In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope sent back to astronomers at the University of Arizona a series of vivid colour images of the Eagle Nebula, a dense formation of interstellar gas and dust the likes of which cradle newborn stars. As evidence that our perceptual universe, in every sense of the word, is defined by the representational powers of colour technology, the Hubble's “cosmic close-ups” are a clear case in point. Colour has become a standard representational form and hence the visual form. If so, what can be said of the recent popularity and proliferation of the black-and-white image?

No self-respecting café-bar or discriminating home, it seems, can now do without a black and white print on the wall. Commercial photography and certain forms of advertising have found a new niche in black and white, and even sepia is staging a come-back. The popularity of the black-and-white image cannot be divorced from the commercial culture in which it circulates; it is a “look” and a marker of taste. Monochrome is a stylistic trend but a revealing one, especially if one considers the growing preoccupation in America with heritage and memory. Both Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes give black and white a status of authenticity judged in relation to past time “properly” captured. For Sontag, monochrome gives an image a sense of age, historical distance, and aura. She writes, “the cold intimacy of color seems to seal off the photograph from patina.” Likewise, Barthes comments on the artifice of colour, how it is a “coating applied later on to the original truth of black and white.” For both critics, monochrome is an aesthetic of the authentic figured around a basic quality of pastness.

The United States after World War II experienced symbiotically the fear of the Soviet threat and the belief in its own system as the ultimate choice for the world. In the confrontation with the Soviet Union, cultural relations programs began to be organized and designed in accordance with national security interest. George F. Kennan, the architect of US containment policy, urged: “let us by all means have the maximum cultural exchange.” The mission of cultural contact, according to Kennan, was “combatting the negative impressions about this country [USA] that mark so much of world opinion.” The US government made new cultural policies in terms of Cold War political concerns and relied extensively on private resources for the implementation of cultural diplomacy via educational exchange. It mobilized the American society for the achievement of “total diplomacy” with political rhetoric, legislative measures, and financial support. Private institutions, which pioneered and dominated US cultural interactions with other nations before the war, now began to play a new but supportive role for the state. Because of their expertise and their unique roles in a democratic society, American philanthropies, professional organizations, and universities became indispensable in delivering the multitude of exchange programs.

One of the notable aspects of Gravity's Rainbow, if we consider it as an historical novel of a special kind, is the way in which “great” political leaders are barely mentioned. The carnival lacks the mock king, and the historical novel lacks the leader who embodies history. The explanation here is paradoxically historicist. Gravity's Rainbow explicitly addresses a constructed audience (in the Orpheus Theatre) in the Cold War and is about the formation of the Cold War in its techno-bureaucratic context. The realpolitik of authority in the Cold War context has changed. Bureaucratic constructions of System operate as the modus operandi for authority in the novel and they parallel the historical formation of Systems theory and analysis with such US organizations as RAND. This development represents, in the technologies and the discourses of the military and political strategists, a response to Hitler and the supposed tyranny and threat of Communism. The series of characters we encounter within the novel reflects different forms of entrapment and/or lines of flight in response to the authority of the System in what John Johnston has called an assemblage, or postmodern multiplicity. Containment and counterforce become metaphors which Pynchon scurrilously uses to subvert the moral righteousness of the Western Cold Warriors in their defense of a “free world” (paradoxically) under siege from an ever threatening Communism. Pynchon is interested not in the great historical figure, but in the relation of the individual to the System, militarily, scientifically, socially, and sexually.

The history of nativism in the United States has received considerable scholarly attention, yet the few systematic attempts to explain it have focused predominantly on psychological or economic causes. This article asserts that such explanations fail to address the crucial cultural dimension of the nativism issue, which must be analyzed through the prism of historical sociology. Specifically, this article argues that American nativism cannot be understood without reference to an “American” national ethnic group whose myth–symbol complex had developed prior to the large-scale immigration of the mid-nineteenth century. Without understanding this social construction, it is difficult to explain subsequent attempts to defend it. This article, therefore, does not seek to retrace the history of American nativism. Instead, it focuses on the period prior to 1850, when American nativism was in its infancy. It examines the development of an Anglo-American ethnicity during 1776–1850 and attempts to delineate its structure. This “American” complex of myths and symbols, with its attendant set of life-style images and narratives, is shown to conform to more generally models recently presented by theorists of ethnicity and nationalism. Finally, it is argued that American nativism may have exhibited a very different pattern if an “American” national ethnicity had not taken root.

In October of 1888, at the height of his literary fame and influence, W. D. Howells wrote the following to Edward Everett Hale:

I am persuaded also that the best that is in men, most men, cannot come out until they all have a fair chance. I used to think America gave this; now I don't. – I am neither an example nor an incentive meanwhile in my own way of living …Words, words, words! How to make them things, deeds, – you have the secret of that; with me they only breed more words. At present they are running into another novel.

Howells's tendency to equate his own weaknesses with the social tensions of late-nineteenth-century America is equally apparent in a letter written a few weeks earlier to Henry James:

I'm not in a good humour with “America” myself. It seems to me the most grotesquely illogical thing under the sun…after fifty years of optimistic content with “civilization” and its ability to come out right in the end, I now abhor it and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew upon real equality. Meantime I wear a fur-lined overcoat and live in all the luxury my money can buy. (417)

While these letters express, most clearly, a sense of disillusionment, a feeling that Howells like his country has betrayed his early promise, they also manage to imply the more disturbing fear that the promise may actually have been kept – that luxury and meaninglessness may be the logical culmination of both moral projects. There is a feeling here beyond irony (and he was never a great ironist) that Howells, like America, is helpless in the grip of a process which makes vacuousness and luxury the inevitable result of any quest for value. I will argue in this article that one name for this process is capitalist modernity and that the specific moment of capitalist development that Howells is reacting to, in these letters and in his work as a whole, is the crisis of overproduction experienced by the US economy towards the end of the nineteenth century. Howells's uncertainty in these letters, about his own life and writing and about the state of his country, speaks, in this context, to the confusions of a culture in which the morally sanctioned effort of production had become somehow itself a problem, a problem whose solution – consumption – appeared as an immoral, yet inevitable, form of wastage.

Nineteenth-century exslave narratives allow us to understand the way in which freedmen, freedwomen, and runaways experienced and enjoyed liberty. In such narratives, liberty, naturally enough, it seems, is the opposite of slavery. Once free, one was no longer a slave. Yet we should view this understanding of slavery and freedom as a problem in itself, as a rhetorical and time-bound use of the notions of enslavement and liberty. This article argues that an early exslave narrativist, John Jea, articulated a dichotomous, unrealistic, yet characteristically American, notion of the relationship between slavery and freedom: that anyone who is not a slave is free. Expressed in evangelical Protestantism, liberal individualism, and laissez-faire economics, this notion was a staple of nineteenth-century American ideology. It is no longer a convincing notion, since it obscures not only the variety of the experience of slaves, freemen, and freewomen, but also the forms of bondage that accompanied slavery and survived it. As a man of the nineteenth century, Jea seems never to have comprehended the ways that he remained unfree once he was manumitted. As a black man and exslave, Jea might have been one of those most sensitive to the persistence of bondage after slavery, but he was not. Surely this suggests how convincing, yet how false, was new thought about slavery and freedom in the early nineteenth century.

In an effort to maximize the representation of African Americans and Hispanics in the United States House of Representatives, many state legislatures have consciously sought to create so-called “majority–minority” congressional districts. This involves carving out districts in which African Americans or Hispanics constitute more than 50 per cent of the voting age population. The expectation is that such districts will elect a minority member of the House, which in turn will lead to a Congress that is more sensitive and responsive to the needs and interests of America's two largest ethnic minorities. Indeed, this expectation has become an article of faith for the mainstream civil rights movement and its white sympathizers.

However, like other forms of affirmative action, majority–minority districting sits rather uncomfortably alongside the Constitutional principle of race-neutrality. In a series of recent cases, the United States Supreme Court has declared that, by subordinating traditional districting principles to the overriding need to draw boundaries along racial lines, states have violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's view of his first American ancestors as belonging to a grim and gloomy race, impatient with human weaknesses and merciless towards transgressors, reflects a wide-spread popular attitude towards the Massachusetts Bay colonists. Indeed, Hawthorne's contribution to the construction and perpetuation of this view is not inconsiderable. Hawthorne frankly confesses to his own family descent from one of the “hanging judges” of the Salem witchcraft trials, and he does not spare any instance of persecution, obsession, or cruelty regarding the community led by his paternal ancestors. But Hawthorne does not stop at indicting his own family history; in a famous exchange with the president of Hartford College, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, shortly after the publication of The House of the Seven Gables (1851) Hawthorne is accused of blackening the reputation of another of New England's great colonial families. Hawthorne denied any knowledge of a “real” Pynchon family, let alone one with living (and litigious) descendants. He apologized for his mistake and offered to write an explanatory preface (which never appeared) for the second edition. Historical evidence suggests that Hawthorne, in fact, knew the history of the Pyncheon family, in particular William Pyncheon and his son John, of Springfield, who shared political and business connections throughout the mid-seventeenth century with William Hathorne of Salem. William Hathorne was a notorious persecutor of Quakers and his son John was the “hanging judge” of the witchcraft trials; William Pyncheon was a prominent fur-trader and founder of several towns along the Connecticut River who left the colony abruptly in circa 1651 accused of heresy. Given this history, a more likely model for the grim Colonel Pyncheon of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel is rather a composite of John and William Hathorne than William Pynchon. So why should Nathaniel, who had already in his fiction revealed his family skeletons, choose to displace his own family history on to the Pyncheon family, with all the trouble that then ensued?