In recent years, New Indian History has emphasized cultural synthesis. Redirecting attention away from traditional themes of conflict and conquest, historians have examined the process by which Indians and Europeans learned to coexist. Initially, according to this literature, neither side enjoyed absolute power and authority over the other. Consequently, native people and European settlers carved out a “middle ground” between their two cultures upon which they engaged in relationships based on mutual accommodation. This mode of contact led to an exchange and intermingling of European and Indian cultural forms and practices.Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Colin G. Galloway, New Worlds For All: Indians, Europeans and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

Commenting on the flap over George W. Bush's visit to Bob Jones University during the 2000 primary election campaign, journalist Hendrik Hertzberg claimed that even staunch conservatives decried the South Carolina college's ban on inter-racial dating as “indefensible.” “This may seem unremarkable,” he noted, ”until one reflects how far it was from being the case a generation or two ago, when miscegenation was racism's trump card and even the most enlightened Americans, black and white, took it for granted that sexual fear was its unkillable heart.” Hertzberg seems unduly optimistic - violence against the bodies of racial “others’ continues to splatter across the American landscape, from the Rodney King beating to the Amadou Diallo shooting. The police rape of Abner Louima illuminates how power, not sexuality, informs such assaults.

When I was thirteen years old, my father took me to Gettysburg. It is my first recollection of my father’s growing passion for studying the history of the Civil War, which, I was only to realize long after his death, was his way of grappling with the unresolved horrors of his own experience as a battlefield medic. By escaping into the minutiae of a past and – at a distance – more heroic war, he had been probing his feelings about a war that he suspected (like Paul Fussell in Wartime, and Farley Mowat in And No Birds Sang) was dominated by ‘‘chickenshit’’ and pointless death. He was past sixty before he told me how terrified he had been, and how he had never stopped thinking and dreaming about what he had seen.

Nearly every handbook of critical theory acknowledges Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) to be the twentieth-century North American critic who was most ahead of his time. Yet he seems to have been so ambitious that we still do not know how to place him. Indeed, it would require the space of a whole book to trace the extensive but scarcely documented impact which he has had. Concepts for which many other critics became famous may be traced back to him: ‘‘the order of words’’ (Frye); ‘‘the rhetoric of fiction’’ (Booth); ‘‘blindness and insight’’ (De Man); ‘‘narrative as a socially symbolic act’’ (Jameson); ‘‘the anxiety of influence’’ (Bloom). Indeed, it may well be that very anxiety which has led so many contemporary critics to repress his memory. But there is a change in the critical climate, corresponding to the global. This article is written in the hope that Burke will shortly be recognized as the first critic systematically to analyse culture and literature from an ecological perspective. As the dating of our epigraph indicates, he initiated this project over half a century before the rise of ecocriticism in the United States. Moreover, this was no passing phase for him; his whole career may be understood as a profound experiment in green thinking.

Through significant and underscored omission, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflict, through the way writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence – one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness.Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 6.

Two men wolf-whistle at Baby Doll during the play of the same name: both of these men are positioned in the shadows. We see the one, Silva Vacarro, skulking around the dilapidated Plantation house in ghostly pursuit of Baby Doll, and the other as an anonymous male on Tiger Tail Road, part of a group of “White an’ black mixed.” Both of these men represent an encroaching dark threat to the sexual and property rights of Archie Lee. It is no coincidence that Silva's forced intrusion into Archie's house is mirrored by the sexual trespassing of the anonymous whistler, and Archie himself challenges the invisible agitator: “trespass across my property... [and] I'll blast... [you]... out of the Bayou with a shotgun... Nobody's gonna insult no woman of mine!!” (BD, 74). Neither Archie nor Baby Doll can see the identity of the invisible menacing man, and so the threat from the shadows is communicated through implicit rather than explicit dialogue. Interestingly, these shadows, hovering amidst the domestic and sexual spaces, allegorize a deeper instability permeating Southern discourse: that of the blurring of racial identities and the threat of miscegenation.

The success of the Founding Fathers in building a nation has for a long time attracted a sense of marvel. That admiration is well deserved. Political leaders in post-Revolutionary America understood that hard-won liberty could only flourish if there was a popular sense of common enterprise. They needed to create a cultural settlement that gave the idea of national civilization clear meaning. The new state would have to contrast sufficiently to the league of states that had combined to overthrow colonial rule, while still protecting local interests and sensitivities. It was an era that lent itself to imaginative statecraft and the Founding Fathers supplied it through their crafting of a national government and a national society. They appreciated that proper constitutional arrangements would not in themselves suffice to bind the common enterprise. The young republic needed to generate its own cultural and economic mechanisms that would serve to consolidate affinity to the nation. Recent studies on the formation of nationhood in the United States have identified some of these mechanisms in the shape of everyday experience in the forging of an identity that transcended the local community. For example, David Waldstreicher and Len Travers have pointed to the role of festivity and ritual in creation of a national consciousness. They have shown that celebration in the early republic served to reinforce the national implications of the American Revolution.

Writing to Morton Zabel in 1932, Marianne Moore praised Zabel’s review of Emily Dickinson for Poetry magazine but also took the opportunity to remind her addressee that ‘‘Emily Dickinson cared about events that mattered to the nation.’’ In his review, Zabel had repeatedly insisted upon Dickinson’s ‘‘fast seclusion’’ from her community, locked as she was within an ‘‘asylum of the spirit.’’ This emphasis upon ‘‘isolation’’ and ‘‘introspection’’ represented the woman poet as being oddly detached from the ‘‘real’’ and implicitly masculine world of political and social change, a critical strategy Moore would have been all too familiar with, her own work having been repeatedly constructed in terms of aesthetic ‘‘purity.’’ Moore’s defence of Dickinson as a poet fully engaged with the political and social issues of her day is also, implicitly, a reminder to Zabel that women’s poetry need not be confined by critical interpretation to the private and feminized sphere of ‘‘introspection’’ but could be related to public affairs of national importance.

The artistic appropriation of place ranks among the central concerns of Asian American writing. Place in literature, a simultaneous geography of space and imagination, has the potential to represent communal formation and preservation as it highlights the identity that binds its members in a shared sense of purpose and a common sense of belonging. For first-generation writers, the portrayal of the land of the past often blends with that of the present, offering a vivid depiction of how immigrants perceive the physical and emotional journey from the geographic and temporal past to the present, as they struggle to establish themselves in the new surroundings. For second-generation Asian Americans, place often acquires another meaning, that of a definition of self in the place of birth, as they shift between visions of their parents' past location and their own cultural differences. Third-generation writers engage a wide spectrum of negotiations with the land that was a protagonists of their growing up, and that of their increasingly complex personal and community history. Consequently, a sense of place becomes one of the most significant elements the Asian American writer can manipulate to condition self-representation and the portrayal of community.

American missionary movements in the nineteenth century contributed to the increasing numbers of foreign students in the United States. Many of those foreign students came from non-western societies where American missionaries were active. The missionaries encouraged and helped young natives of other lands to come to the United States for Christian education with the belief that American education was a vital process for training indigenous leaders for Christianity. Missionaries of different denominations tended to recommend students to the educational institutions they were affiliated with. For instance, Methodist missionaries directed the students to educational institutions of the Methodist Church; the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, and the Catholics, and other denominations did likewise.William Wheeler, Henry King, and Alexander Davidson, eds., The Foreign Student in America (New York: Association Press, 1925), 270. They hoped that the students, upon completion of their studies, would go back to their homelands to assume leadership in spreading Christianity.

For most of the twentieth century, the predominant view of Edgar Allan Poe held him to be a passionate aesthete with little interest in the political and social issues of his time. However, in recent years, there have been numerous scholarly efforts to place Poe back into his cultural milieu and to illustrate that rather than an apolitical romantic Poe was indeed a man very much engaged in the major debates of his day. Much of this attempt to historicize Poe has focused on the issue of slavery and has reconstructed Poe as a typical antebellum Southerner, possessing aristocratic pretensions, racist opinions, and an overwhelming – though perhaps subconscious – fear of slaves and their potential for uprising.For a sampling of recent studies that address Poe, the South, and slavery, see Richard Gray, ‘ “I am a Virginian’: Edgar Allan Poe and the South,” in Edgar Allan Poe: The Design of Order, ed. A. Robert Lee (London: Vision, 1987), 182–201; Louis Rubin, The Edge of the Swamp: A Study of Literature and Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); John Carlos Rowe, “Poe, Antebellum Slavery, and Modern Criticism,” in Poe's Pym: Critical Explorations, ed. Richard Kopley (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 117–41; Joan Dayan, “Romance and Race,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 89–109; Dana Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading ‘Race’ in American Literature, 1638–1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Scott Bradfield, Dreaming Revolution: Transgression in the Development of American Romance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993) ; James Livingston, “Subjectivity and Slavery in Poe's Autobiography of Ambitious Love,” Psychohistory Review, 21 (1993): 175–96; Joan Dayan, “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” American Literature, 66 (1994): 239–73; Sam Worley, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the Ideology of Slavery,” ESQ, 40 (1994): 219–50; David Leverenz, “Poe and Gentry Virginia,” in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, eds. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 210–37; Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Nancy Harrowitz, “Criminality and Poe's Orangutan: The Question of Race in Detection,” in Agonistics: Arenas of Creative Conflict, eds. Janet Lungstrum and Elizabeth Sauer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 177–95; Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and Lesley Ginsberg, “Slavery and the Gothic Horror of Poe's ‘The Black cat,’ ” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, eds. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 99–128. Recently, Terence Whalen has challenged many of the assertions of these critics in Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum American (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). This body of work has convincingly illustrated the connections between Poe's often ignored views on slavery and fictional works such as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Black cat,” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” One of Poe's final stories, “Hop-Frog” (1849), a tale of an abused dwarf's violent revenge upon his cruel master, would certainly lend itself to an examination of the author's views on slavery but has never been fruitfully employed in this discussion apart from being briefly mentioned in larger discussions of Poe and slavery by Harry Levin, Louis Rubin, and, most recently, Joan Dayan, who has argued that “Hop-Frog,” Poe's “most horrible tale of retribution,” is his “envisioned revenge for the national sin of slavery.”Dayan, “Amorous Ladies,” 258. See also Dayan, “Romance and Race,” 103–04; Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1957), 122; and Rubin, The Edge of the Swamp, 183–89.

He was born in 1893 in the New York brownstone house near Washington Square where he lived all his adult life, a member of Edith Wharton's settled, circumscribed world of ordered privilege whose affluent, well-travelled, and sophisticated men and women traced their lineage back to the Founding Fathers and their principles to the American Revolution. His father was an artist who served as Consul General to Italy, and Armstrong was brought up in a milieu which took for granted the fact that there existed a world outside the United States. He died in 1973, as the United States finally withdrew from the Vietnam War, a conflict which deeply distressed him and shattered the foreign policy elite and its controlling consensus, whose creation had been a major part of his life's work. In an obituary notice Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., described him as “a New York gentleman of a vanishing school,” who “treated every one, old or young, famous or unknown, with the same generous courtesy and concern.”

In 1970, Robert W. Peterson, the author of Only the Ball Was White, one of the first and most influential books on the Negro leagues, wrote: ‘‘Negro baseball was at once heroic and tawdry, a gladsome thing and a blot on America’s conscience.’’ When this appraisal was first made, every team in the Major Leagues had been ‘‘integrated’’ for at least ten years, and, as Peterson notes, ‘‘Negro baseball had virtually been forgotten.’’ This was perhaps willful on the part of many white people. At the time, Leroy ‘‘Satchel’’ Paige (1906–82) and Josh Gibson (1911–47) had neither been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame nor had they been transformed into national icons, and there was a general ignorance, even among most sports fans and scholars, about the Negro leagues.

On the morning of 4 August 1892, between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m., Abby Durfee Borden and Andrew Jackson Borden were murdered with an axe in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Why did the case spark so much interest at the time? Why did throngs of people literally block the street gawking at the Borden residence? Why did the country’s leading newspaper devour and report the daily happenings in this small New England town? Why, a century later, are ‘‘whodunit?’’ novels, plays, and films still being made about this gruesome double murder?

The practices of abortion and infanticide seem worthy of at least a fleeting mention in most studies of slave women in the United States, yet few historians mention the use of contraception. Those who do, usually conclude that little is known about the subject, but that it is probably not particularly significant. This article will discuss the use of contraception among slaves and will concentrate, in particular, on the use of cotton roots as a form of birth-control. Evidence that the cotton root was used for this purpose is taken mainly from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) narratives, edited by George Rawick.George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Vols. 2–41 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972–1979). As yet, the author has come across only a few references to the use of cotton roots as a form of contraception in any other source. The WPA narratives are a controversial source, but, in sifting through every single interview, the multiple references to such an intimate practice were striking and demanded attention. This article forms part of a chapter from a thesis which looks at the work of slave women in the American South.Liese M. Perrin, “Slave Women and Work in the American South” (University of Birmingham: Ph.D. diss., 1999).

A thorough reading of the WPA narratives reveals not only that slave women used contraception, but also that it may have been very effective. In the context of slave women and work, this is a significant discovery, as the evidence, which is detailed below, suggests that slave women not only understood that their childbearing capacity was seen in terms of producing extra capital, but that they were sufficiently opposed to this function to actually avoid conception. The use of contraception can be seen not only as a form of resistance, but also, more specifically, as a form of strike, since reproduction was an important work role for most slave women.

I recently completed a book of interviews (Latina Self-Portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers, co-edited with Juanita Heredia, University of New Mexico Press, 2000) with ten of the most prominent Latina writers in the US; Julia Alvarez, Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, Rosario Ferré, Cristina García, Nicholasa Mohr, Cherríe Moraga, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Esmeralda Santiago and Helena María Viramontes. These women, Cuban, Dominican, Mexican and Puerto Rican Americans, raised issues that ranged from the craft of writing to the inherent problems of national identities. The themes generated in our conversations with these women – their doubled ethnic identities, their complicated relationship to their communities, their difficulties in representing their communities and, finally, their work as part of the larger American canon – revealed a powerful discourse about what it means to be Latina American in the United States. After spending two years talking with these women, it is evident to me that Latina literature is a vital part of American literature and should be included in any study of comparative American literatures.

Shortly after the end of World War II, on 11 December 1945, James Webb Young, Chairman of the Advertising Council and Director of the J. Walter Thompson Company, spoke to the annual meeting of the American Association of Advertising Agencies at the Continental Hotel in Chicago. The title of his speech was, “What Advertising Learned From the War,” and in it Young talked about an immediate post-war period that was, by most accounts, an exuberant time for an America flushed by a victory that finally marked it as a true global power. The American government proclaimed it, the American people believed it, and American business stood ready to sell it through an advertising industry that itself had come of age during, and because of, the war.

By the mid-1960s, American writer Kay Boyle was in possession of a three-book contract from Doubleday publishers in New York. The cornerstone of this deal was to be a history of Germany, a manuscript she began in the late 1950s. Boyle encountered difficulties completing this work, and after lobbying successfully to write a history of German women instead, she eventually abandoned the project altogether. To help her meet her professional obligations, Boyle hoped that Doubleday would accept a new plan to republish Three Short Novels, a work that had appeared under the Beacon imprint in 1958. That publisher still had four thousand copies of the book in its warehouse, however, and Doubleday editor Ken McCormick was unable to agree to Boyle’s proposal. McCormick suggested instead that she undertake work revising Robert McAlmon’s 1938 autobiography, Being Geniuses Together. Indeed, in the years following his death in 1956, Boyle had been unsuccessful in locating an American publisher for her friend’s book, so when Doubleday brought forward an edition of the work in 1968, it contained alternate chapters written by Kay Boyle, herself. McAlmon’s original text is approximately one hundred and ten thousand words in length; Boyle’s edition is one hundred and sixty thousand words, only seventy thousand of which were written by Robert McAlmon. ‘‘This present book is his,’’ Boyle wrote of McAlmon’s achievement in her 1984 afterword (333), and while one might argue that this is the case, no one can question the fact that his book was altered substantially from its original form.

Life in the cultural shallows tested the character of American art. Where the Depression had encouraged artists to engage in social and political criticism, the early cold war years constricted and confounded them. By conflating dissent and disloyalty, the triumphant conservatism of the cold war not only shifted the frame of cultural reference dramatically to the right, it narrowed it as well. This had a profound impact on America's cultural establishment. With conservatives now in possession of the moral absolutes, the more politically progressive artists felt pressed into the position of endorsing ambivalence and moderation. The result, for many, was a quiet retreat from principle; unwilling to blindly adopt the conservatives' standard of good and evil, and yet unable to risk their own, forward-thinking artists ended up chronicling rather than challenging their age. So much of fifties art became an exploration of the ordinary – domestic comedy, social commentary, “wistful melodrama,” sermons on rootlessness or delinquency or affluence – instead of a questioning of the larger truths. Tragedy, which, by challenging certitudes, required the moral commitment of liberal writers, became, in this context, anachronistic. “We are not producing real tragedy,” observed Leonard Bernstein in 1952, because “caution prevents it, all the fears prevent it; and we are left, at the moment, with an art that is rather whiling away the time until the world gets better or blows up.” Art had adopted the Technicolor blandness of the age.B. Witham, “Appropriately Wistful: Blacklisting and the American Theatre,” Exchange (winter, 1978), 11–17; Leonard Bernstein to Irving Fine, 19 Sept. 1952, cited in H. Burton, Leonard Bernstein (New York: 1994), 229, J. Elsom makes the same point in Cold War Theatre (London: 1992), Ch.2.

Barbara Haskell, The American Century: Art and Culture 1900–1950 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, in association with W. W. Norton, 1999, $60 cloth). Pp. 408. ISBN 0 393 04723 7, 0 87427 122 3.

Lisa Phillips, The American Century: Art and Culture 1900–1950 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, in association with W. W. Norton, 1999, $60 cloth). Pp. 398. ISBN 0 393 04815 2, 0 87427 123 1.