In his T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures delivered at the University of Kent in March, 1971, and subsequently published as In Bluebeard's Castle or Some Notes Towards A Re-definition of Culture, George Steiner apostrophized the condition of American culture in the following way:

America is the representative and premonitory example [of the democratization of high culture]. Nowhere has the debilitation of genuine literacy gone further (consider the recent surveys of reading-comprehension and recognition in American high schools). But nowhere, also, have the conservation and learned scrutiny of the art or literature of the past been pursued with more generous authority. American libraries, universities, archives, museums, centres for advanced study, are now the indispensable record and treasure-house of civilization. It is here that the European artist and scholar must come to see the cherished after-glow of his culture. Though often obsessed with the future, the United States is now, certainly in regard to the humanities, the active watchman of the classic past.

So far, so good. But Steiner's encomium (notwithstanding that second sentence) carried with it a conditional scrutiny which was less attractive in its implications.

In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson became the first American to put history to work to create a nation. He blazed a path that historians have been following ever since. Consider the difficulty Jefferson faced. Different events were happening in thirteen intensely local and isolated colonies among people with different traditions, languages, religions, and circumstances. Jefferson turned these scattered events into a national narrative. Behind these individual acts by agents of the British Crown aimed at different colonies was a single menace, Jefferson insisted, that should inspire these isolated individuals to discover and act upon what they shared as bearers of the traditional liberties of Englishmen. To introduce his stunning attempt to fit isolated events into a single narrative, Jefferson began by boldly declaring that it was “necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds that have connected them with another.” The colonists, Jefferson proclaimed, were “one people.” Jefferson knew that the colonists were not “one people.” But in order to invent one nation, Jefferson had to invent one people, and in order to invent one people Jefferson had to invent one history that might unite that “one people.” It has been hard work ever since.

From 1776 until sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, it was possible to believe – indeed, it was hard to question – that nations were, or even should be, the embodiment of people's destinies – that nations could express their identities, solve their problems, and be entrusted with their dreams and fates. The modern practice of history was born a couple of centuries ago to serve this process, to invent narratives and persuade peoples to interpret their personal experiences within national terms and narratives.

When President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in August 1996, it brought to an end the much vilified sixty-one-year-old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) programme. Although few mourned the passing of AFDCper se many liberals were alarmed by the nature of the changes. AFDC had effectively been a cash maintenance programme for poor single-parent families with the costs shared between federal and state governments. The PRWORA repealed AFDC and some smaller related programmes, with Washington giving its former share of funding to the states in the form of a new block grant, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). The existing entitlement nature of AFDC was ended with the states given new discretion in determining TANF eligibility. Overall considerable responsibility for the implementation of welfare policy was devolved to the states. The bill, however, did set a maximum time limit for individual receipt of federal TANF funds. After two years, welfare recipients must engage in a recognized work effort to continue to receive help, with a total five-year limit on TANF money. Opposition to these measures was overwhelmed by the demand for significant reform of the welfare system. Previously this demand had been thwarted through a combination of Washington gridlock and the limited scale of those changes which were enacted. In 1996, however, the dam holding back reform was breached at the high tide of anti-welfare sentiment. The despair this provoked among liberals should perhaps have caused them to reflect on their part in blocking previous attempts at an overhaul of AFDC. In particular, the elder statespersons of liberalism might regret their role in helping defeat President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan (FAP).

Beltings and beatings play a prominent role in Twain's boy fictions. In “The Story of the Bad Little Boy” (1865), Jim is “always spanked…to sleep” by his mother and, instead of a good-night kiss, “she boxed his ears when she was ready to leave him.” While in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884–85), when Huck stays with pap in the cabin in the woods, “by-and-by pap got too handy with his hick'ry, and I couldn't stand it. I was all over welts.” It is the prevalence of such punishments, and attempted punishments, in Tom Sawyer's young life that provides the starting-point for my present analysis of childhood discipline and its fictional representation in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). For to focus on the different types of punishment Tom undergoes, the supervisory controls which are placed over him, and the way he responds to them, is to suggest a reading of Twain's novel as illustrative both of the changing forms of domestic discipline being introduced in America in the 1830s and 40s, and the spaces in which that discipline functions. In pursuing this line of inquiry, I build on previous work on the development of modern American social regulation in the antebellum period, and particularly that by G. M. Goshgarian and Richard H. Brodhead.

“What is an American?” asked the French émigré Hector St. John Crèvecoeur in 1782. In so doing, Crèvecoeur posed one of the fundamental questions of the revolutionary era. When the colonists overthrew imperial authority; declared independence; formed an independent confederation of states; and waged war for its existence; they created a new nation and a new nationality. To be sure, colonists and Britons alike had long used the term “American,” none the less, a complete sense of American national identity was largely inchoate before the American Revolution. Before the Revolution, most Americans identified more with their individual colonies than with an abstract geographic concept like “America.” While the Revolution did not completely supplant regional loyalties, it introduced a new, compelling loyalty: to the United States of America. The Revolution forced Americans to choose between loyalty to Britain or the United States. Ultimately, the majority opted for the United States. Those who did, helped define what it meant to be American by their words and actions. The purpose of this article is to examine the development of loyalty to the United States and the development of an American national identity among one group of Americans: sailors imprisoned in Britain during the Revolution.

They talked until three, from biology to organized religion, and when Amory crept shivering into bed it was with his mind aglow…

(Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise)

Readers familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald's early work might recall that in those years just before the Scopes trial he wrote of Victorians who “shuddered when they found what Mr. Darwin was about”; or that he joined in the fashionable comic attacks on people who could not accept their “most animal existence,” describing one such character as “a hairless ape with two dozen tricks.” But few would guess the extent to which his interest in evolutionary biology shaped his work. He was particularly concerned with three interrelated biological problems: (1) the question of eugenics as a possible solution to civilization's many ills, (2) the linked principles of accident and heredity (as he understood these through the lens of Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic law), and (3) the revolutionary theory of sexual selection that Darwin had presented in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). As I hope to show in the following pages, his concern with these issues underlies such well-known features in the Fitzgerald landscape as his insecurity in the “social hierarchy” (his sense of its “terrifying fluidity”), his emphasis on the element of time, his interest in “the musk of money,” his interest in Spengler and the naturalists, and his negative portraiture of male violence. The principles of eugenics, accidental heredity, and sexual selection flow together as the prevailing undercurrent in most of Fitzgerald's work before and after The Great Gatsby, producing more anxiety than love from the tangled courtships of characters he deemed both beautiful and damned.

In the wake of World War II, the unofficial cartoonist laureate of the war, Bill Mauldin, turned the focus of his comic art to life within America's borders. In a 1946 panel, he portrayed two men talking in the shadow of the United States Capitol building. The listener was clearly a slick senator; the speaker looked to be a well-groomed tramp. His question no doubt left the senator fumbling for an answer: “Do you mean your American Way or my American Way, Senator?”

Mauldin did not provide us with the senator's response, but it hardly matters. The tramp's question all but answers itself. The supposed post-war consensus, the shared American Way, had not been achieved by unanimous consent, the tramp was suggesting, but by leaving out those who did not fit into it. The popular imagination of America might have attained a single, clean vision of the nation, but only by cropping out anything that could blur the picture. The imagined American Way would not admit it, but there were others trying to climb into the frame.

Historians have on the whole ignored the ideas of the segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s. They assume, apparently, that racism – which historians have studied from every conceivable angle – is enough to explain how and why people fought to preserve a racist institution in a specific time and place. The civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s did not make that assumption: they attacked specific and concrete institutions, hoping that the “hearts and minds” of southern racists might give up their racism after the institutions were destroyed. Segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s, in turn, tried to defend those institutions, not just politically, but culturally and intellectually as well. A full understanding of the destruction of those institutions requires an understanding of the way they were defended. Racism, after all, existed long before the specific legal forms of segregation and disfranchisement were created – and shows every sign of outliving them. Historians who ignore the cultural and intellectual defenses of those specific forms miss a crucial historical question: why did segregationist arguments ultimately fail to inspire the southern white population to defend those forms of racism successfully ?

The drive to enact a constitutional amendment requiring balanced federal budgets has been a defining issue of American politics in the final decade of the twentieth century. Supporters of this measure deemed it the only way to break the cycle of huge deficits that inflated the national debt to almost unmanageable proportions in recent years. In 1995, 1996 and 1997 only the Senate's narrow failure to deliver the requisite two-thirds majority – latterly by a single vote – prevented Congress proposing an amendment for ratification by the states. Nevertheless the balanced-budget amendment campaign is not a product of the deficit-conscious 1990s. It originated in the 1970s as a movement by the states to impose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Between 1975 and 1979 thirty states petitioned Congress for a convention to write a balanced-budget amendment. The convention method of constitutional reform had lain unused since the Founding Fathers devised it as an alternative to congressional initiative, but the support of only four more states would have provided the two-thirds majority needed for its implementation. The states' campaign stalled at this juncture in the face of opposition from the Carter administration and congressional Democrats. By then, however, it had done much to popularize the balanced-budget amendment and make it part of the nation's political agenda.

This article seeks to analyze the development of the balanced-budget amendment constitutional convention campaign and to assess its historical significance. Aside from its relevance to today's fiscal politics, the movement merits attention as an important episode in the history of the 1970s, an era when economic problems at home and defeat abroad underlined the limits of America's prosperity and power. In this troubled time, popular confidence in the nation's political leaders underwent marked decline. The Watergate scandal, failure in Vietnam and economic stagflation created doubts about their trustworthiness and competence to deal with America's problems. The budget revolt by the states was a manifestation of this anti-Washington mood. In style as well as substance, the campaign challenged conventional politics: it manifested distrust in elected leaders to manage public finances without constitutional restraint and sought to bypass establishment control of the orthodox forms of politics through adoption of an untested process of constitutional change. In many respects the drive for a balanced-budget amendment convention was an expression of the same populist impulse that was the mainspring of Jimmy Carter's campaign for president in 1976. The former Georgia governor's status as a political outsider untainted by previous connection with Washington had been his greatest electoral asset, but in office this man-of-the-people aligned himself with the nation's political establishment against the convention campaign. Analysis of Carter's response to this movement casts light on the ambiguity and complexity of his presidential politics.

With how little cooperation of the societies after all is the past remembered – At first history had no muse – but a kind fate watched over her – some garrulous old man with tenacious memory told it to his child.

Henry David Thoreau,

Journals (1842)

In 1823, something of the bittersweet occurred in Cranston, Rhode Island: an aged revolutionary war veteran returned to his hometown after a prolonged exile in England. Hopeful about reuniting with his family and community after an absence of nearly fifty years, the old soldier was surprised and disappointed to learn that his property had been sold, his family had moved west, and few among the remaining villagers even remembered who he was. Such is the story of one Israel Potter. An adventurous fellow, he had fought at the battle near Bunker Hill, had met Benjamin Franklin, and, after being captured by the British, had roamed England after the war, continually poverty-stricken, while searching for a passage back to America. Once returned to Cranston, he applied for a federal pension for his wartime services. In all probability, Potter never received any financial compensation, but he left a narrative of his life, reminding his readers that at one point in the republic's history, he did matter.

Robert Creeley's long and productive writing life has resolutely witnessed personal rather than public change. Notoriously self-absorbed, his reticent poetry is fiercely individual in style and solipsistic in outlook. Like the poet, a man of few words, wryly humorous and intelligently self-contained, Creeley's poems seem determined “to say as little as possible as often as possible.” Yet the tightly crafted economy of this poetic idiom masks a curious amplitude which is easy to overlook. The tension between the persistent “circularities” in Creeley's work, his concern with the dualistic energies of contradiction and paradox, and the brevity with which such concerns are typically addressed, is worth noting, especially in the light of Creeley's abiding friendship with fellow poet, Robert Duncan, of whom Creeley once remarked:

I've always felt very close to him as a writer, although our modes of writing must seem to readers quite apart. I tend to write very sparely, and Robert has a lovely, relaxed and generous kind of movement. But…[he] showed me kinds of content that I hadn't previously recognized.

Eastman Kodak was in the vanguard of those companies seeking to capitalize on newly available mass markets at home and abroad in the 1880s and 1890s. George Eastman had acute instincts for photographic innovation, cost-effective manufacturing, and the assembling of powerful corporate structures, but his greatest gift was for seizing on, and fostering, the general demand for a commodity with specious aesthetic inflections – a simple camera, together with a processing service available by mail – at a time when the appetite for such things was becoming insatiable. As Lawrence W. Levine has argued, photography

was the perfect instrument for a society with a burgeoning middle class, which could not satisfy itself with processes and images that had previously been confined to elite circles.

The aim of this article is to examine aspects of Henry James's predicament within the context of mass photography. In particular, the focus will be on “The Real Thing” (1893) and its engagement with issues of representation and reproduction in an arena forever changed by Kodak.

The arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955 provided the spark which ignited the long smouldering resentments of black Montgomerians. For 381 days they waged a boycott of the city bus lines, frustrating the opposition of white authorities and financially crippling the local transit company. More profoundly it resulted in a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on public transportation. Equally momentous was the emergence of the man who would serve as the spiritual figurehead of the civil rights movement: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott, one national black newspaper acclaimed King as “Alabama's Modern Moses.” Since the darkest days of slavery African-Americans had sought spiritual salvation by comparing their own condition to that of God's Chosen People, the Israelites of the Old Testament. Throughout their years of enslavement they prayed for the Moses who would deliver them from their suffering unto the Promised Land. During the boycott, the black citizens of Montgomery had similarly sustained their morale by singing the old slave spirituals, raising their voices at the nightly mass meetings in rousing renditions of “Go Down Moses, Way Down in Egypt Land.” “As sure as Moses got the children of Israel across the Red Sea,” King exhorted the black community, “we can stick together and win.” Others too drew the analogy between the historical experience of Jews and the contemporary predicament of African-Americans. Looking back on the boycott, white liberal activist Virginia Durr evoked the spectre of Nazi Germany in describing the strength of racist opposition.

An interpretation of frontier texts must respond to the demand by Gesa Mackenthun and other scholars that “empire be added to the study of American culture.” As written by authors like Frederick Jackson Turner, who placed themselves on the colonizing side of the frontier, these texts described the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” where European immigrants became “Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race.” Here was forged a “composite nationality for the American people.” Such texts with their understanding of the “Indian frontier ” as a “consolidating agent in our history” which developed “the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman,” helped to construct the American identity as the “imperial self” with its implicitly patriarchal, Eurocentric, and colonial assumptions. Describing the frontier as a “military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression,” such texts failed to acknowledge the aggressive acts that seized the land from its original inhabitants.

Somewhat to the surprise of the critics and the public, the exiled company of the Royal Opera House had a great success with their production of Benjamin Britten's “operetta,” Paul Bunyan, just before Christmas, 1997. Everyone knew the difficulties in advance – for instance, the piece has absolutely no dramatic momentum – but no one seems to have foreseen that the splendid music would carry all before it in a theatre, or that a highly accomplished cast would find so many moments of real comedy and pathos in performance. Even now it is hard to imagine the piece entering the regular repertory, but it is easy to foresee frequent revivals, and still more frequent concert performances.

To an Americanist, however, the work presented as many unexpected problems as pleasures. The fault was entirely W. H. Auden's. His libretto is in many respects as brilliant and beautiful as the music (though at times it sinks to doggerel) but the theme he expounds sticks in my craw. Once upon a time the New World, he says, was nothing but virgin forest. Then Paul Bunyan, the giant, was born, and dreamed of felling trees – of being the greatest logger in history. And such he became. When the forests had all been cleared, “America” had emerged – the America of the farmer, the clerk, the hotel manager, and Hollywood. Paul Bunyan therefore moved on, leaving his followers with the message, “America is what you make it.”

The difficulty is not simply that this myth of America seems ecologically and historically unsound to anyone who knows something of the pollution and despoliation inflicted by American logging companies; nor even that the total elimination of the natives from the story (except for one reference to fighting Indians) is a grave falsification; nor even that the accumulation of these and many other simplifications produce an effect that in today's terms is politically incorrect and in 1941 seems to have been thought patronizing. It is that to anyone with actual knowledge, however slight, of American history, Auden's myth is so inaccurate as to make any suspension of disbelief largely impossible. To take but one detail: as Auden said himself, Paul Bunyan is a post-industrial-revolution myth: he is a product of the nineteenth-century frontier, in the tall-tale tradition. The loggers, like the mountain men, the boatmen, the cowboys, and the slaves, were at the mercy of large economic forces; they consoled themselves for their impotence by developing the legend of the giant lumberjack who was invincible and omnipotent. The forests were far from virgin: if they were silent it was because first the game and then the original inhabitants had been driven off by the process of European settlement. Even in 1939, when the influence of F. J. Turner was at its height, Auden could have discovered these points – probably did discover them. But he chose to ignore them.

In the late summer of 1996 Iraqi troops moved into the Kurdish “safe haven” in Northern Iraq, thereby triggering a crisis of national security for the United States. Unsurprisingly, this incident led to speculation in the media about the nature of President Clinton's response. Would he be able to meet this test of his leadership? What form would any military action take? Would it be strong enough, or would it be an overreaction? In the event, the president ordered two cruise missile strikes against Iraqi defence installations and substantially extended the no-fly zone in Southern Iraq set up after the Gulf War. These actions were the subject of debate in the United States Senate and, after some partisan wrangling, and a few rumbles of complaint about inadequate consultation, a non-binding resolution endorsing the missile strikes was approved by a vote of 96–1. But, as was noted by the press, “none of this really mattered because such ‘sense of the Senate’ resolutions have no binding effect and are largely ignored, even inside the Beltway.”

What was striking about this incident was that throughout the crisis the United States Congress was little more than a bystander. Inevitably all eyes turned to the president. It was he and not the national legislature that became the focus of public and media attention. Does he have the mettle needed? What will he do, and will his actions be sufficient to deal with the situation? These were the sort of questions being debated on the talk shows and in the press. To put it bluntly, at this moment, there was little interest in what the legislature might say or do, the mighty Congress, at this point at least, was reduced to a role comparable, dare it be said, to that of the British House of Commons. The situation called for leadership and decisive action and no one was under any illusion that the legislature could provide either, only the president was in a position to meet these needs. When it comes to the making of foreign policy, and particularly when crises of national security arise, the president, it seems, is inevitably, the main player, the senior partner.

Northern reactions to the antebellum South can only be fully understood in the context of northern concerns for the future of the American republican experiment, which was at base the search for an American national identity. Central to antebellum concerns in this regard was the issue of freedom in a nation which yet retained slave labour. In the nineteenth century, the belief in freedom was, in Fred Somkin's words, “the res Americana, the matter of America.” In the decades preceding the Civil War, however, North and South came to hold very different ideas of what freedom meant, and what it entailed. In time, northern concerns over slavery and the society that relied upon it found political expression in what Eric Foner termed the “Republican critique of the South.” This critique was not focussed on slavery alone but on the South as a whole; its society, culture, industry, and intellectual achievements. It was both an attack on the South and an affirmation of northern superiority. Ultimately, it was a sectional message with national ambitions. The “matter of America” became the matter of the North. How this happened, however, has never been adequately explained.

This essay seeks to shed some light on the background to the “Republican critique” by looking in particular at the career of Horace Mann of Massachusetts, specifically at his brief period in Congress (1848–52) during which he adopted an increasingly confrontational stand toward slavery and the South.

Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, $16.95). Pp. 252. ISBN 0 8223 1864 4.

Paul R. Spickard, Japanese Americans: The Formation and Transformation of an Ethnic Group (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996, $28.95). Pp. 225. ISBN 0 8057 7841 1.

Gordon Chang, Morning Glory, Evening Shadow: Yamato Ichihashi and his Internment Writings, 1942–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, £35.00). Pp. 552. ISBN 0 8047 2733 3.

Appearances can be deceiving, sometimes they are fatal. In 1982, Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American, entered a Detroit bar with some friends. Ronald Ebens, a foreman at a Chrysler automobile plant, and his stepson Michael Nitz, a laid-off Chrysler assembly-line worker, also came into the same bar. It is uncertain what exactly prompted Ebens to derisively call Chin a “Jap” and scoff: “It's because of you motherfuckers that we're out of work!” What is indisputable, however, is the sequence of events which took place after the insult. In the wake of the abusive remark, a fist-fight erupted between Ebens and Chin. The brawlers were evicted from the bar. Ebens and Nitz went to their car and grabbed a baseball bat. Observing that Ebens was in possession of a bat, Chin and his companions fled from the bar's parking lot. Unwilling to be thwarted by this escape, Ebens and Nitz stalked Chin. After a twenty minute pursuit, Ebens and Nitz cornered Chin. Nitz held Chin while Ebens beat him on the head with the baseball bat. Four days after this attack, Chin died from his head wounds.

What makes the murder of Vincent Chin particularly hideous is the perverse element of mistaken identity that led to his death. Ronald Ebens took Chin for a “Jap.” At one level of interpretation, this visual blunder comments on the blind spots of racist thinking, where categorical forms of reasoning isolate us between our prejudices and our self-serving interests. Ebens saw an Asian face and automatically made it the target of his frustration. At another level of interpretation, Eben's racial slur, although inaccurate in ethnically identifying Chin, strangely articulates the conceptual incongruities and cultural displacements that occur in representations of ethnicity and race. Chin's physical appearance made him vulnerable to ethnic mistranslation and an eventual victim of racist misrepresentation. In short, there is (much like pronouncing two people husband and wife) a performative aspect to Ebens's misrecognition of Chin's identity. To put it grimly, Chin's figurative transformation literally concluded in his execution.

C. Vann Woodward, who is ninety on 13 November 1998, is the author of perhaps the most famous work of history every to have rocked the Southern United States. The Strange Career of Jim Crow, first presented as the James W. Richard lectures at the University of Virginia, appeared in 1955: only one year after the Supreme Court's celebrated decision in Brown v. Board of Education, that racially segregated schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because separate facilities were “inherently unequal.” White Southern publicists and politicians stormed and raged that racial separation was in the order of nature, the segregation laws were from time immemorial, and that Chief Justice Warren ought to be impeached; and now came a soft-spoken, professionally respected historian, himself from Arkansas, to tell them, and, worse, to tell the world, that the South's universal segregation or “Jim Crow” laws in fact dated at most only from the 1890s – well within the lifetime of many who were still expressing their opinions.

The controversy was intense and prolonged. And it came to involve less politically motivated questions of historical interpretation because Woodward was often taken to have been referring more generally to the substance of race relations as well as the segregation laws. He accepted that some of his formulations required reconsideration, and the book, in constant demand, went through several revisions and four editions, the last appearing in 1974. But the core of the argument has survived to leave an enduring legacy in Southern historiography.