Inventor of the hand-held stereoscope and “autocrat of the breakfast table,” the editor of the Atlantic Monthly proved himself, in an important series of articles on photography, a master of rhetoric. Behind the Epicurean touches with which he colored the “mirror with a memory” – the most “audacious, remote, improbable” discovery of human ingenuity – and through the irony of his thundering philosophical conclusions – “form is henceforth divorced from matter,” which “as a visible object is of no great use any longer” – the modern reader perceives O. W. Holmes's keen awareness of the documentary possibilities born of photography. In this essay, it is one of the first sketches of such a “Bank of Nature” that I shall examine.

Frederick Douglass may or may not have been the greatest African American abolitionist and orator of the 19th Century, but he was certainly the most accomplished master of self-projection. His autobiographical writings demonstrate the genius with which he seized and manipulated mainstream American symbols and values. By appropriating the Euro-American myth of the self-made man, Douglass guaranteed that his struggle would be canonized, not only within an African American tradition, but within the traditions of the mainstream as well. He manipulated the rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon manhood as skillfully as did any of his white contemporaries, including such master manipulators as Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Phineas T. Barnum. I mention Douglass along with these wily exemplars of American showmanship, not because I want to drag out embarrassing cliches about making heroes more human, but in order to address the truly monumental nature of Douglass's accomplishments. Douglass, like Lincoln, Emerson, and Barnum, was abundantly endowed with the spiderish craft and foxlike cunning that are often marks of self-made men.

In one of the first and best-known collections of cultural criticism in America, Civilization in the United States (1922), Harold Stearns begins his chapter on “The Intellectual Life” with this widely quoted passage:

When Professor Einstein roused the ire of the women's clubs by stating that “women dominate the entire life of America,” and that “there are cities with a million population, but cities suffering from terrible poverty – the poverty of intellectual things,” he was but repeating a criticism of our life now old enough to be almost a cliché. Hardly any intelligent foreigner has failed to observe and comment upon the extraordinary feminization of American social life, and oftenest he has coupled this observation with a few biting remarks concerning the intellectual anaemia or torpor that seems to accompany it.

“A good deal of our politics is physiological.” When Ralph Waldo Emerson made this remark in his characteristically emphatic way, he might have been merely alluding to the traditional notion that the physical body and political systems are related in some odd way. But that Emerson was saying this in America in 1851 has a significance that goes beyond his being a clever, bookish man with the habit of connecting dots across wide conceptual spaces.

As early as 1946, Clement Greenburg was inclined to disregard Georgia O'Keeffe's significance on the grounds that her work “skipped essential stages” in the development of an abstract vocabulary. In his view, she simply got there too fast and too easily. She's famous, of course, for pictures that at first sight seem quite the opposite of abstract: challengingly labialike petals and priapic stamen, a whole painterly idiom of sexuality inscribed in representations of natural objects (Figure 1: Jack in-the-Pulpit, no. 4). As Ian McKay recently put it in Contemporary Art, O'Keeffe's early exhibitions were regarded by many contemporary critics “as the work of a pathologically sex-crazed woman who, lacking the wherewithal to control her urges, poured them out onto the canvas for public display.” The sexual interpretations that so intrigued New York Freudians of the 1920s, and now serve to validate the oeuvre in its entirety for her feminist critics, have since tended to be absorbed into formal critique with a certain charge of displaced sexual innuendo: her painterly surface is “thin,” her perspectives “flat and frontal,” her scale distorted or unfathomable.

With the late-19th-Century rise of the metropolis came new ways of seeing in the American city. Observers attempting to decipher the “mysteries” of an urban landscape radically transformed by industrial and mercantile capitalism responded in a variety of ways: some chose to portray the “underside” of the city, some its expansive beauty, others its vast and disorienting scale. But what these different perspectives share is an assumption that one can comprehend and order the sprawling urban scene through a knowledge and experience predicated on sight; to “see” the city is, quite literally, to understand it.

In 1925 in The New Negro, Alain Locke announced to the world that something new, “something beyond the watch and guard of statistics,” had taken place in the racial alembic of 20th-century America. Although the “Sociologist,” the “Philanthropist,” and the “Race-leader” were not unaware of this “changeling,” this New Negro, they were unable to account for what they saw. A new awareness was needed, for these authorities were unable to see beyond the limits and assumptions of their professional interests. For this reason, it was Locke's intent, as a professor of philosophy at Howard University, to announce, to identify, and to help bring to life this renaissance of the spirit. Not unlike W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk, Locke challenged his generation to see the world with fresh eyes. But, whereas DuBois took his reader to the South, to “historic ground,” Locke looked over the terrain of a “younger generation … vibrant with a new psychology.” Harlem, not Georgia, was the center of his attention. And, unlike DuBois, Locke did not seek to reveal “the strange experience” of being a “problem” but celebrated the pride of being black in America.

May Alcott's identity as an artist is overshadowed by, and often confused with, that of the author Louisa May Alcott. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1840, Abbie May Alcott [later Nieriker], was the youngest of the Alcott sisters. Her capricious nature and artistic aspirations served as the inspiration for the character of Amy, the “little Raphael” of the March family, in Louisa's first popular novel, Little Women. Amy's desire to “go to Rome, and do fine pictures, and be the best artist in the whole world” (Alcott, quoted in Bedell, 248) was the embodiment of May Alcott's own fervent childhood dream of becoming a successful artist.

Rhythm—the measured flow of motion—is an essential formative aspect of reality and of our experience, and ritual is among the principal cultural resources by which we grasp and participate in those rhythms and gain some purchase upon them and the energies they embody.

A 1993 article in the washington post about responses to David Brock's The Real Anita Hill argues persuasively that neither the authors nor reviewers of such books are likely to be disinterested. Yet Howard Kurtz oversimplifies when he asks, “Can reviewers fairly evaluate an investigative work that builds its case upon a mountain of disputed facts and assertions? Or must the debate be relegated to a tiny circle of experts, endlessly hashing over arcane details” as in “some modern-day Hiss case?”

The choice need not be so stark. Reviewers cannot evaluate fairly unless they consider details. If they don't read debates of the experts, they may choose to avoid the tedium of complex cases by relying on the reputation of a single expert. That seems to be what two of the best national newspapers have done in recent years about the Alger Hiss case — even while striving to report fairly.

The late 19th Century witnessed the beginnings of a profound transformation of the political culture in the industrialized world. With the rise of reform movements concerned with labor, religion, women's rights, and a host of other matters, the winds of change blew around the globe. These crosscurrents were particularly evident in the Anglo-American environment where the ideology of reform reflected certain continuities of culture among the English-speaking countries. In particular, this period of reform saw the development of significant connections between America and New Zealand. While Peter Coleman has ably analyzed the exchanges of ideas that shaped legislation and emergent progressivism in both countries, he has not adequately addressed the complexity of the cultural and ideological dimensions of these exchanges. In considering those cultural and ideological dimensions, I will attempt to offer some insight into the political culture of reform in both countries at the end of the 19th Century.

That there is a striking correspondence between the thinking of such A nineteenth-century transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and that of the twentieth-century American master of photography Edward Weston should come as no great surprise, for it is widely recognized that transcendentalism has been an essential ingredient in the lives and work of numerous major American artists. During the nineteenth century, this influence was most fully expressed by poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, by the painter Thomas Eakins, and by the architect Louis Sullivan. At the turn of the century, the composer Charles Ives and painters Robert Henri and his “Ashcan” colleagues John Sloan, George Luks, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn continued to draw sustenance from the ideas and example of the transcendentalists. And during the early twentieth century, the brilliant architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the gifted painter Georgia O'Keeffe, and major poets Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams made clear through their work the looming presence of the transcendentalist tradition. Thus, well before the 1920s, when Edward Weston began making his most innovative photographs, transcendentalism consciously and unconsciously pervaded American intellectual and artistic life: It was something to absorb or reject-or both. “Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, the army of unalterable law,” was how Eliot put it. Weston was not exempt from this law.

The two versions of The Abduction of Daniel Boone's Daughter by the Indians by Charles Wimar (1828–62) reveal a remarkable alteration in conception in the span of only two years. The earlier version (Fig. 1), painted in 1853, is a rather unimaginative picture rooted in an overworked tradition. In 1855 Wimar produced a much more original painting (Fig. 2), which reflected an enlightened approach to the myths of the American West. Although the two works were painted while Wimar was studying at the Düsseldorf Academy, he gained his knowledge of Indians from firsthand experience while growing up in the frontier city of Saint Louis, to which he had emigrated from Germany at the age of fifteen. Wimar devoted the bulk of his oeuvre to Indian subjects, mostly portraits and genre scenes. A narrative subject dealing with a specific and, by that time, legendary figure such as Daniel Boone's daughter was atypical for Wimar. By probing the background and sources of this theme, both literary and pictorial, one can bring to light the aspects of frontier mythology embodied in these paintings.

In 1933, Dial Press in New York published Two Valleys, the first novel by a very young man named Howard Melvin Fast. The publisher's blurb noted that “Mr. Fast is not yet nineteen.”(He had been born in 1914.) In 1995, The Bridge Builder's Story, the most recent of Howard Fast's novels, appeared. Sixty-two years lie between Two Valleys and The Bridge Builder's Story.

In the 1850s a diverse, sometimes discordant, collection of New York City public officials, reformers, and physicians came jointly to the conclusion that their city's foundlings constituted a problem in need of immediate solution. While once they had allowed abandoned babies to languish in the almshouse — where their death rate at times reached 100 percent — they now felt that the plight of these unwanted waifs was a judgment on themselves and their society that had to be addressed.

Pressed into action by a force made of both sympathy and anxiety, they got to work. In the decade before the Civil War municipal officials assembled committees to look into the possibility of building a public foundling asylum, reformers conducted investigations, and the press hovered — prodding, accusing, and carrying out investigations of its own. The Civil War brought all this activity to a halt, but as soon as the war was over it resumed. In less than a decade following the end of the war four foundling asylums opened in a city that previously had not had a single one.

Why did these citizens identify the phenomenon of infant abandonment as a problem when they did? What sort of a problem did they think it was? The answers to these questions reveal at least as much about their collective anxieties about such matters as rapid urban growth and fallen women as they do about the plight of the unwanted children they tried to help.

It is difficult to understand this shift in sensibility without understanding what came before it. Antebellum New Yorkers, like their European counterparts, equated infant abandonment with illegitimacy.

In 1926, President Coolidge delivered an address to the American Association of Advertising Agencies in which he acknowledged and praised the role played by advertising in the economic life of the nation. His speech was fraught with cultural contradictions: one moment he affirmed the traditional values of industry and thrift, and the next moment, almost in the same breath, he heralded the idea of increased spending and consumption. The address reflected the small-town ideology of a government leadership trying to remain convinced that modern-day advertising posed no threat to the 19th-century work ethic. The ideological dividedness of Coolidge's speech brings to mind a man happily sawing away at the branch on which he is sitting. Advertising is “not an economic waste”:

[R]ightfully applied, it is the method by which the desire is created for better things. When that once exists, new ambition is developed for the creation and use of wealth.

A photograph of three women in dark dresses, white aprons, and beehivelike white hats has been used by historians throughout the 20th Century as evidence that young, uniformed nurses served in general hospitals during the Civil War. This is a fine example of historical halftruth: the women in the photograph were young and uniformed, but they were not Civil War nurses. They were New Yorkers who had volunteered to work in a food concession at the Sanitary Commission's metropolitan fundraising fair in April, 1864, and they were dressed in traditional Normandy costumes to sell Normandy cakes. The 20th-century historian who first identified this photograph expected nurses to wear white hats, even though no female hospital worker in Civil War America to my knowledge ever wore professional headgear or a uniform.

The Blithedale Romance occupies a unique position in the Haw-thorneian corpus for at least two reasons: Hawthorne's use of a first-person narrator and his decision to base, albeit loosely, the fictional Blithedale on his experiences as a resident at Brook Farm, an actual Utopian community founded by the transcendentalist minister George Ripley in 1841. If The Blithedale Romance constitutes a new point of departure for Hawthorne's fictional project, it is nevertheless a point of departure that Hawthorne, in particular in his prefaces, had contemplated all along. Hawthorne's fidelity to a new kind of fiction that more closely approximates lived experience would seem to be a betrayal of his notion of romance, which does not, like the novel, aim to be faithful to “the probable and ordinary course of man's experience,” but it is part and parcel of Hawthorne's anxieties about the transgressions of representation, transgressions peculiar to the kind of fictional project Hawthorne attempts to prosecute (Seven Gables, 1). While Hawthorne's preface to The Blithedale Romance celebrates his romances as “a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their phan-tasmagorical antics (38), his preface to The House of the Seven Gables warns that romance runs the risk of sinning unpardonably; that it commits, in other words, a “literary crime” (1). Our concern with Hawthorne as a writer seems all the more urgent, indeed necessary, given the connections Hawthorne seeks to establish between himself and his self-confessed minor poet and alter ego Miles Coverdale.

For both herman melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the quin-tessence of midcentury bachelor life was found across the Atlantic. Attempting to capitalize on the phenomenal success of Donald Grant Mitchell's Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), Melville in 1855 published “The Paradise of Bachelors,” with its companion sketch, “The Tartarus of Maids,” in Harper's (during Mitchell's tenure there as editor). This diptych juxtaposed the hard labor of unmarried New England female millworkers to the leisurely pleasures of English bachelor residents of the Inns of Court. For Melville, the “quiet absorption of good living, good drinking, good feeling, and good talk” was epitomized by bachelor life in London. Hawthorne made his own entry in the bachelor sweepstakes with The Blithedale Romance (1852), which portrayed the temporary residence of the bachelor Coverdale in an American Utopian community and an urban hotel. Yet Hawthorne, like Melville, associated ideal bachelor life with London. Describing a dinner he had enjoyed at the Reform Club, Hawthorne noted in his journal that “there are rooms and conveniences for every possible purpose, and whatever material for enjoyment a bachelor may need, or ought to have, he can surely find it here.”