We only half-understand how meaning depends upon geography. We usually think of meaning in global terms, as having to do with the universals of truth, goodness, and beauty. But global meanings are anchored in the unselfconscious geography of everyday life, the “rhythmic functional patterns” by which we order time and space. Those patterns change over the lifetime of the individual, profoundly altering what life means to him.

It once seemed that the civil rights movement resulted from a kind of historical immaculate conception and signalled an historical “break” of major proportions. Now, however, we have historical studies tracing a long tradition of “core values” at work in black American culture and sociological studies that reconstruct the dense institutional matrix from which the civil rights movement emerged and drew sustenance. We can now identify historical developments – the great migration of southern blacks to the North, the increasing prosperity enjoyed by the South after World War II, and, most crucially, the Supreme Court decision of 1954 – that set the stage for the movement. Nor could the movement have come into existence without the nexus of black churches and colleges, the early work of the NAACP or the emergence of action-oriented organizations such as SCLC, SNCC and CORE. Even before Montgomery, we now learn, there were mass action campaigns by southern blacks that provided both information and inspiration for the fledgling movement in the capital of the Confederacy.

At the World's Fair Congress of Anthropology in Chicago in 1915 Professor O. T. Mason explained the ethnological exhibit in the following terms: “The aim was to have each leading linguistic stock of peoples represented by collections of art products and by groups of life-size figures engaged in characteristic arts and industries serially in the alcoves.” A certain cultural confidence is manifest. Language is seen as the basis for “stocks” of peoples (stocks being a favourite classificatory measure for Darwinists and Financiers), and museum humanoids, engaged in representative and atomised industrial tasks, presented in serial order, become authoritative ways of coding behaviour, language and culture.

Can cultural change be explained as a function of discourse? A discourse is any language territory, whether a mode of thinking, talking or writing, which presupposes shared assumptions between its producer and consumer. This means that the relationship between language and ideology is dependent upon the nature of a particular discourse. This paper offers comments on this question with reference to the formation of the post-bellum American business culture and its ideology by examining the written works of one of its leading exponents, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Working from the assumption that this business culture was serving the interests of a new ruling group at the expense of subordinate Populist-Producer ones, does an evaluation of the business-man's discourse reveal how it helped create that ideological domination? Both Hayden White and Michel Foucault have claimed that culture can be explored by reference to the primary figurative modes of discourse, particularly the tropes of metonymy and synecdoche. Basic to this rhetorical approach to cultural formation is its assumption that ideology is a function of discourse, even though White, the most devoted practitioner of the theory of the poetic foundation of cultural practices, recognises Foucault's insight that discourse resides in the world and is bound up with property ownership, power and the imposition of force. Assuming that power is embedded in a dominant social formation, business spokesmen like Carnegie, working to maintain the authority of a particular class, did so through a range of discursive cultural practices that contended with others for dominance. In the Gramscian model of cultural change Andrew Carnegie was an organic intellectual in as much as he functioned according to the interests of the new fundamental class of the wealthy industrial bourgeoisie.

A familiar sight at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. is people tracing onto a piece of paper the name of a relative or friend who was killed in Vietnam. On one hand, this gesture is sadly poignant, even cathartic. On the other hand, it is also symptomatic of many Americans' perceptions of the Vietnam war, whether in the sixties or in the eighties: when we have the name of something we somehow also possess the thing named. Even though there is obviously an enormous semiotic gap between that symbol, etched instone, and its object, long gone, that symbol nevertheless acquires a powerful ontological status. A traced symbol of a symbol on a symbol becomes reality. When I recently witnessed this scene, I couldn't help asking myself, “just what kind of legacy is this?”

Thoreau first told me about this predecessor of mine;…that here…dwelt, in some long past time, in this man who resolved never to die…

It gave me a stronger interest in this spot; and according to my custom, I mused and meditated, and thought within myself, and tried to make out what manner of man this might be, that deemed it within his power to subvert the usual conditions of humanity. …Had he discovered …the great secret philosophers used to seek for?

In the study of contemporary American politics the phenomenon referred to as the “decline of party” has aroused considerable debate. Many writing on this subject maintain that American parties have been in a longterm and irreversible process of secular decline. Others hold that American parties have merely changed their role in the political system and although increasingly eliminated from presidential politics have developed considerably as national political organisations. This latter thesis has particular reference to the Republican party. The GOP has won four of the last five presidential elections, and has developed its national party organisation to a level of efficacy and sophistication unprecedented in American history.

In 1960, on the edge of a new decade, Norman Mailer thought he might have seen a superman coming to the supermarket. The supermarket was the U.S. presidential election; the possible superman, disguised as an orthodox candidate of a mainstream political party, was John F. Kennedy. Despite the conventionality of his politics, Kennedy had “the eyes of a mountaineer” and the “cool grace” of a hipster. Ever since a Japanese destroyer rammed his PT boat and left him swimming for life on the vast Pacific, Kennedy had “the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated from the mass of others.”

Thirty years after the publication of Arthur Schlesinger's The Crisis of the Old Order and two decades after the “New Left” provoked a modicum of self-examination by established historians of the New Deal, there is still no general revisionist work or interpretation of the 1930s of the stature of Schlesinger, Leuchtenburg or Freidel. Despite twenty years of revisionist challenges, the notion of the 1930s as an affirmative and progressive era in American history remains dominant and commands broad acceptance. Revisionist analysis has appeared marginal to the dominant interpretations of the New Deal and has been either easily accommodated or effortlessly dismissed by the “liberal historical establishment.” This does not validate the dominant discourse so much as suggest that dissenting historians have pursued unrewarding lines of enquiry in challenging prevailing orthodoxy about the nature and significance of the New Deal. Whatever their differences, revisionists have shared with the “liberal establishment” the assumption that it was public policy which ensured the State's survival during the severe economic crisis of the 1930s and which provides the touchstone for historical evaluation of the New Deal. In the course of this review of the overarching concerns of historical writing about the New Deal it is intended to suggest that new perspectives and points of reference are required, and are being developed, to reinvigorate revisionist historiography of the New Deal period, and to shed light, in particular, on the State's ability to withstand crisis. As the debate over slavery was enlivened and sharpened by the introduction of cultural perspectives, so historical analysis of the New Deal stands to derive similar benefit.

To an increasing degree, the American states in recent years have taken the lead in domestic policymaking. In many areas — education, economic development, welfare reform, health care, housing and the environment, among others — state governors and legislatures are providing the initiative in identifying public needs, setting policy agenda and devising effective programmes to implement them.