Showing papers in "American Quarterly in 2001"

Art of the People

Abstract: Life of the People: Realist Prints and Drawings from the Ben and Beatrice Goldstein Collection, 1912-1948 [ex. cat.]. Ed. Harry L. Katz with essays by Bernard F. Reilly, Jr., and Garnett McCoy. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1999. 119 pages, $19.95 (paper). Web exhibit, Life of the People: Realist Prints and Drawings from the Ben and Beatrice Goldstein Collection, 1912-1948: http://lcweb.loc.gov/

Fixing the Color Line: The Mulatto, Southern Courts, and Racial Identity

Abstract: IN JULY 1857 ABBY GUY SUED FOR HER FREEDOM AND THAT OF HER FOUR children in an Arkansas court. The court records state that Abby Guy had been supporting herself and her children by farming and selling her own crops. The Guy family "passed as free persons": Abby's oldest daughter "boarded out" so that she could attend school, and the family "visited among white folks, and went to church, parties, etc.,-[such that one] should suppose they were white."' Following these accounts of where and how the Guys lived, the court required that the family be presented for physical inspection by the jury, which was to base its decision of whether Abby Guy and her children were black or white, slave or free, on their appearance as well as on any testimony offered: "Here the plaintiffs were personally presented in Court, and the judge informed the jury that they . . . should treat their . . . inspection of plaintiffs' persons as evidence."2 Following their evidentiary "inspection" of the Guy family, the jury was told that the Guys had lived as "free persons" in Arkansas since 1844. In 1855 they moved to Louisiana where a Mr. Daniel "took possession of them as slaves" roughly two years later, claiming that Abby Guy "came with ... [him] from Alabama to Arkansas" as his slave.3 Witnesses for Daniel testified that Abby's mother, Polly, was said to have been "a shade darker than Abby," such that they "could not say whether Polly was of African or Indian extraction."4 Determining Abby Guy's status and race solely according to her complexion and that of her mother was complicated by the fact that neither woman's complexion was considered white, nor could they be said to be of either African or Native American descent. Consequently, the nature and degree of Abby Guy's "otherness" as

"Ah Toucoutou, ye conin vous": History and Memory in Creole New Orleans

Abstract: IN THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS, SHORTLY BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR, A WOMAN nicknamed "Toucoutou" sued her neighbor for slander. The neighbor had committed the insufferable offense of calling Toucoutou a woman of color in public. This offense did more than wound Toucoutou's pride. It also threatened her marriage to a leading white citizen, potentially rendering it null and void according to a Louisiana state law. If she were indeed a woman of color, her liaison with this white man would have been understood at the most as a "plagage," and Toucoutou would have been not a wife, but a formalized mistress.1 Actually, her position would have been exactly that of the neighbor who had accused her of being negre. By instituting a slander case, Toucoutou hoped to preempt further damage to her reputation and become marked officially as white. Instead, her case failed miserably. In court, her supporting evidence unraveled bit by bit, until there was no doubt in the court's mind that she was of African descent. The Toucoutou case was a failed attempt at obtaining a secure social status as a white person, in effect a failed attempt at "passing." Ironically, this woman who used all of the resources at her disposal to prove her whiteness is remembered now, a century and a half later, only by her Creole nickname "Toucoutou."2 Almost immediately, her case began to spawn cultural commentaries. During the period of the trial, barber and musician Joseph Beaumont, a Creole of color, penned a devastating critique of her actions and set it to music.3 This song, "Toucoutou," mocked the woman's aspirations to whiteness, ensuring that the annoyingly repeti-

Nancy Prince and the Politics of Mobility, Home and Diasporic (Mis)Identification

Abstract: IN THE CULTURAL CRITICISM OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, THOSE WHO STUDY African American society have traditionally envisioned black men and women as heavily invested in the politics of local American places and peoples. Although both the Haitian revolution and the transatlantic abolition movement represent important moments of African American participation in transnational political activity, such moments have always conditioned scholarly reading of black claims to U.S. citizenship rather than disturbed general assumptions about African American identities as products of the so-called “New World,” a world translated invariably into the “national” boundaries of the United States. Most recently, Paul Gilroy’s influential The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) has questioned the very idea that African Americans ever imagined their identities via what he calls a “volkish popular cultural nationalism” that tied them exclusively to an American cultural setting. Looking at the work of Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and also at the fluid traditions of black contemporary music, Gilroy argues that black Americans have always exhibited “a desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity,” to fully occupy what he calls “the black Atlantic,” a space of African diasporic hybridity enriched by cultural crossovers among peoples of African descent, especially in Europe and the Americas. Challenging both “the archaeology of black critical

Victorian Antigone: Classicism and Women's Education in America, 1840-1900

Abstract: apotheosis in the early twentieth century, when Antigone became by far the most frequently performed classical play on American college campuses. Antigone formed part of a culture of classicism that had permeated American politics, art, and letters since the eighteenth century. A century later Americans still drew on a rich fund of female classical imagery: Sappho the lyric poetess, Minerva the icon of American liberty, Helen the dangerous seductress. The career of Antigone in Victorian America, by contrast, illuminates the moment at which Americans reimagined the function of classicism in women's education, and in turn women's preparation for citizenship. Antigone's career between 1840 and 1900 spans the decades during which American women achieved for the first time the kind of education that men had long deemed requisite for participation in public affairs: a knowledge of classical antiquity. Since the Renaissance, classical learning had buttressed European public life, instructing men in such arts of statesmanship as history, rhetoric, and eloquence. Largely exiled from this classical education, women had been

Contesting "The Way the Almighty Wants It": Crafting Memories of Ex-Slaves in the Slave Narrative Collection

Abstract: BETWEEN 1937 AND 1939, SEVENTEEN STATE BRANCHES OF THE FEDERAL Writers' Project (FWP) interviewed more than two thousand ex-slaves, approximately 2 percent of the total ex-slave population.' Federal employees gathered a number of interviews collected by this Ex-Slave Studies program into a rare book housed in the Library of Congress. The Slave Narrative Collection, which emerged out of this effort, has played an important role in shaping the narratives written by folklorists, sociologists, and historians about slave culture and the masterslave relationship.2 Most academics acknowledge the problematic nature of these sources, since they generally resulted from encounters in the Jim Crow South between white southerners and elderly blacks, many of whom were children at the time of Emancipation and octogenarians when they were interviewed. Few academics, however, have explored how the narratives came into being, a process which reveals not only the biases of the ex-slave interviews as sources but also the operations of racism in the early twentieth century. Two versions of an interview that Federal Writer Esther de Sola conducted with Charlie Moses, an ex-slave from Brookhaven, Mississippi, illustrate how the interviews gathered in the Slave Narrative Collection resulted from contestations over the memory of slavery. The original transcript of Moses' interview depicts him as one of the most articulate, angry, and, as de Sola put it, "exceptionally intelligent" exslaves.3 In his concluding comments, Moses, true to his prophetic name, argued poignantly against the "harsh treatment" that slaves

Signifying Spain, Becoming Comanche, Making Mexicans: Indian Captivity and the History of Chicana/o Popular Performance

Abstract: SINCE AT LEAST THE 1960S, MANY CHICANAS/OS HAVE ENGAGED IN A KIND OF ideological archeology, attempting to reconstruct genealogical relationships between their present and a distant pre-Columbian past. Just as certain African American nationalists turned toward Egypt for cultural cues, in recent decades Chicana/o intellectuals and cultural producers have looked to ancient Indian civilizations for inspiration. One of the most famous examples is the work of Luis Valdez, for both the plays he helped to produce with El Teatro Campesino and his subsequent films such as Zoot Suit and La Bamba are filled with Mayan and Aztec themes and images. More recently Gloria Anzaldúa has employed a related image repertoire in her influential articulation of a “new mestiza consciousness.” Despite their important differences, both Valdez and Anzaldúa participate in a larger project I would call an indigenismo of the antique. Such discourses generally focus on the Spanish conquest of Mexico, singling out in particular the fall of the Aztec empire as the primal scene of Chicana/o identity and as a paradigm for the subsequent conquest of the territory now known as the U.S. Southwest. By claiming descent from aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas, Chicanas/ os counter the claims of manifest destiny and white nativism. A famous lithograph by Yolanda M. López elegantly makes this case. Selfconsciously recalling U.S. military recruitment posters featuring Uncle Sam, the lithograph depicts an Aztec warrior who points at the viewer and rhetorically asks, “Who’s the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim?”

The Secret Lives of Objects; The Secret Stories of Rock and Roll: Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Seattle's Experience Music Project

Abstract: IF ANYBODY HAS CORNERED THE MARKET ON REVEALING THE SECRET LIVES OF objects, it is novelist Tom Robbins, although I'm not aware of any museum curator ever consulting Robbins for philosophical or logistical advice regarding an exhibition. To be sure, Robbins's novels frequently address matters central to the power of rock and roll-sex, philosophy, drugs, freedom, and outlawry-and often themselves possess the power simultaneously to arouse, outrage, inspire, and excite. But might those qualities not also inform exhibitry? Still Life with Woodpecker (1980) and Skinny Legs and All (1990) dramatize alternative models for communing with the inanimate particularly well. In Still Life, Princess Leigh Cherry sequesters herself for months and focuses all of her attention on a pack of Camel cigarettes, confident that hidden meanings

Vocabularies of Native American Languages: A Literary and Historical Approach to an Elusive Genre

Abstract: Notre père faites nous la charité Kissemenetou Kittiminaouerò Qu’as tu à vendre Keekoneia etavoeian Une paire de souliers Makisinon Kitatamiré Il ne m’a rien donné Nimiri cossi ouikikou Je m’en vais dormir Neessa-cata Allons ensemble à la chasse Mamaoué naton amaouikané Dinons ensemble Mamaoué micitaoui Pourrais-je rester chez vous cette nuit? Ouahi niné paeata inoki? Combien voulez-vous de cela? Tami tassu calamehmana C’est trop cher Ouissa Kinantotah Tu es avare Issoukiré Je vous remercie Ouaouahinou. Ckitacamei Va-t’en Man-ciarou Tous les hommes mourront Ceheki kiné essemina Connois tu le bon Dieu Enkoh Kissemanetou relamann Je ne le connois pas Enkikken relanson Je le connois h! h! enkikken retan Etes vous de la prière? Encouh Kirà narneak Pourquois ne pries-tu pas Dieu Kekoané oncianamea seon Etes vous baptisé? Enkou sa separekok Mais c’est inutile puisqu’il ne prie pas Dieu h! h! sa separekok Ne pensez vous pas à la mort Nessé an ki repoassó Il ne faut point S’enivrer Kalaki onshé be kekò

In the Name of Science: Suffering, Sacrifice, and the Formation of American Roentgenology

Abstract: ACCOUNTS OF EARLY AMERICAN EXPERIMENTATION WITH X-RAYS TEND TO LINGER over the ghastly wounds of scientific practice: ruptured blisters, cancerous limbs, and pus-ridden grafts.1 Curiously, these descriptions of decaying flesh are joined by vigorous assertions of practitioners' unflagging devotion to science; scrupulous litanies of dismemberment and death glorify, rather than trouble, the quest for new knowledge. In

Outrageous Freedom: Charles Mingus and the Invention of the Jazz Workshop

Abstract: THE MUSIC WAS ARGUABLY BORN ON 30 JANUARY 1956, A WELL-NIGH APOCALYPTIC moment when jazz composer Charles Mingus set in motion a novel but durable experiment in musical orchestration and simultaneously unveiled a menacing critique of modernist authority. Mingus had assembled his Jazz Workshop in the Atlantic studios to record "Pithecanthropus Erectus," a "jazz tone-poem" that was simple in the primordial sense. An allegory of Promethean ambition and slave revolt, "Pithecanthropus" was intended to illustrate the rise of the first man, the bloating of his ambition, his rule over his fellow men, and then-most extendedly-his downfall at the hands of a mass insurrection. It was a ferocious version of the plot that, as sociologist Paul Gilroy has remarked, is central to African American modernism: the "interrogation of the concept of progress from the standpoint of the slave," this time voiced by a 33 year-old composer and bass virtuoso whose ambitions had so far swelled larger than his commercial accomplishments. "Pithecanthropus" was his Workshop's major label debut as well as his most groundbreaking work to date.1 Yet it was not simply the plot that transformed "Pithecanthropus" into the sourcebook of postbop jazz. More strikingly, Mingus found a license for freedom in the mechanics of the tone-poem, just as his modernist model Richard Strauss had introduced new dissonances in

Tourism in Performance

Abstract: "THE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK," WRITES JANE DESMOND, "CAME FROM A SENSE OF shock" (xiii). Indeed, the tourist experience can be quite a shockerperhaps more disturbingly so when its conventions of display and appropriation pass unnoticed. In her book, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display From Waikiki to Sea World, Professor Desmond transforms her initial reactions into a full-scale analysis that is both rigorously

The Worlding of American Studies

Abstract: SURVEYING THE LEGACY OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY AT THE HEIGHT OF THE COLD War, Henry Nash Smith found a contradictory mixture of isolationism and imperial ambitions. As the nation extended its borders westward, its economic and political programs were buttressed by a symbolic constellation that he called "the myth of the garden." The requisite utopianism surrounding the garden of America gave rise to a dangerous xenophobia, a belief that "other men [sic] and other continents, having no share in the conditions of American virtue and happiness were by implication unfortunate or wicked" (187). Instead of looking east to see themselves as "members of a world community," Americans had been excessively oriented towards continental expansion as the means to fulfilling the promise of Manifest Destiny.' Fifty years later, the muted critique of isolationism advanced by Virgin Land has become one of the central concerns for scholars

Timing Impossible Subjects: The Marketing Style of Booker T. Washington

Abstract: OF THE FIRST U.S. NATIONAL MEDIA EDITORS, IT WAS THE World’s Work’S Walter Hines Page who most often wrote about a narrative style that could quickly drive home a point. He studied the brevity of brand advertising with a covetous eye, praising brand layout as the briefest of storyforms written “to the point” and, curiously, thus filled with a “thousand and one things a manufacturer would want to say about the benefits of his product.” The relation between the brevity of storyform and a profusion of things to say was precisely the relation Page found in the story style of Booker T. Washington. His advice to Washington excerpted above came after reading “Signs of Progress Among the Negroes,” and from that moment on, Page began to think of the Tuskegee president as a master of narrative brevity: Washington’s

Prismatics, Multivalence, and Other Riffs on the Millennial Moment: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, 13 October 2000

Abstract: ion that a concept defined by one experience or situation can be transported meaningfully into another; throwing in theory is something like throwing in the clutch, helping us all to shift gears and move smoothly and meaningfully through a sequence of contexts. But most people drive automatic transmissions these days, which is to say that both the metaphor and the working of these connective/ transmissive relationships are too easily mystified in practice. Here, as elsewhere, it seems to me that for an American studies wishing to both understand and change the world the answer lies in a deeper and more sustained dialogue, of talking and really listening across diverse realms of experience, informed by a belief in the possibility that experience as well as expertise—the two words have the same root, I like to observe—each provide tools for the creation of a new discourse of possibilities. For beyond narrative as illustration, and narrative as appreciation, and even narrative as instruction, it is narrative as dialogue—which however implicitly is embedded in all narrative—that may be most worth our attention. And these notions point, once again, to the usefulness of recognizing how important engagement, and mutual interrogation have always been to the force field of cultural and intellectual practice in American studies. These help nourish the energizing tension and provocative instability of “both/and” responses to “either/or” questions, responses American studies at its best has always embraced. Multivalent intellectual issues and embodied institutional postures, that is, have characterized our organization and work for some time now in one form or another, at every level from scholarship to pedagogy to community engagement to international involvement and activities— and are needed now more than ever. This has been instructive and defining for me—to close where I began —in my own program in Buffalo, which began decades ago, with Larry Chisolm’s prescient vision, joined by Charlie Keil, Bob Dentan, Liz Kennedy, Dick Blau, and others, of an American studies re-situated in a global perspective and grounded in the centrality of cross-cultural fieldwork, of activist scholarship, of music, dance, and literally em219 THE MILLENNIAL MOMENT bodied praxis. And it is no coincidence at all that this orientation became the generative ground for a multicultural constellation of programs focused outside the academy and never seen as inconsistent with this broader, inclusive vision—Native American studies developed by Barry White, John Mohawk, and Oren Lyons; Women’s studies as built by Liz Kennedy, Lillian Robinson, Ellen Dubois, and more recently Masani Alexis DeVeaux; a cosmopolitan Puerto Rican studies led by Francisco Pabon and Alfredo Matilla; and an African American studies program propelled, at the start, by Jim Miller, who has gone on to be so important in this work in ASA. The many-dimensioned multivalence of this approach was never really appreciated by our university, or perhaps it was apprehended too clearly—in any event, a once-substantial department has now been restructured and absorbed within a broader, vaguely constituted umbrella “Center for the Americas.” This makes perfect and even admirable intellectual sense, on many grounds, even if it has been more problematically imagined from above as a way to retain the prestige of cutting edge scholarship without the pesky intrusion of the actual people, issues, problems, agendas, and agency to whom our space has been open, and by whom it has been shaped. This is a complex, painful transition, but the new Center, initially shaped by the Americanist literary critic Mark Shechner and about to be led by the remarkable combination of John Mohawk and Dennis Tedlock, may yet surprise administrators bent on deconstructing precisely the kind of energizing constellations I have been invoking tonight. They may yet be surprised by the durability of dialogue and engagement, and their indispensability to currently cosmopolitan constructions. This will depend, I expect, on whether the kind of generative tensions suggested by my models tonight can, on the programmatic level, be sustained, nourished, respected, and embodied in engaged community—both within and leading beyond the program and the university. This the broader politics of the academy renders quite uncertain. As it is here, in Detroit and in ASA, which is why we have sought—in constructing the conference program, in the community based preconvention collaboratives, and in the plenary, “community commons” and performance tomorrow evening—to emphasize the centrality of engagement beyond the Renaissance Center, and beyond the circle of our own academic discourse. Seen in the prismatic array or in the quadrilateral of forces I have described (physics in the hands of an 220 AMERICAN QUARTERLY historian, I have surely demonstrated, being no more constraining than history in the hands of a physicist), I see the current moment as one of extraordinary dimensionality, not usefully reduced to any particular intellectual posture or organizational model and requiring connections and resources beyond our intellectual work as such. For only in the most demandingly inclusive interrogation of our mutually implicated world will we be able to mobilize the power of a fully deployed diversity—as we move, together, through this necessarily dialogic, infinitely prismatic, and relentlessly multivalent millennial moment. Larry Chisolm, the founder of the American Studies program at SUNY Buffalo, died of cancer in April 1998. The program and his inspiring vision are discussed towards the end of my address. For a fuller appreciation of Larry’s unique presence and significance in the field, see Charlie Keil, “Obituary: Lawrence Washington Chisolm,” American Studies Association Newsletter (Mar. 1999). In Memory of Lawrence Chisolm 221 THE MILLENNIAL MOMENT

Making American Studies Dance

Abstract: Two NEW BOOKS BY DANCE SCHOLARS BRENDA DIXON GOTTSCHILD AND LINDA J. Tomko show the importance of putting performance studies center stage in American studies. Each engages specifically with issues at the heart of current American studies research: race and class formations. Both books are by seasoned scholars who write clearly and accessibly, making their work easily approachable by scholars and students outside their specialty areas. I have no doubt that these books, like all work by these two scholars, will be eagerly read by those in dance studies. My concern here is to help assure that they are read by the wider audiences they both deserve. While these audiences include scholars who work on critical race studies, immigrant studies, leisure policy analyses, urban history, and so on, the wider American studies scholarly community offers a particularly capacious and welcoming home for these investigations. I would like to see these books engaged with by social historians, literary specialists, musicologists, and those concerned with

Music, Experience, and History

Abstract: WHEN JIMI HENDRIX ASKED HIS AUDIENCE IN 1967 IF THEY WERE "EXPERIENCED," his word gestured toward a widely shared belief that listening to rock music now mattered-that it was now more than just fun (though it was still that) because it offered new and useful ways of being in and knowing the world.1 Similarly, when Bruce Springsteen famously observed in 1984 that "we learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school,"2 he was voicing a deeply held conviction that rock music was instructive-not just entertaining-and that it provided its young listeners with what Kenneth Burke called "equipment for living."3 While the truth of such claims may seem obvious to rock fans, most academic scholars of popular music and popular culture have dedicated themselves to demonstrating their falsehood, or at least their naivet6.

The Shifting Monument of American Marriage

Abstract: "MARRIAGE IS LIKE THE SPHINX-A CONSPICUOUS AND RECOGNIZABLE MONUMENT on the landscape, full of secrets," announces Nancy Cott at the beginning of Public Vows. One approach to understanding American marriage is to try to illuminate the secrets that comprise this most intimate of human relationships-the tender caresses and the petty cruelties that are part of the interpersonal complexities that privately transpire between two spouses.1 Yet, as Cott shows in her study, these "private experiences [are] so precious that they [have] amounted to a public necessity worth fighting for" (188). The chief innovation of these three erudite new studies of American marriage is their resolute emphasis on the double role of marriage as a public monument central to political history. Their collective achievement should more firmly

History Goes Hollywood and Vice Versa: Historical Representation and Distortion in American Film

Abstract: AFTER RECEIVING THE AWARD FOR BEST DIRECTOR AT THE 1997 ACADEMY AWARDS for his work on Titanic, James Cameron raised his Oscar into the air and announced, "I'm the King of the World." It was an embarrassing moment for many of us in the TV audience. Cameron's pronouncement, a line borrowed from Jack Dawson, Titanic's romantic male lead played in the film by Leonardo Di Caprio, seemed inappropriate for a number of different reasons. It may be okay for a young boy from steerage, who had won his ticket on the ship of dreams in a game of cards just moments before the ship left port, to utter these words as the wind ruffles his blonde hair as he heads towards the new world. Cameron, though, in his designer tuxedo, collecting the tenth Oscar of the night for his film, seemed megalomanical, to say the least. He added to the embarrassment moments later when he received the film's award for best picture. After a staged maudlin moment of silence for

Making Jews, Making Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Identity

Abstract: In the city, living in a "Jewish" neighborhood, one may unconsciously continue to accept one's Jewishness in residual terms of ethnic "belonging"; in the suburbs and in most smaller towns this is no longer possible: one must begin to think "seriously" of his Jewishness, and the only possible outcome of such thinking in present-day America is identification with the Jewish religious community, frequently leading to affiliation with the synagogue.'

New Negroes, Black Communists, and the New Pluralism

Abstract: UNTIL THE 1990s, SCHOLARS ALMOST UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED AN UNCOMPLICATED narrative of black Marxist history. Conventional wisdom held that the relationship between communism and black struggle was inherently corrupt. Critics of African American cultural arts frequently portrayed the affiliation between "white communists" and black intellectuals as a kind of reenactment of the colonizer-colonized encounter, where black creative workers were expected to submit to a racist agenda. But, in 1989 Cary Nelson's inclusive Repression and Recovery suggested that in modernist period literary study such an account was fraught with difficulty.1 Looking at the 1930s, Barbara Foley's chapter on "Race, Class, and the 'Negro Question'" in her Radical Representations a few years later challenged decades of received wisdom.2 The genealogy of the reading, which assumes that blacks were expected to adopt an inferior status in communism, is traceable to historians and critics in the 1960s and 1970s. The views of such scholars exhibited a popular

Gay Men and the Rural South: No Contradiction in Terms

Abstract: GAY MISSISSIPPI. FOR MANY RURAL SOUTHERNERS WHO ARE ACCUSTOMED TO maintaining a pretense of ignorance toward what they do not want to see or hear about, those two words together have represented something of a contradiction for much of the twentieth century. Male-male desire and gender insubordination might exist in the seemingly less normative and more anonymous environment of major, mostly Northern cities but largely not in their homes and communities. Ironically, such a mindset also informs the beliefs of many non-Southern lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists and historians who assume that individuals who are attracted to others of the same gender will come out-and if they live in a rural part of the country, move out-and settle in a large metropolitan area where they can supposedly express their sexual identities more openly. These activists and historians cannot fathom the possibility that individuals interested in pursuing same-gender relationships could live satisfying lives in Jackson or Biloxi, much less in Brandon, Mississippi, the town in which John Howard grew up. Howard's work demonstrates that "men like that," as well as men "who liked that" (men who had sex with other men but who did not identify themselves as gay or bisexual), not only survived but flour-

Gender and the New Liberal Synthesis

Abstract: NOT SO LONG AGO, REPUBLICANISM REIGNED AS THE PREVAILING PARADIGM FOR interpreting the vast sweep of American history from the Revolution through the New Deal. Wherever they looked, historians discovered a political tradition that emphasized concepts such as civic virtue and the threat of corruption to the body politic. Commitment to the common good offered a bracing alternative to the single-minded pursuit of individual self-interest. Whether republicanism was a discourse or an ideology, a continuous tradition or an intermittent rhetoric remained subject to discussion and debate. Nonetheless, there seemed to be little doubt that republicanism represented a competing mode of political thought that challenged the monopoly of liberalism on the American past.

An Aesthetics of Crime

Abstract: AS A HISTORIAN OF CRIMINOLOGY, NICOLE RAFTER HAS DEMONSTRATED THAT SHE has a strong understanding of the different approaches that criminologists have taken in thinking about the origin and prevention of crime. Creating Born Criminals, her social history of biological theories of crime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, effectively traces the work of some of the early attempts at a scientific approach to why individuals commit crime and how we might identify those most likely to engage in criminal behavior. In her recent study, Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society, Rafter extends her work into the

Agonizing over Indians

Abstract: WHEN I WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF READING ANTHONY F. C. WALLACE’S BOOK Jefferson and the Indians, the New York Times reported yet another story about the “strong evidence” proving Thomas Jefferson had fathered at least one “if not all six of the children of Sally Hemings.” On almost exactly the same day, I discovered that the Jefferson-Sally Hemings business reached a wonderfully banal, if perfectly predictable, pop-culture apotheosis. With Sam Neill in the role of Thomas Jefferson, CBS aired its made-for-TV movie “Sally Hemings: American Scandal,” and advertised it, in at least one commercial, as “the greatest love story never told.” The Jefferson-Hemings affair sits, for the American public, at the irresistible intersection of history, medical science, presidential scandal, and racial taboo. One is tempted to think that a made-for-TV-movie is as low as it is possible to go with this particular bit of presidential salaciousness, but American culture has had a remarkable capacity to prove Edgar’s admonition from King Lear: “the worst is not/ So long as we can say ‘this is the worst.’” The extent to which Jefferson actually agonized over slavery has been much discussed. What DNA testing has now proved, to the satisfaction of those who discounted the historical case many had been arguing for years, is just how personal that agony might have been. Historians, especially over the last generation or so, have explored in seemingly numberless pages the nature of that agony—whether, in fact,

Breaking Iron Bonds, Elucidating Fluid Boundaries: "Indians" in American Studies

Abstract: IN 1970 VINE DELORIA JR. RECOGNIZED THE POVERTY OF AMERICAN STUDIES when it fails to take stock of exclusions. "It is necessary to outline the Indian point of view as a contribution to the discussion," Deloria wrote in his second book, We Talk, You Listen. "Further generalizations about how we are all alike-all people-are useless today .... All we can do is try to communicate what we feel our group means to itself and how we relate to other groups."' Despite ongoing efforts since 1970 in American studies to be inclusive and aware of what it leaves out, there is no identifiable "Indian point of view" in recent efforts to define the field, not in the pages of the summer special issue of American Studies edited by Norman Yetman in 1997, nor among the pages of the American Quarterly essays reintroduced by Lucy Maddox in Locating American Studies two years later.2 Still mostly missing in the year 2001 from the central concerns of American studies constituted in its

Reading Poe, Reading Capitalism

Abstract: PERHAPS NOTHING BETTER DEFINES THE MAIN CURRENT OF AMERICAN POE criticism than the complaint that Poe has been left "quite outside the main current of American thought" (58), whether by Vernon Louis Parrington (who coined this phrase and critical posture in 1927), by F.O. Mathiessen who found Poe ancillary to the democratic ambitions of The American Renaissance (1941), or by the myth-and-symbol school of American studies.1 American critics continue to be haunted by the suspicion that Poe is not, and never has been, entirely their own, frequently attributing their sense of dispossession to the superior or misguided enthusiasm of French authors and theorists. Poe had to be rescued from Charles Baudelaire's romantic identifications and from Marie Bonaparte's psychoanalytic speculations long before his tales became exemplary texts in poststructuralist debates over the relations of language and truth. American Poe scholarship has experienced successive waves of attempts to reclaim Poe for the study of American culture, beginning with Arthur Hobson Quinn's magisterial Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941; repr. 1995), which "tried to tell the story of Poe the American, not the exotic as he has so often been

Anti-Foundational Founders: Did Post-structuralism Fail the Historians, or Did the Historians Fail Post-structuralism?

Abstract: DURING THE 1990S, NO HISTORIAN OF EARLY AMERICA MORE PUBLICLY OR forthrightly argued for the value of postmodern theory than Saul Cornell. In a series of provocative conference presentations and articles, Cornell depicted a set of theoretical insights that had the potential to help early American historians, legal scholars, and students of the American “founding” out of the interpretive quagmire. Cornell was also, not coincidentally, one of the first winners of the prestigious postdoctoral fellowship of the Institute of Early American History and Culture to take a postmodern plunge. The subsequent publication by the Institute of several books that took a cultural, and even at times selfconsciously literary and post-structuralist, approach to classic problems in the field might otherwise obscure the important role Cornell played in sounding the tocsin for “theory,” in trying to define (and translate) the substance of those theories, and in catching flak from an assortment of political, social, and intellectual historians who wondered where the reorganization of scholarship around competing “texts” and “discourses” might take the study of early America.

"There's Something Happening Here": The Sexual Revolution in Lawrence, Kansas

Abstract: LOOSELY TOSSED AROUND BY POLITICIANS, DISCREDITED IN THE PUBLIC IMAGINATION, and flat-out violated by advertisers, the entire concept of "revolution" seems to be in crisis Whereas the desire for revolution was evident in the 1960s in countless ways, most activists from this period look back upon the overblown rhetoric of the new left and counterculture with, at best, an impish sense of chagrin "Be Realistic-Demand the Impossible," a world-wide rallying cry for young militants in 1968, today carries all of the sound and fury of a bumper sticker on an ailing Volkswagen How very felicitous, then, is Beth Bailey's new book Sex in the Heartland-a lucid and complex look at the cultural and sexual politics that took shape in Lawrence, Kansas from World War II until the early 1970s Although Bailey admits that the seismic changes in American sexual attitudes during this period can only be described as "revolutionary," she also believes that scholars who have tried to locate these changes in the upheavals, convulsions, and cataclysms of the "Radical Sixties" have been led astray However real the "sexual revolution" may have been, Bailey argues that this is an inadequate way of describing the remaking of gender relations in the second half of the twentieth century, which actually came about in a tentative, halting fashion, often as a result of unintended consequences and with origins in mainstream sources