In his role as a promoter of scientific exploration of North America, Thomas Jefferson shared with Jedidiah Morse, considered by many to be the father of American geography, the patriotic desire to counteract misinformation furnished by “imperfect and erroneous sketches” describing the continent's geography by European writers. Yet his interest in the science of geography was also motivated by a concern with America's self-image in the realm of international politics, learning, and commerce. In the summer of 1802 Jefferson was prompted to send an exploring party to North America's westernmost territories in response to reading Voyages from Montreal, Alexander Mackenzie's account of his voyages across the continent to its northwest coast. At the end of his narrative, the Scottish explorer had encouraged Britain's control of a region that, if certain natural obstacles were overcome, might supply fur and fish to “the markets of the four quarters of the globe,” and proposed a line of fortified posts to be established to maintain the British Empire's presence from Lake Winnipeg to the Pacific. Jefferson understood that such action would obstruct America's westward expansion, block Russian advances from Alaska, and thus make possible a British dominion linking two great oceans. Edward Thornton, the British minister to the United States, would later observe that Mackenzie's discoveries had provoked the American President, who in 1803 was also the president of the American Philosophical Society, to concretize his dream “to set on foot an expedition entirely of a scientific nature for exploring the Western continent of America,” and that he was, furthermore, “ambitious in his character of a man of letters and science, of distinguishing his Presidency by a discovery” of a route to the Pacific Ocean by way of the Missouri, “now the only one left to his enterprise, the Northern Communication having been so ably explored and ascertained by Sir Alexander Mackenzie's journeys.

On 20 September 2001 the founder and CEO of a New Jersey-based face-recognition technology company called Visionics testified before a special government committee appointed by the secretary of transportation. Joseph Atick's message to the committee was simple: his company's face recognition equipment could dramatically improve security in US airports and embassies. The science of biometrics, a method of identifying people by scanning unique physical characteristics like facial structures and retinal patterns, could, claimed Atick, be deployed as part of a comprehensive national surveillance plan that he called Operation Noble Shield. According to this plan the Office of Homeland Security might take the lead and liaise with local police forces to install cameras linked to a web-based biometric network throughout American cities. In order to protect America from further terrorist acts, Atick claimed, “We need to create an invisible fence, an invisible shield.” Members of the committee liked his ideas and seemed ready to endorse his recommendations.

“We've some splendid old point-lace in our family, yellow and fragrant … all tags and tangles and fibrous and bewildering” (7). This is the way that Giorgione (Yone) Willoughby opens her tale, “The Amber Gods”; instead of “beginn[ing] at the beginning” (7) she offers a luxuriant description of a type of old lace, rich in sense impressions. Bewilderingly, like her point lace, her story's introductory proprieties are delayed until the second paragraph. Such improper sensuality disconcerted many of her Protestant New England readers when her story appeared in the Atlantic in 1860. Yet also, hypocritically, at this time, a rising bourgeoisie, secure in its socioeconomic position, was increasingly embracing a phase of conspicuous leisure and consumption. It is with this embrace, and its dark origins and dark legacies, that “The Amber Gods” engages.

In an 1899 essay Mark Twain wrote,

It would not be possible for a humane and intelligent person to invent a rational excuse for slavery; yet you will remember that in the early days of the emancipation agitation in the North the agitators got but small help or countenance from any one. Argue and plead and pray as they might, they could not break the universal stillness that reigned, from pulpit and press all the way down to the bottom of society – the clammy stillness created and maintained by the lie of silent assertion – the silent assertion … that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop.

Early in 1844 Eliza Farnham (1815–64) was appointed to the post of matron at the first purpose-built women's prison, the women's section of Mount Pleasant Prison in New York, the institution popularly known as Sing Sing. Her appointment, which she won through her connection with Horace Greeley and the reforming circles of New York, brought her, at first, a burst of favourable attention and subsequently considerable notoriety. The precise reasons for this reversal are a matter of varying interpretations, but the defining impulse of Farnham's tenure at Sing Sing is not: Farnham's particular interest was in campaigning for phrenology, perhaps the most popular of the new psychologies of the period, as a means to diagnose and cure female prisoners. This psychological science was based on the premise that there was a match between character and the outer shape and protuberances of the head; character could be read by studying the head's surface. During this period, phrenology was often linked with the figure of the criminal, indeed phrenology first evolved in the work of Franz-Joseph Gall and was subsequently frequently explained through descriptions of prisoners and the inhabitants of asylums. Farnham was a pivotal figure in the argument for phrenology's efficacy in treating prisoners in New York in the mid-1840s.

Far from being limited to conspiracist McCarthyism, American anticommunism always spanned the entire ideological spectrum. Recognizing this, in his classic studies of the initial Western reception of Bolshevism, Arno J. Mayer divided early anticommunists into mutually antagonistic “parties of order” and “parties of movement” and claimed that these two fought each other almost as much as they combatted the Bolsheviks themselves. Mayer's conceptualization spoke to a profoundly important dimension in Western anticommunism, both before and during the Cold War, in that it exposed a sort of civil war between Western liberals, conservatives and socialists in which each of these groups tended to define their ideological rivals as the allies, unconscious tools or prototypes of Soviet Bolshevism.

Hollywood screenwriter Robert Riskin was the head of the Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information during World War II. His role not only helped to shape the administrative and managerial strategy of the agency but also created a body of documentary film work that was arguably the most incisive of the entire war. And yet in most accounts of American propaganda production during the last sixty years, as well as specifically OWI conduct and development, Riskin's role has been confined to that of a functionary, a name that is only mentioned in cursory anecdotes. The aim of this article, therefore, is not only to foreground Riskin's contribution to the OWI, neglected though that is, but to argue that Riskin's documentary programme, Projections of America, was actually one of the most important, influential and substantive collections of propaganda made during the war.

African American writers often express great affection for barbecue, a food many describe as “scrumptious” – to use a term that recurs throughout Bobby Seale's cookbook, Barbeque'n with Bobby (1988) – and invest with a particular capacity to lend shape and coherence to the idea of the African Diaspora. In the writings of Ntozake Shange, Albert Murray, Alice Walker, and others, barbecue seems able to reunite black communities, to gather together people dispersed across the USA or even the world. This literary use of barbecue is epitomized by Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), the concluding pages of which make the food central to a rejuvenating Diasporic optimism that stands in sharp contrast to the novel's desolate opening description of Celie's sexual abuse. Having grown up in West Africa, Adam, offspring of Celie's rape, finally meets his mother at a barbecue held in the American South. The food provides a conversation opener, a point of contact that the estranged family badly need:

Everybody make a lot of miration over Tashi. People look at her and Adam's scars like that's they business. Say they never suspect African ladies could look so good. They make a fine couple. Speak a little funny, but us gitting use to it.

Scholars have been debating what constitutes “the Southwest” for decades. Thirty years ago, geographer D. W. Meinig began his landmark study Southwest: Three Peoples in Geographical Change, 1600–1970 by stating: “The Southwest is a distinct place to the American mind but a somewhat blurred place on American maps.” For Meinig, the crucial determining factor in constituting the geographical parameters of his own study was the coincidence of Native American and Mexican American settlement patterns in Arizona, New Mexico and around El Paso, Texas. The watersheds of the Gila River in Arizona and the Rio Grande in New Mexico provide the focus of his study of the historical interaction of Indians, Mexican Americans and Anglos through the successive periods of Spanish colonialism, Mexican independence and American rule. The historical geographer Richard Francaviglia has challenged the relatively narrow focus of Meinig's study by calling for a more expansive consideration of the Greater Southwest, which, in addition to the core of Arizona and New Mexico, also includes parts of Colorado, Utah, Texas and the northern states of Mexico. He rationalizes, “The southwestern quadrant of North America is, above all, characterized by phenomenal physical and cultural diversity that regionalization tends to abstract or simplify. The more one tries to reduce this complexity, the smaller the Southwest becomes on one's mental map.”2

Each generation needs to rewrite literary history. And it may be that this generation needs to do it more than most, if only because the proliferation of schools and theories has turned what was once common critical ground into a battlefield. American books, among others, have become a site of struggle, and American writers have been among those caught in the criss-crossing searchlights of ethnic and gender studies, interdisciplinary investigations and studies of popular culture, language and communication. Just how far things have gone can be measured by the fact that every term in the phrase “history of American literature,” is now open to debate. The textuality of history and the historicity of the text have become the most contentious issues in contemporary criticism, while the question of nationhood, in particular, is under scrutiny. In a famous phrase, Walt Whitman described his work as a language experiment, an attempt to summon a nation into being through words. The slippery, plural nature of American identity and the bewildering contingencies of American history that drove Whitman to say this feed into the more challenging of the recent accounts of American writing.