Although this issue is the first to appear during my tenure as Editor of the Journal of American Studies, an expression of gratitude to Jay Kleinberg for ten years of unstinting effort on behalf of the Journal of American Studies, first as Associate Editor (1996–2001) and as Editor (2001–6) is in order. The present issue is one that has taken shape in the period of transition from her Editorship to mine, and her contribution to it has been considerable. I am sure that readers will share with me in thanking Jay for her hard work over the past decade, and in wishing her the very best for future endeavours.

On the face of it, the move to classify any particular cultural period might seem such a slippery, arbitrary undertaking that the result would almost inevitably appear excessively homogenizing or otherwise misleading. The first use of the term “Enlightenment” in the English-speaking world was not until 1865, for example, while the notion of literary Romanticism as a discrete historical phenomenon did not emerge until the later part of the nineteenth century, long after Wordsworth and Coleridge had died.1 The more sceptical wing of microhistorians and new historicists would say this merely exemplifies the categorical distance and difference between particular situations and the subsequent rationalizations imposed forcibly upon them. A counterargument, however, might suggest it is only through retrospective mapping of this kind that what Arjun Appadurai calls the “isomorphic” qualities running through particular eras can be brought to light.2 Works or phenomena apparently quite diffuse and unrelated can be brought together in illuminating constellations, thereby suggesting ways in which structural patterns of certain kinds, ideological as well as economic, have helped to shape, if not altogether determine, cultural narratives at particular junctures in history. Fredric Jameson's 1984 essay “Periodizing the 60s,” for instance, rigorously eschewed both the anecdotal indulgence and the sentimental forms of nostalgia which have accumulated persistently around that decade through its insistence that history “is necessity, that the 60s had to happen the way it did, and that its opportunities and failures were inextricably intertwined, marked by the objective constraints and openings of a determinate historical situation.

An important but little-studied feature of Toni Morrison's novels is their ambivalent relationship with classical tradition. Morrison was a classics minor while at Howard University, and her deployment of the cultural practices of ancient Greece and Rome is fundamental to her radical project. Indeed, the works' revisionary classicism extends far beyond the scope of established criticism, which has largely confined itself to the engagement with Greek tragedy in Beloved, with the Demeter/Kore myth in The Bluest Eye and with allusions to Oedipus and Odysseus in Song of Solomon.1 Morrison repeatedly subverts the central role that Greece and Rome have played in American self-definition and historiography. In Paradise, for example, the affinity between the Oven in Ruby and the Greek koine hestia or communal hearth critiques the historical Founding Fathers' insistence on their new nation's analogical relationship with the ancient republics. And in their densely allusive rewritings of slavery, the Civil War and its aftermath, Beloved and Jazz expose the dependence of the “Old South” on classical pastoral tradition. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in her most recent novel – Love (2003) – Morrison further develops the transformative engagement with America's Graeco-Roman inheritance that characterizes all of her previous fiction.2

The civilized and genteel tone of art critic Adeline Adams captures a fading historical and cultural moment that she recovers in this memory of American beaux-arts sculpture, fitfully described in a contemporary exhibition brochure as employing “the classical or Renaissance figural type, stripped of idealization and infused with baroque exuberance in composition,” and “combined with a purely nineteenth-century insistence on accuracy in surface detail.” Despite this sculptural syncretism, Adams's assessment evokes the high civic and didactic role that American public sculpture played toward the end of the nineteenth century, and her memory is even more poignant given the fact that Daniel Chester French, born in 1850, would be dead within two years of her commentary. A modest and contemporary survey of his sculpture thus might help us understand the totalizing effect that the City Beautiful Movement held for a short time in terms of aesthetic urban planning. French ranked among Frederick Law Olmstead, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and other architects and artists “to influence the heart, mind, and purse of the citizen,” as William H. Wilson simply puts it. Confronted by industry, urbanization, and immigrants, those harried and long-time residents of Adeline Adams's American urbs were reminded as they rounded street corners and ascended the steps of civic institutions that a kind of classical beauty and simplicity still existed, and that a small corps of artists and urban planners wanted to keep it that way.

Aside from William Faulkner it is difficult to think of a white twentieth-century American writer who has negotiated the issue of race in as sustained, unflinching and intelligent a fashion as Russell Banks. Whilst the impulse to produce novels on the grand scale shows little sign of diminishing, authors opting to place race at the very centre of their great American fictions remain relatively rare. With a couple of notable exceptions, most of the major works produced by white American authors over the past decade – whether by elder statesmen such as Updike, DeLillo or Pynchon or younger writers such as Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace – appear to quarantine the topic.

With emancipation a fait accompli by 1865, one might ask why Kentucky-born Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835–1907), former Confederate soldier, son of a border state slaveholder, began painting slaves then. Noble had known the “peculiar institution” at first hand, albeit from a privileged position within the master class. As a result, his choice to embark upon a career as a painter using historical incidents from slavery makes for an interesting study. Were the paintings a way of atoning for his Confederate culpability, a rebel pounding his sword into a paintbrush to appease the conquering North? Or was he capitalizing on his unique geographic perspective as a scion of slave-trafficking Frankfort, Kentucky, soon to head a prestigious art school in Cincinnati, the city where so many runaways first tasted freedom? Between 1865 and 1869 Noble exhibited in northern cities a total of eight paintings with African American subjects. Two of these, The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis (1865, repainted ca. 1870) and Margaret Garner (1867), featured mixed-race women, or mulattos, as they had come to be called. From a young female up for auction, to the famous fugitive Margaret Garner, his portrayals show a transformation taking place within perceptions of biracial women in post-emancipation America. Opinions about mulattos surfaced in a range of theoretical discussions, from the scientific to the political, as strategists North and South envisioned evolving social policy.

In a profile of Frank Sinatra published in 1955, in the midst of the star's second defining career ascent, Time magazine declared, “His new success spreads like a Hoboken cargo net across almost every area of showbusiness.”1 Time's use of Sinatra's urban industrial background to describe his extraordinary success is typical of the commentary surrounding the star in the 1950s which cast him as a working-class interloper and betrayed the problematic class dynamics frequently denied by post-war America's dominant culture. Sinatra's non-conformist behaviour, aggressive ambition, extreme experiences of success and failure, and the screen characters through which he portrayed alienation and disenfranchisement combined with this type of unsubtle critique in the development of Sinatra's conspicuous working-class star identity.

Nathaniel Hawthorne claims, in his brief preface to “The May-pole of Merry Mount,” that “the facts, recorded on the grave pages of our New England annalists, have wrought themselves, almost spontaneously,” into a “philosophical romance” and “a sort of allegory.” He later refers to these “true” and “authentic passages from history” as “a poet's tale.” Yet to anyone familiar with the sources available to Hawthorne,1 nothing is more striking than how much authentic history he has left out – most notably Thomas Morton himself, whose version of what transpired at his fur-trading post on Massachusetts Bay (New English Canaan) is indeed a tale told by a poet, albeit a minor one. What do we know about the man who put up the maypole that so outraged his pious neighbors? Who was Thomas Morton and why were the Puritans so offended by him? If his maypole symbolized the festive culture of Merry Old England, Morton epitomized its spirit. No wonder he was a persona non grata among the Puritans of New England, although Falstaff would have welcomed him to the Boar's Head Tavern. Like many a man of the Elizabethan Renaissance, he was enamored of classical learning and the New World; three times he abandoned London's Bankside to seek his fortune in Massachusetts Bay, at the risk of his life.

In the summer of 1965 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) toured possible locations for a campaign that would highlight the problems African Americans faced in Northern cities.1 Chicago was chosen, primarily due to the presence of an effective local movement.