PAGE This project uses the remarkable careers of anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, stunt reporter Nellie Bly, anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, and war correspondent Richard Harding Davis, as well as literary texts by Davis and Henry James, to frame a set of questions about the politics and implications of cultural crossover at the end of the nineteenth century. Through their work as participant observers of racial, ethnic and social Others, these reporters, reformers, and authors were gradually transformed into charismatic exotics. More than simply mediating between a mainstream (usually white, middle-class) audience and a more exotic people or place, these individuals inserted themselves into the story and ultimately became its star. Putting their own bodies to work in this manner-as evidence and even spectacle-often meant transgressing the limits of what was socially acceptable for their gender, race, or class. The ensuing scrutiny and speculation, together with their efforts to manage this precarious celebrity, provide insight into the complex cultural tensions underlying America's emergence as a modem nation and imperial power. As a white man who appeared to "go native," Cushing struggled to reaffirm his status as a serious scholar and dispel rumors that he had succumbed to the intoxicating pleasures of playing Indian. The divergent personas he adopted to describe his experience living as a Zuni suggest that the role of a Smithsonian scientist in primitive drag was an inherently unstable one at this moment. By blurring the boundary between "savage" and "civilized," Cushing threatened to disrupt the self-Other dichotomy which lay at the heart of America's emerging relationship to the exotic. Despite the titillating social dislocations that her undercover stunts entailed, Bly, unlike Cushing, maintained a coherent performance of self and emphatic bodily presence. By filtering all experience through the lens of her own consciousness and asserting her middle-class femininity, Bly forged what I term personality armor, enabling her to float through the metropolis as an untainted observer while mesmerizing readers with a seemingly unabashed display of self. Davis' work chronicling America's burgeoning empire posed little threat to his social standing, instead linking him to the gentlemen explorers who populated his fiction. While deeply implicated in the nation's outward imperial drive, Davis also sought to reassert boundaries, particularly those that protected the male body. To see him, as I do, as a proto Boy Scout, allows us to appreciate how freighted his early adventures were with the burden of future expectations. Seizing upon the new visibility of spectacle lynchings, Wells adeptly manipulated the mechanisms ofthe exotic to "other" the white South before an external, international audience during and after her two British lecture tours. In addition to advancing the antilynching cause, the tours marked a turning point in Wells' sense of her own authority as a public figure. Her reception abroad as an American Negro lady, an oxymoron in the Jim Crow South, paradoxically emboldened her to adopt tactics more suited to a race man.

Celebrity and the national body: Encounters with the exotic in late nineteenth-century America

The most famous fictional rendition of the American Civil War is Stephen Crane's masterpiece The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Lacking any experience of warfare, Crane asserted he had gained his ‘sense of the rage of conflict on the football field’, college football being a popular sport in America in the 1890s. This claim has been discussed in some detail by Christian K. Messenger (in Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction, 1981) and Bill Brown (The Material Unconscious, 1996), and both scholars find Crane's use of the football trope either inappropriate or improper. It is my contention, however, that Crane's experience of football in the 1890s pervades his narrative use of the physical, tactical and rhetorical images of the sport to recreate successfully the sights and sounds of warfare, transforming a historically frightening, confusing and chaotic event into a structured and meaningful contemporary literary experience.

The Red Badge of the Running Back: Stephen Crane, Football and the Fictional Representation of the American Civil War

An analysis of the beginnings of American imperial rhetoric; This is a study of the early writings of Richard Harding Davis, the premier American journalist of the 1890s, best remembered for his coverage of the Spanish-American War. The emphasis of the book is on Davis's reporting - including several volumes of travel writing, covering trips to the Near East and South and Central America. Some account is also made of his fiction, most especially Soldiers of Fortune (1897), which critics have seen as a romantic treatment of the imperialist elan. As such, the novel serves as a prolegomenon to the war in Cuba, which Davis covered during its insurrectionist stage. He later accompanied Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders when U.S. forces invaded the island in 1898, an action he had urged and may have in part inspired. John Seelye argues that Davis, rather than supporting the notion of an American empire on the Roman or British plan, advocated what would become U.S. strategy over the next century: a limited engagement in support of embryonic democratic movements in the Caribbean, followed by withdrawal of armed forces once a stable government had been established. While approving British methods when they seemed in accord with his ideas of fairness, Davis was critical of the English presence in Egypt and was scathing in his treatment of the Boer War, championing the Dutch settlers over the invading army. Like many others associated with the Spanish-American War, Davis was an ardent fan of football: fair play and good sportsmanship were integral to his notions of democratic expansionism, hence the title of this book. Seelye not only brings Davis into the mainstream of recent historical treatments of American imperialism, but makes a case that Davis was, as his contemporaries regarded him, a master of journalistic style.

John D. Seelye

Papers

War Games: Richard Harding Davis and the New Imperialism