On a map or from the air, nothing defines New York City more clearly than the rectilinearity of Central Park at the heart of the curvilinear island of Manhattan. And nothing encodes the paradox of the thinking that created Frederick Law Olmsted's first great park – and simultaneously distinguishes it from many of the parks inspired by Central Park – than the virtually perfect geometry of its outline. The Park simultaneously confirms the grid structure of the streets of Manhattan and dramatically interrupts this structure: streets that run vertically uptown and downtown or horizontally across town must, when they reach the horizontal and vertical boundaries of the park, leave their verticality and horizontality behind to traverse the Park before rejoining the grid of streets and avenues at the far boundaries of the Park's expanse. If the Cartesian clarity of midtown Manhattan has come to represent the efficiency of American capitalism that was making the United States a major industrial power during the years when the Greensward Plan was designed and Central Park constructed, the Park represented (and continues to represent) a counter-sensibility: as Olmstead and Vaux predicted.

In 1934 Horace Mann Bond, an African American, was in the early years of a distinguished career as an historian and university president when the lynching of a young black man, Jerome Wilson, impinged on his life, shaking him to the core. Already, at age twenty-nine, a professor at Fisk University with an armful of publications, his expertise as an authority on black education had taken him to a small community near Franklinton, in Washington Parish, Louisiana, where the lynching took place. Bond knew the victim's family, and he wrote an account of the lynching that traced the history of the Wilson family from the days of slavery.

The poems of George Oppen continue to occupy a marginal place in most literary histories, even though his work encapsulates some of the major shifts in American writing between high modernism and contemporary Language poetry. In part this marginalization is due to the habit of tying Oppen to Louis Zukofsky's shortlived “Objectivist” tendency of the thirties. Oppen did indeed publish his first collection, Discrete Series, in 1934, and with a strong endorsement from Ezra Pound (“I salute a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man's sensibility and which has not been got out of any other man's books”). Yet after this propitious start Oppen fell silent for twenty-five years, jettisoning poetry for politics. He and his wife Mary were members of the Communist Party between 1936 and 1941, their activities eventually attracting close scrutiny from the FBI. In 1949, Oppen and his family opted for political exile in Mexico to avoid harrassment. They would not return until 1958; only then did Oppen begin writing poetry again, initiating a sequence of major volumes, from The Materials (1962) to Primitive (1978).

At the end of Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In America (1984), Max (James Woods) appears finally to be dead. Max, alias Secretary Bailey, Secretary of Commerce, has been killed on the eve of testifying before a Congressional Investigating Committee, late in 1968. Others due to testify have died in suspicious circumstances. Max has told Noodles (Robert de Niro), minutes before his disappearance, that he (Max) is “a dead man.” There is little doubt, it would seem, that he is dead, ingested by a refuse wagon. But he appeared to die once before in the spring of 1933, when Max, the bootlegger and labour fixer, was shot down and burned on his last liquor run before the end of Prohibition. Indeed, a full sized confectionary coffin to Prohibition is seen in the sequence, set in Moe's bar, just prior to his death – one coffin going, apparently, before another. If Max has died once, and lived … perhaps he can do it twice.

L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was an instant success when it was published in 1900. Baum's quirky and imaginative tale of the girl from Kansas and her friends was complemented by W. W. Denslow's accomplished illustrations to produce the best-selling children's story of the 1900 Christmas season. After years of failed endeavors, the book brought Frank Baum personal prosperity. It also launched a long-lived and highly successful series of children's books based on the Oz theme. There were theatrical and cinematic productions as well, the most famous of which was MGM's 1939 film The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland. Indeed, the film eventually came to displace the original Oz tale as the work to which imitators referred. But the books, and especially the first book, continue to have a popular presence among lovers of Oz.

On several occasions during the late 1860s, the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe exhorted readers to adorn their homes with chromolithographs, color prints which reproduced original oil-paintings or, less often, depicted images created specifically for the print medium. In her 1869 domestic advice manual, The American Woman's Home, co-authored with her sister Catharine Beecher, Stowe described chromolithographs (or “chromos,” as they were commonly called) as essential components of a properly embellished home interior. In proposing a hypothetical budget devoted to parlor furnishings, the authors recommended that almost one-fourth of the total be allocated to lithographic reproductions of “really admirable pictures” by some of “America's best artists.” Stowe's advocacy of chromos also appeared in the promotional publications of L. Prang & Company, one of the country's largest publishers of these images. The short-lived quarterly Prang's Chromo: A Journal of Popular Art (published in five issues from January 1868 to April 1869) printed a letter in which Stowe thanked Louis Prang for sending her several free chromolithographs. After praising the “beautiful objects,” Stowe concluded her note with the kind of testimonial Prang no doubt had been seeking when he sent her the complimentary items: “Be assured I shall neglect no opportunity of proving my sympathy with your so charming and beautiful mission, and bringing it to everyone's notice, so far as I can.” And, though it is impossible to know what exact role Stowe's promotions played in the overall sale of chromos, it is clear that she aligned herself with a hot commodity: from 1840 to 1900, chromolithographs in America sold by the millions.

One of the most talked about moments of Ken Burns's television documentary The Civil War (1990) was the dramatic reading of Sullivan Ballou's letter to his wife, Sarah, in which the Union officer anticipates his own death in the First Battle of Bull Run. This moving conclusion to the series' first episode and the sensation it caused underscore the persistence of a gendered model of wartime literacy: the ideal war-text is an eyewitness account written by a man, and read by a woman at home. Women, the Ballou letter sequence suggests, are consumers, not producers of war-texts. As innovative as Burns's documentary was, however, the dramatization of a personal letter from the front has a long history. The first chapter of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), for example, climaxes with Marmee's recitation of a letter from Mr. March, absent at the war. “Very few letters,” the narrator tells us, “were written in those hard times that were not touching, especially those which fathers sent home.” Both Burns's original script for the Ballou segment and Alcott's earlier writing about the war reveal the artificiality of the normative model of literacy presented by The Civil War and Little Women; in order to maintain exclusively male control over the production of wartime texts, documentary and novel must repress or radically circumscribe female voices. Burns originally planned to have an actress, reading as Sarah Ballou, finish the letter, but decided against it; the effect of a woman reading would have been “so emotional [ctdot ] just too much” – as if even a female audience for the male wartime text can only be hinted at, not represented.

What is the effect of placing speech in a poem? What is the effect of placing a poem in a collection of poems by other poets? These ordinary cultural acts of displacement are taken for granted by most writers and readers, but for the Objectivist poet Lorine Niedecker they represented highly conscious acts alien to her everyday world. Although her fellow Objectivists were marginalized by the literary world for much of their careers, they mostly lived and worked within the metropolitan cultures where their avant-garde poetry was read. She spent almost all her life in rural Wisconsin in relative poverty, keeping her writing life quite separate from her various working-class jobs and the local community. By reading her relations with the poetic avant-garde in terms of these acts of displacement, it is possible to appreciate the complexity of a poetic style that can appear to dissolve meaning into a limpid clarity that leaves nothing to interpret, and to recognize that the poetic avant-garde makes rarely questioned assumptions about the universal transmissibility of poetry.

During World War II, when the Office of War Information urged the American film companies to help the nation win the war, the OWI's Bureau of Motion Pictures delivered both moral support and guidance. The BMP “Manual” (1942), for instance, encouraged producers to show women dropping off their children at day-care centers, then cheerfully heading off to jobs where they enjoyed equal opportunity and equal pay. Scenes like those may have been fantasy, and for some women wryly amusing, and yet, in the late 1940s and beyond, as one historian says, World War II came to be thought of as “the best war ever,” the war, according to myth, where there were no tensions over class, or race, or gender.

For close on to a hundred years discourses on national identity, European ethnic assimilation and the problem of class division within the Republic had been principally addressed in the popular arts through the agency of the black mask. During the 1930s, blackface in American films shifted from the idea implied in the racial slur, “nigger in the woodpile,” to the rather less visible, but no less derogatory, “octoroon in the kindling,” a phrase used in Her Man (Pathé, Tay Garnett, 1930) to suggest something is amiss, but which is used here to suggest the cultural miscegenation that informs much of the material discussed in this article.

A century ago, Woodrow Wilson rejected as unnatural the idea of a static political system tethered by a mechanical set of checks and balances. He said “Government is not a machine but a living thing. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of living.” In a similar vein, Dodd argued that, by its very nature, the historical process creates dynamic change. He recommended thinking in terms of the “transformational analysis” of the circumstances in which the office of the presidency is fundamentally altered. To speak of such transformation is not to deny the continuities between presidents, but merely to emphasize the significance of differences. The theory of the modern presidency, starting under FDR in the 1930s is, Dodd said, a significant example of an inherently time bound concept. This paper picks up Rose's gauntlet that suggests that internal changes within America and changes in the world in which it has become an increasingly important actor in the last half century, together raise the possibility of a further transformation in terms of which we should now think of a post-modern presidency.

The conflicted racial identity politics of Zora Neale Hurston climaxed in a statement printed in February 1943 in the New York Herald Telegram. In the article, “When Negro Succeeds, South is Proud,” Hurston argued that “the Jim Crow system works.” Hurston later retracted this statement, claiming that it was taken out of context and grossly distorted. Hurston said that her point was to show that “there was plenty of race prejudice both north and south” but that the South “by opportunity of long practice had worked out a system, while the North, caught between declarations of no prejudice, and its actual feelings [ctdot ] was groping around for the same thing, but with fine phrases.”

Historians are more likely to examine monumental buildings as finished products than as processes of construction. Chicago's Auditorium Building was monumentality itself: upon completion in 1890 it was the largest edifice in the United States, and an exceptionally elegant one. Though often discussed as a work of art, an urban icon, and a measure of regional accomplishment, it has yet to be considered as a nexus of social relations. For monument appraisal tends to overlook the role of labor – including its relations with capital – that is not only inherent to the construction process, but that in this instance also affected Chicago's future. It was precisely the Auditorium's monumentality that prompted local trade unions to develop new tactics that yielded unprecedented results.

Toni Morrison's fiction, we have been repeatedly told, embodies features taken from jazz. Her books have a “jazzy prose style,” express a “jazz aesthetic,” or are “literary jazz.” Critics propose that jazz riffs can be found in her writing, and that she improvises in prose in a manner comparable to an improvising jazz musician. None of this seems to me to be true. To establish a relationship between music and prose fiction would be difficult under any circumstances. It is all the more difficult when the critics concerned show themselves to be unaware of the basic formal structures of jazz. The riff is foregrounded because it is the only feature of jazz that can be compared to prose (because both may include repetitions). It is a more serious objection that Rice, Small-McCarthy, Berrett, and others, including James A. Snead and Henry Louis Gates Jr., consistently ignore structure, harmony, and melody in favour of rhythm. The reason for this is that jazz rhythm can be traced back to its African origins, whereas structure, harmony, and melody require an engagement with European sources. Clearly, an ideology of authenticity is at work here. Yet a parallel argument is willing to relate Morrison's fiction to its European origins. For, if her novel Jazz is, as Rinaldo Walcott indicates, a rewriting of Scott Fitzgerald's version of the “Jazz Age,” then that rewriting or radical revision must occur by reference to a form – the novel – that originated in Europe and is (in the cited instance) a product of white America.

Christopher Lasch completed this book under “trying circumstances,” which presumably included the knowledge that he was dying from leukemia. Its final sardonic section is entitled “The Dark Night of the Soul,” and contemplates the pitiable plight of modern and secularized man, who denies himself the discipline of religion and is compelled to seek security in the easier and probably falser gods of science or therapy or identity politics. Lasch's last, racking examination of the human condition as it is displayed in the United States is not exactly despairing, because the human agency means that there is always hope, but his subjects are unfulfilled beings in a dysfunctional society. In short, Lasch has not used his farewell address to reprieve his fellow intellectuals of the charges he has previously levelled against them; rather, the indictment has been intensified. In many ways this a perfect Parthian shaft, gathering together and synthesising into one compelling critique the many misgivings that Lasch had long been developing about American life.

Nearly a decade ago, historian Alan Dawley proclaimed the idea of American exceptionalism to be dead and buried. Dawley's pronouncement proved premature given the subsequent publication of books by Byron Shafer and Seymour Martin Lipset reaffirming the concept, as well as studies by Ian Tyrell, George Fredrickson, and others addressing the issue. However, the motion of American uniqueness so widely accepted a generation ago has come under serious challenge, and new conceptions of American “distinctiveness” or “variability” have emerged in recent scholarship.