 overseas burials from the Second World War are interred in twelve European cemeteries. These “silent cities” are monuments to an enduring result of global conflict: a forceful American presence in the cultural and political landscapes of other countries. The cemeteries' standardized styles, laconic epitaphs, and their removal from the sphere of family and community erase much of the sense of individual tragedy associated with premature death. Indeed, the American burial grounds were not meant to be mere memorials; they were designed primarily as representations of the American spirit abroad and as a political “foothold in Europe,” according to one of their prominent exponents. They were planned to evoke a common national cause rather than mourn the death of young soldiers. Their foreign context, the New York Times stated, meant that they would “stand forever as symbols of America, our spirit and our aesthetic.”

Between 1953 and 1961 Myles Horton's Highlander Folk School developed the Citizenship Education Program (CEP) beginning in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Within the program from 1957 onwards Septima Clark and Bernice Robinson developed Citizenship Schools centered on literacy classes. By slowly developing local leaders, like Esau Jenkins, the CEP evolved as an educational framework for social mobilization, which was later used by the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. In the summer of 1961, since the Folk School faced closure by Tennessee state authorities, Highlander transferred the CEP to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Between 1961 and 1970, hundreds of civil rights activists from across the South attended the SCLC's Citizenship School teacher training courses at the Dorchester Center near Savannah in south-east Georgia. Moreover, in the mid-1960s the Southwide Voter Education Project enabled civil rights activists from across the region to study the political organization that the CEP had spawned in Charleston county as a model for their own community work. Given its widespread influence, the CEP's work was a vital aspect of the Civil Rights Movement itself and constituted Highlander's chief contribution to it.

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has long been recognised as one of the most influential of modern American institutions. Indeed, for some scholars at least, the relationship between the Council and the federal government has been a troubling one. A private group that is exclusive and unrepresentative in membership, funded by large corporations and foundations, highly secretive about its operations, and ensconced in the centres of state power, raises serious issues of principle for a democracy. At its crudest, the question is who “controls” whom, the state or the unofficial group? Allowing for a more complex relationship between an official policy elite and outside advisors, just what are the points of convergence or divergence between these “internal” and “external” bureaucrats, as Chadwick F. Alger has called them? Such issues draw attention to the nature of the state itself, and, whatever the proper role of the CFR in the American system of government, its existence provides an opportunity to examine a number of major ideas about power and the state.

The term “isolationism,” still used today in discussions of contemporary United States policy, is “ fittingly…identified with a revulsion against the entanglements of world war.” For analysts using this concept, isolationism means American withdrawal from political connections with the rest of the world (no treaties and permanent alliances) and idealism in foreign policy (no secret clauses or deals). They consider that it has characterized American foreign policy since the first president took office and was expressed in Washington's Farewell Address in 1796 for the first time. Although the term appeared only in 1922, it is thus applied to early American foreign policy, as Lawrence S. Kaplan does in the chapter entitled “Toward isolationism: the Rise and Fall of the Franco-American Alliance 1775–1801” of his Entangling Alliances with None: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Jefferson. According to Kaplan, this speech “became an enduring symbol of America's isolation,” and he defines early “isolationism” as follows: “…a freedom to enjoy access to all ports interested in receiving American products. It meant further a freedom from subservience to any foreign power, of the kind which had forced them into the service of a maternal economy or of dynastic wars in the past. Finally, it extended to a self-image of virtue and innocence that would be protected by advancing principles of peaceful relationships among nations.”

Even if one thinks, like Albert K. Weinberg, that “isolationism” is a “poor theory,” which “has placed the discussion of American foreign policy in a sad predicament of obfuscation,” one has to admit with him that “mere scholars can change no social habit.”

The recent writings of Thomas McGuane show a particular interest in environmentalist concerns, examining the role played by inherited mythologies of the frontier in the ecology and politics of the contemporary American West. McGuane's explorations reveal complex and ambivalent responses to these subjects, in part liberal, radical and conservative.

This essay will discuss these issues in relation to contemporary American attitudes to nature. The basis for my approach will be to assume that conceptions of “nature” are socially constructed, and that “nature” and “culture” are separate but mutually interdependent. The relationship between human societies and the natural world will therefore be considered as an ongoing process in which the term “nature” must not be wholly subsumed under that of “culture.” Environmental history is, as Donald Worster puts it, “a story of reciprocity and interaction rather than of culture replacing nature.”

Thomas McGuane's writings tend both to repeat and to question what may be called “traditional” or “Romantic” attitudes to nature. In particular, he combines both aesthetic and utilitarian perspectives: nature as a scene of spiritual restoration through the appreciation of beauty, and as the object of technological mastery and control. In practice, these two approaches are historically interrelated, in that they are both responses to, and constructions of, nature produced within an urban capitalist society. As Walter J. Ong has argued, a necessary precondition for Romantic attitudes to nature is a society that has confidence in its capacity to dominate nature, through the use of the very industrial technologies such attitudes ostensibly reject.

In the relatively short history of Hemingway studies, a significant controversy has erupted as to how early and to what degree Gertrude Stein influenced Ernest Hemingway's early style. The earlier commentators (whose works date roughly from 1952 to 1973) agree that Gertrude Stein significantly influenced Hemingway's early style from 1921 to 1924. For instance, Philip Young writes that “similarities between his prose and hers suggest indeed that he learned a lot. What she had tried to do in the days when Hemingway was a boy was remarkably like what the young man was going one day to try to do, too.” Charles Fenton concurs, writing that Hemingway responded to Stein's method “between 1922 and 1924, the period of Miss Stein's greatest personal importance to him.” Carlos Baker reports that Stein provided sound advice and that “nearly any 23-year-old author could profit by it,” which is “what Hemingway did whenever he sat down at the typewriter.” Finally, Sheldon Grebstein concludes that “Hemingway brought [Stein's] experiments to fruition and made it [her style] a major resource of his style.”

Women's traditional place on the American frontier has been as invisible helpmate or at best as some shadowy figure who appeared occasionally when describing pioneer homes and lifestyles. Until recently, historians followed the individualistic and linear progression of Frederick Jackson Turner westward across the continent and found no need to discuss the activities of both sexes. Euro-American men were fully capable of explaining the frontier, both as authors and as subjects. But the American frontier is no longer one-dimensional. Increasing numbers of female historians have insisted on not only placing women in the midst of established pioneering ventures, but have widened western horizons to discuss different pioneers and new economic and social roles for women of all ethnic and racial groups. Women's place on the frontier has now become so central that it is impossible to make any sense of new settlement patterns without examining the experiences of both men and women and their relationships to each other.