Cultures of United States Imperialism

Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke UP, 1993).

This (654-page) anthology of essays aims to integrate the study of foreign relations and the study of American culture, breaking down boundaries between internal and external imperialisms and generally rejecting the idea that America is special because it hasn't had an empire (except for those little island states taken over at the end of the 19th century). Authors look at the ways in which America's project has been a fundamentally imperial one since the beginning.

Some of the noteworthy essays that I may need to refer to later:
-Donna Haraway's "Teddy Bear Patriarchy," on the fear of degeneration and white male anxiety in the founding of the AMNH (this essay originally appeared in Social Text and also appears in Primate Visions)
-Bill Brown's "Science Fiction, the World's Fair, and the Prosthetics of Empire, 1910-1915," is fantastic - analyzes the ways that scifi from this period merges man's perfect body and the extensions of his machines to imagine the technological manipulation of distant "prosthetic" places (as exemplified by the Panama Canal - which is the gap which Hercules creates in the body of the earth, in the image appearing on the cover of the book). Brown contrasts this emphasis on the perfect body with the previous century's scifi, and scifi from Europe, which sees science as a way to recuperate lost bodies or make up for deficiencies. Brown is at Chicago and co-edits Critical Inquiry - he also has written on "Thing Theory," which Janet had referred me to earlier this year and which integrates the analysis of the movements of material objects into an analysis of lit
-Vincente Rafael's "White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the US Colonization of the Philippines" contrasts the United States census, which was used as an "educational" tool by American colonizers intent on "lifting" certain Filipinos above others, and which fixed categories of race and gender, with Filipino street theatre which celebrated indigenous gender categories and created a Filipino identity
-Amy Kaplan's "Black and Blue on San Juan Hill" describes the controversy over TR's description of the supposed "cowardice" of the black soldiers during the Rough Riders' surge over San Juan Hill - Kaplan writes that the black community resisted this categorization, and that the way that TR focused on this cowardice, and the supposed disorganization of the Cuban resisters who assisted the United States, shows that race, and the organization of categories, was the most visible "happening" in the middle of a confusing battlefield. This episode also shows how TR lumped Cubans and American blacks together - they are seen as usable, when commanded by a white man, but not effective soldiers if working by themselves.
-In "Anti-Imperial Americanism," Walter Benn Michaels (Univ. of Illinois at Chicago, writes on race, literature and national identity) describes how pro-KKK southern writers saw themselves as "colonized" by Reconstruction.
-In "The Patriot System, or Managerial Heroism," Susan Jeffords talks about the Gulf War (which took up an inordinate amount of space in this book - see pub date, 1993) - she writes that Americans justify the war by describing themselves as the most competent of techno-managers - it's interesting to think about how different this thesis would look if applied to the current Iraq War...

Daughters of Suburbia

Lorraine Kenny, Daughters of Suburbia: Growing Up White, Middle Class, and Female (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2000)

This "autoethnography" has Kenny returning to her Long Island hometown (Shoreham-Waring River) to follow eighth-grade girls around for a year. It is not a book about "self-esteem" or any other Reviving Ophelia-style trope, thank God - it's about how whiteness and middle-class-ness articulate themselves in the form of absence. Kenny intersperses chapters about the kids at SWR Middle School with chapters about famous cases of media attention to white girls from LI - Amy Fisher, Cheryl Pierson (who hired a friend to kill her abusive dad), and Emily Heinrichs (a former white supremacist and teenage mother whose chapter was perhaps the most interesting, as her story was represented so many different ways in the media).

The most interesting sections of this book for me were the ones on narrative and on "multiculturalism" in an all-white school. The chapter on stories that teenage girls tell about and to each other resonated with me very much (as did many of the things that Kenny discusses here). Kenny writes that girls are so obsessed with story because they lead such "normal" or "boring" (aka, non-racialized) lives. "Girls' wild stories make being normal possible," she writes (101).

The chapter on "multiculturalism" and its failures in an all-white context shows how the silences surrounding the real stakes of racial difference create situations in which white kids don't recognize their own privilege - and how these silences are created by the adults around them. Kenny describes how the kids from this school did an exchange with the kids from a blacker adjacent school, and how the real differences between the pedagogical styles, social systems, and infrastructure between the two schools, which could have been a fertile topic of discussion, were instead left to the kids to parse themselves (or not, as the case may be). Adult failures to explicate how being white is actually a subject position leave kids without a leg to stand on when it comes to discussing race.

Kenny is apparently now working for the ACLU, for their Reproductive Freedom project, though I couldn't find any more information on her online.

The Word in Black and White

Title: The Word in Black and White: Reading "Race" in American Literature 1638-1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)

Author: Dana D. Nelson, professor of English at Vanderbilt. Her other book is National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Duke University Press, 1998). Looks like she's working on a project about the history of alternative ideas of democracy.

My review: I'm going to have to get over my distaste for the use of quotation marks around words like "race" or "black" or "white", and the capitalization of the word "Other", and a host of other early-90s-race-lit-crit things which just distract and annoy me. This book is about the "ingraining" of categories of race through literature, in the pre-Civil War US. Basic philosophy: "to write is to know is to dominate" (see Lepore). The authors discussed include Edgar Allen Poe (for the awesome Arthur Gordon Pym book), Cotton Mather, Fenimore Cooper, Sedgwick, and Lydia Maria Child, the last being the only author Nelson describes as fulfilling the ultimate liberal white authorial mission of both disdaining racism and proposing alternative modes of racial interaction. Other authors, including Melville, whose "Benito Cereno" comes under Nelson's scrutiny, manage to criticize white slave-owning but don't move beyond into prescriptiveness.

Nelson borrows ideas from Richard Slotkin, Annette Kolodny, Richard Drinnon, Mary Louise Pratt, Karen Halttunen, and Abdul JanMohammed.

Books: Secondary: Nancy Stepan, Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (1982)

American Slavery, American Freedom

Title: American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975)

Author: Edmund S. Morgan, professor emeritus of the Yale history department. Studied under Perry Miller at Harvard. Teacher of John Demos. Winner of many awards for his books on colonial and early Republican history, and for his life work in general, including the National Humanities Medal in 2000 and a Pulitzer "special citation" in 2006 (is that like an Oscar lifetime achievement award? I think so). Other notable books (he wrote a bunch) are The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (1955); The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 (1956); and Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988), which won the Bancroft Prize. Morgan has also written biographies of Ezra Stiles, Roger Williams, and Benjamin Franklin.

My Review: This book attempts to answer the paradox embodied in its title: how could a society founded on the ideals of human freedom accept the blatant violation of that ideals in its very midst? (Morgan sees this as the fundamental paradox of America as a whole.) In order to answer the question, Morgan looks at the hundred years during which Virginia existed previous to the beginning of wholesale African slavery, describing the social and labor conditions of the colony.

The Jamestown colony, he writes, was founded with a great need for labor - indeed, those who became rich at the outset were those who could manage to marshal the greatest number of servants, not those who had the most land or the most capital. The upper classes of Britain looked at Virginia as perfect place to offload the lazy, unproductive classes of people who were unemployed in the home country. These people would accept contracts to come to Virginia as servants and serve a certain term to pay for their passage. Once in the colony, excuses would be made to extend their term, and once they were set free, there was very little hope for the American Dream - land was difficult to work if you were doing it on a small scale; land was only available on the dangerous, Indian-proximate frontier; and women were scarce, meaning family life for these "small" ex-servants was nonexistent. More than anything, though, these servants usually just died so early in life (as did most people in Virginia) that they didn't have a chance to ask for their rightful place in Virginia's economic order.

For Morgan, this short life expectancy is one of the major reasons why Virginia's planters saw it as economically more advantageous to import English servants, rather than African slaves - why pay the higher price for a slave when s/he was likely to die soon, leaving a planter without having exploited the full "term" of their labor (that is, their lifetime)? There were some Africans in the colony before the end of the seventeenth century, but Morgan says that they were unaccompanied by the later racism they experienced. They worked alongside white servants, and intermarried with whites.

When life expectancy began to go up, and events such as Bacon's Rebellion convinced the upper classes that the lower classes were indeed dangerous, slavery began to look like a better option. With a plantation of African slaves, control would be easier and economic advantage easier to extract. In a story familiar from such books as Roediger's Wages of Whiteness, the white lower classes were pacified with minor economic advances, begrudging cession of political rights, and the knowledge that they, at least, were "better" than the Indians and black people living alongside them in the South. Meanwhile, the upper classes could (mostly) rest safe in their beds, knowing that the poor people who supported their wealth were enslaved and controllable. (The "mostly" refers to the fear a lot of them retained of slave rebellions, which were actually rare.) Voila - slavery and freedom, side by side.

Souvenir from the 1907 Jamestown Exposition ("Meet Me On The War Path"!)

Reviews: The book won the Francis Parkman Prize, as well as others. In the Journal of American History, Russell Menard wrote that the book was "graceful, learned and witty" (it is that) and loves it, mostly, except when he worries that by attributing all of English racism to economic need, Morgan gives short shrift to any possible other explanation - it's almost mechanical, an account which Menard compares unfavorably to Winthrop Jordan's more subtle work (presumably White over Black [1968] though Menard doesn't specify). Menard also wants more evidence about the decline in mortality, a point at which I found myself confused as well, and wants more drawn-out analyses of the difference in prices between slaves and servants. In the Journal of Social History, Lois Green Carr said that she liked the book, too, but thought that actually servants had more opportunity when "graduated" from service than Morgan had it, and that those who joined Bacon's Rebellion were not actually reacting from stringent conditions for freedmen at the time - that things were status quo for them, until about the 1680s.

Words: "feeoffee" ("a person invested with a fief")

Poster for Terence Malick's 2005 film "The New World," with Colin Farrell as John Smith - a film I have to admit I found myself embarrassingly swept away by, with a good representation of the dirtiness and desperation of the Jamestown settlement, and a really romantic one of the nobility of the Indian.

Middle Ground

"The map...is the first attempt at delineating the country of the Great Lakes. Based wholly on Indian reports, the map accompanied a work by Samuel de Champlain, Les Voyages de la Nouvelle France, which was published in Paris in 1632." Caption from this site...

Title: The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Author: Richard White, now holding an endowed professorship at Stanford. White is one of the major architects of the new environmental and Western histories (see also William Cronon, Patricia Limerick, Hal Rothman, Ramon Gutierrez). The Western approach embodied in his work re-visions the West as a land where various groups of people interacted, not simply the empty spot where Anglo-Americans exercised their growing dominance, as described in nineteenth-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis".

White is also author of The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (1983); "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American West (1991), which I've never read but always wanted to, and which apparently never uses the word "frontier"; The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (1996), which we read in a Landscape class and which is notably shorter than Middle Ground; and Remembering Ahanagran: A History of Stories (1998).

Tecumseh, portrait uncited anywhere I could find (but I included it because of the prominence of the medal on his chest and the epaulets of his uniform). White wrote in his intro that he initially intended to write a book about Tecumseh's story, but decided that the back-story of Indian interaction with Europeans in the area was all the more interesting.

My short review: White dives into the complex, sometimes deeply confusing territory of the relationships between various Indian groups and the French, English, and American colonizers of the upper Midwest during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and emerges with a coherent narrative of the ways that cultural contact resulted in what he calls "the middle ground."

The book is not really assignable to undergrads, but (or maybe because) its underlying message is that stuff back then was more complex than we think it was. This complexity accounts for the occasional Biblically byzantine prose, describing the successions of various chiefs and French commanding officers. (I was only willing to forgive White the 525-page length of the book because he, quite endearingly, called Middle Ground "the Tristam Shandy of Indian history" in the foreword.) But all of this depth is definitely necessary, and definitely serves his point well: in a land of fragmented Indian groups, contacted by equally fragmented French traders, Jesuits, and travelers, people created a culture based on individual, face-to-face interactions, and it was a much more flexible and mutable one than has been described.

Particularly interesting examples of French and Indian contact/conflict come under the cultural situations of gift-giving, order-giving, murder, and sex. Gifts were used by Indian groups as ways to establish alliance; the French initially resented this, but eventually saw their efficacy; the British never wholeheartedly capitulated to what they saw as "begging Indians" and their empire suffered as a result. The maintenance of authority was understood differently by the Europeans and the Indians - Euros thought that because somebody was a chief, that meant that they could control all of their people, while Indian authority was much more conditional. French people in the country (the pays d'en haut) eventually learned this and worked around it, but their imperial commanders never seemed to understand; and the British saw the Indian lack of hierarchy as an emblem of their less-developed society. Murder was a situation which the Indians dealt with by "raising" or "covering" the dead (ie, giving the bereaved family a slave to replace the lost person, or goods to make up for his/her loss), while the Europeans believed in an eye for an eye. White describes how various instances of murder forced the French and Indians to create solutions which satisfied both sides of the equation, and how the British and American interactions were far less flexible. Finally, sex in the backcountry was an example of the literal "middle ground" - the birth of various metis (half-French, half-Indian) children served to help trade and establish ties between communities of the different nations.

All of this cultural exchange was possible and necessary because the French "needed" the Indians - or at least, they needed the Indians not to kill them, and to trap beaver for them, and not to betray them to the English during imperial wars. Once the British came into power, and once the Americans started colonizing the back-country, this "need" went away and "Indian-hating" became more common. Against this backdrop, the story told by Jill Lepore of the interactions between Indians and English in Massachusetts takes on added poignancy. (Or does it? The story White tells makes it pretty clear that the French weren't inherently more tender-hearted or kind, but simply in dire-r straits, which forced them to interact on a more human level with the Indians...if they had lived in tight quarters with Indians and needed land for domesticated animals and seen no need to patronize Indians to maintain trading relationships, as was the case in MA, they might not have been so open to relating in the way they did.)

"The Black Robe", 1991 movie about a Jesuit priest in the pays d'en haut - haven't seen it yet, but intend to. Check out the praise: "Packs twice the punch of Dances with Wolves."

Reviews of Others: Well, this book won the Francis Parkman Prize and was a Pulitzer nominee, so there's that. In the Journal of American History, Robert Berkhofer Jr (author of The White Man's Indian), wrote that the book was praiseworthy for its synthesis, but worried that White had tried too hard to maintain his narrative scenario by omitting mention of what happened after the end of the War of 1812 (how can this be a "middle ground" if it's constantly shifting westward because of the actions of faraway imperial nations?) Rebecca Kugel, in the American Indian Quarterly, said much more about the patriarchal family relationship between French and Algonquins than I did in the above review (and it's helpful for me to remember that the French saw this relationship as one of authority, while the Algonquins thought a "father" should provide for and mediate between his "children" - and trouble came about when the French violated this compact, which they might not have completely understood). Kugel thought that White might have shortchanged the British and American eras in comparison to the French (what did she want, the Gravity's Rainbow of Indian history?)

Words: "phratry" ("any of various analogous clans or kinship divisions found in other societies; [esp. in Anthropol.] a descent group or kinship group in some tribal societies); "moiety" ("a half, one of two equal parts"); "stroud" ("a blanket manufactured for barter or sale in trading with the North American Indians" - White writes that the British, for a time, had a trade advantage over the French because of their superior supply of scarlet strouds).

Books to follow up on: Secondary: Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas, 1774-1880 (1980).

Moby-Dick

Images from leftist artist Rockwell Kent's 1930 illustrated version of Moby-Dick, which was sold through the Book-of-the-Month Club and revived the book's popularity. Kent was asked to do a version of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, but proposed the Melville classic instead. Weirdly enough, the cover of this version did not credit Melville (is Moby-Dick himself the author? V. fitting).

Title: Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (1851). I read the Penguin Classics edition, introduced by Andrew Delbanco.

Author: Herman Melville, 1819-1891. It's sad to think how early in his life he wrote this amazing book, and how anti-climatically it was received. Melville's first couple of books, which were more conventional adventure stories, got a degree of popular acclaim, but Moby-Dick didn't sit so well with the type of readers who had gone for his more salty (sorry) stuff. Melville saw a revival in the 1920s, spearheaded by the writing of several biographies (Lewis Mumford wrote one in 1929! was there anything the Mum couldn't do?), as well as the belated publication of Billy Budd, Sailor in 1924. See above caption for info about the popular revival of Moby-Dick. There have also been a couple of film version of this book, including one made in 1930 and one in 1956, directed by John Huston and script-written by Ray Bradbury, which I would really like to see.

Some words: This book was totally wasted on seventeen-year-old me the first time I read it. It's a fever dream, it's obsessive, it's beautiful, it's funny and very sad.

I appreciated Andrew Delbanco's introduction for a number of reasons, but I most profited by keeping in mind his comment about the looseness of the narrative form. He writes that there are times in the novel when there's no way that Ishmael can still be the narrator, in the traditional first-person sense, and the reader must give up on wondering "How could Ishmael know what Ahab said to himself in the belowdecks...or what Starbuck said to Ahab in private conversations..." etc.

Forewarned, I pictured the narrative more as Ishmael's scrapbook on the fall of the Pequod, a series of texts, accounts of things he witnessed, reports of his studies, but also things he might have imagined or foreseen or projected. (I suppose you could also look at the book as alternating between first and third person narrators, but I think my way is more fun.)

I kept a list of the different narrative forms that these small texts/chapters took, and I came up with: Dramatic script or soliloquy; affadavit; natural history (these were the chapters on the whale's anatomy, which I thought were hundreds of pages long when I was in high school reading this, but were actually much shorter); adventure story; yarn-within-a-story, a la Heart of Darkness (the chapter on the Town-Ho!); Emersonian essay (the amazing "Whiteness of the Whale"); object study resulting in multiplicity of character perspectives (the chapter in which each character reacts to the doubloon pounded into the mast); and horror story (the appearance of the dead Parsee, lashed to Moby-Dick's back and staring at Ahab, was an indelible image worthy of Poe). This is a very postmodern book, perhaps. I'm sure somebody has written on that.

I am going to forebear to comment too much on the questions of what Moby-Dick means for America or American literature, since I'm pretty sure a couple of the authors I have yet to read will do that, but I am interested to know if anyone has written an ecocritical or animal-studies analysis of the book. The chapter on the possible future extinction of the whale (in which Ishmael points to the buffalo, who, he argues in 1851, are commonly slaughtered without going extinct, as evidence of the whale's similar ability to withstand constant culling - heh) is one candidate for an analysis, but I also kept fixating on how Ishmael constantly points out how ironic it is that the whale lights the scene of his own slaughter. There's something here about the way that the body of the animal is made to betray itself, and how the nineteenth-century character sees this as somehow grotesque yet inevitable.


Also, the entire project of Moby-Dick could be seen as a forced re-marriage of production and consumption; during a time in which whale oil is used to light the ceremonies and celebrations of humanity, Ishmael writes, fewer and fewer humans seem to understand the risks and death involved in the killing of whales (risks and death both for the whales and the humans). The chapters on the floating factory that is the Pequod after a kill point toward a sort of a Jungle for the whaling industry, but with a less activist slant - it seems as though Ishmael simply wants the landlubber to realize the ultimate madness of technological achievement that their desires can stimulate.

In a way, the madness of Ahab is the ultimate extension of an endeavor (whale-hunting) which comes about because of the mad strivings of humanity. Even Starbuck (aka reasonableness/rationality) is unable to stop it. The human bond, as between Ahab and Starbuck, is finally unable to slow down Ahab's mad desires - after Ahab bids Starbuck to come close and "let [him] look into a human eye", which gaze is "better than to gaze upon God" (591), the bond that's created doesn't stop Ahab from continuing, but seems rather to seal Starbuck's fate. The first mate is unable to make a moral stand against Ahab's madness, because he sees Ahab's humanity. So, Melville says, we are all complicit in allowing each other to run amuck with doing and fixing and pushing and achieving.


Other books I've read which analyze this one: In Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current, he points to both Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1938) and the writings of J.N. Reynolds (most prominently the story "Mocha-Dick" [1839]) which he describes as antecedents to Moby-Dick. Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden juxtaposes the chapter in which Ishmael sits on the masthead and meditates on the meaning of life and the dirty, dark production chapters, in order to show the conflict in American life between lofty transcendentalism and the underpinnings of capitalism and material progress.

Vocab words: "puissant" ("possessed of or wielding power"); "poniard" ("a small, slim dagger"); "tierce" ("a third part").

Darwinism Comes to America

Title: Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)

Author: Ronald Numbers, of the history of medicine and bioethics department at UW-Madison. Numbers has written many books about religion and science in America (and has been the president of both the American Society of Church History and the History of Science Society). His books include Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White (1976); Medicine Without Doctors: Home Health Care in American History (1977); Almost Persuaded: American Physicians and Compulsory Health Insurance, 1912-1920 (1978) (that's an interesting one - I wonder how/if Spencerian ideas of "survival of the fittest" worked there); The Creationists (1992); Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender (1999); and most recently, When Science and Christianity Meet (2003). His site says he's working on a bio of John Harvey Kellogg, among other things.

My review: This book consists of a series of essays, many derived from conference presentations or articles, some co-authored. Numbers begins the book with an introduction of the terms, describing the evolution (sorry) of "Darwinism, creationism, and intelligent design" as concepts. Here he tries to restore some of the nuance to the spectrum of beliefs about evolution: some creationists believe(d) in the long-day theory (the idea that Genesis' "week" referred to eras, not days as we know them); some believe(d) in "natural" evolution punctuated by divine interventions, etc. (Interestingly, this chapter also addresses the impact of Sputnik on teachings of evolution.)

The next chapters seek to illuminate different aspects of the controversy, including whether or not Southern scientists reacted completely negatively to the theory (no, sir - this section recalls Marsden's arguments about the variety of religious opinion during this time period, including the point that fundamentalism originated in many cases in the urban North); how "creationism" has changed since its use by Louis Agassiz; how the Scopes trial got re-cast in the eyes of history as a victory for urban values and secular society (this chapter would be a good one to use to introduce the trial in an undergrad context); and how Adventists and Holiness sects responded to the theory. The Adventist chapter included some interesting material on how Ellen G. White may or may not have associated "lower" races with animals in her understanding of what happened during and after the Flood (p 99). Adventists saw some sciences as having been derived from satanic delusions - but believed that it was possible to know (or at least, for some people, like White, to know) which ones were satanic and which were okay.

Reviews of others: In The Journal of Southern History, Steve Wolfgang welcomed the chapter on southern reception of Darwin (to be expected, given the rehabilitative nature of the work) and called the book a good introduction for students unaware of many aspects of Darwinism (an assessment echoed by David Hull of Northwestern, who wrote one of the blurbs for the back of the book). Kary Smout, in Isis, begged to differ, writing that the essays in this book would be difficult for non-specialists (I think I might have to agree) because many of them are based on Numbers' responses to a large body of scholarship, a setting-straight of a body of knowledge. (It's no fun to read a setting-straight when you have no idea what was crooked.) She wished that Numbers had seen fit to make broader conclusions: "Although I learned many fascinating facts from this book, all I learned was many fascinating facts. Since Darwinism has come to America, the result has been varied and complex. What hasn't?"

Vocab words: "prosopographical" ("a study of a collection of persons or characters, esp. their appearances, careers, personalities, etc., within a historical, literary, or social context").

Books to follow up on: Primary: Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (1931); EP Ellyson, Is Man an Animal? (mid-1920s - anti-evolution book); Youth's Instructor - Adventist periodical for young people

Secondary: Jon Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859-1900 (1988) (Numbers dedicated this book to "Jon Roberts, author of the best book on Darwinism in America" - I do believe he meant this book, which I think might have been advisable to read instead, or at least in addition to, Darwinism Comes To America).

The back matter of this book includes a series of biographical notes about each of the 80 naturalists in the National Academy of Sciences from 1863-1900.

The End of Victory Culture

Roll the dice, lady. Roll the dice.

Title: The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995)

Author: Tom Engelhardt, a former journalist and book editor, now working as a fellow for the Nation Institute and writing for/editing the alternative news site TomDispatch.com. One of the things he works on for Metropolitan Books is called The American Empire Project and looks really awesome.

Argument: The time between the Cold War and Vietnam marked the beginning of the end of American triumphalism, which was at a high point at the end of WWII, but marred by the existence of the bomb. Combining a bunch of different previous scholarship about American exceptionalism (see Nash Smith), Native Americans (see Slotkin), narratives of war and racism (see Dower, Drinnon), as well as his own childhood reflections, Engelhardt seeks to answer the question of how Americans lost their loving feeling toward their own country - and especially, how children who grew up during that 1950s got to the point where they began to question the country's mission. All of this questioning added up to what Engelhardt terms The End of Victory Culture. (Problem: Weren't there dissenters and disbelievers in American culture all along? Anti-imperialists and war protestors? Socialists? Communists? Yes, there were... Also, there's still a Victory Culture: just ask any random person on the street in Concord, New Hampshire.)

Chapter-by-chapter:
I. War Story
1. Triumphalist Despair: Basic argument laid out.

2. Story Time: Real-life war stories of America, whose parameters are determined by the victors (see Lepore). Native Americans as central to these stories, while the black story is elided (and haunting in its absence).

3. Ambush at Kamikaze Pass: War stories in the movies. Short history of the Western, pre-1960, and its similarities with the war movies of the 1940s. A bit about captivity narratives; a bit about the "victim complex" (we are always the transgressed upon, never the aggressor).

4. Premonitions: The Asian Death of Victory Culture: How Asia became "the frontier", and how Korea became a precursor of/warning of what was to come in Vietnam.

II. Containments (1945-1962)
1. War Games: How the 1950s mixed wartime with peacetime objectives (see May). Includes section on children's war games (81).

2. X Marks the Spot: Articulation of tensions between inclusionary and exclusionary tactics during the Cold War (how are we safe? by assimilating difference, or rejecting it altogether?)

3. The Enemy Disappears: The invisibility of Cold War adversaries; coverage of the HUAC hearings and blacklisting (emphasis on the performative nature thereof).

4. The Haunting of Childhood: Childhood, during the Cold War, was the "symbolic meeting place" for two fears: the fear of infection by the Other (see juvenile delinquents); and the propensity of the media to "concretize the fantasies of the young and the nightmarish fears of grown-ups into potent products" (137). "Twilight Zone" seen as example of how these secret fears/fantasies emerged in the public eye.

5. Entering the Twilight Zone: The atomic stalemate "reflected the limits of what the American story, American national identity, could withstand" (157): we couldn't picture ourselves killing so many people without "provocation". This meant that adversaries had to be more careful, talk about things more, and that "a certain amount of control over the American war story...was placed in enemy hands" (161). Interesting piece on the invention of the Peace Corps as JFK's plan to Americanize far places through youth (164).

III. The Era of Reversals (1962-1975):
1. The First Coming of GI Joe: Evolution of GI Joe figures seen as marker of how American ideas of heroism and enemy-ship evolved during this time.

2. The Invisible Government: JFK's assassination, and subsequent conspiracy theories, indicated that Americans could now conceive that their government would keep things from them purposefully.

3. Playing with Fire: The story of Morley Safer's atrocity reports from Cam Ne, and how the response to it (people thought he was a Communist plant, and hey, he was Canadian) indicated America's inability to accept the possible moral bankruptcy of their mission in Vietnam.

Morley Safer at Cam Ne, 1965.

4. Into the Charnel House of Language: Vietnam's "backwardness" in the American war story led to linguistic machinations intended to help Americans process what was happening: an interesting analysis of the use of the word "quagmire", which holds that the word implies American victimhood, once again: Who's in the wrong, when men are being "sucked into" a war? The thing doing the "sucking", for sure. I'm never calling Iraq a quagmire again. (199)

5. The President as Mad Mullah: Nixon told advisors that he wanted the Vietnamese to see him as an evil madman so they would lose their nerve - a concept which fascinates Engelhardt, given American need to see their leaders as upright moral beings.

6. The Crossover Point: More on the American state of mind in Vietnam, including the "logic" of body counts, which built on itself, and the idea that America wanted to impose a "story" on Vietnam, not just political rule (214).

7. "Something Rather Dark and Bloody": The story of the My Lai massacre, and response to it. Interestingly, Engelhardt points out, everybody on either side of the protestor/establishment divide was interested in comparing the other side with Nazis.

8. The War Crimes of Daniel Ellsberg: Ellsberg, who worked for RAND and then leaked the Pentagon Papers, is seen as an exemplar of a young American who fell out of love with the war story he'd been raised upon.

D. Ellsberg.

9. Ambush at Kamikaze Pass (II): Reflections of the Vietnam War in film. Also, story of how young war protestors singlehandedly realized the twin fears of the Cold War era: Communism, and the vulnerability of the young.

10. Besieged: How the war protestors used the national media by manipulating symbols such as "Good War" paraphenalia in order to create a sort of living MAD magazine: a subordination of the accepted narrative. Those in charge were horrified: not only the war, but also the home agenda, was slipping from their grasp, due to the death of Victory Culture.

11. Reconstruction: How did post-Vietnam Americans, robbed of their self-image of conquering righteousness, think to recoup their self respect? Through the children, of course...

IV. Afterlife (1975-1994): Attempts to rehabilitate American self image include Star Wars, the first Gulf War (in its spectacular, TV-ready execution). More on GI Joe, and a bit of interesting, if slightly out of place, musing on the way that children's culture seems to drive all meaning before it in the creation of an apolitical, timeless global state of conflict (do I agree? don't know) (301).

Reviews: In Contemporary Sociology, George Lipsitz wrote (a bit scathingly, but rightly) that Engelhardt draws "sporadically and unsystematically" on recent scholarship, pointing out holes in interpretation caused by ignorance of such work as that of Eric Lott and David Roediger. Furthermore, Lipsitz continued, Engelhardt's unfamiliarity with the methods of cultural studies led him to write in a narrow, Myth-and-Symbol-style framework, ignoring contradictory or complicating aspects of his Overarching Narrative; and his lack of context for each cultural object (no analysis of the actors involved in production, etc) leads him to make unsupported guesses about their meanings. In the Journal of American History, Stephen Whitfield wrote that the book's analysis was "sprightly", if thin, and that Engelhardt's overall theory about triumphalism was worth encapsulating in book form. Both reviewers called Engelhardt a "leftist". It's interesting to see how differently a "popular" book is reviewed in scholarly publications...

Vocab words: "osculation" ("close contact, an instance of this; spec. (a) the mutual contact of blood vessels (obs.); (b) Geom., contact of curves or surfaces which share a common tangent at the point of contact (also used analogously of spaces of higher dimension)" - also, "kissing").

Books to follow up on: Primary: Books: Textbook from 1953: America Before Man; Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Diane E Levin, Who's Calling the Shots: How to Respond Effectively to Children's Fascination with War Play and War Toys (1990); MIA Hunter series ("Vietnam snuff novels"). Toys: GI Joe "Soldiers of the World" (p 175) and animal enemies. Movies: "North by Northwest"; "The Long Telegram"; "Fail Safe"; Morley Safer's reports on "The Burning of Cam Ne"; "The Dirty Dozen"; "The Wild Bunch"; "Bonnie and Clyde"; "Little Big Man"; "Soldier Blue"; "The China Syndrome"; "Coming Home".

Secondary: Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (1992); Leslie Daikin, Children's Toys Throughout the Ages (1953); Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (1964); Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (1979); Antonia Fraser, A History of Toys (1966); Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984); John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925 (1975); Sydney Ladensohn and Ted Schhoenhaus, Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry (1990); Edward Tabor Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (1991); June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (1993); David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (1993); Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987); Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (1987); Keith Thompson, Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination (1991).

Homeward Bound

For May, bomb shelters exemplify the "containment" metaphor, showing how public fears intersected with (created?) domestic ideologies of the hothouse nuclear family.

Title: Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988)

Author: Elaine Tyler May, history, University of Minnesota (PhD, UCLA, 1975). She writes: "I am a historian of the United States in the twentieth century, with a particular interest in the intersections of politics and private life. My research and teaching focus on the areas of women's history and history of the family, exploring the ways in which gender and sexuality reflect and express American political, cultural and social values." Her other books include Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (1980) and Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (1997), which I really, really want to read.

Argument: Dominant historical and cultural narratives have normalized the 1950s way of marriage and family life, but in reality, the 50s paradigm (early marriage; rigid gender roles; nuclear family) was different from anything before or after - and, of course, the social relations of the time period were constructed, like those of any other. May asks why, after the Depression and WWII, when women worked outside of the home in large numbers, the pendulum swung so far toward the other, more traditional configuration during the 1950s. The larger theoretical point here has to do with the way that political ideology, or national political "direction", can be reflected/refracted in ideas of domestic relationships. Specifically, during the postwar years, ideas of "containment" (on the international level) manifested themselves in the domestic sphere.

Chapter-by-chapter:
1. Containment at Home: Cold War, Warm Hearth: Beginning with the story of the Nixon/Khruschev "kitchen debates", May describes what deeper meanings or usefulnesses the domesticity of the 1950s had for the society: "The appliance-laden ranch-style home epitomized the expansive, secure lifestyle that postwar Americans wanted. Within the protective walls of the modern home, worrisome developments like sexual liberalism, women's emancipation, and affluence would lead not to decadence but to a wholesome family life. Sex would enhance marriage, emancipated women would professionalize homemaking, and affluence would put an end to material deprivation..." (19-20) Also, this lifestyle, when available to (or idealized for!) many people, would make Communism look unattractive and unnecessary to the majority of Americans. Here, May also introduces the Kelly Longitudinal Study, the survey of married couples begun in the 1930s which will serve as an important part of her evidence for the book.


Nixon v. Khruschev, 1959 Kitchen Debates. But why did Moscow allow an exposition of American culture in the first place? Anybody know? (Also, Khruschev said, when Nixon showed him a TV, "This is probably always out of order...Don't you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you've shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life...they are merely gadgets" [quoted on page 163]. And then Nixon proceeded to go see about inventing that food-pusher...)

2. Depression: Hard Times at Home: Context for the 1950s model of domesticity includes the Depression years, during which many more women went to work, but which, May says, also "created nostalgia for a mythic past in which male breadwinners made a decent living, and homemakers were freed from outside employment" (38). May discusses Depression-era Hollywood depictions of working women, which always managed to emphasize flexibility and problem-solving in marriages strapped for cash, without proposing a fundamental shift in the way marriages worked.

3. War and Peace: Fanning the Home Fires: Again, during WWII, women worked in greater numbers; however, this "emergency suspension" of gender roles (see Gail Collins, who probably got this idea from May) is revoked at the end of the war. May returns to Hollywood to show how women working in the film industry were depicted as domestic (and includes an awesomely memorable picture of Joan Crawford washing the floor in full eyebrowed splendor). The emphasis on domesticity during a time when many women worked was due to a desire to contain the female sexuality which was seen as being "on the loose" during the wild wartime years (see: paintings of bombshells on planes and, well, bombshells). May also writes about the real dilemmas of women who decided whether or not to work during this era, pointing out that opportunities for women - whether college-educated or not - were slim, and may have made domesticity seem like a more appetizing solution to the question "What do I do with my life?"

4. Explosive Issues: Sex, Women, and the Bomb: During the postwar years, women's sexuality was linked pervasively with the power of the bomb, "a symbolic connection that found widespread expression in professional writings, anticommunist campaigns, and the popular culture" (93). Many people in many levels of government sincerely believed that there was a "direct connection between communism and sexual depravity" (94). Male power needed to be exercised in the home as well as in the public sphere, so that the power of sex could be harnessed and channelled in positive directions: men would be fulfilled, and not subject to temptations of pornography, homosexuality, and prostitution; women would be fulfilled, and would raise healthy kids, like good republican mothers. Here May talks about the bomb shelter and its meanings for idealized family "togetherness" and insularity.

Marilyn Monroe, she of the totally uncontrollable sexuality, in Niagara (1953).

5. Brinkmanship: Sexual Containment on the Home Front: Following the paradigm set up in the previous chapter, May returns to the Kelly data, attempting to see how postwar couples were affected by ideologies of containment. Discussing ideas of the acceptability of premarital sex, she writes that many couples got married early to avoid the disasters that were supposed to happen when you did engage in intercourse before getting hitched. May outlines the paradox of expert advice on sex and marriage in this time period: the recommendation was for complete virginity before marriage, and then mutual bliss within - a combination which didn't really seem to work in the real world, or at least the real world as reported by Kelly. All in all, sexual containment had an "ambiguous legacy" (134) - it did not guarantee security or fulfillment, but the consequences of non-adherence (loss of status, stigma, "the economic hardship of divorce") were too great for many people to risk.

6. Baby Boom and Birth Control: The Reproductive Consensus: During the Cold War, having babies was a way to exercise civic values. Pronatalism, rampant during these years, held that having children was the number one way to be happy, and to contribute to the growth of the nation. To this end, ideas of maternity being the ultimate sexual fulfillment for women were widely held, but also (and this is interesting) people thought that men should be fathers - as May contends, fatherhood was seen as an antidote to an office life that might be overwhelmingly depersonalized. For the first time, the family was supposed to fulfill all human emotional needs - a microcosm unto itself. Again, May returns to H'wood to describe how these ideas grew in movie-world.

Still from the pronatal film "Penny Serenade", starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne (1941)

7. The Commodity Gap: Consumerism and the Modern Home: Returning to the kitchen debates, May shows how consumerism was tied with stability and anti-Communism, and how investing in the home became the best way of "planning for the future" (even if it put financial burdens on the family in the present). May writes that part of the way Americans, still adhering to a Puritan model of pragmatism and guilt, justified spending as much as they started spending was that if it was the home they were investing in, consumerism was seen as unselfish (it's for the kids, not for me!) Good point.

8. Hanging Together: For Better or for Worse: Returning to the Kelly couples, May goes straight to the heart of some bad marriages, asking why the couples in question stayed together, and finding that the answer was usually status, stability, and security.

9. Epilogue: The Baby Boom Comes of Age: Starting with Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), May writes about responses to the domestic ideal, beginning with those who lived it (women who wrote to Friedan after the publication of the book) and moving into the responses of their children. She eventually concludes that domestic containment moved out of fashion after the Cold War political conditions changed, and that there was, after the 1950s, no "consensus" idea of how family life would be lived - at least, not the way there was back then.

Reviews: Joseph Hawes, writing in the Journal of American History, wrote that May used the "perfect" data set provided in the form of the Kelly survey to great effect, comparing her work to that of Nancy Cott in Bonds of Womanhood (1977). Hawes also liked May's use of the Civil Defense images in chapter 4. The only possible quibble: May seemed to focus on unhappy couples, but, Hawes wrote, "the 60s rebirth of feminism fully justifies her emphasis". In Signs, Susan Ware wrote that the use of the Kelly data was the strength and the weakness of the book - the data's concentration in the white middle class, for example, was a drawback (but one of which, as Ware admits, May is fully aware). More important, Ware wrote that the somewhat imperfect chronology of the Kelly survey - which began in the late 30s - meant that many of the 50s ideologies described in the book could not be said to apply directly to the experiences of these couples. Overall, though, Ware appreciated May's interest in placing these 50s experiences in a chronology which included the 30s and 40s.

Sources to follow up on: Primary: Movies: "The Atomic Cafe"; "Niagara".

Secondary: Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (1976); Robert J. Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (1979); Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (1983); Ellen Peck and Judith Senderowitz, Pronatalism: The Myth of Mom and Apple Pie (1974); Ellen Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (1984); Leila Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939-1945 (1978); Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (1985).

Waste and Want

Fresh Kills 3, by the photographer Susan Wides (2000).

Title: Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Henry Holt, 1999).

Author: Susan Strasser, of the history department at the University of Delaware. She calls herself a "historian of American consumer culture" and is currently a Senior Resident Scholar at the Hagley Museum and Library’s Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society (at Delaware). Her other books include Never Done: A History of American Housework (1982); Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (1989); Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (1998); and Commodifying Everything: Relationships of the Market (2003).

Argument: Trash, which is a culturally defined category, has meant wildly different things to Americans from colonial times through today. Before about 1900, American households were "closed" systems: domestic objects were used and reused and split up into parts and used again, reflecting the scarcity of...everything...in the pre-industrial era. Strasser adopts Levi-Strauss' idea of "bricolage", writing that Americans who re-worked dresses and made soap out of fat and fed chickens with food waste were bricoleurs, playing with available materials in order to serve their needs. After the turn-of-the-century tipping point, however, Americans, aided by advertisers and marketers eager to sell products, became more and more accustomed to the convenience of disposal, beginning to see it as their right (convenience equalling freedom which equalled the American way). Trash disposal became the province of experts, and bricolage became the province of the poor. (There are a lot of small details in this book, which is rich in description, so the chapter summaries below may be shorter.)

Chapter-by-chapter:
Toward a History of Trashmaking: Here Strasser introduces the basic elements of her argument (see above), using anthropologists Mary Douglas, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Sidney Mintz.

One: The Stewardship of Objects: Nineteenth-century uses of old clothing, food waste, worn-out sheets, and packaging material, as recommended by household advice manuals such as Catherine Beecher's.

Two: Any Rags, Any Bones: Nineteenth-century "recycling" practices facilitated the "return of household wastes to manufacturers for use as raw materials" and were "inherent to production in some industries, central to the distribution of consumer goods, and an important habit of daily life" (72). Using the example of the rag industry, which gathered rags from householders to make paper, Strasser shows how one type of waste that we would now call "trash" formed a link in the early industrial economy. She also describes the relationships between rural households and peddlers, who would gather their rags in return for goods, and talks about the "recycling" trades in iron and bones.

Jacob Riis, Home of an Italian Ragpicker (1894): Ragpickers in the cities, especially when juvenile, were considered dangerous and corrupt (Strasser cites Charles Loring Brace on child ragpickers as an example).

Three: Trash and Reuse Transformed: During the transition period at the turn of the century between a culture of bricolage and one of consumerism, "new ways coexisted with old": people in the cities and those with money adopted packaged goods before poor country cousins; young people changed habits before old. Some cities began to take charge of refuse disposal, and with this separation came new class anxieties: middle-class people who were horrified by the idea of being "like" Riis' "Italian ragpickers" "learned to toss things in the trash" instead of reusing (113). Meanwhile, the Salvation Army and Goodwill began to take advantage of the new trends, offering to take the job of reusing trash off the hands of the individual householders (and do some good in the meantime). The first World War momentarily reversed upward trends in disposal, but the curve resumed at the cessation of hostilities.

Rather than being a radical requirement, Strasser argues, recycling is just a new version of the old "sorting" that people used to do with household waste.

Four: Having and Disposing in the New Consumer Culture: Strasser uses the evolution of the use of Kotex disposal "sanitary napkins" as an example of what advertisers had to deal with when attempting to persuade people to abandon old ways of reuse (she cites Roland Marchand's idea of the advertising man as the "town crier" of modernity). In the 1920s, she writes, attitudes attendant to the development of products such as Kotex "equated handy new inventions with ease and prosperity" (170). "Cleanliness" was a major selling point for paper products, and the idea of "technological obsolesence" came into play as part of a new "ethos of disposability" (173). Convenience in household products came associated with freedom and assurance - "an amalgam of luxury, comfort, and emancipation from worry" (184). Often, household products were advertised as being like "servants", harkening back to 19th-century ideals of genteel householdery.

Five: Making Do and Buying New in Hard Times: Depression-era attitudes toward disposal and consumerism were altered, but Strasser argues that although people tried to cut down on their buying, they were still inextricably intertwined in a culture of consumption: "few people made soap anymore; most bought clothing, and sewing was becoming a hobby...when hard times came, most younger people, at least, were thoroughly consumerist. Their versions of 'making do'...were framed by consumer concerns and consumer possibilities" (204). Two major consumer items - autos and refrigerators - even ceased being considered luxuries during this time period. (This chapter also cites several quilt patterns incorporating technological themes, like airplanes and electric fans...p 218.)

Six: Use It Up! Wear It Out! Get in the Scrap!: WWII-era scrap drives, though often considered exemplars of patriotic recycling, were actually, Strasser argues, not so much of a sacrifice for homeowners, and the industrial donations were actually far more cost-effective. Although some homefront rhetorics emphasized sacrifice, they also promised that when the war was over, good ol' consumer days would return again (as they did!) Roosevelt's Four Freedoms included "Freedom from Want", which promised that after the war, everybody would have a turkey in a refrigerator. Meanwhile, women's household activities were seen as another "front" in the war - by participating in scrap drives and rationing, women could be seen to be "supporting" their soldiers.

The awesome movie "Idiocracy" (2006), in which one of the signs of societal collapse is that humans are regularly buried in huge trash avalanches.

Seven: Good Riddance: Strasser wraps up the book with perhaps the most familiar part of the story: the expansion of waste in the postwar era. "New materials, especially plastics of all kinds, became the basis for a relationship to the material world that required consumers to buy things rather than make them and to throw things out rather than fix them...nobody made plastic at home, hardly anybody understood how it was made, and it usually could not be repaired" (267). Strasser sees Vance Packard's The Waste Makers (1960) as a harbinger of the environmental movement, one of the first social critiques of the waste culture. She ends the book with a discussion of "garbage" art (see below) and some ideas for future change in how Americans see waste: "We are not likely to revive the stewardship of objects and materials, formed in a bygone culture of handiwork. But perhaps new ideas of morality, utility, common sense, and the value of labor - based on the stewardship of the earth and of natural resources - can replace it" (293). Artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the unsalaried "artist in residence" of the NYC sanitation department, in one phase of her "Touch Sanitation" project (1978-80), which involved shaking hands with every member of the department.

Reviews: In Technology and Culture, JD Lindeberg wrote that while it's interesting to think about changing attitudes toward personal waste, industrial waste continues to outpace household waste at huge margins. Thus, he wrote, Strasser's analysis would appeal to both academics and those in the political world with the power to shift policy and therefore industrial practice: "Academics may focus on the detailed analyses of changing sociocultural attitudes toward waste. But professionals and policymakers will be struck by how current behaviors are clearly the outcome of the economic policies of the middle twentieth century. Successfully creating change in those behaviors will require economic policies no less profound in their effects." In the Business History Review, Timothy Spears particularly liked Strasser's discussion of bricolage, but wishes she'd extended it beyond the world of women's work into the more masculine realms (mending farm equipment, etc).

Vocab words: "nahptha".

Books to follow up on: Primary: Kevin Lynch, Wasting Away: An Exploration of Waste—What It Is, How It Happens, Why We Fear It, How to Do It Well (1990); Mary Lillian Patterson, How to Teach Thrift: A Manual for Teachers and Parents (1927).

Secondary: Jane Becker, Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940 (1998); Simon J. Bronner, ed., Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920 (1989); Faye Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (1983); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (1988); Stephen Gelber, "Do-it-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing, and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity", American Quarterly 49 (March 1997); Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Cultulre Abroad in the 1950s (1997); Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (1995); Claudia B Kidwell and Margaret C Christman, Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of Clothing in America (1974); Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (1994); Carl Husemoller Nightingale, On The Edge: A History of Poor Black Children and Their American Dreams (1993); Michiel Schwarz and Michael Thompson, Divided We Stand: Redefining Politics, Technology, and Social Choice (1990); Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (1979); Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (1998); William Tuttle, "Daddy's Gone to War": The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children (1993).

Trash art by German artist H.A. Schult (late 90s) gets displayed in traditionally exalted locales, such as this cathedral in Cologne, the Matterhorn, and the Great Wall of China.