If reckoned by unkind reviewers as “one of the dullest and most vulgar productions ever published,” Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred nevertheless enjoyed prolific sales in both England and the United States because of the reputation Stowe had earned with Uncle Tom's Cabin. Given Stowe's international popularity, more charitable reviewers were reluctant to chastise her second antislavery novel too severely. The reviewer from Blackwood's, for example, spoke of “a respect due to genius; even though its wing droop in the attempt to soar” (“Dred,” 694). No deferential attitude, however, could sway this critic from his perceived duty to inform those who had not yet bought the book of its egregious flaws. Glossing over what struck him as offensive dialogue and improbable characterization, he focused attention on Stowe's apparent lack of dramatic skill. The fact that Dred's title character, a slave rebel, dies a peremptory death in an undescribed combat gave good cause for complaint. But also troubling was Stowe's substitution of cholera for insurrection as the means of dispatching Dred's antagonists, a move that the reviewer called “truly ludicrous” (695). “It is the Julius Caesar plot, minus the assassination of Caesar,” he jibed (701): “It is as if, after the meeting between Brutus and Cassius, and the scene with Portia, a herald were to announce to the conspirators that Caesar was dead, and they were not wanted” (704). From the standpoint of aesthetic unity, he was absolutely right. Dred's balked trajectory reads like an unintentional parody of more traditional plots. But to let the task of interpretation go at that is to miss the complex manner in which Stowe involved herself in the major political crisis of her time. Situated as it is on the brink of Civil War, the attenuated structure of Stowe's novel is telling — a metaphor for the failure of antebellum polemical patterns to shape a national consensus. When properly viewed as discourse, that is, a figurative running back and forth (from the Latin dis-, “in different directions,” and currere, “to run”), Dred evokes a whole field of signification where militant, sentimental, and ironic rhetorics clash, combine, and regenerate.

A photograph of three women in dark dresses, white aprons, and beehivelike white hats has been used by historians throughout the 20th Century as evidence that young, uniformed nurses served in general hospitals during the Civil War. This is a fine example of historical halftruth: the women in the photograph were young and uniformed, but they were not Civil War nurses. They were New Yorkers who had volunteered to work in a food concession at the Sanitary Commission's metropolitan fundraising fair in April, 1864, and they were dressed in traditional Normandy costumes to sell Normandy cakes. The 20th-century historian who first identified this photograph expected nurses to wear white hats, even though no female hospital worker in Civil War America to my knowledge ever wore professional headgear or a uniform.

In 1857, a bangor, maine, newspaper announced that a man named Phineas P. Quimby was engaged in “investigations in psychology” and that he had “discovered and in his daily practice carries out, a new principle of treatment of diseases.” A few years later, a Portland newspaper reported that Quimby's “new theory of disease” was “so contrary to the commonly received opinions” that people “hardly dare believe there can be any truth in it.” Contemporary observers found both Quimby's theory of Mind Cure and his medical practice to be highly unusual. Apparently, Quimby would “sit down beside him [the patient], and put himself en rapport with him.” He did “not use medicine or any material agency, nor call to his aid mesmerism or any spiritual influence whatever” in his treatment. Rather, observers maintained that “his power over disease arises from his subtle knowledge of the mind”.

Anyone familiar with mark twain's humor will recognize its traces in this description of an early stage performance. Here is selfmockery, the mockery of grandiloquent stage oratory, and the mockery of grandiloquence itself, all the more fun for our reviewer's high-serious complaint. Here is a trace of something else, though, that has not been fully appreciated in Twain criticism: the aggression his oral and literary performances exert against their audiences. As our reviewer describes it, Twain's comic gambit about the Sandwich Islands also mocks and catches out his listeners. In the process of seeming to gratify the sort of conventional, “serious” expectations that auditors like our reviewer take to the performance, Twain becomes “untrustworthy,” so that the audience's not knowing where “the fun will come in” comes close to its knowing that the fun is at the expense of these expectations. Its “queer state,” like a bruise, marks Twain's deepest aggression: while indulging his audience's highcultural desires – his “brilliant” purple prose signals the entry into a touristic transaction as clearly as buying a berth on the Quaker City does in Innocents Abroad – Twain's concluding verbal self-consciousness flourishes before his auditors both the inauthenticity of his offer and the selfdelusion involved in their accepting it.

From its revolution based on Newtonian physics to its Star-Spangled Banner on the Moon, the United States of America shares with astronomy a worldview of infinite expansion. As above, so below: in space, myriad galaxies multiply the stars; on earth, cities of light interminably sprawl with people and production. This cosmology of growth, which first materialized in the scientific revolution and conquest of America during the European Renaissance, reemerges in the “American Renaissance” of the 1840s and 1850s when the American Observatory Movement and Manifest Destiny declare expansion a natural law for the heavens and North America.

In the 19th Century, white American women of the middle and upper classes began to travel abroad in significant numbers for the first time in history. Prior to the 19th Century, and with the exception of such women as Abigail Adams and Martha Bayard, who accompanied their parents or husbands on diplomatic missions, American women as a rule traveled only about the countryside or to frontier settlements. Beginning in the 1820s, however, and escalating after the Civil War, the prototypes of Henry James's Isabel Archer and Edith Wharton's Undine Spragg set out by the hundreds to see the world, from Europe to the Middle East and from Africa to Japan and China. The greatest number of them visited the British Isles and continental Europe. As early as 1835, according to Paul R. Baker, some fifty American women visited Rome during Holy Week. Many women were among the fifty thousand Americans who, in 1866 alone, traveled to Europe. According to Mrs. John Sherwood in 1890, there were “more than eleven thousand virgins who semi-yearly migrate[d] from America to the shores of England and France.” Women found their way to virtually all parts of the world, as the book-length travel accounts of women (far fewer than the numbers of women who traveled) show. Women published accounts of twenty journeys to China, seventeen to Palestine, eleven to India, twenty-two to Egypt, two to the East Indies, twenty to Greece, three to Arabia, six to Algeria, and four to Africa, as well as travel in Central and South America, Cuba, the Yucatan, and Jamaica.

Millions of older Americans well remember the stockmarket Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. Painfully recalled is the widespread misery: the unemployment, the sudden loss of income and savings, the evictions of families and consequent homelessness, the squatter shantytowns on the edge of cities, and the breadlines and soup kitchens where even the upper class had to accept handouts. Popular histories of the event have etched that grim era indelibly in the nation's mind. Scholars have been especially interested in how people dealt with the disaster emotionally and its impact.

In late October, 1944, the Martha Graham Dance Company performed Appalachian Spring at the Library of Congress, establishing Graham as the master of modern dance. The significance of Appalachian Spring, however, went well beyond Graham's artistic development. Notwithstanding its traditional theme, Appalachian Spring heralded an important shift in American art. Following the Second World War a large segment of New York City artists abandoned the effort, so dominant in the interwar years, to create an explicitly “American” art in favor of a “modernist” aesthetic, best exemplified in abstract expressionist painting. Choreographed by Graham, composed by Aaron Copland, and designed by Isamu Noguchi, the “Ballet for Martha” marked an early expression of the shift from American realism to modernism. But unlike much of the radically nonrepresentational work of the late 1940s and early 1950s Appalachian Spring continued to embody the concerns of American realism, even unabashedly displaying its creators' continued embrace of the folk vernacular, while moving toward its modern aesthetic.

Charles Sheeler, like most American modernists of his generation, avoided the human subject. Instead his paintings and photographs focus upon inanimate objects that range from the Shaker furniture seen in Home Sweet Home (Figure 1) to the Ford factory buildings depicted in Rouge River Plant (Figure 2). These depopulated subjects have established Sheeler's reputation as an impersonal celebrant of the functionalist tradition in American design. But on close examination, the images also reveal understated longings and fears; they function as metaphors for a psychological confrontation with the external world.

A 1993 article in the washington post about responses to David Brock's The Real Anita Hill argues persuasively that neither the authors nor reviewers of such books are likely to be disinterested. Yet Howard Kurtz oversimplifies when he asks, “Can reviewers fairly evaluate an investigative work that builds its case upon a mountain of disputed facts and assertions? Or must the debate be relegated to a tiny circle of experts, endlessly hashing over arcane details” as in “some modern-day Hiss case?”

The choice need not be so stark. Reviewers cannot evaluate fairly unless they consider details. If they don't read debates of the experts, they may choose to avoid the tedium of complex cases by relying on the reputation of a single expert. That seems to be what two of the best national newspapers have done in recent years about the Alger Hiss case — even while striving to report fairly.

As a youngster, Art Rust, Jr., one of New York's first prominent black sportscasters, lived on St. Nicholas Avenue, a stone's throw equally from Minton's and Monroe's, the after-hours clubs where Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk created bebop, and the Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants. Rust remembered the day in the 1930s when “Billy the Cop,” just off duty, told Rust's father that Giant manager Bill Terry, the last National League player to hit over 400, complained to the precinct commander. Terry didn't want any “nigger cops” patrolling the Polo Grounds, at least not near the executive entrances. Almost twenty years later, in the early 1950s, George Weiss, the general manager of the New York Yankees, a team whose Ruthian dominance prevailed in the Stadium, built with intentional perversity within eyesight of the Polo Grounds just across the East River in the South Bronx, responded to charges that the Yankees had failed to sign black players. In private, Weiss said, “I will never allow a black man to wear a Yankee uniform. Boxholders from Westchester don't want that sort of crowd. They would be offended to have to sit with niggers.” Publicly, in the spring of 1952, he responded that the team had been looking long and hard for a black player, “good enough to make the Yankees.” Weiss's accuser, Jackie Robinson, then entering his sixth season with the Brooklyn Dodgers, rejoined, “Bullshit.”

The lyrics cited above are from the 1990 Living Colour single “Elvis Is Dead” and serve as another reminder, as if we needed one, that, despite the song's emphatic refrain, the rumors we hear are true: Elvis is alive. His shade haunts us, bringing with it strange but vital messages. Greil Marcus, Elvis's best critic, may be blessed with second sight when he avers that Elvis comprises our “cultural epistemology,” that he holds the “skeleton key to a lock we've yet to find.” Marcus's elliptical prophecy promises what for many may be a stunning revelation: Elvis Presley so profoundly embodies the complexities of American culture that only Melville's Moby Dick is comparable to his richness, his ambiguity, his mysterious meaning. As with most supernatural sightings (or Melville's whale), Elvis's presence is nearly impossible to identify.

These are, respectively, the first sentence of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and the last sentence of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. Each centrally keys into the title (and a governing trope) of its particular text; each locates its subject precisely. Ellison's protagonist speaks to us from within a state which he calls “hibernation”; David Schearl takes leave of his readers by entering into one – what the penultimate sentence tells us we “might as well call …sleep.” I want to read these two remarkably contiguous moments alongside each other for a moment before I proceed to a discussion of exactly what such reciprocal facing of texts might entail.

In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison sets out to chart a new “geography” in literary criticism, to provide a “map” for locating what she calls the “Africanist” presence in the American literary tradition. The assumption of Americanist critics, she argues, has been that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the fourhundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then, African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence — which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture — has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture's literature.” For Morrison, recording the Africanist presence produces nothing less than an absolute revision of our notion of what constitutes the American literary tradition.

I imagine, you imagine, we imagine. And they imagine. This process may not be as simple as it appears to be inviting.

Dwight MacDonald once remarked wittily upon the good and the bad of Ernest Hemingway. He commented on the grace: “The short words, the declarative sentences, the repetition, the beautiful absence of subordinate clauses … It was a kind of inspired baby talk when he was going good”:

And what if she should die? She won't die. People don't die in childbirth nowadays. That was what all husbands thought. Yes, but what if she should die? She won't die. She's just having a bad time. The initial labor is usually protracted. She's just having a bad time. The initial labor is usually protracted. She's only having a bad time. Afterwards we'd say what a bad time and Catherine would say it wasn't really so bad. But what if she should die? She can't die. Yes, but what if she should die? She can't I tell you. Don't be a fool. It's just a bad time. It's just nature giving her hell. It's only the first labor, which is almost always protracted. Yes, but what if she should die? She can't die. Why should she die? What reason is there for her to die? … But what if she should die? She won't. She's all right. But what if she should die? Hey, what about that? What if she should die?

After this passage MacDonald cites another passage from A Farewell to Arms, one that he sees as having far less meaning.

The nation of islam is well known for its anti-Semitic rhetoric. What is little known, or at least little acknowledged, however, is that the Nation of Islam and Judaism possess a number of striking similarities. Although some of these parallels may be attributed to the influence of Christianity and traditional Islam on the Nation's development, or even to direct or indirect contact with Jewish traditions, themselves, others must be traced to the fertile religious imagination of the movement's prophet and former leader, Elijah Muhammad.

In march, 1994, the University of Pennsylvania held a conference to celebrate the opening of the Howard Fast papers at the university's library. To commemorate Fast's remarkable sixty-year career, a group of historians and literary critics gathered to reconsider the intellectual and cultural milieu of the United States in the early years of the Cold War. During the eventful years, from 1945 to 1960, Fast emerged as a leading Communist activist and a major literary figure who achieved great popular success. Fast, an unabashed member of the Communist Party, like many other oppositional writers of the era, clashed with the national security state. He faced harassment, blacklisting, and marginalization for his refusal to cooperate with federal authorities who were committed to silencing cultural and political voices from the Left. Like other stalwarts of the Communist Party, Fast was often doctrinaire. As a reporter for the Daily Worker and an occasional partisan polemicist, Fast was often stiflingly orthodox. But Fast's Communism was a distinctively American variant, mediated by New York's Jewish radicalism, deeply concerned with the American dilemma of racial inequality.

Daniel aaron, writing about American literary communism at the turn into the 1960s, concluded that the literary radicalism of the 1930s had been one more “turn in the cycle of revolt” characterizing the generational politics of American writers since the early 19th Century. The American writer's “running quarrel with his [sic] society” springs “as much from his identity with that society as from his alienation,” Aaron argued. When this rebellion fails to sustain itself, the writer is “gradually absorbed into the society he has rejected.” Like earlier “experiments in rebellion,” the 1930s movement had its “ancestors and founders, its foreign prophets, its manifestoes, its saints and renegades.” It “be[gan] in joy and end[ed] in disillusionment,” although (here Aaron was probably alluding to the early signs of civil rights activity) “amidst its monuments and ruins are the shoots of rebellion to come” (20, 22).

The usual stories of 1950s influence upon the 1960s have now been retold, and so often as the autobiography of a generation, that they may be said to have achieved emblematic textbook status. The Beats, with Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Allen Ginsberg's Howl, are said to have reopened a closed culture of McCarthyism; and rock ‘n’ roll, if it did not actually save the souls of the teen participants, prepared them for the multiracial youth culture dreams of the following era.

On the morning of June 20, 1951, a hundred FBI agents poured out of the Foley Square Federal Building in Manhattan at dawn, buttoned up their gray trenchcoats, and bounded into a fleet of waiting Buicks. Spreading throughout New York City in a well-orchestrated operation, they surrounded twenty private homes, burst into bedrooms, and dragged sixteen Communist Party leaders off to jail under the Smith Act charge of conspiring to teach the overthrow of the U.S. government. This was the second group of top Party functionaries to be arrested under the Act.