America is a nation making itself up as it goes alonga story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history.
In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nation’s many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what “Made in America” means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoriccultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape.
The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.
Please visit www.newliteraryhistory.com for more information.
Greil Marcus is the author of The Doors, Mystery Train, and other books.
Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Table of Contents
Timeline
Introduction
Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors
1507
The name “America” appears on a map
Toby Lester
1521, August 13
Mexico in America
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
1536, July 24
Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
Ilan Stavans
1585
“Counterfeited according to the truth”
Michael Gaudio
1607
Fear and love in the Virginia colony
Adam Goodheart
1630
A city upon a hill
Elizabeth Winthrop
1643
A nearer neighbor to the Indians
Ted Widmer
1666, July 10
Anne Bradstreet
Wai Chee Dimock
1670
The American jeremiad
Emory Elliott
1670
The stamp of God’s image
Jason D. LaFountain
1673
The Jesuit relations
Laurent Dubois
1683
Francis Daniel Pastorius
Alfred L. Brophy
1692
The Salem witchcraft trials
Susan Castillo
1693–94, March 4
Edward Taylor
Werner Sollors
1700
Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph
David Blight
1722
Benjamin Franklin, The Silence Dogood Letters
Joyce E. Chaplin
1740
The Great Awakening
Joanne van der Woude
1740s, September 13-14 1814, Yankee Doodle goes to town; Francis Scott Key writes The Star-Spangled Banner
1765, December 23
Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur
Leo Damrosch
1773, September
Phillis Wheatley
Rafia Zafar
1776
The Declaration of Independence
Frank Kelleter
1784, June
Charles Willson Peale
Michael Leja
1787
James Madison, Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention
Mitchell Meltzer
1787–1790
John Adams, Discourses on Davila
John Diggins
1791
Philip Freneau and The National Gazette
Jefrey L. Pasley
1796
Washington’s farewell address
François Furstenberg
1798
Mary Rowlandson and the Alien and Sedition Acts
Nancy Armstrong
1798
American gothic
Marc Amfreville
1801, March 4
Jefferson’s first inaugural address
Jan Ellen Lewis
1804, January
The matter of Haiti
Kaiama Glover
1809
Cupola of the world
Judith Richardson
1819
The Missouri crisis
John Stauffer
1820, November 27
Landscape with birds
Christoph Irmscher
1821
Sequoyah, the Cherokee syllabary
Lisa Brooks
1821, June 30
Junius Brutus Booth
Coppelia Kahn
1822
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the Ojibwe firefly, and Longfellow’s Hiawatha
David Treuer
1825, November
Thomas Cole and the Hudson River
Alan Wallach
1826, July 4
Songs of the republic
Steve Erickson
1826
Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales
Richard Hutson
1826; 1927
Transnational poetry
Stephen Burt
1827
Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon
Terryl L. Givens
1828
David Walker, Appeal, in Four Articles
Tommie Shelby
1830, May 21
Jump Jim Crow
W. T. Lhamon, Jr.
1831, March 5
The Cherokee Nation decision
Philip Deloria
1832, July 10
President Jackson’s bank veto
Dan Feller
1835, January
Democracy in America
Ted Widmer
1835
William Gilmore Simms, The Yemasseee
Jefrey Johnson
1835
The Sacred Harp
Sean Wilentz
1836, February 23–March 6
The Alamo and Texas border writing
Norma E. Cantú
1836, February 28
Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
1837, August 31
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”
James Conant
1838, July 15
“The Divinity School Address”
Herwig Friedl
1838, September 3
The slave narrative
Caille Millner
1841
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
Robert Clark
1846, June
James Russell Lowell’s Biglow Papers
Shelley Streeby
1846, late July
Henry David Thoreau
Jonathan Arac
1850
The Scarlet Letter
Bharati Mukherje
1850, July 19
Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist Movement
Lawrence Buell
1850, August 5
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville
Clark Blaise
1851, Moby-Dick
1851
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Beverly Lowry
1852
Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance and utopian communities
Winfried Fluck
1852, July 5
Frederick Douglass, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?”
Liam Kennedy
1854, March
Maria Cummins and sentimental fiction
Cindy Weinstein
1855
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Angus Fletcher
1858
The Lincoln-Douglas debates
Michael T. Gilmore
1859
The science of the Indian
Scott Richard Lyons
1861
Emily Dickinson
Susan Stewart
1862, December 13
The journeys of Little Women
Shirley Samuels
1865, March 4
Lincoln’s second inaugural address
Ted Widmer
1865
“Conditions of repose”
Robin Kelsey
1869, March 4
Carl Schurz
Michael Boyden
1872, November 5
All men and women are created equal
Laura Wexler
1875
The Winchester Rifle
Merritt Roe Smith
1876, January 6
Melville in the dark
Kenneth W. Warren
1876, March 10
The art of telephony
Avital Ronell
1878
“How to Make Our Ideas Clear”
Christopher Hookway
1879
John Muir and nature writing
Scott Slovic
1881, January 24
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
Alide Cagidemetrio
1884
Mark Twain’s hairball
Ishmael Red
1884, July
The Linotype machine
Lisa Gitelman
1884, November
The Southwest imagined
Leah Dilworth
1885
The problem of error
James Conant
1885, July
Limits to violence
James Dawes
1885, October
Writing New Orleans
Andrei Codrescu
1888, The introduction of motion pictures
1889, August 28
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Yael Schacher
1893
Chief Simon Pokagon and Native American literature
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