Zenith comprises three cities. At the outskirts is Floral Heights, a streetcar suburb of Dutch colonial houses three miles from downtown. Central Zenith, a commercial-retail focus of fireproof ten- to thirty-five-story office towers of Indiana limestone or yellow brick and stores selling everything from dictaphones to scarves, hums with speculative prosperity. On suburb and downtown Sinclair Lewis focuses almost all of the action of his 1922 novel Babbitt. But between Floral Heights and Babbitt's high-rise real estate office is a third city, an industrial zone Lewis calls South Zenith, although it encircles the city center. South Zenith is “a high-colored, banging, exciting region: new factories of hollow tile with gigantic wire-glass windows, surly old red-brick factories stained with tar, high-perched water tanks, big red trucks like locomotives, and, on a score of hectic side-tracks, far-wandering freight-cars from the New York Central and apple orchards, the Great Northern and wheat-plateaus, the Southern Pacific and orange groves.” It is a place of foundries, automobile factories, shops where five thousand men work under one roof, a place threaded with high-speed railroads.

However much reviewers argued about the character of Babbitt and his lifestyle, philosophy, and usefulness as a “type,” few questioned the setting of the novel. Indeed, newspapers in five cities, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Duluth, and Minneapolis, each proclaimed that its municipality was the prototype of Zenith, and Minneapolis actually celebrated a “Babbitt Week.”

The culture of the equestrian nomads of the Great Plains was relatively short-lived. The more sedentary inhabitants of the plains — the Mandan, Arikara, Hidatsa, Pawnee, Wichita — had cultures stretching back hundreds of years. By contrast, that of the mounted hunting tribes — the Kiowa, Comanche, Crow, Blackfoot, Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux — developed rapidly with the acquisition of the horse, flourished for perhaps a century, then began its death throes under the pressure of white settlement and the catastrophic effects of European disease. The destruction of the buffalo herds removed the plains nomads' economic base, and their whole civilization finally collapsed in military defeat at the hands of the United States Army. Older, white-oriented studies of Indian history tended to concentrate on the years when this culture was in decline and to neglect earlier periods and developments. Such an approach is understandable, and to some extent inevitable, given the historical sources available, but it conveys an inaccurate impression of the situation on the Great Plains prior to white settlement. This paper considers the Plains Indians in their heyday and examines intertribal trade and warfare at a time when the spread of horses and guns was causing great upheavals in native power structures.

Non-Indian powers on the peripheries of the Great Plains tentatively penetrated the region and largely determined the flow of horses, trade, and guns, while their conflicts caused shifts in location, allegiance, and power among the tribes.

In the London Quarterly Review for January 1814 appeared a long and brilliantly written review of an anonymous American pamphlet entitled Inchiquin the Jesuit's Letters, which had been published in New York some four years earlier. The pamphlet, indeed, was only of passing interest to the Quarterly. The real issue was the moral condition of the United States, an enemy which had to be dealt with during the coming year first militarily then diplomatically. The British reader was to be assured that the Americans should be handled no less severely than the French. To this end, the essayist revealed the distressing truth: through Gallic influence the Yankees had become imperialists, and the mania pervaded every aspect of life in the States. It followed that such a people should be chastised without scruple — whatever their English affinities. American magazines called the review a “collected mass of calumny and falsehood against a whole nation,” a “nefarious tissue of calumnies on the American character,” a copy of “all the effusions of malevolence, misrepresentation, and ignorance” which the Quarterly could find against “American taste, customs, morality, and literature.” Even a few notable Britons were embarrassed: the venerated Wilberforce called on John Quincy Adams in London to explain that the Quarterly's opinions of the United States were not those of the British people, and Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate and a major contributor to the magazine, told young George Ticknor in Paris after the war (a conflict that the Tory Southey had supported enthusiastically) that nothing in his literary career had caused him more mortification than “being thought” the author of the piece.

During the post-Civil War decades, the major Eastern literary magazines – the Atlantic, Scribner's, Harper's – came to serve, in Malcolm Cowley's phrase, as the “principal voices of the genteel era.” The business of the magazines – with Boston's Atlantic at the head – was delivering “culture” to the middle class. As Walt Whitman wrote in his essay “Personalism,” published in The Galaxy in May 1868, “The writers of a time hint the mottoes of its gods. The word of the modern, say these voices, is the word Culture.” But in pointing out that the culture everywhere advocated by American writers was based largely on European models, Whitman exposes a pathetic irony: “Never, in the Old World, was thoroughly upholster'd exterior appearance and show, mental and other, built entirely on the idea of caste, and on the sufficiency of mere outside acquisition – never were glibness, verbal intellect, more the test, the emulation – more loftily elevated as head and sample – than they are on the surface of our republican States this day.” In their slavish worship of European models and consequent devaluation of the native, American writers had become the high priests of a thin and bloodless “culture” that was distributed abroad through the magazines.

Whitman shrewdly recognized, as Alan Trachtenberg has written, that genteel culture had become an instrument of “social control.”

Avery Brundage liked to say that revolutionaries were not bred on the playing field. That theme neatly expressed Brundage's distrust of any challenge to the established political and social order he cherished and garnished his speeches to countless audiences during the forty years in which he was the single most powerful figure in both the American and international Olympic movements, first as president of the American Olympic Committee (1929–1953), and then as president of the International Olympic Committee (1952–1972). Although the Iron Chancellor of amateur sport regarded himself as the last true defender of the strict separation of sport and politics, he also frequently insisted that more than the future of amateur sport was at stake in shielding sport from political manipulation. Upon sport for sport's sake depended the healthy psychological valuation of individual effort and excellence that was at the very heart of a democratic way of life. Moreover, fit bodies and competitive spirits were in Brundage's view essential for the continued success of American capitalism at home and abroad. Though he never acknowledged the political coloring of his vision of the Olympics, he regarded them as a kind of international mission for spreading democratic values in the continuing ideological battle between Communism and the American way of life.

Because it dramatizes victory, defeat, struggle against nature and other competitors, sport is a potent symbol constantly under pressure to lend its emotional power to other causes.

In the early 1970s, a number of Vietnam veterans sought publication for a collection of veterans' creative writing which they felt could make an important contribution to a political understanding of the war in Indochina. However, efforts to find a commercial publisher for their anthology met with no success. Their conviction that this literature both deserved and could find a substantial audience led these writers to establish their own independent publisher for the literature of Vietnam veterans, the 1st [sic] Casualty Press. In 1972, the Press published an anthology of veterans' poetry, Winning Hearts and Minds (or WHAM as it is often called), edited by Larry Rottmann, Jan Barry and Basil T. Paquet; it was followed a year later by Free Fire Zone, an anthology of short stories edited by Rottmann, Paquet and Wayne Karlin. As their epigraph, both volumes were given the quotation: “In war, truth is the first casualty.”