Charlotte Perkins Gilman travelled from California to Chicago in 1896, spending three months at Hull House with her friend Jane Addams. Their discussions that summer resulted in a curious cross-pollination, each woman borrowing from the other, although neither, as it turns out, finding the exchange quite comfortable. Gilman, gratified by the intellectual audience at Hull House, was repelled by the day-to-day visceral contact with the poor. When Addams arranged for her to run a settlement on Chicago's North Side, known as “Little Hell,” Gilman eyed the grim prospect: “The loathly river flowed sluggishly near by, thick and ill-smelling; Goose Island lay black in the slow stream. Everywhere a heavy dinginess; low, dark brick factories and gloomy wooden dwellings often below the level of the street; foul plank sidewalks, rotten and full of holes; black mud underfoot, damp soot drifting steadily down over everything.” Poverty, in her description, infects both nature and culture, fouling the city and infesting it with literal and metaphorical disease. She soon handed her job over to Helen Campbell and moved on to write her theoretical analysis of the disease of middle-class marriage, Women and Economics (1899); “my interest was in all humanity, not merely the under side of it,” she mused, “in sociology, not social pathology.”

In Ghosts, the second part of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, a private eye called Blue is hired by a certain White to shadow a man called Black. Black lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn; Blue moves into an equally small apartment just across the street from Black. He is alarmed to discover that Black spends most of his time at his desk by the window, writing in a notebook with a red fountain-pen. In the evenings Black reads, and through his binoculars Blue can just make out the title of Black's book: Walden, by Henry David Thoreau.

Accordingly Blue obtains his own copy of Walden – a 1942 edition published, by coincidence, by one Walter J. Black – thinking it might help him solve the mystery of his assignment. But, like almost every reader of Walden, from Emerson to Stanley Cavell to Auster himself, Blue finds reading this book is “not a simple business”:

Whole chapters go by, and when he comes to the end of them he realizes that he has not retained a thing. Why would anyone want to go off and live alone in the woods? What's all this about planting beans and not drinking coffee or eating meat? Why all these interminable descriptions of birds? Blue thought that he was going to get a story, or at least something like a story, but this is no more than blather, an endless harangue about nothing at all.

The next day Blue tries the book again, and finally comes across a sentence he can understand: “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.” Blue realizes that “the trick is to go slowly, more slowly than he has ever gone with the words before.” Nevertheless, he still finds the whole business excruciatingly painful, and curses Black for torturing him in this way. “What he does not know,” the anonymous narrator remarks, “is that were he to find the patience to read the book in the spirit in which it asks to be read, his entire life would begin to change, and little by little he would come to a full understanding of his situation – that is to say, of Black, of White, of the case, of everything that concerns him.” Instead, Blue throws the book aside in disgust and goes out for a walk, not realizing “that this is the beginning of the end.”

In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope sent back to astronomers at the University of Arizona a series of vivid colour images of the Eagle Nebula, a dense formation of interstellar gas and dust the likes of which cradle newborn stars. As evidence that our perceptual universe, in every sense of the word, is defined by the representational powers of colour technology, the Hubble's “cosmic close-ups” are a clear case in point. Colour has become a standard representational form and hence the visual form. If so, what can be said of the recent popularity and proliferation of the black-and-white image?

No self-respecting café-bar or discriminating home, it seems, can now do without a black and white print on the wall. Commercial photography and certain forms of advertising have found a new niche in black and white, and even sepia is staging a come-back. The popularity of the black-and-white image cannot be divorced from the commercial culture in which it circulates; it is a “look” and a marker of taste. Monochrome is a stylistic trend but a revealing one, especially if one considers the growing preoccupation in America with heritage and memory. Both Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes give black and white a status of authenticity judged in relation to past time “properly” captured. For Sontag, monochrome gives an image a sense of age, historical distance, and aura. She writes, “the cold intimacy of color seems to seal off the photograph from patina.” Likewise, Barthes comments on the artifice of colour, how it is a “coating applied later on to the original truth of black and white.” For both critics, monochrome is an aesthetic of the authentic figured around a basic quality of pastness.

The United States after World War II experienced symbiotically the fear of the Soviet threat and the belief in its own system as the ultimate choice for the world. In the confrontation with the Soviet Union, cultural relations programs began to be organized and designed in accordance with national security interest. George F. Kennan, the architect of US containment policy, urged: “let us by all means have the maximum cultural exchange.” The mission of cultural contact, according to Kennan, was “combatting the negative impressions about this country [USA] that mark so much of world opinion.” The US government made new cultural policies in terms of Cold War political concerns and relied extensively on private resources for the implementation of cultural diplomacy via educational exchange. It mobilized the American society for the achievement of “total diplomacy” with political rhetoric, legislative measures, and financial support. Private institutions, which pioneered and dominated US cultural interactions with other nations before the war, now began to play a new but supportive role for the state. Because of their expertise and their unique roles in a democratic society, American philanthropies, professional organizations, and universities became indispensable in delivering the multitude of exchange programs.

The 1890s and the 1930s were periods of intense consumer activism during which organized consumers pressured government to regulate business on behalf of the consuming public. In both periods, however, the heightened awareness of the consumer had an impact that extended beyond the realm of grass-roots activism or government regulation. One of the areas profoundly affected by this heightened awareness was political–economic thought. In both periods, political–economic theorists turned their attention to the consumer, debating such issues as whether humans were fundamentally producers or consumers, whether civic identity should be rooted in the consumer or the producer identity, and whether the “good society” was one based on “producerist” or “consumerist” values.

My husband was a slave of de Sloans and didn't get to see me as often as he wanted to, and of course, as de housemaid then, dere was times I couldn't meet him, clandestine like he want me. Us had some grief over dat, but he got a pass twice a week from his marster, Marse Tommie Sloan, to come to see me…Sam was a field hand and drive de wagon way to Charleston once a year wid cotton, and always bring back something pretty for me.George P. Rawick, The American Slave : A Composite Autobiography, Vol. 2, Part 1 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972), 300.

Historians have found it difficult to assess the extent and nature of slave cross-plantation marriages (that is, where husband and wife lived on different slaveholdings). This is largely because white sources give no basis for estimating their scale or character. Estate papers and business records often list slaves belonging to a particular owner, but such lists give no indication of spouses and other relatives of those slaves who might belong to neighbours. Similarly, except for scattered comments on visiting privileges given to certain slaves, or references to the possible advantages and inconveniences of allowing slaves to marry off the plantation, owners took little interest in the vigour of such unions.

In the work of contemporary writers who explore the racial and social geography of growing up in the American South, fleeting encounters between white and black girls abound but enduring friendships prove to be more problematic to represent. In Ellen Foster (1987), Ellen and Starletta's association stretches across the novel whereas, most frequently in fictions, the points at which black and white women converge and relate tend to be brief and transient, as in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) where a heavily pregnant and fugitive Sethe is aided by poor white Amy; or in Thulani Davis's 1959 (1992) where the brief kindness of a white woman is remembered as a significant, if fleeting gesture. I wish to raise questions about the ways in which cross-racial childhood relationships are represented formally and aesthetically. There is often an understandable but troubling literary–critical impasse whereby black girls are contained within the first-person narrations of white protagonists which, whilst explicating the connection between the girls, risk engulfing or subsuming the black “best friend.” I shall examine the ways in which this may be the inevitable result of the Bildungsroman form and consider how the representation of the cross-racial friendship at the heart of Ellen Foster is modified in direct correspondence to the novel's structuring.

He has fertilized an A to Z of postwar creativity, quite literally from Kathy Acker to Frank Zappa; he has acted as godfather for literary countercultures from the Beats to the Cyberpunks; he has haunted our media zones as an icon of iconoclasm – and William Burroughs has remained a critical curse. Leaving aside what Burroughs' academic marginality tells us – about Burroughs or academia – the main reason he has hexed his critics is also the key to the proliferation of his image and its power of mimetic magic: those he does not repel, Burroughs fascinates. This is the basis to his distinct iconicity, infectious now across four decades.

Self-styled as El Hombre Invisible, Burroughs fully inhabits Maurice Blanchot's construction of fascination as “the absence one sees because it is blinding”: “Whoever is fascinated doesn't properly speaking, see what he sees. Rather, it touches him in an immediate proximity; it seizes and ceaselessly draws him close, even though it leaves him absolutely at a distance.” Unable or unwilling, Burroughs critics have done little with such knowledge other than to pass it on. Robin Lydenberg, author of the ground-breaking study Word Cultures (1987), could go back twenty years to quote Joan Didion praising Burroughs for “a voice so direct and original and versatile as to disarm close scrutiny of what it is saying”; so too, Robert Sobieszek in his artwork catalogue Ports of Entry (1996), could go back twenty to cite Philippe Mikriammos' formula, “vox Williami, vox monstrorum,” to account for the sound “which ultimately seduces the listener.” A voice that disarms scrutiny; a voice that seduces. In the critical context, to approach Burroughs disarmed and seduced has meant taking him on his own terms – and being taken in by him. Burroughs resists power to the extent that he also exercises it, understands power so well precisely because he has always worked from its deep insides. From the outset, this WASP scion of American big business (public relations on his mother's side, adding machines on his father's) was born to live out power's painful contradictions. His life as addict, homosexual, and writer literalized that undesired inheritance with a perverse vengeance, queering the legacy of “Poison” Ivy Lee and Burroughs computers by reincarnating it as a pathogenic cultural virus. And so Burroughs dedicated himself to immortality by becoming what Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene (1976), called a “meme”: “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” which propagates analogously to the genetic code and the parasitism of viruses, and is more than metaphorically “alive”. If memes survive by parasitizing human minds, so, reciprocally, can the mind survive through parasitic self-replication: the viral programme “simply says ‘Copy me and spread me around.’” This is Burroughs: “all poets worthy of the name are mind parasites, and their words ought to get into your head and live there, repeating and repeating and repeating.” He could scarcely be more explicit. And so to exempt Burroughs from the terms of his own critique is to miss the whole point of his textual politics – that is, not only his texts' analysis of power, but their own relation to it – since complicity in all he opposes is the condition of his work's extraordinary brinkmanship. As I have argued elsewhere, it may well be those who would gladly burn Burroughs who have best understood the unique force of his work, a force at its maximum in his two crucial decades, falling either side of The Naked Lunch (1959).

One of the notable aspects of Gravity's Rainbow, if we consider it as an historical novel of a special kind, is the way in which “great” political leaders are barely mentioned. The carnival lacks the mock king, and the historical novel lacks the leader who embodies history. The explanation here is paradoxically historicist. Gravity's Rainbow explicitly addresses a constructed audience (in the Orpheus Theatre) in the Cold War and is about the formation of the Cold War in its techno-bureaucratic context. The realpolitik of authority in the Cold War context has changed. Bureaucratic constructions of System operate as the modus operandi for authority in the novel and they parallel the historical formation of Systems theory and analysis with such US organizations as RAND. This development represents, in the technologies and the discourses of the military and political strategists, a response to Hitler and the supposed tyranny and threat of Communism. The series of characters we encounter within the novel reflects different forms of entrapment and/or lines of flight in response to the authority of the System in what John Johnston has called an assemblage, or postmodern multiplicity. Containment and counterforce become metaphors which Pynchon scurrilously uses to subvert the moral righteousness of the Western Cold Warriors in their defense of a “free world” (paradoxically) under siege from an ever threatening Communism. Pynchon is interested not in the great historical figure, but in the relation of the individual to the System, militarily, scientifically, socially, and sexually.

A large portion of colonial America's population on the eve of the revolution was composed of immigrants and children of recent immigrants. Because of the variety of ethnic groups involved, studies of how Americans reacted to the revolution should not be limited to generalizations. The involvement of different ethnic groups has been examined, but these studies seem largely to have concentrated on the wealthier and more politically motivated members of those groups. Examining the reactions of poorer members of ethnic groups has been difficult, since few of these people left significant documentation of their experiences. German redemptioners, an important sub-group of colonial American immigrants, seem to have been well represented among the lower orders of colonial American society. A memoir of Johann Carl Büttner's experiences in America prior to and during the revolution provides a revealing and detailed portrait of his reactions to the revolution. This portrait may well be an archetype for German redemptioners of the “lower sort.”

Sue Barton is the fictional redhaired nursing heroine of a series of novels written for young women. Recalled by several generations of women readers with affection, Sue Barton has remained in print ever since the publication of the first novel in the series: Sue Barton, Student Nurse, written by Helen Dore Boylston, was published in America in 1936. Neither the covers of her four novels now in paperback, nor the publisher's catalogue entry, however, acknowledge Sue Barton's age: “Sue Barton Series – The everyday stories of redheaded Sue Barton and hospital life as she progresses from being a student nurse through her varied nursing career.”

The catalogue entry for the series and the novels' paperback covers now claim Sue Barton as a contemporary young woman, poised for romance. Sue is, however, a pre-war heroine, and very much located within an American history and tradition of nursing. With her close contemporary, Cherry Ames, Sue Barton is one of the nursing heroines who were to establish a genre in popular fiction for young women, the career novel, and, more particularly, the nursing career novel.

The history of nativism in the United States has received considerable scholarly attention, yet the few systematic attempts to explain it have focused predominantly on psychological or economic causes. This article asserts that such explanations fail to address the crucial cultural dimension of the nativism issue, which must be analyzed through the prism of historical sociology. Specifically, this article argues that American nativism cannot be understood without reference to an “American” national ethnic group whose myth–symbol complex had developed prior to the large-scale immigration of the mid-nineteenth century. Without understanding this social construction, it is difficult to explain subsequent attempts to defend it. This article, therefore, does not seek to retrace the history of American nativism. Instead, it focuses on the period prior to 1850, when American nativism was in its infancy. It examines the development of an Anglo-American ethnicity during 1776–1850 and attempts to delineate its structure. This “American” complex of myths and symbols, with its attendant set of life-style images and narratives, is shown to conform to more generally models recently presented by theorists of ethnicity and nationalism. Finally, it is argued that American nativism may have exhibited a very different pattern if an “American” national ethnicity had not taken root.

Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, The Devil's Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1997, £28.50). Pp. 274. ISBN 0 19 511242 3.

Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom’: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997, £19.95). Pp. 311. ISBN 0 674 893 9 3.

Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998, £38.00). Pp. 252. ISBN 0 8032 3716 2.

Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, £24.99). Pp. 240. ISBN 0 19 5114833.

The historical study of women has evolved from a consideration of elite women, the quest for suffrage, and women in organized groups to encompass different classes, ethnic groups, and social settings. Writing women back into the historical record has led to a more creative use of data sources, a greater depth of understanding about how societies work on both formal and informal levels, and the exploration of gendered patterns of most aspects of the economy, social structure, and politics. However, the conceptual frameworks of women's history have not kept pace with the expansion of scholarship to encompass a more diverse population.

These four books highlight two trends in contemporary historical practice: the inclusion of gender as an essential aspect of our understanding of the past and the use of comparative frameworks to investigate the significance of socially constructed sex roles for society. By contrasting women's lives in different settings and racial groups, the authors illustrate how communities shape gender roles and how those roles influence a wide range of social, political, economic, and cultural events. Gender thus takes its place as a fundamental category of historical analysis without which it is difficult to understand American (or any other) history; women's work, family relationships, voluntary, social, and political activities are as central to understanding society as men's.

Gillis set down his tan cardboard extension case and wiped his black, shining brow. Then slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw: Negroes at every turn; up and down Lenox Avenue, up and down 135th Street; big lanky Negroes, short, squat Negroes; black ones, brown ones, yellow ones; men standing idle on the curb, women, bundle-laden, trudging reluctantly homeward, children rattle-trapping about the sidewalks; here and there a white face drifting along, but Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere. There was assuredly no doubt of his whereabouts. This was Negro Harlem.

This is the first sighting of Harlem for King Solomon Gillis, the protagonist of Rudolph Fisher's story “City of Refuge,” published in 1925 in Atlantic Monthly. Gillis has fled the South after killing a white man, and comes to Harlem, “with the aid of a prayer and an automobile” (3) to escape being lynched. His arrival sees him propelled into a carnivorous city of disorienting sounds, speed and subways until, like “Jonah emerging from the whale” (3), he is burped up into a sunny, calm and all-black Harlem. The spectacle of a public space peopled by “Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere,” seems to hold a utopian promise: “In Harlem, black was white. You had rights that could not be denied you; you had privileges, protected by law. And you had money. Everybody had money…The land of plenty was more than that now; it was also the city of refuge” (4). However, this vision of plenty and security ultimately proves chimerical for the naïve Southerner who fails to see beyond the surface effects of the urban scene. For Fisher, the turned around, “black is white” world of Harlem involves complex issues of racial agency and identification which are central to the narrative of modernity associated with the experience of migration to the North. In his work – and in that of Bruce Nugent and Nella Larsen, which also form the basis of this article – we find a recurrent focus on the urban scene of Harlem as a space of spectacular and spectacularised desire, and an understanding of racial identity as contingent and performative within this space.

In October of 1888, at the height of his literary fame and influence, W. D. Howells wrote the following to Edward Everett Hale:

I am persuaded also that the best that is in men, most men, cannot come out until they all have a fair chance. I used to think America gave this; now I don't. – I am neither an example nor an incentive meanwhile in my own way of living …Words, words, words! How to make them things, deeds, – you have the secret of that; with me they only breed more words. At present they are running into another novel.

Howells's tendency to equate his own weaknesses with the social tensions of late-nineteenth-century America is equally apparent in a letter written a few weeks earlier to Henry James:

I'm not in a good humour with “America” myself. It seems to me the most grotesquely illogical thing under the sun…after fifty years of optimistic content with “civilization” and its ability to come out right in the end, I now abhor it and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew upon real equality. Meantime I wear a fur-lined overcoat and live in all the luxury my money can buy. (417)

While these letters express, most clearly, a sense of disillusionment, a feeling that Howells like his country has betrayed his early promise, they also manage to imply the more disturbing fear that the promise may actually have been kept – that luxury and meaninglessness may be the logical culmination of both moral projects. There is a feeling here beyond irony (and he was never a great ironist) that Howells, like America, is helpless in the grip of a process which makes vacuousness and luxury the inevitable result of any quest for value. I will argue in this article that one name for this process is capitalist modernity and that the specific moment of capitalist development that Howells is reacting to, in these letters and in his work as a whole, is the crisis of overproduction experienced by the US economy towards the end of the nineteenth century. Howells's uncertainty in these letters, about his own life and writing and about the state of his country, speaks, in this context, to the confusions of a culture in which the morally sanctioned effort of production had become somehow itself a problem, a problem whose solution – consumption – appeared as an immoral, yet inevitable, form of wastage.

From long experience and wide observation I have come to have little patience with the science of ethnology that consigns a man, or race of men, to generations of slow development.

Richard Henry Pratt, Proceedings of the National Education Association, 1895, 763

These people, who are with us and with whom we share a common fate, are a thousand years behind us in moral and mental development. Substantially the two races, {Negro and Indian} are in the same condition, and the question as to what education is best for them, and how such education is to be put within their reach, is pressing itself closely upon all thinking men and women.

Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Proceedings of the Department of Superintendence, Circulars of Information, No. 3, Bureau of Education, 1883, 139.

In the final two decades of the nineteenth century, Americans built an extensive system of Indian schools, largely financed by Congress and increasingly controlled from Washington. These schools were principally residential, boarding institutions. Their goal was to indoctrinate Indian children in white ways: to eradicate native tribal cultures. This campaign to transform native children into American citizens appeared to represent a clear declaration of faith in the equality and educability of the Indian. Today, its aggressive and misguided nature is recognized and the long-term consequences for all the tribes are beginning to be understood. But, while scholars acknowledge the blinkered ethnocentricism of Indian policy, they have not questioned that its goal was rapid Indian assimilation. Historians argue over the impact of pseudo-scientific racist ideas on the formulation of Indian policy; disagreements focus on the pre-Civil War period and the early twentieth century. However, it is generally accepted that, in the late nineteenth century, Indian affairs were dominated by a group of Christian reformers and their universalist, Christian ideals. These self-styled “Friends of the Indian” worked for legislative reforms to bring individual land ownership and citizenship to all adult Indians and schooling to their children. Their reform programme, historians have consistently argued, was driven by a single overriding assumption: Indians, once having discarded their savage lifestyle, were capable of joining American society as the white man's equal.

Nineteenth-century exslave narratives allow us to understand the way in which freedmen, freedwomen, and runaways experienced and enjoyed liberty. In such narratives, liberty, naturally enough, it seems, is the opposite of slavery. Once free, one was no longer a slave. Yet we should view this understanding of slavery and freedom as a problem in itself, as a rhetorical and time-bound use of the notions of enslavement and liberty. This article argues that an early exslave narrativist, John Jea, articulated a dichotomous, unrealistic, yet characteristically American, notion of the relationship between slavery and freedom: that anyone who is not a slave is free. Expressed in evangelical Protestantism, liberal individualism, and laissez-faire economics, this notion was a staple of nineteenth-century American ideology. It is no longer a convincing notion, since it obscures not only the variety of the experience of slaves, freemen, and freewomen, but also the forms of bondage that accompanied slavery and survived it. As a man of the nineteenth century, Jea seems never to have comprehended the ways that he remained unfree once he was manumitted. As a black man and exslave, Jea might have been one of those most sensitive to the persistence of bondage after slavery, but he was not. Surely this suggests how convincing, yet how false, was new thought about slavery and freedom in the early nineteenth century.

In an effort to maximize the representation of African Americans and Hispanics in the United States House of Representatives, many state legislatures have consciously sought to create so-called “majority–minority” congressional districts. This involves carving out districts in which African Americans or Hispanics constitute more than 50 per cent of the voting age population. The expectation is that such districts will elect a minority member of the House, which in turn will lead to a Congress that is more sensitive and responsive to the needs and interests of America's two largest ethnic minorities. Indeed, this expectation has become an article of faith for the mainstream civil rights movement and its white sympathizers.

However, like other forms of affirmative action, majority–minority districting sits rather uncomfortably alongside the Constitutional principle of race-neutrality. In a series of recent cases, the United States Supreme Court has declared that, by subordinating traditional districting principles to the overriding need to draw boundaries along racial lines, states have violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.