“Who's a Professional? Who Cares?” asked a prominent historian nearly a decade ago. In the essay that followed the answer was shrewdly crafted. Because so many Americans have cared to call their occupational activity professional, few have succeeded in bringing to the concept a consistent and coherent interpretation. When nearly everyone “cares,” from gamblers and killers to jet fighters and physicians, the question “who's a professional?” loses its seriousness of meaning. The criticism cut to the bone. It served to question the integrity of the historical field of inquiry. Ironically, if students of the professions can not find a coherent body of knowledge in the subject, a similarity of pattern, then they are using the concept falsely – that is, unprofessionally.

America's leisure-time activities — artistic, entertaining, inlorma-tional and other — have usually been divided into elite and mass components, high culture and popular culture. However, because sociologists aim, among other things, to connect people's behavior with their social and economic origins, and because leisure-time culture is in part a reflection and an effect of class, a sociologically more accurate analysis calls for a set of cultural strata or subcultures that parallel class strata. I proposed such cultural strata in an earlier study; the purpose of this paper is to update the previous analysis. After raising some conceptual issues, I want to describe recent changes in the American class structure and therefore in American culture, concluding with some comments on the relationships between culture and class.

“I have Just come from the Gallery—my third visit,” announced a correspondent to the Boston Daily Advertiser on the second day of the Washington Allston retrospective at Harding's Gallery (Figures 1 and 2), “where I stood in the very midst… of the glowing colors and glorious subjects [of] the artist who stands alone in this his age, in this his art.” He was part of a chorus of dazzled spectators who crowded the exhibition, “filled with enthusiastic admiration” in “surveying forty-five pictures, many of which only the golden time of art could equal.” For the young Henry T. Tuckerman, who would recall it vividly in his influential Book of the Artists, the show “proved an epoch in the history of Art in the United States.” It was also the signal event of the artist's old age: a benefit exhibition that recalled the fifty-nine-year-old Allston from “a life of great seclusion” in suburban Cambridgeport, was extended from six to eleven weeks by popular demand, and fascinated some of the most critical minds in Boston.

Of all the great modern innovations, the railroad probably is the one to which American artists have accorded the largest significance. The passenger railroad first appeared on the American scene in the 1830s, and it almost immediately caught the eye of several of the nation's most gifted landscape painters. By the time of the Civil War the new machine already had been incorporated into the work of Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty, Asher Durand, and John Kensett. The subject attracted their attention, for one thing, because of its newness — its radically innovative character-and, for another, because of its compelling visual properties. A steam-powered locomotive moving across the landscape is an arresting sight-so arresting, indeed, that its visual character alone might seem to account for the strong hold it so quickly took on the imagination of artists. Here, after all, was an imposing, mobile, man-made contrivance, a complicated mechanism wrought of dark metal in various shifting sharp-edged geometric forms; the engine's motive power was made visible by the train of cars it pulled, the surging puffs of smoke and steam (black or white or both) that trailed behind it, and the intermittent flashes of red when its fire box was open.

New york city went through a period of dramatic change between 1845 and 1860. During those fifteen years New York became a complex and multiform modern city-the center of American commerce and culture, and the center as well of the new social problems that large-scale immigration and economic centralization brought. I am interested in the contemporary discourse used to describe the rapidly changing city, and I concentrate here on the convention of the panorama as used in that discourse. I will try to show that the New York panorama — as developed in popular illustration and popular fiction, in journalism and nonfiction — functioned to acknowledge a new immensity of urban scale at the same time as it created an image of the city as a single, comprehensible whole.

Saul bellow, in Humboldt's Gift, extends Chicago's present imaginatively back to its immigrant past. Through the mediating vision of Charlie Citrine, he remembers an old neighborhood's “Polish days” when its “small brick bungalows were painted fresh red, maroon, and candy green.” “I always thought,” Citrine says in calling up this vision of things past, that “there must be Baltic towns that looked like this, Gdynia for instance.” Nearly a century before Bellow's novel, the same commingling of places—and almost the same sense of transplanted homes and communities — seized the imagination of the novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz. Looking at homes in an immigrant section of Chicago and reading the Polish inscriptions and names on the houses, “it seemed,” Sienkiewicz said, “as though I were in Poland.” Bellow's and Sienkiewicz's doubled visions of place, their sense of Europe and America transposed and telescoped, turn on the lingering ambiguities of the new immigrant's experience—the paradoxical act of finding and losing home and identity in America.

In her recollections of the 1930s, Louise Tanner helped to create an image that has stayed with us despite a number of studies that should have dissolved it by now. Thirties movies were, she insisted,

a flop as a source of Communist propaganda. Some studios – notably Warner brothers – tried to bring Father to grips with social reality. But most of the cinemoguls agreed with Louis B. Mayer that Dad got all the social significance he needed at home. The script writers of Hollywood might take the Spanish Civil War to heart but they were more concerned with a public that preferred Carole Lombard doing secretarial work in a penthouse with a white telephone. Father sitting there in the dark forgot his own plight as he watched the gods and goddesses of the screen sweeping down staircases into dining rooms with a footman behind every chair. Depression movies portrayed an America devoid of economic conflict.

In 1975, the folklorist archie green wrote a short, pioneering article about a folk song leaflet produced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration in 1936. Green suggested that the song sheet was “intrinsically interesting: a sharp pen-and-ink sketch, a traditional song both radical and humane in content, a singable musical transcription faithful to the folk idiom.” But, Green added, the fact that the song sheet had developed in a context of art and radical politics in the 1930s gave it additional meaning; “because something of the circumstances of its issue is known,” he said, “we can use the song sheet as a passport into New Deal cultural history.”

In 1840, edward jarvis of the two-year-old Kentucky Historical Society wrote to Samuel Haven, Librarian of the American Antiguarian Society, complaining of the difficulties faced by the new organization in its efforts to collect and preserve materials relating to Kentucky's past. Despite enthusiastic support from the citizens of Louisville and from the state legislature, Jarvis explained, the task was an enormous one, for “the southern and western people are not in the habit of saving documents.”

“Our age is retrospective,” Emerson observed in 1836. “It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism.” Emerson identified a phenomenon far greater than the literary production of the New England Renaissance. He put his finger on an attitude toward the past that was quite new, yet was imitative rather than provincial and idiosyncratic. The Americans of Emerson's time developed a commemorative consciousness similar to that of the English and French. Following revolutions, all three nations attempted to redefine their pasts in material as well as literary terms. Inspired by Enlightenment philosophy, they considered the processes of nature metaphors for history, and they looked to the Arcadian periods of classical civilizations for precedents of the balanced blending of Art and Nature indicative of a certain sense of the past not associated with their own medieval histories.

Thomas Jefferson's right to membership in the pantheon of Enlightenment thinkers is repeatedly argued, in his own writings as well as in writings about him by others, by trope, by the use of vision as a figure for understanding: if we can only clear our thinking of those interferences that are the accumulated clutter of history, the enlightened Jefferson seems to say, our apprehension of the natural and human worlds will be as clean, plain, and immediate as the act of looking at a physical object.

In 1924 van wyck brooks suffered a nervous breakdown while trying to finish a book about Emerson. For four terrifying years Brooks moved in and out of mental hospitals in Europe and America while the Emerson manuscript lay unfinished in his study, “a kind of symbol of his failure to resolve … the dialectical crisis of his own personality — so much like that of Emerson himself.” There were “manic” moments when he thought his depression had left him. In May 1925 he wrote to his good friend Lewis Mumford, “You may know I had a breakdown last spring — it really lasted about two years; and when it came to a head and burst — on May 20th, when I woke up — I felt as if I had expelled from my system the gathering poisons of years. … Everything I have done so far has been a kind of exploration of the dark side of our moon, and this blessed Emerson has led me right out into the midst of the sunny side.” Emerson had become for him a healing agent, a subject that, he told his wife Eleanor, would make him “sane again,” serving as an example of a successful American writer to contrast to his books about failures.

Just as patriot orators invoked the spirit of Puritanism in their remonstrances against British tyranny, just as the nineteenth-century cult of Pilgrimism taught all America to look back upon the Pilgrim fathers as everyone's fathers, so modern American intellectual history has proclaimed the Puritan origins of the American way. The result has been a scholarly upsurge, during the past half-century, of “Puritan legacy” studies, of which Perry Miller was the prime mover and Sacvan Bercovitch is the leading contemporary theorist. So far as the interpretation of literary history is concerned, these studies have given a new authority and depth to the old New England-centered map of American literary tradition first drawn up by the Yankee-oriented genteel intellectual establishment of the late nineteenth century that presided over the literary institutions whose prestige had been built upon the reputation of the perpetrators of the antebellum New England Renaissance. The old-fashioned interpretation of American literary history and the new-fashioned interpretation of American civil religion as a nationalized version of Puritan ideology have combined to create a strong presumption, at least for specialists in New England Romantic literature, that theirs was the key formative moment in American literary history as a whole.

At the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin remarked on the radiant sun painted on the back of George Washington's chair: “I have,” he said, “often and often in the course of the Session … looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.” In one of his earliest published poems, “The Columbian's Song,” Whitman draws upon the rising-glory rhetoric of the Revolutionary period to express a similar confidence in America's future:

O, my soul is drunk with joy,

And my inmost heart is glad,

To think my country's star will not

Through endless ages fade,

That on its upward glorious course

Our red eyed eagle leaps,

…………

That here at length is found

A wide extending shore,

Where Freedom's starry gleam

Shines with unvarying beam.

When lionel trilling delivered an important lecture on William Dean Howells more than thirty years ago at Harvard, he began with an anecdote that helps to move us directly into Howells country. Offering a course on American literature at Columbia College, Trilling “imagined that it might be useful to [his] students to have a notion of the cultural and social situation which Howells described,” and he therefore “spent a considerable time talking about [Howells's] books”; whereupon, Trilling reports, “I received the first anonymous letter I have ever had from a student-it warned me that the lapse of taste shown by my excessive interest in a dull writer was causing a scandal in the cafeterias.”

Writing in his diary in August 1842, Thoreau noted that “there is much to console the wayward traveller upon the dustiest and dullest road” because the “path his feet travel is so perfectly typical of human life.” As a lifelong journeyer and seeker he often used the metaphor embedded in his diary notation for that summer day: “Now climbing the highest mountains, now descending into the lowest vales. From the summits we see the heavens and the horizon, from the vales we look up to the heights again.” Thoreau sought utopia in nature and in himself at Walden by journeying westward a short distance from Concord to establish a community of one. There he found a piece of sacred earth and anchored himself in order to confront some practical problems having to do with economy, nature, and society.