I Will Begin with two dates. The first is August 3, 1958. It has – as far as I know – no significance whatsoever, except to me. It was my sixteenth birthday, and a friend gave me a record of Louis Armstrong's Hot Seven. I can still vividly remember, more than thirty years later, the shock of first hearing “Potato Head Blues,” particularly Satchmo's second trumpet solo, which leaps like a golden gazelle away from the stalking stop chords of the band. The British jazzman Humphrey Lyttelton remarked that jazz would never be the same again after that solo. Neither would I. Until then, I had looked with a typically British mixture of amusement and amazement at the American consumer products like Coke, bubblegum, and Westerns which had lightened the rationed gloom of a postwar childhood. After “Potato Head Blues,” not just jazz but America generally became exciting and exotic. I determined to find out more about it.

The 18th Century began with a debate between the ancients and the moderns in which the proponents of classicism seemed to enjoy a temporary advantage, but it ended with two revolutions whose victors loudly proclaimed a radical disjunction with the past. The age obviously contains more than one site on which we might locate a discourse of modernism, but the differences between a battle of the books and guillotining a king suggest that we should expect to find more than one kind of modernism. Or better, we might expect to find a discourse of modernism rich with an unrecognized and unresolved problematics that has become somewhat clearer, both to the original speakers and to us, only in the light of subsequent texts and events. In the summer of 1776, for example, many Americans thought that the Declaration of Independence had resolved an ambiguous situation by breaking with the political conventions of the past, but scarcely a decade later they required another text to clarify and constitute relationships among themselves. That Constitution immediately called into play discourse about the possible futures it made possible, and the advent of the French Revolution two years later called for a total reevaluation of the American revolutionary project. Some participants in the national discourse thought the events in France exposed the fallacy of any revolution that sought to go beyond the limits of replacing an unjust regime and aspired to transform human nature and human culture, while others thought the French experience made more explicit and extended the genuine meaning of the American Revolution as a radical transformation of history. The discourse of the Declaration, that of the Constitution, and that of the response to the French Revolution suggest that the origination and establishment of the young United States might be helpfully understood as an exemplary episode of the modernism that transformed the postmedieval world.

As the scarlet letter ends, Hawthorne offers us a glimpse of Hester Prynne's future. We are to imagine her as a figure of wisdom, offering counsel to a community of perplexed and sorrowful women, the casualties of love. Her bitter experience has at last become a source of authority; the marginal has become central. This vision of Hester anticipates Hawthorne's transformation of his fiction as he moved from The Scarlet Letter to The House of the Seven Gables. The “hell-fired” intensity of the former book generated in Hawthorne the wish to write something more genial, less gloomy, “a more natural and healthy product of my mind,” a work he could feel less “reluctance” about publishing. The lure of the central hinted at in Hester's reward and Hawthorne's remarks is at the heart of The House of the Seven Gables's way of claiming authority, its attempt to reinvent and perform the work of the novelist.

In all of the literature on abstract expressionism, very little has been written about what I would call the Emersonian presence. It is a presence rather than a source or influence. And it is not limited to Emerson, since it can be found in such figures as Walt Whitman and William James, among others. But it is easier to say “an Emersonian presence” because precise influences are difficult, probably impossible, to establish. What I am concerned with is an attitude of mind that recurs in American intellectual history and that resonates through much 20th-century American art, ranging from early modernists such as John Marin through artists associated with process art. I do not mean to deny other welldocumented European and American sources, influences, and presences in abstract expressionism and other American movements, but only to call attention at this time to the Emersonian presence.

Two days before the 1884 presidential election, Woodrow Wilson, then a graduate student in history and political science at the Johns Hopkins University, confessed somewhat guiltily to his fiancée that he had been scanning the newspapers on the Lord's Day to gauge the chances of the Democratic candidate. “I am exceedingly hopeful,” he wrote, “though so anxious as to be thankful that there is only a day or two more of suspense. Only my profound trust in an over-ruling Providence will keep me from the deepest despondency, my darling, if Cleveland should be defeated.” Wilson's commitment to Grover Cleveland and his aversion to James G. Blaine were characteristic of the feeling at the university. In the department of historical and political science, headed by thirty-fouryear-old Herbert Baxter Adams, such feeling ran high. Adams, a New England Republican who made no secret of his mugwump convictions, took for granted that his students hoped for a Cleveland victory. The Cleveland motto, “Public Office is a Public Trust”, he reminded them, was a truth as old as Aristotle. On election night, Hopkins men scrutinized the returns into the early morning hours, and lectures the next day were heard with slight attention. Cleveland's inauguration was an occasion for celebration, and Adams, with a large contingent of Hopkinsians, went off on a “spree” to the Capital.

At the beginning of february, 1884, Henry James was having a typed copy made of his manuscript for “A New England Winter,” a tale written in London, but prompted by his months-long stay the previous winter in Boston–to which he had been recalled by the death of his father.

Some time after the Civil War, writers of American etiquette books marked the rise of the city by introducing new sections on “etiquette in the street” and “conduct in a crowd.” No one should look to their texts and the accompanying illustrations for a faithfully detailed and documented history of 19th-century city life. The stiff, cutout figures that walk through city streets in these old line drawings represent a particular fantasy of social order, focused in the figure and type of the lady and gentleman. “Walk slowly, do not turn your head … and,” The Ladies' Book of Etiquette (1876) warned, “avoid any gesture or word that would attract attention.” That advice is illustrated, with punctilious care, in Gentleman Meeting a Lady, a line drawing in John Young's 1882 guide, Our Deportment (Figure 1). The gentleman and the lady make no apparent eye contact; they, in strict observance of propriety, look off and away from each other. Again, in Alice Emma Ives's Social Mirror (1886), the ladies who illustrate the way to give a gentleman “formal street recognition” grant it with averted eyes and unturned heads. Ives quite properly avoids the word “meet” (Figure 2).

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.

American illustration occupies an anomalous position in art history. Its proponents celebrate its brief but glorious history, a “Golden Age”, lasting roughly from 1880 to 1930. It is a history with a definite, limited chronology, determined by issues of quality and stylistic development and focused on the achievements of a few individuals. Others, however, regard American illustration as a minor episode in the history of art; many consider it to be beneath consideration as serious art. Yet there has been little analysis of why American illustration is considered so marginal or of why to this day the question of whether illustration is a fine art has not been resolved.

This article is about who or what art is for and what, if anything, art J. can do. It begins with the assumption that art can indeed function beyond itself and the specifically aesthetic premises that conditioned its production and that it is acceptable for the audience to consider such broader, cultural functions for it. In particular this article examines Thomas Hart Benton's The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley with an eye toward the ways in which uninitiated viewers might respond to that painting and how it can be read as responding to certain cultural conditions in which contemporary viewers would have found themselves. By offering viewers several levels on which to respond, as well as by responding itself to viewers' lives, the painting provides one example of Benton's desire, not to undermine high art in this country – as is often implied by accusations that his art is little more than kitsch – but rather to build the sophistication of the viewing public.

The term “Living Newspaper” has been used to describe various topical theatrical productions adapting a considerable diversity of performance styles and relationships to an audience. For the Works Projects Administration (WPA) Federal Theatre Project (FTP) (1935–39), the Living Newspaper was a documentary drama that examined the nature, size, and origin of a current problem or issue. In theory, the action and dialogue would be completely objective by simply reenacting actual events. In practice, however, the authors of the Living Newspaper selected what they thought typical or representative to highlight or explain the “facts.” The play generally concluded by exhorting the audience to support a particular position or a specific piece of legislation.

Improving low-income housing in New York City was one of two objectives for the Phelps-Stokes Fund when it was incorporated in 1911. Enhancing educational opportunities for African-Americans, Native Americans, Africans, and needy white students was the other. Both represented lifelong concerns of Caroline Phelps Stokes (1854–1909), whose bequest financed the fund.

Since the 1920s, the discourse about American urban culture has suggested the appropriateness of organizing metropolitan life around territorial subcommunities in two distinctive ways, each of which yielded a distinctive period in the history of professional city and social welfare planning. During the first period, which persisted into the 1950s, the planners focused on the problem of forging a coherent sense of metropolitan community among cultural groups conceived of as separate but equal (or potentially equal). To achieve this goal, they emphasized the role of experts in analyzing the forces controlling urban culture and in devising schemes to segregate, assure the integrity of, and foster mutual understanding and respect among cultural groups whose characteristics stemmed from forces beyond the control of experts or group members. During the second period, which began in the 1950s and persists in our own time, planners abandoned cultural group determinism and the quest for a segregated yet coherent metropolitan community of separate but equal groups in homogeneous neighborhoods. Instead they decided they could control the future of the metropolis by persuading individuals to create heterogeneous neighborhoods through a process of “community action” in which neighborhood residents would define their culture (“lifestyles”) by participating in the design of the social and physical environment of the neighborhood of their choice. This new pattern of thinking about urban culture, which centered on “individualism” and neighborhood rather than groups and metropolitan community, involved a revolt against cultural group determinism, the notion that individuals carry an identity determined by the accident of their membership in the group with characteristics determined by the experience of a group in a social and physical environment created by “outsiders” and or impersonal “forces.”

Middletown, or Muncie, is one of the most studied communities in the United States. Since the initial research was begun in 1924, the community has learned to endure the probing of many investigators, and the many reports have reflected the tensions and concerns of scholars searching for clues to the American urban experience. One might well trace the course of 20th-century American studies through the Middletown experience. In a limited way, that is what this effort purports to do.

Ironically the community was chosen largely by accident, studied by a person unqualified to do so, and the results were not what the sponsoring organization had wanted. When published, however, the report titled Middletown was an immediate success; it has remained in print since first issued, and has inspired many successors.