The politics of the last quarter century in the United States cannot be fully understood without reference to cultural–religious issues such as abortion, prayer in the state schools, school curriculum including sex education and teaching the biblical account of creation, gay rights, gun control, the death penalty, and the proper roles of men and women. Cultural–religious conservatives defend traditional values such as patriarchy and sexual abstinence for the unmarried, while cultural–religious liberals challenge them. For example, the opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) objected, not to its guarantee of formal legal equality which was uncontroversial, but rather to it potentially changing gender roles. While the New Deal party system had been founded on a conflict between economic liberalism and economic conservatism, recent contemporary US politics also contains an explicit cultural–religious dimension. Although they have not replaced the older economic issues associated with the New Deal party system, cultural–religious issues coexist with them and have transformed the contemporary US political agenda by disrupting older coalitions and creating new coalitions and cleavages.

Two primary manifestations of the eugenics movement in America were the involuntary sterilization of certain classes of people, including the mentally ill and disabled and some types of criminals, and the “family study,” genealogical reports that traced criminal behavior, immorality, and mental problems throughout family trees to determine whether the characteristics are inheritable. Both family studies and sterilization proved to be important fodder for American literary authors, who made significant use of the rhetoric of family and propagation. Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road is particularly interesting to read with eugenics in mind, for the 1932 novel is intrinsically bound up with issues of breeding, heredity, and degeneration. Caldwell's text, which he characterized as literary realism, relies not only on the genre of family study in general but more particularly on a study conducted by Caldwell's father in 1928 and published two years later in the journal Eugenics; Ira Caldwell had attempted to rescue a poor white family from what he saw as the conditions of their ongoing degeneracy but was rejected completely by the family, leading to his renunciation of many of his social reform ideals in favor of sterilization programs. Erskine Caldwell drew heavily on his father's failed attempt at reform, and Tobacco Road ultimately argues for the sterilization of Georgia's poor whites, but with the pessimistic caveat that the problems of degeneracy and rural poverty have no final solution. Caldwell's manipulation of his audience, his observation of his father's eugenics experimentation, and his use of extended metaphors, both mechanical and agricultural, for family all create a deeply cynical novel that condemns America's economic modus operandi for the living conditions of the poor but also condemns those poor as being permanently beyond help. In the end, Caldwell argues that the poor – in both money and breeding – will be always with us and that we are doomed to witness the full horror of their degradation without the possibility of either relieving their plight or eradicating them.

August 21, 1970

A few sound[s] are embedded in the fog – a gull mewing, different far off fog horns – like unset polished stones laid out in cotton wool.

Tuesday, March 5, 1985

At six AM the heavy gray burns a heavier blue. Rain, water drops clinging to the balcony.

There is an ethical consideration in James Schuyler's Diary. While we have spent the last fifty years grappling with the aesthetic problems of how to represent the unrepresentable, how to present the unpresentable, and how to signify the significant, little time has been spent considering the status of representations of the unremarkable. There is a whole history in American poetry and literature of validating the everyday, making it special, but Schuyler never really does that. Are things special just because we say so, or rather because we note them down? Do we name things into being, at least linguistic or literary being? The Diary asks these questions and in doing so it broaches the kind of postmodern ethical questions that one finds in the recent work of Lyotard, Derrida, and Nancy. These questions are significant not in the normal sense of the reasons for such interrogations or the answers expected, but rather because they represent a desire on the part of Schuyler to ask after otherness, to try to elicit a response from the other while respecting that such a response may not be comprehensible even if it is forthcoming. I would like here to posit a desire to ask after the other first before one asks after oneself, to enquire without any hope of a satisfactory answer as such as the postmodern ethical position, and to suggest that the autobiographical slant of Schuyler's work is, paradoxically considering the nature of autobiography, just such a positioning of his self in relation to the world.

The relative obscurity of Chicago's Henry Blake Fuller (1857–1929), a prolific essayist, journalist, reviewer and novelist, with collections of plays, poems and short stories to his name, in part derives from the difficulty of placing him: the work resists classification. His early fiction, for instance, reflects, debates and sometimes satirises the alternating influences of Howells and James. The Cliff-Dwellers (1893) and With the Procession (1895), “American” novels, are framed by such “European” fictions as The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani (1890) and Waldo Trench and Others: Stories of Americans in Italy (1908). His closet homosexual novel Bertram's Cope's Year (1919), a translation of Goldoni's The Fan (1925) and the non-fictional Gardens of this World (1929) testify to an incremental diversity. Characteristically, his last work, the posthumously published novel Not on the Screen (1930), which projects the interactive mimicry of “real” life and cinema, saw Fuller exploring fresh thematic and formal territory.

Reputedly, painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand's Manhatta is the first significant title in the history of American avant-garde cinema. It is a seven-minute portrait of New York City and focuses on those features which make the city a modern megalopolis – the traffic, the crowds, the high-rise buildings, the engineering wonders, and the speed and dynamism of street life. The film strives to capture rhythmic and graphic patterns in the movements and shapes of cranes, trains, automobiles, boats, steam shovels, suspension bridges, and skyscrapers. Due to the dominance of technology, the entire urban landscape appears in the film as a machine-like aggregate of static and moving parts independent from human intention.

Perry Miller was one of the most famous and distinguished American intellectual historians, in the estimation of his contemporaries and the evaluations of more recent scholars. Although his death provided some detractors with an opportunity to question his findings without fear of riposte, more recent studies confirm the relevance of his work to those historians seeking answers today to the questions which he addressed. This is especially true in the Puritan period, where his massive encapsulation of The New England Mind is a routine point of departure for new enquiries.