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Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter i
- CONTENTS v
- INTRODUCTION xxi
-
A New Literary History of America
- 1507 The name “America” appears on a map 1
- 1521, August 13 Mexico in America 6
- 1536, July 24 Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca 11
- 1585 “Counterfeited according to the truth” 15
- 1607 Fear and love in the Virginia colony 21
- 1630 A city upon a hill 26
- 1643 A nearer neighbor to the Indians 30
- 1666, July 10 Anne Bradstreet 35
- 1670 The American jeremiad 40
- 1670 The stamp of God’s image 44
- 1673 The Jesuit relations 50
- 1683 Francis Daniel Pastorius 54
- 1692 The Salem witchcraft trials 59
- 1693–1694, March 4 Edward Taylor 64
- 1700 Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph 69
- 1722 Benjamin Franklin, The Silence Dogood Letters 74
- 1740 The Great Awakening 79
- Late 1740s; 1814, September 13–14 Two national anthems 84
- 1765, December 23 Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur 88
- 1773, September Phillis Wheatley 93
- 1776 The Declaration of Independence 98
- 1784, June Charles Willson Peale 103
- 1787 James Madison, Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention 108
- 1787–1790 John Adams, Discourses on Davila 113
- 1791 Philip Freneau and The National Gazette 117
- 1796 Washington’s farewell address 122
- 1798 Mary Rowlandson and the Alien and Sedition Acts 127
- 1798 American gothic 131
- 1801, March 4 Jefferson’s first inaugural address 136
- 1804, January The matter of Haiti 141
- 1809 Cupola of the world 145
- 1819, February The Missouri crisis 150
- 1820, November 27 Landscape with birds 154
- 1821 Sequoyah, the Cherokee syllabary 160
- 1821, June 30 Junius Brutus Booth 164
- 1822 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the Ojibwe firefly, and Longfellow’s Hiawatha 168
- 1825, November Thomas Cole and the Hudson River school 173
- 1826, July 4 Songs of the republic 178
- 1826 Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales 182
- 1826; 1927 Transnational poetry 187
- 1827 Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon 192
- 1828 David Walker, Appeal, in Four Articles 196
- 1830, May 21 Jump Jim Crow 201
- 1831, March 5 The Cherokee Nation decision 205
- 1832, July 10 President Jackson’s bank veto 210
- 1835, January Democracy in America 215
- 1835 William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee 221
- 1835 The Sacred Harp 225
- 1836, February 23–March 6 The Alamo and Texas border writing 230
- 1836, February 28 Richard Henry Dana, Jr. 235
- 1837, August 15 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar” 239
- 1838, July 15 “The Divinity School Address” 244
- 1838, September 3 The slave narrative 249
- 1841 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” 254
- 1846, June James Russell Lowell’s Biglow Papers 259
- 1846, late July Henry David Thoreau 263
- 1850 The Scarlet Letter 268
- 1850, July 19 Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist Movement 273
- 1850, August 5 Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville 278
- 1851 Moby-Dick 283
- 1851 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 287
- 1852 Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance and utopian communities 292
- 1852, July 5 Frederick Douglass, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” 297
- 1854 Maria Cummins and sentimental fiction 302
- 1855 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass 306
- 1858 The Lincoln-Douglas debates 312
- 1859 The science of the Indian 317
- 1861 Emily Dickinson 322
- 1862, December 13 The journeys of Little Women 328
- 1865, March 4 Lincoln’s second inaugural address 333
- 1865 “Conditions of repose” 338
- 1869, March 4 Carl Schurz 344
- 1872, November 5 All men and women are created equal 349
- 1875 The Winchester Rifle 353
- 1876, January 6 Melville in the dark 358
- 1876, March 10 The art of telephony 362
- 1878 “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” 366
- 1879 John Muir and nature writing 371
- 1881, January 24 Henry James, Portrait of a Lady 375
- 1884 Mark Twain’s hairball 380
- 1884, July The Linotype machine 384
- 1884, November The Southwest imagined 387
- 1885 The problem of error 392
- 1885, July Limits to violence 397
- 1885, October Writing New Orleans 401
- 1888 The introduction of motion pictures 406
- 1889, August 28 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court 410
- 1893 Chief Simon Pokagon and Native American literature 415
- 1895 Ida B. Wells, A Red Record 420
- 1896 Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life 425
- 1896, September 6 Queen Lili‘uokalani 429
- 1897, Memorial Day The Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Monument 434
- 1898, June 22 Literature and imperialism 440
- 1899; 1924 McTeague and Greed 445
- 1900 Henry Adams 450
- 1900 The Wizard of Oz 455
- 1900; 1905 Sister Carrie and The House of Mirth 459
- 1901 Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition 464
- 1901; 1903 The problem of the color line 469
- 1903, May 5 “The real American has not yet arrived” 473
- 1903 The invention of the blues 478
- 1903 One sees what one sees 482
- 1904, August 30 Henry James in America 488
- 1905, October 15 Little Nemo in Slumberland 493
- 1906, April 9 The Azusa Street revival 498
- 1906, April 18, 5:14 a.m. The San Francisco Earthquake 503
- 1911 “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” 507
- 1912, April 15 Lifeboats cut adrift 512
- 1912 The lure of impossible things 517
- 1912 Tarzan begins his reign 522
- 1913 A modernist moment 526
- 1915 D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation 531
- 1915 Robert Frost 536
- 1917 The philosopher and the millionaire 540
- 1920, August 10 Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” 545
- 1921 Jean Toomer 550
- 1922 T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence 554
- 1923, October Chaplinesque 559
- 1924 F. O. Matthiessen meets Russell Cheney 564
- 1924, May 26 The Johnson-Reed Act and ethnic literature 569
- 1925 The Great Gatsby 574
- 1925, June Sinclair Lewis 580
- 1925, July The Scopes trial 584
- 1925, August 16 Dorothy Parker 588
- 1926 Fire 593
- 1926 Hardboiled 598
- 1926 The Book-of-the-Month Club 602
- 1927 Carl Sandburg and The American Songbag 607
- 1927, May 16 “Free to develop their faculties” 612
- 1928, April 8, Easter Sunday Dilsey Gibson goes to church 617
- 1928, Summer John Dos Passos 622
- 1928, November 18 The mouse that whistled 627
- 1930 “You’re swell!” 632
- 1930, March The Silent Enemy 636
- 1930, October Grant Wood’s American Gothic 640
- 1931, March 19 Nevada legalizes gambling 644
- 1932 Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters 649
- 1932 Arthur Miller 654
- 1932, April or May The River Rouge plant and industrial beauty 659
- 1932, Christmas Ned Cobb 663
- 1933 Baby Face is censored 668
- 1933, March FDR’s first Fireside Chat 672
- 1934, September Robert Penn Warren 677
- 1935 The Popular Front 683
- 1935 The skyscraper 689
- 1935, June 10 Alcoholics Anonymous 695
- 1935, October 10 Porgy and Bess 700
- 1936 Gone with the Wind and Absalom, Absalom 705
- 1936, July 5 Two days in Harlem 710
- 1936, November 23 Life begins 714
- 1938 Superman 719
- 1938, May Jelly Roll Morton speaks 724
- 1939 Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit” 728
- 1939; 1981 Up from invisibility 732
- 1940 “No way like the American way” 737
- 1940–1944 Preston Sturges 742
- 1941 An insolent style 747
- 1941 Citizen Kane 752
- 1941 The word “multicultural” 757
- 1943 Hemingway’s paradise, Hemingway’s prose 762
- 1944 The second Bill of Rights 766
- 1945, February Bebop 770
- 1945, April 11 Thomas Pynchon and modern war 775
- 1945, August 6, 10:45 a.m. The atom bomb 780
- 1946, December 5 Integrating the military 786
- 1947, December 3 Tennessee Williams 790
- 1948 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics 795
- 1948 Saul Bellow 799
- 1949–1950 “The Birth of the Cool” 804
- 1950, November 28 “Damned busy painting” 809
- 1951 A poet among painters 814
- 1951 The Catcher in the Rye 819
- 1951 James Jones, From Here to Eternity 823
- 1951 A soft voice 828
- 1952, April 12 Elia Kazan and the blacklist in Hollywood 832
- 1952, June 10 C. L. R. James 837
- 1953, January 1 The song in country music 842
- 1954 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems 847
- 1955, August 11 “The self-respect of my people” 852
- 1955, September 21 A. J. Liebling and the Marciano- Moore fight 856
- 1955, October 7 A generation in miniature 861
- 1955, December Nabokov’s Lolita 866
- 1956, April 16 “Roll Over Beethoven” 871
- 1957 Dr. Seuss 876
- 1959 “Nobody’s perfect” 880
- 1960 Psycho 885
- 1960, January More than a game 890
- 1961, January 20 JFK’s inaugural address and Catch-22 895
- 1961, July 2 The author as advertisement 899
- 1962 Bob Dylan writes “Song to Woody” 904
- 1962 “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” 908
- 1963, April “Letter from Birmingham Jail” 913
- 1964 Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead” 918
- 1964, October 27 “The last stand on Earth” 923
- 1965, September 11 The Council on Interracial Books for Children 928
- 1965, October The Autobiography of Malcolm X 932
- 1968 Norman Mailer 938
- 1968, March The illusory babels of language 943
- 1968, August 28 The plight of conservative literature 948
- 1969 Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems 953
- 1969, January 11 The first Asian Americans 958
- 1969, November 12 The eye of Vietnam 963
- 1970 Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker 968
- 1970; 1972 Linda Lovelace 973
- 1973 Loisaida literature 977
- 1973 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck 983
- 1975 Gayl Jones 988
- 1981, March 31 Toni Morrison 993
- 1982 Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story 997
- 1982 Wild Style 1002
- 1982 Maya Lin’s wall 1006
- 1982, November 8 Harriet Wilson 1012
- 1985, April 24 Henry Roth 1016
- 1987 Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey 1020
- 1995 Philip Roth 1025
- 2001 Twenty-first-century free verse 1030
- 2003 Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing 1035
- 2005, August 29 Hurricane Katrina 1039
- 2008, November 4 Barack Obama 1045
- Contributors 1051
- Index 1063
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter i
- CONTENTS v
- INTRODUCTION xxi
-
A New Literary History of America
- 1507 The name “America” appears on a map 1
- 1521, August 13 Mexico in America 6
- 1536, July 24 Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca 11
- 1585 “Counterfeited according to the truth” 15
- 1607 Fear and love in the Virginia colony 21
- 1630 A city upon a hill 26
- 1643 A nearer neighbor to the Indians 30
- 1666, July 10 Anne Bradstreet 35
- 1670 The American jeremiad 40
- 1670 The stamp of God’s image 44
- 1673 The Jesuit relations 50
- 1683 Francis Daniel Pastorius 54
- 1692 The Salem witchcraft trials 59
- 1693–1694, March 4 Edward Taylor 64
- 1700 Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph 69
- 1722 Benjamin Franklin, The Silence Dogood Letters 74
- 1740 The Great Awakening 79
- Late 1740s; 1814, September 13–14 Two national anthems 84
- 1765, December 23 Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur 88
- 1773, September Phillis Wheatley 93
- 1776 The Declaration of Independence 98
- 1784, June Charles Willson Peale 103
- 1787 James Madison, Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention 108
- 1787–1790 John Adams, Discourses on Davila 113
- 1791 Philip Freneau and The National Gazette 117
- 1796 Washington’s farewell address 122
- 1798 Mary Rowlandson and the Alien and Sedition Acts 127
- 1798 American gothic 131
- 1801, March 4 Jefferson’s first inaugural address 136
- 1804, January The matter of Haiti 141
- 1809 Cupola of the world 145
- 1819, February The Missouri crisis 150
- 1820, November 27 Landscape with birds 154
- 1821 Sequoyah, the Cherokee syllabary 160
- 1821, June 30 Junius Brutus Booth 164
- 1822 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the Ojibwe firefly, and Longfellow’s Hiawatha 168
- 1825, November Thomas Cole and the Hudson River school 173
- 1826, July 4 Songs of the republic 178
- 1826 Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales 182
- 1826; 1927 Transnational poetry 187
- 1827 Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon 192
- 1828 David Walker, Appeal, in Four Articles 196
- 1830, May 21 Jump Jim Crow 201
- 1831, March 5 The Cherokee Nation decision 205
- 1832, July 10 President Jackson’s bank veto 210
- 1835, January Democracy in America 215
- 1835 William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee 221
- 1835 The Sacred Harp 225
- 1836, February 23–March 6 The Alamo and Texas border writing 230
- 1836, February 28 Richard Henry Dana, Jr. 235
- 1837, August 15 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar” 239
- 1838, July 15 “The Divinity School Address” 244
- 1838, September 3 The slave narrative 249
- 1841 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” 254
- 1846, June James Russell Lowell’s Biglow Papers 259
- 1846, late July Henry David Thoreau 263
- 1850 The Scarlet Letter 268
- 1850, July 19 Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist Movement 273
- 1850, August 5 Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville 278
- 1851 Moby-Dick 283
- 1851 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 287
- 1852 Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance and utopian communities 292
- 1852, July 5 Frederick Douglass, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” 297
- 1854 Maria Cummins and sentimental fiction 302
- 1855 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass 306
- 1858 The Lincoln-Douglas debates 312
- 1859 The science of the Indian 317
- 1861 Emily Dickinson 322
- 1862, December 13 The journeys of Little Women 328
- 1865, March 4 Lincoln’s second inaugural address 333
- 1865 “Conditions of repose” 338
- 1869, March 4 Carl Schurz 344
- 1872, November 5 All men and women are created equal 349
- 1875 The Winchester Rifle 353
- 1876, January 6 Melville in the dark 358
- 1876, March 10 The art of telephony 362
- 1878 “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” 366
- 1879 John Muir and nature writing 371
- 1881, January 24 Henry James, Portrait of a Lady 375
- 1884 Mark Twain’s hairball 380
- 1884, July The Linotype machine 384
- 1884, November The Southwest imagined 387
- 1885 The problem of error 392
- 1885, July Limits to violence 397
- 1885, October Writing New Orleans 401
- 1888 The introduction of motion pictures 406
- 1889, August 28 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court 410
- 1893 Chief Simon Pokagon and Native American literature 415
- 1895 Ida B. Wells, A Red Record 420
- 1896 Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life 425
- 1896, September 6 Queen Lili‘uokalani 429
- 1897, Memorial Day The Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Monument 434
- 1898, June 22 Literature and imperialism 440
- 1899; 1924 McTeague and Greed 445
- 1900 Henry Adams 450
- 1900 The Wizard of Oz 455
- 1900; 1905 Sister Carrie and The House of Mirth 459
- 1901 Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition 464
- 1901; 1903 The problem of the color line 469
- 1903, May 5 “The real American has not yet arrived” 473
- 1903 The invention of the blues 478
- 1903 One sees what one sees 482
- 1904, August 30 Henry James in America 488
- 1905, October 15 Little Nemo in Slumberland 493
- 1906, April 9 The Azusa Street revival 498
- 1906, April 18, 5:14 a.m. The San Francisco Earthquake 503
- 1911 “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” 507
- 1912, April 15 Lifeboats cut adrift 512
- 1912 The lure of impossible things 517
- 1912 Tarzan begins his reign 522
- 1913 A modernist moment 526
- 1915 D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation 531
- 1915 Robert Frost 536
- 1917 The philosopher and the millionaire 540
- 1920, August 10 Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” 545
- 1921 Jean Toomer 550
- 1922 T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence 554
- 1923, October Chaplinesque 559
- 1924 F. O. Matthiessen meets Russell Cheney 564
- 1924, May 26 The Johnson-Reed Act and ethnic literature 569
- 1925 The Great Gatsby 574
- 1925, June Sinclair Lewis 580
- 1925, July The Scopes trial 584
- 1925, August 16 Dorothy Parker 588
- 1926 Fire 593
- 1926 Hardboiled 598
- 1926 The Book-of-the-Month Club 602
- 1927 Carl Sandburg and The American Songbag 607
- 1927, May 16 “Free to develop their faculties” 612
- 1928, April 8, Easter Sunday Dilsey Gibson goes to church 617
- 1928, Summer John Dos Passos 622
- 1928, November 18 The mouse that whistled 627
- 1930 “You’re swell!” 632
- 1930, March The Silent Enemy 636
- 1930, October Grant Wood’s American Gothic 640
- 1931, March 19 Nevada legalizes gambling 644
- 1932 Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters 649
- 1932 Arthur Miller 654
- 1932, April or May The River Rouge plant and industrial beauty 659
- 1932, Christmas Ned Cobb 663
- 1933 Baby Face is censored 668
- 1933, March FDR’s first Fireside Chat 672
- 1934, September Robert Penn Warren 677
- 1935 The Popular Front 683
- 1935 The skyscraper 689
- 1935, June 10 Alcoholics Anonymous 695
- 1935, October 10 Porgy and Bess 700
- 1936 Gone with the Wind and Absalom, Absalom 705
- 1936, July 5 Two days in Harlem 710
- 1936, November 23 Life begins 714
- 1938 Superman 719
- 1938, May Jelly Roll Morton speaks 724
- 1939 Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit” 728
- 1939; 1981 Up from invisibility 732
- 1940 “No way like the American way” 737
- 1940–1944 Preston Sturges 742
- 1941 An insolent style 747
- 1941 Citizen Kane 752
- 1941 The word “multicultural” 757
- 1943 Hemingway’s paradise, Hemingway’s prose 762
- 1944 The second Bill of Rights 766
- 1945, February Bebop 770
- 1945, April 11 Thomas Pynchon and modern war 775
- 1945, August 6, 10:45 a.m. The atom bomb 780
- 1946, December 5 Integrating the military 786
- 1947, December 3 Tennessee Williams 790
- 1948 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics 795
- 1948 Saul Bellow 799
- 1949–1950 “The Birth of the Cool” 804
- 1950, November 28 “Damned busy painting” 809
- 1951 A poet among painters 814
- 1951 The Catcher in the Rye 819
- 1951 James Jones, From Here to Eternity 823
- 1951 A soft voice 828
- 1952, April 12 Elia Kazan and the blacklist in Hollywood 832
- 1952, June 10 C. L. R. James 837
- 1953, January 1 The song in country music 842
- 1954 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems 847
- 1955, August 11 “The self-respect of my people” 852
- 1955, September 21 A. J. Liebling and the Marciano- Moore fight 856
- 1955, October 7 A generation in miniature 861
- 1955, December Nabokov’s Lolita 866
- 1956, April 16 “Roll Over Beethoven” 871
- 1957 Dr. Seuss 876
- 1959 “Nobody’s perfect” 880
- 1960 Psycho 885
- 1960, January More than a game 890
- 1961, January 20 JFK’s inaugural address and Catch-22 895
- 1961, July 2 The author as advertisement 899
- 1962 Bob Dylan writes “Song to Woody” 904
- 1962 “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” 908
- 1963, April “Letter from Birmingham Jail” 913
- 1964 Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead” 918
- 1964, October 27 “The last stand on Earth” 923
- 1965, September 11 The Council on Interracial Books for Children 928
- 1965, October The Autobiography of Malcolm X 932
- 1968 Norman Mailer 938
- 1968, March The illusory babels of language 943
- 1968, August 28 The plight of conservative literature 948
- 1969 Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems 953
- 1969, January 11 The first Asian Americans 958
- 1969, November 12 The eye of Vietnam 963
- 1970 Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker 968
- 1970; 1972 Linda Lovelace 973
- 1973 Loisaida literature 977
- 1973 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck 983
- 1975 Gayl Jones 988
- 1981, March 31 Toni Morrison 993
- 1982 Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story 997
- 1982 Wild Style 1002
- 1982 Maya Lin’s wall 1006
- 1982, November 8 Harriet Wilson 1012
- 1985, April 24 Henry Roth 1016
- 1987 Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey 1020
- 1995 Philip Roth 1025
- 2001 Twenty-first-century free verse 1030
- 2003 Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing 1035
- 2005, August 29 Hurricane Katrina 1039
- 2008, November 4 Barack Obama 1045
- Contributors 1051
- Index 1063
