In 1934 Horace Mann Bond, an African American, was in the early years of a distinguished career as an historian and university president when the lynching of a young black man, Jerome Wilson, impinged on his life, shaking him to the core. Already, at age twenty-nine, a professor at Fisk University with an armful of publications, his expertise as an authority on black education had taken him to a small community near Franklinton, in Washington Parish, Louisiana, where the lynching took place. Bond knew the victim's family, and he wrote an account of the lynching that traced the history of the Wilson family from the days of slavery.

On several occasions during the late 1860s, the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe exhorted readers to adorn their homes with chromolithographs, color prints which reproduced original oil-paintings or, less often, depicted images created specifically for the print medium. In her 1869 domestic advice manual, The American Woman's Home, co-authored with her sister Catharine Beecher, Stowe described chromolithographs (or “chromos,” as they were commonly called) as essential components of a properly embellished home interior. In proposing a hypothetical budget devoted to parlor furnishings, the authors recommended that almost one-fourth of the total be allocated to lithographic reproductions of “really admirable pictures” by some of “America's best artists.” Stowe's advocacy of chromos also appeared in the promotional publications of L. Prang & Company, one of the country's largest publishers of these images. The short-lived quarterly Prang's Chromo: A Journal of Popular Art (published in five issues from January 1868 to April 1869) printed a letter in which Stowe thanked Louis Prang for sending her several free chromolithographs. After praising the “beautiful objects,” Stowe concluded her note with the kind of testimonial Prang no doubt had been seeking when he sent her the complimentary items: “Be assured I shall neglect no opportunity of proving my sympathy with your so charming and beautiful mission, and bringing it to everyone's notice, so far as I can.” And, though it is impossible to know what exact role Stowe's promotions played in the overall sale of chromos, it is clear that she aligned herself with a hot commodity: from 1840 to 1900, chromolithographs in America sold by the millions.

One of the most talked about moments of Ken Burns's television documentary The Civil War (1990) was the dramatic reading of Sullivan Ballou's letter to his wife, Sarah, in which the Union officer anticipates his own death in the First Battle of Bull Run. This moving conclusion to the series' first episode and the sensation it caused underscore the persistence of a gendered model of wartime literacy: the ideal war-text is an eyewitness account written by a man, and read by a woman at home. Women, the Ballou letter sequence suggests, are consumers, not producers of war-texts. As innovative as Burns's documentary was, however, the dramatization of a personal letter from the front has a long history. The first chapter of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), for example, climaxes with Marmee's recitation of a letter from Mr. March, absent at the war. “Very few letters,” the narrator tells us, “were written in those hard times that were not touching, especially those which fathers sent home.” Both Burns's original script for the Ballou segment and Alcott's earlier writing about the war reveal the artificiality of the normative model of literacy presented by The Civil War and Little Women; in order to maintain exclusively male control over the production of wartime texts, documentary and novel must repress or radically circumscribe female voices. Burns originally planned to have an actress, reading as Sarah Ballou, finish the letter, but decided against it; the effect of a woman reading would have been “so emotional [ctdot ] just too much” – as if even a female audience for the male wartime text can only be hinted at, not represented.

The conflicted racial identity politics of Zora Neale Hurston climaxed in a statement printed in February 1943 in the New York Herald Telegram. In the article, “When Negro Succeeds, South is Proud,” Hurston argued that “the Jim Crow system works.” Hurston later retracted this statement, claiming that it was taken out of context and grossly distorted. Hurston said that her point was to show that “there was plenty of race prejudice both north and south” but that the South “by opportunity of long practice had worked out a system, while the North, caught between declarations of no prejudice, and its actual feelings [ctdot ] was groping around for the same thing, but with fine phrases.”

Historians are more likely to examine monumental buildings as finished products than as processes of construction. Chicago's Auditorium Building was monumentality itself: upon completion in 1890 it was the largest edifice in the United States, and an exceptionally elegant one. Though often discussed as a work of art, an urban icon, and a measure of regional accomplishment, it has yet to be considered as a nexus of social relations. For monument appraisal tends to overlook the role of labor – including its relations with capital – that is not only inherent to the construction process, but that in this instance also affected Chicago's future. It was precisely the Auditorium's monumentality that prompted local trade unions to develop new tactics that yielded unprecedented results.

Christopher Lasch completed this book under “trying circumstances,” which presumably included the knowledge that he was dying from leukemia. Its final sardonic section is entitled “The Dark Night of the Soul,” and contemplates the pitiable plight of modern and secularized man, who denies himself the discipline of religion and is compelled to seek security in the easier and probably falser gods of science or therapy or identity politics. Lasch's last, racking examination of the human condition as it is displayed in the United States is not exactly despairing, because the human agency means that there is always hope, but his subjects are unfulfilled beings in a dysfunctional society. In short, Lasch has not used his farewell address to reprieve his fellow intellectuals of the charges he has previously levelled against them; rather, the indictment has been intensified. In many ways this a perfect Parthian shaft, gathering together and synthesising into one compelling critique the many misgivings that Lasch had long been developing about American life.