In his role as a promoter of scientific exploration of North America, Thomas Jefferson shared with Jedidiah Morse, considered by many to be the father of American geography, the patriotic desire to counteract misinformation furnished by “imperfect and erroneous sketches” describing the continent's geography by European writers. Yet his interest in the science of geography was also motivated by a concern with America's self-image in the realm of international politics, learning, and commerce. In the summer of 1802 Jefferson was prompted to send an exploring party to North America's westernmost territories in response to reading Voyages from Montreal, Alexander Mackenzie's account of his voyages across the continent to its northwest coast. At the end of his narrative, the Scottish explorer had encouraged Britain's control of a region that, if certain natural obstacles were overcome, might supply fur and fish to “the markets of the four quarters of the globe,” and proposed a line of fortified posts to be established to maintain the British Empire's presence from Lake Winnipeg to the Pacific. Jefferson understood that such action would obstruct America's westward expansion, block Russian advances from Alaska, and thus make possible a British dominion linking two great oceans. Edward Thornton, the British minister to the United States, would later observe that Mackenzie's discoveries had provoked the American President, who in 1803 was also the president of the American Philosophical Society, to concretize his dream “to set on foot an expedition entirely of a scientific nature for exploring the Western continent of America,” and that he was, furthermore, “ambitious in his character of a man of letters and science, of distinguishing his Presidency by a discovery” of a route to the Pacific Ocean by way of the Missouri, “now the only one left to his enterprise, the Northern Communication having been so ably explored and ascertained by Sir Alexander Mackenzie's journeys.

While William Leuchtenburg is certainly correct in concluding that the shadow of both FDR and the New Deal is receding, the decade of the 1930s is still regarded as the acme of progressive reform in America. Although the memories of the 1930s are fading and the reforms of the decade have been contested, in this narrative the achievements of the New Deal are still heroic.

Depictions of deathbed scenes are commonplace within mid-nineteenth-century United States literary culture, particularly sentimental fiction. They serve a variety of ideological and aesthetic functions and have rightly received a good deal of critical attention. One aspect of their significance and broad impact that has not yet been included within revisionist assessments of the aesthetic and political strategies of sentimentalism provides the primary focus here. The stylized representational modes that characterize the dying of many characters in literary texts, magazine illustrations, paintings and other cultural productions were appropriated by nineteenth-century spiritualists to perform farewells between spirits and the living within the many seances that proliferated on both sides of the Atlantic from the late 1840s onward. The conventional structure of such partings, predicated on the imminent death of at least one of the participants, focused on an exemplary death in which tearful goodbyes and final words were significant features. Yet when spiritualists appropriated the formulae of such scenes it was within a set of practices that explicitly denied the fact of death at all. Since for spiritualists death was a chimera, the adoption of the symbolism of the deathbed scene as a model for how to facilitate different kinds of departure – not always those that took place between the soon to be dead and those they leave behind – took the rhetoric and practices of dying and transformed them into a new form of performance.

On 20 September 2001 the founder and CEO of a New Jersey-based face-recognition technology company called Visionics testified before a special government committee appointed by the secretary of transportation. Joseph Atick's message to the committee was simple: his company's face recognition equipment could dramatically improve security in US airports and embassies. The science of biometrics, a method of identifying people by scanning unique physical characteristics like facial structures and retinal patterns, could, claimed Atick, be deployed as part of a comprehensive national surveillance plan that he called Operation Noble Shield. According to this plan the Office of Homeland Security might take the lead and liaise with local police forces to install cameras linked to a web-based biometric network throughout American cities. In order to protect America from further terrorist acts, Atick claimed, “We need to create an invisible fence, an invisible shield.” Members of the committee liked his ideas and seemed ready to endorse his recommendations.

Of all the great silent film comedians, it is Buster Keaton who most completely inhabits and exemplifies the machine age, perhaps because, unlike other performers, Keaton repeatedly foregrounds the notion that the movie camera itself is a machine, one more device in an automated jungle of sprockets, cranks and motors. Certainly, no other comedian of the period seems so aware of the essentially mechanical nature of the medium, its specifically machine-made possibilities and absurdities; with its flattened space, accelerated tempo and discontinuous leaps in time and space, film acts as a kind of technological synonym for modernity, a modernity in which Keaton's poetic engineering and ingenuous modes of transport appear wholly, indivisibly, at home.

There are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowledge gathered and hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a key-stroke, a mouse-click, a password – world without end amen … Everything is connected in the end.

In Cane the reader is immediately struck by Jean Toomer's bold manipulation of a collage technique; he abandons progressive plotting, instead assembling a variety of disparate forms and genres. As well as signalling the heterogeneity of the collage elements through typographical layout, he stretches and scrambles familiar forms, breaking them, splitting them open and stitching them onto other genres. In a letter to Toomer on 25 April 1922, Waldo Frank describes the effect of these broken forms: “in the reading the mind does not catch on to a uniformly moving Life that conveys it whole to the end, but rather steps from piece to piece as if adventuring through the pieces of a still unorganized mosaic.” As Frank points out, Toomer abandons linear narrative and “uniform” progression, subjecting the reader to chaotic surprises and unexpected truths revealed through the process of piecing together the meaning of seemingly random fragments.

In April 1815 Mary Clarke Carr submitted an insolvency petition to the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. The petition described how Carr had failed to take in the subscription monies owed for her magazine, The Intellectual Regale, or Ladies' Tea Tray, “and lost thereby at least $200 … the receipts not being sufficient for the support of herself and family.” As a consequence of her debts, Carr was forced to sell the rights to the magazine, along with “printing press types, printing apparatus, paper and all … & every other thing &c pertaining to the said ‘establishment.’” After collecting $256 from printer Thomas Smith in exchange for her property, Carr continued to struggle with her magazine for more than a year.

“We've some splendid old point-lace in our family, yellow and fragrant … all tags and tangles and fibrous and bewildering” (7). This is the way that Giorgione (Yone) Willoughby opens her tale, “The Amber Gods”; instead of “beginn[ing] at the beginning” (7) she offers a luxuriant description of a type of old lace, rich in sense impressions. Bewilderingly, like her point lace, her story's introductory proprieties are delayed until the second paragraph. Such improper sensuality disconcerted many of her Protestant New England readers when her story appeared in the Atlantic in 1860. Yet also, hypocritically, at this time, a rising bourgeoisie, secure in its socioeconomic position, was increasingly embracing a phase of conspicuous leisure and consumption. It is with this embrace, and its dark origins and dark legacies, that “The Amber Gods” engages.

The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively – because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a “box” around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?

If John Cage, for instance, says, “I'm putting a contact microphone on my throat, and I'm going to drink carrot juice, and that's my composition,” then his gurgling qualifies as his composition because he put a frame around it and said so. “Take it or leave it, I nowwillthis to bemusic.” After that it's a matter of taste. Without the frame-as-announced, it's a guy swallowing carrot juice.

In August 1962 the American novelist Mary McCarthy surprised everyone by extolling the virtues of William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959), thereby raising the public profile of both the novel and novelist. The occasion was an Edinburgh conference on writing and censorship organized by the publisher John Calder, and attended by literary luminaries such as Norman Mailer and Henry Miller. For McCarthy the virtue of Naked Lunch was its timeliness, the way it appeared “sort of speeded up like jet travel”; “it has that somewhat supersonic quality.” Addressing the conference audience, Burroughs went a step further, heralding a new epoch of space writing: I feel that a new mythology is now possible in the space age and that we can again have heroes and villains, with respect to the planet, and in closing I would say that the future of writing is in space and not in time.

In an 1899 essay Mark Twain wrote,

It would not be possible for a humane and intelligent person to invent a rational excuse for slavery; yet you will remember that in the early days of the emancipation agitation in the North the agitators got but small help or countenance from any one. Argue and plead and pray as they might, they could not break the universal stillness that reigned, from pulpit and press all the way down to the bottom of society – the clammy stillness created and maintained by the lie of silent assertion – the silent assertion … that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop.

Early in 1844 Eliza Farnham (1815–64) was appointed to the post of matron at the first purpose-built women's prison, the women's section of Mount Pleasant Prison in New York, the institution popularly known as Sing Sing. Her appointment, which she won through her connection with Horace Greeley and the reforming circles of New York, brought her, at first, a burst of favourable attention and subsequently considerable notoriety. The precise reasons for this reversal are a matter of varying interpretations, but the defining impulse of Farnham's tenure at Sing Sing is not: Farnham's particular interest was in campaigning for phrenology, perhaps the most popular of the new psychologies of the period, as a means to diagnose and cure female prisoners. This psychological science was based on the premise that there was a match between character and the outer shape and protuberances of the head; character could be read by studying the head's surface. During this period, phrenology was often linked with the figure of the criminal, indeed phrenology first evolved in the work of Franz-Joseph Gall and was subsequently frequently explained through descriptions of prisoners and the inhabitants of asylums. Farnham was a pivotal figure in the argument for phrenology's efficacy in treating prisoners in New York in the mid-1840s.

In a 1992 interview, Art Spiegelman described the genealogy of Maus, his acclaimed comic-book treatment of the Holocaust. He was inspired to write Maus, he stated, when asked to contribute to a commix anthology called Funny Aminals; the only restriction on his creativity was that the story must somehow involve anthropomorphized animals. “At the time I was trying to figure this out,” Spiegelman reports, I went to sit in on some classes of a friend of mine, Ken Jacobs, a filmmaker and very wonderful teacher at SUNY Binghamton, who was showing some old animated cartoons in his class with cats and mice romping around, and then he was showing some racist cartoons from the same period, and it became clear that there was a connection between the two, that Al Jolson was Mickey Mouse without the ears. At that point I said, “I have it: I'll do a comic-book story about the Ku Klux Kats, and a lynching of some mice, and deal with racism in America using cats and mice as the vehicle.” And that lasted about ten minutes before I realized that I just didn't have enough background and knowledge to make this thing happen well, that it would just come across as well intended liberal slop. And instantly the synapses connected, and I realized that I had a metaphor of oppression much closer to my own past in the Nazi Project. (Spiegelman CD-ROM)

My room is looking more and more like a picture gallery … or a kind of photographic shrine.

This essay will discuss corporeal and racial representation in the work of John Gregory Brown, a little-known, yet immensely rewarding, New Orleans novelist. Placing the discussion within the rich literary tradition of the American South, I will focus on the male protagonists of his first two novels – Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery (1994) and The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur (1996) – and examine why Brown's characters constantly shift between different racial positions, and how notions such as racial purity or fixed subjectivity are exposed and interrogated. My analysis will also address physical defect, and explore how Brown destabilizes the ideal of the body as a privileged locus of authoritative wholeness. I will be arguing that, as a cultural and racial signifier, the body in Brown's work is linked with fluidity and fragmentation, and that the boundaries between whiteness and blackness are continuously reshaped by the characters' ambiguous perceptions of themselves as subversive, multi-racial subjects. The conclusion will maintain that both novels offer new insights into the interaction between corporeal representation and racial identity, which make an important contribution to the tradition of American and, particularly, southern literature.

In the parlance of the time he was known as a “sick comedian.” He was also called a junkie, a hipster, a satirist, a shaman, a free-speech martyr, “a disease of America,” “a nightclub Cassandra,” and a prophet. But Lenny Bruce, the caustic comedian who gained a following in the late 1950s and early 1960s, called himself something else: a deviate. “All my humor is based on destruction and despair,” he said. “If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing on the breadline.”

Far from being limited to conspiracist McCarthyism, American anticommunism always spanned the entire ideological spectrum. Recognizing this, in his classic studies of the initial Western reception of Bolshevism, Arno J. Mayer divided early anticommunists into mutually antagonistic “parties of order” and “parties of movement” and claimed that these two fought each other almost as much as they combatted the Bolsheviks themselves. Mayer's conceptualization spoke to a profoundly important dimension in Western anticommunism, both before and during the Cold War, in that it exposed a sort of civil war between Western liberals, conservatives and socialists in which each of these groups tended to define their ideological rivals as the allies, unconscious tools or prototypes of Soviet Bolshevism.

This article focusses on the concept of cultural pluralism in the North American folk music revival of the 1960s. Building on the excellent work of earlier folk revival scholars, the article looks in greater depth at the “vision of diversity” promoted by the folk revival in North America – at the ways in which this vision was constructed, at the reasons for its maintenance and at its ultimate decline and on the consequences of this for anglophone Canadian and American musicians and enthusiasts alike.

Hollywood screenwriter Robert Riskin was the head of the Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information during World War II. His role not only helped to shape the administrative and managerial strategy of the agency but also created a body of documentary film work that was arguably the most incisive of the entire war. And yet in most accounts of American propaganda production during the last sixty years, as well as specifically OWI conduct and development, Riskin's role has been confined to that of a functionary, a name that is only mentioned in cursory anecdotes. The aim of this article, therefore, is not only to foreground Riskin's contribution to the OWI, neglected though that is, but to argue that Riskin's documentary programme, Projections of America, was actually one of the most important, influential and substantive collections of propaganda made during the war.