We quiet the inner voices that mock our free will, comforting ourselves that clocks in their turning kill time. But the past is not dead. It lives in mind, as mind. Our thoughts arise, our words appear, our deeds emerge out of the past. Subtly or obviously, now is made of then. The past tests our uniquely human birthright, lending us the strength to act freely and cajoling us to deny innate potentials and create the future in its image.

One of the continuing ironies of American Studies is that jazz, among America's most important contributions to the arts, has received little scholarly attention. The new music required recognition from Europe before we could stop looking at it with disdain or condescension and it continues to arouse frowns from many who still regard it as a form of cheap popular music or simply another form of folk music, interesting for sociological purposes but of little lasting aesthetic significance. For these and other reasons jazz scholarship has developed slowly in the United States. But despite the complex problems raised in placing and illuminating a new art form, we have come a long way from the evangelical journalism of early writing on jazz and now have a number of sensitive and intelligent critics of considerable attainment, accomplished jazz-oriented musicologists, sociologists, and historians who have contributed greatly to our understanding of jazz musicians and the forces that have shaped their careers.

Americans are movers. The rest of the world, looking on, has said this of us, and we can hardly argue with their perceptions, for we place such a positive value on mobility, tying it to personal and social progress. But we are hardly unambivalent about moving. In response to a need for roots, we cling to an agrarian family image of the good and proper and cooperative life lived in harmony with the seasons. Some of the most powerful fictions by which we negotiate for a common order are as fully explored in our folk and popular forms of expression—especially our songs and dances—as in our more sophisticated and complex works of art. It is in such conventional forms that we find the most consistent explanations of what it means, socially and psychologically, to travel on or to come home to stay.

In a letter to Peter Collinson in 1753, Benjamin Franklin recounted his meeting with a “Transylvanian Tartar,” actually a Greek Orthodox priest, who had arrived in America in 1748 during a tour around the world. The “Tartar” asked Franklin why he thought the people of so many cultures—Tartars in Asia and Europe, Negroes in Africa, and Indians in the Americas—“continued a wandring [sic] careless Life, and refused to live in Cities, and to cultivate the arts they saw practiced by the civilized part of Mankind.” Before Franklin could respond, the “Tartar” offered his own explanation, beginning at the beginning, with Genesis and God's expulsion of Adam and his progeny from Eden. “God make man for Paradise,” Franklin quoted the “Tartar,” “he make him for to live lazy; man make God angry, God turn him out of Paradise, and bid him work; man no love work; he want to go to Paradise again, he want to live lazy; so all mankind love lazy.”

In the two decades from 1860 to 1880 the eastern image of the American West changed drastically. Prior to 1860 that image had been based primarily upon the accounts of a few travelers and explorers. It was an image of generalities, distortions, and vague impressions in which imagination was a significant element. But with the coming of photography, the transcontinental railroad, and the surge of humanity that spilled westward following the Civil War, the image acquired a refinement in detail. Much of the West should have become commonplace.

Professional historians will surely agree that the writing of history is itself an act of historical consequence. If history is, as Carl Becker argues, “the artificial extension of the social memory,” and if social identity and behavior depend in part on memory, then created versions of the past are a serious matter. They can have decisive effects on the present. Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land is an exemplary form of a creative history which extends, refines, and enlightens social memory. And it does so in a particularly significant way, by pioneering a new area for study, a new territory in the landscape of memory. It is the area of a general cultural consciousness—“the region of culture,” as Leo Marx puts it, “where literature, general ideas, and certain products of the collective imagination—we may call them ‘cultural symbols’— meet.” Henry Nash Smith himself describes as his aim to trace “the impact of the West, the vacant continent beyond the frontier, on the consciousness of Americans.” His territory is consciousness in relation to a complex historical actuality, the American West.

By the outbreak of the Civil War, the kind of highbrow psychological romance that Hawthorne and Melville had brought to a brilliant consummation in the 1850s had clearly lost favor both with critics and with the reading public. At the same time, middlebrow domestic fiction with a religious emphasis in the manner of Susan B. Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), and the “sensation novel” of physical adventure aimed at an even less literate audience, were gaining more and more readers. During the 1860s the field of American fiction was dominated by weekly story papers serializing this popular fiction, and the closely related series of dime novels published by the firm of Beadle & Adams and its competitors. Such material was ground out according to formulas in an essentially industrial process; it had little bearing on the development of serious literature.

The early years of the twentieth century saw the sudden flowering of a specialized form of juvenile literature, the serial novels written for and about adolescent girls. From 1900 to 1917, literally dozens of new series emerged to chronicle the adventures of teenage heroines at school, at play, at work, and in what was invariably called “The Great Outdoors.” Although they are not as well remembered as the contemporaneous sagas of boy idols like Frank Merriwell, Tom Swift, or the Rover Boys, the many-volumed adventures of Dorothy Dale, Billie Bradley, Ruth Fielding, Polly Pendleton, Aunt Jane's Nieces, and other all-American heroines that began to appear in the decades before World War I provide a fascinating record of the diverse interests and often contradictory attitudes and expectations attributed to the first generation of twentieth-century American women.

For an understanding of why an art movement becomes dominant in any period it is necessary to look at some of the ideological and political views and social needs of its practitioners, its patrons, and even its critics. In many eras—say the medieval age or the Renaissance—artists and their patrons, power and ideology, were at one with each other. The artist was integrated with the established process of thought and government; the ideas of the artist and the needs of the patron were agreed upon by both. Personal caveats, when they existed, were rarely deliberately reflected in commissioned visual art—and scarcely any sculpture and painting came into being outside of direct commission. Art was made to order, as today's public buildings are still custom built for a specific purpose and to a prescribed plan. The goal to be achieved in a particular image destined for a known location—a fresco on the wall of a church, a portrait of a pope or potentate—was clearly defined, as was the technique, often by contract. Both the artist and the patron knew exactly the audience toward which the work of art was directed.

A minor-key tragedy of American artists, it seems to me, is that which visits, at times, the most proteanly dexterous, the most joyously volatile—those who find themselves somehow diverted, or discouraged, or lulled into some particular cove or inlet of their art, with which their audiences often identify them, exclusively, forevermore. Such becalming, I think, befell one of American art's trimmest and most adroitly navigated vessels: the talent of Harrison Cady, who, for close to five decades, until his death on December 10, 1970, was crowned by generations of readers with the floppy ears and pink-nosed countenance—beaming or winsomely staring—of Peter Rabbit; who, to triply seal the charm, was the transatlantic conversion, sea-changed but recognizable, of Beatrix Potter's cabbage-pillaging picaro—a suburban cousin of the more footloose and dreamily sententious Peter of Thornton W. Burgess' Mother Nature volumes. This third Peter, Cady's whimsical avatar, was, of course, the Peter Rabbit of the New York Tribune's (later, the Herald Tribune's) Sunday comic pages, from August 15, 1920, until July 25, 1948: a tenure that seemed, indeed, to harden even as the initial comic brio and adventurous friskiness drained way into the kind of inane, half-desultory mechanics which can nevertheless delight small children (as shrewdly economical as sparrows in finding their pleasures) but which, for Cady admirers, was the rather saddening sunset streak lingering from his early career's lusty radiance. It was a career, not of the most copiously imaginative, the most originally perceptive or charm-laden of artists, but that of a richly articulate and jovially inventive artist, the kind who, as he needs the oxygen he breathes, needs to circulate and traffic in the widest of worlds possible because his converse with such a world, the tapestry of his daily notations, is the content of his art, and its savour.

From the early 1920s until the mid-1930s, artistic tremors rolled through Afro-America. Dramatic societies, literary clubs, and poetry groups sprang up in Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Indianapolis, Nashville, and Topeka, among other places. In Boston, the Quill Club launched the Saturday Evening Quill periodical; in Washington, D. C., there was Howard University's Stylus magazine and the freewheeling and remarkably productive soirées of Georgia Douglas Johnson's Saturday Nighters; Philadelphia's literati published the intriguingly promising review, Black Opals. But most of this ferment remained inchoate and, at best, decidedly amateurish. Only in Harlem was there sustained and professional artistic output—although much of its music was tested in and imported from Chicago.

Just before the words and subway of Imamu Amiri Baraka's (LeRoi Jones') Dutchman rush to their violent climax, Lula, the Eve-emissary of the white middle-class, shrieks at Clay:

Come on, Clay … let's do the thing. Uhh! Uhh! Clay! Clay! You middle-class black bastard. Forget your social-working mother for a few seconds and let's knock stomachs. Clay, you liver-lipped white man. You would-be Christian. You ain't no nigger, you're just a dirty white man. Get up, Clay. Dance with me, Clay.

Although barely two decades have passed since the modern “civil rights era” began, a folk wisdom about the history of desegregation and civil rights activism has already developed. In broad outline at least, the major themes of this new folk history are contained in the following assertions: (1) the white South greeted the Brown decision with massive resistance; (2) this opposition was centered in violence-prone poor whites who would not tolerate the idea of blacks and whites “mixing” in the same schools; (3) more “enlightened” southerners, especially in the border or moderate states, did their best to counter such extremism; and (4) the plight of blacks improved only when John Kennedy became president, and in response to the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., initiated change in the South through federal intervention.

When richard wright died in November 1960, many of the Parisian obituaries quoted Wright's statement that “this [France] is the place where I could die.” Having lived in France for some sixteen years, Wright to some degree had become part of the Parisian intellectual setting and was mourned by the French as though he were a compatriot. Conversely, in the United States many saw in Wright's death-in-exile not only a comment on the racial situation in America but a reflection of the writer's personal attitudes. Some, white and black, resented his choice of living elsewhere. Some remembered the dedication of The Outsider—“To Rachel, my daughter who was born on alien soil”—and were offended by the dedication of Eight Men: “To my friends, Helene, Michel, and Thierry Maurice-Bokanowski whose kindness has made me feel at home in an alien land.”

Terence malick's remarkable film of 1974, Badlands, contains a sequence which vividly epitomizes the experience of American violence and deftly connects it to the impulse deep within even the most inarticulate of victims and violators to turn pain into art. Like its cinematically inferior predecessor Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands is based upon actual history—the Charles Starkweather case of 1958 in which a pair of Nebraska teenagers went on a murderous rampage, killing eleven persons including the girl's parents and baby sister. In the film, Kit and Holly flee to the prairie shack of Cato, Kit's fellow worker on the town garbage truck. Cato tries to sneak away and sound the alarm. Kit shoots his friend in the back. Cato staggers indoors, bleeding but silent, and collapses on the bed. As Kit and Holly circle aimlessly around the room, the dying man does something oddly significant—he picks up a mirror and carefully examines his face in its surface. Kit says nothing and Holly offers neither apology nor help. Instead she innocently inquires about Cato's pet spider. What does it eat? Does it ever bite? “It never bit me,” he gasps laconically. After he dies Kit drags the body into the shed, then stalks up and down outside gesturing vehemently to the corpse. Like other victims in this brilliant, disturbing film, Cato has been caught in the spiraling coils of Kit's almost voiceless and casual violence.

From his own time to the present, Washington Irving has seemed to many observers to embody the ambiguities of the American aesthetic response to Europe. The critical success of The Sketch Book, published in 1819–20, offered the first important reversal to the one-way flow of culture across the Atlantic. Through the persona of Geoffrey Crayon, genteel, literate observer of Old World customs, Irving offered a convincing argument that an American could be a man of letters, that a “demi-savage” from the New World wilderness could hold “a feather in his hand, instead of on his head.” Yet Irving's very success in conforming to European literary standards left him open to charges of imitativeness and overrefinement; critics complained that his work was too Anglicized and prettified, that he sold his native birthright for the pottage of international acclaim. More recent commentators have attempted to rescue Crayon for American literature, stressing Irving's humor, his incorporation of native materials, and his ties to the landscape. Both sides of the argument, however, tend to focus on Irving as he presented himself at the end of his career, after a quarter-century of elaboration on Geoffrey Crayon. By the time Irving published the Author's Revised Version of his works in 1848, a shelf full of books affirmed his identity as the gentle wanderer, graceful observer, resident of the Alhambra, and spectator at Bracebridge Hall.

Today's younger generation of intellectuals consists of the late arrivals to the generation that made its appearance as American “Marxists” and which has lived its entire life with Marxism (including, of course, anti-Marxism) as its central theme and interest. Without Marxism this generation is not only dull—it is nothing. It does not exist.—Harold Rosenberg, “Death in the Wilderness”

Although he was regarded primarily as a nationalist, Alexander Hamilton was indeed a New Yorker. The trading post in his native Caribbean in which he clerked as a lad was an offshoot of New York merchant families, the Crugers and Kortrights. When his friends in St. Croix sent him to the continent for education they consigned him, as it were, to business patrons in New York. After attending King's College (Columbia), he was firmly identified with New York, city and state. His first choice was to attend the College of New Jersey (Princeton). His intellectual sponsor in St. Croix, Reverend Hugh Knox, was a Princeton graduate, as was Francis Barber, master of the academy in Elizabethtown where Alexander had his preparatory year. In Elizabethtown he was befriended by William Livingston and Elias Boudinot, and President John Witherspoon found him eligible for entrance to Princeton. But Hamilton's was the rare case in which the candidate imposed conditions: as he was older than other beginning students, would he be allowed to complete the course as rapidly as he could pass examinations, without respect to the conventional four-year program? The academic authorities regretfully said no, and Hamilton entered King's College on his own terms.

In the course of his career Nathaniel Hawthorne twice wrote the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England. He told the story for children in Grandfather's Chair (1841) and for adults in five related tales published between 1831 and 1838. These tales do not appear in chronological order among Hawthorne's collections, nor were they so written. But they are assigned prominent positions in the two volumes of Twice-Told Tales and in The Snow-Image and Other Tales. They contain a ritual history of protorevolutionary events in New England extending from the beginning of the settlement in Massachusetts Bay to the eve of the American Revolution. The key stories in this series and the events they deal with are “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” concerning Governor Endicott's destruction of Thomas Morton's maypole in 1629; “Endicott and the Red Cross,” on Endicott's desecration of the British flag in protest at the appointment of a royal governor in 1634; “The Gray Champion,” on the people's defiance of tyrannous Governor Andros on the eve of his expulsion in 1689; “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” introduced as an incident relating to mistreatment and expulsions of governors between 1689 and 1730; and “Howe's Masquerade,” on the expulsion of military governor General Howe, predicted at a masquerade ball given by him during the siege of Boston in 1775.

Any attempt to explain Emerson inevitably results, to one degree or another, in explaining one's self, for Emerson's purpose was to awaken each person to assurance that the individual is indeed a self, different from but potentially similar to all others. With this in mind, I shall nonetheless attempt through an examination of his first series of essays to challenge the often expressed critical observation that his essays ultimately consist of aptly phrased, eminently quotable aphorisms strung formlessly together, so that his sentences are often better than his paragraphs, his paragraphs superior to the essays that they compose, and his collection—though wondrously inspiring in parts—is, finally, a miscellany. My enterprise is encouraged by Emerson's observation in his journal not many months after the Essays of 1841 appeared: “It is much to write sentences; it is more to add method & write out the subject of your life symmetrically … to arrange many general reflections in their natural order so that I shall have one harmonious piece.” It is the symmetry, the harmonious whole, the natural order, which I seek to discover and reveal.