150: David Nye's American Technological Sublime

In American Technological Sublime, David Nye investigates the history of the social construction of the sublime in America from about 1820 to the early 1990s.  Nye's American sublime is somewhat like 18th century European concepts of the sublime, which involve human apprehension of something so big, beautiful, and incomprehensible that the mind is seized with terror, awe, and pleasure all at once; these extremes dominate the human mind, so that the person transcends the material world and comes into contact with the divine.  However, while the European sublime was a category of experience accessible only to educated individuals in contact with nature or sacred architecture, the American sublime has distinctly populist, nationalist, and capitalist overtones.  As early as the 1830s, American travellers in the West were reporting on the sublimity of the natural landscape, while people in the presence of massive new technologies were experiencing a transcendence usually reserved for nature or high art, and revivalists were recommending sublime tourist sites like Niagara as places to get in touch with the divine.  The American sublime was thus a popular, communal experience rather than an elite individual one; it was associated with emotions of awe, pleasure and terror rather than worldly transcendence; it could involve feats of engineering as well as high art and natural beauty; and its ties to American technological transformations of the landscape meant that the experience could be incorporated into nationalist narratives (love of country) and commodified into landscapes of fantasy and pleasure (Disneyland).  As Nye argues, the American sublime is key to American cultural identity.

Although the chapters are roughly chronological, Nye is more interested in talking about sublimeS rather than THE sublime, so that differences of time, place, and personal experience only add to his discussion.  Technological sublimes include the railroad as a "dynamic sublime" that awed in its ability to unite, expand, and enrich the nation; bridges and skyscrapers as a "geometric sublime" that "appeared to dominate nature through elegant design and sheer bulk.... the triumph of reason in concrete form;" factories, electric power plants, and other manufactories as a new "mechanical sublime, which regulates the mind and technologically supersedes nature;" the electrified urban landscape as an accidental "electrical sublime" that dominated night, embodied the values of capitalism and "transformed the appearance of the world;" the atomic bomb as a new, more terrifying form of the dynamic sublime, and Vegas and Disneyland (with nods to Niagara and the Grand Canyon) as the "consumer sublime," commodified pleasure landscapes that provide the rush associated with dislocation from the world of work in simulation of the sublime.

Throughout, Nye traces the ways in which increased articulations between the sublime and mass American culture have led to a watering down of what was once a transcendent, otherworldly dislocation from reality, even as they make that experience accessible to more people.  While he argues that the sublime is at once an individual and collective experience, he also shows how top-down and structurally conditioned that experience has been.

125: Kenneth Foote's Shadowed Ground

In Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy, Kenneth Foote examines the treatment of spaces of violence and tragedy in the US to see how the relationship between private grief and larger national narratives is encoded and shaped by the landscape.  His (many) case studies include the Revolutionary and Civil Wars; the first slave arrival (in 1619), mass murders, political assassinations, violent labor and race riots, transportation accidents, fires, floods, and explosions; he argues that "the decision to render sites visible/ invisible reflects a deliberate choice regarding issues of meaning and identity."  Shadowed Ground thus contributes not just to the recovery of American history in the landscape, but to the exploration of the relationship between space and memory.

Foote argues that responses to tragic sites generally fit somewhere along this continuum, keeping in mind that the categories are not fixed:

99: Domosh & Seager's Putting Women in Place

In Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World, Mona Domosh and Joni Seager show that space and place are both gendered and integral to the construction of gender.  In providing an overview of feminist geographical scholarship (up to 2001), they argue that this gendering has historically (and is currently) integral to processes of segregation, dominance, and resistance, in places like work and home as well as in the actions of everyday life.  Further, they situate this discussion of gender and geography within both local urban historical geographies in Western Europe and the US AND a structural analysis of global gender issues.  Their book is divided into six parts:

Home: history and analysis of a space almost universally associated with women.  Focusing on England and the US form the 17th century on, they show how the emerging capitalist system separated the male world of production from the female world of reproduction, from the Victorian cult of domesticity to mid-century suburbia.  They then interrogate the raced and classed connections between notions of domesticity and turn-of-the-century social engineering projects aimed at "Americanizing" urban working-class and immigrant women and rural Native American women.

37: Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (round 2)

Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution argues that the ideology of the American Revolution was based on the usual combination of Enlightenment thought, religion, English common law, classical literature, but also on the "peculiar strain of anti-authoritarianism bred in the upheaval of the English Civil War."  Bailyn's critical intervention was that the Revolutionary generation were not a cabal of philosophical intelligentsia using Enlightenment principles to construct the ideal society; they were a bunch of real-world people operating within an ideology that had both British and American roots, and they overthrew British rule because this ideology led them to suspect a British conspiracy against liberty.

Bailyn comes to this conclusion by closely reading the pre-1776 pamphlets produced in the colonies regarding the "Anglo-American struggle" - political theory, history, polemics, sermons, correspondence, and poems - for the "assumptions, beliefs, and ideas - the articulated world view - that lay behind the manifest events at the time."  Rather than focus on "Enlightenment platitudes," he looks for what the leaders of the Revolution were "actually saying," and where their words and ideas had come from.  He calls his method "deeply contextualist," but it feels more like the myth and symbol approach of Henry Nash Smith or Leo Marx, where a popular text is read as though it contains clues to what the people were really thinking at the time.  And he comes up with a picture of pre-1776 ideology that mixes British and American ideas with American real-world experience: a growing consciousness that Americans could and should be free, a suspicion that the corrupt and despotic British Empire (especially the church of England) was plotting to take liberty away from all English-speaking people, and a Revolution designed to save America from corruption and tyranny and preserve the rights of liberty.

This worldview, and the Revolution and Constitution that came out of it, came out of English thought and developed in reaction to British policies, so the Revolution was not a radical break.  It was, however, the beginning of a country that was fundamentally different from England: English government had developed out of the accretions of history; America's would develop out of ideology, an amalgam of real-world experiences, ideas, philosophy, politics that both drew on its English heritage and was unique unto itself.

You can check out round 1 here.

34: Kaplan and Pease's Cultures of United States Imperialism

Cultures of United States Imperialism helped usher in the international turn in American Studies, and got AMS folks thinking about America's place in the world many years before 9/11 forced pop culture to come to terms with America as an empire, and not a particularly nice one, either.

In her introduction, Kaplan is straightforward: she argues that we cannot understand American culture without looking at the interconnections between internal and external colonization, because in America, empire-building and nation-building go hand-in-hand.  If Deloria argues that Indians are at the heart of American national identity, Kaplan takes that argument a step further and says that empire is at the heart of America; and unlike Deloria, who focuses on cultural play, Kaplan anchors her argument in the very real world of foreign relations, economics, and cultures of subjugating and subjugated peoples.  In other words, taking over other countries and colonizing them is part and parcel of what it means to be America, and it has been that way since the colonial era.

29: Joy Kasson's Buffalo Bill's Wild West

Buffalo Bill's Wild West is one of those cool pop culture books that simultaneously teaches you a ton about a cultural product and about the culture that produced it.  In this case, the product is the ever-evolving, politically-topical, travelling western variety show hosted by "Buffalo Bill" Cody around the turn of the last century; the culture that produced it is turn-of-the-century America, a world as uneasy about the conflict and exploitation in its past as it was about the growth of industrial capitalism in its midst.  Arguing that Buffalo Bill himself was among the first modern American celebrities, Kasson shows how his Wild West shows knit together celebrity, American history, and cultural memory into a new narrative of American national identity.

Kasson uses a lot of interdisciplinary hoopla to achieve her goal, but basically, her argument goes like this.  Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was enormously popular starting in the 1890s, and its producers constantly tweaked it to incorporate both audience feedback and topical stories, so we can safely consider it embedded enough in turn-of-the-century American culture to have both affected and reflected the mood of the times.  Further, the show presented itself as both authentic history and spectacle, and Buffalo Bill himself was both a real person and a widely-publicized invented celebrity.  By walking a very hazy line between fact and fiction, the show started an enduring link between American history and popular culture, where history becomes a spectacle created by the people for their own edutainment.  Conflicts, wars, even struggles with Native Americans get whitewashed; in the name of pleasure, even the bloodiest battle scenes end with Indians - yes, real Indians! - and Anglos reconciled to the applause of the audience at the end of the show.

And finally, from history as edutainment, it's but a few short steps to national identity as edutainment: to paraphrase my friend Jessica, we like the lies we tell ourselves; if we tell them enough, eventually we come to believe them.

I like this book because it is readable, but also because it still rings true today.  Have you been to Disneyland?  Seen Lincoln?

24: Laura Pulido's Black, Brown, Yellow and Left

Laura Pulido squeezes several agendas into this book.  As an LA activist who worked with an antiracist, anticapitalist group called the Labor/Community Strategy Center to organize a multiethnic left, she is interested in learning from the history and mechanics of previous multi-racial organizing attempts; she is also interested in fostering a class-based leftist politics among her readers.  As a scholar, she is fascinated by the sixties and frustrated that histories of radicalism in that period are either mostly white or centered around the Black Panther Party, so she wants to expand the history of racial/ethnic activism to incorporate more of LA's racial and ethnic groups; and she wants to complicate racism by breaking down the black white binary and investigating racial hierarchies and collaborations (or not) in the people she is studying.
 
Therefore, Black, Brown, Yellow and Left is part history of the Third World Left, part empirical study of what she calls "differential racism," and part analysis of the growth, development, and decline of a social movement.  Pulido accomplishes all of these goals via a comparative analysis of left-leaning activism among three racial/ethnic groups in LA in the late 1960s and early 1970s, using three organizations as stand-ins: the Black Panther Party for African Americans; East Wind, a Japanese American group, for Asian Americans; and CASA, a Chicano/a group, for Latino/as.

Although the details of each case make for good reading, her historical conclusions about the relationship between race/ethnicity, racism, and Left activism reveal the complexities of the Third World Left.  Her study of the Black Panther Party suggests that their two main concerns of self-defense and community service were directly related to African American racialization (as the 'Other' to whites, they were at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy and over-policed) and their class position as urban poor.  CASA, by contrast, focused on labor organizing and immigration issues reflected Chicano/as position as a 'problem minority': their racial status and particular historical experiences as immigrants and low-wage workers meant that they were a needed part of the economy, but only as subordinated and exploited workers.  And as a Japanese American group in a multiethnic, multi-class Asian American community, East Wind focused on issues of identity, community service, and solidarity work; their activities reflected their mixed economic position and their status as a 'middle minority.'

Though Pulido found enough connections among groups to indicate a relatively coherent Third World Left, she quickly discovered that these connections were rather thin.  All three organizations were interested in the connection between their own identity as a racial or ethnic 'nation' and anticolonial struggles worldwide, and all three were fighting racism and economic exploitation at home, but they were unsure how to work with other communities in LA.  This uncertainty had a lot to do with the complex racial hierarchies in LA at the time: African Americans, for instance, were at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but through the millitancy and visibility of the Black Panther Party they were at the top of the social movement hierarchy. Uncertain positioning, as well as uncertainty regarding the status of one's own group, made lasting coalitions difficult.

Pulido argues that despite a strong need for a multiethnic left today, the situation is much the same as it was in the 1960s and 1970s: strong ethnic groups with weak connections among them, and a weak Third World Left as a result.  Despite some issues with scope (using a single organization to stand in for all ethnic/racial organizing, for instance), Pulido's book provides a thoughtful analysis of the intersections between race and class in LA that may well be a useful guidebook for folks trying to build political capital today.

23: Edwin Layton's Revolt of the Engineers

Revolt of the Engineers lives in the depths of library storage, which is unfortunate because it's a rather interesting study of a failed social movement among early 20th-century engineers.  Also, it was written in 1971, and the political and ideological struggles of that era seem clearly to have influenced Layton's thinking.  And maybe it's just me, but I find reading about a social movement from one era through the eyes of another to be rather illuminating.

Layton argues that professionalization and progressive organizing efforts among engineers in the early 20th century may not have led to large, lasting social change either within the profession or in American society, but the engineers' efforts were still an important cross-pollination between technology and culture.

To support this claim, Layton traces a chronological history of the rise and fall of different professional engineering organizations and their relationship to the broader social reform movement in turn-of-the-century America.  One of his more entertaining examples is the career of Henry Gantt, whose appropriately-named Gantt charts are still in use today, at least among my undergrad Civil Engineering students.

Henry Gantt was a talented follower of Frederick Taylor, the guy who devised all those time and motion studies to make Ford's assembly lines faster and more efficient.  (Harry Bravermann and Tim Cresswell both do cool - and very different - treatments of Taylor and his impact.)  Like Taylor, Gantt thought scientific management was the best thing ever, and he developed his Gantt chart as a visual project management tool to help users maintain top-down scientific control over an entire process.  Also like Taylor, Gantt thought that scientific management principles could and should be applied in areas beyond the confines of business, especially government and education.  But Gantt, who liked to carefully chart out arms production and ship production processes in his office during WWI, went a step further.  With the right visualization tools (heh) and a firm commitment to scientific management principles, Gantt thought that engineers could potentially plan not just individual industries but the whole economy, from defense production, education, and government to automobile manufacturing, city development, and social services.  And because scientific management efficiently allocated resources and talent, letting the engineers run society would be perfectly efficiently and perfectly just.  Democracy and scientific management would finally become synonymous!

Now, the problem with this scheme, as Layton points out, is that it's not a democracy but a technocracy, where the engineers in their central planning offices get to design sociotechnical systems, but all citizens can do is conform to them.  Incidentally, this kind of thinking also plagued engineering's professional societies, where infighting over power and prestige kept engineers from making any serious progress toward social goals.  Layton concludes here, with the decline of a movement that could have had a huge impact on society, particularly during the Great Depression. 

Yet I think that if self-serving politics hindered engineers from effecting large-scale social reform or a mass seizure of political power, they helped them spread scientific management ideas in more conservative arenas like business, and manufacturing in particular.  Here, stripped of its revolutionary potential, scientific management could be used to further exploit the labor of assembly-line and sweatshop workers by speeding the pace of production and thus lowering per-unit labor costs.  Layton doesn't dwell on this particular legacy, but his frustration with his subjects' deflation of their movement is clear.  The implications for the time in which he was writing seem pretty clear, too.

12: Stephen Daniels' Fields of Vision

Fields of Vision is a book about the relationship between landscape imagery and national identity in England and the United States. This is not exactly a topic that excites me, though to his credit, Daniels does manage to make a bunch of 18th- and 19th-century landscape paintings a lot more interesting than I thought they were.  He also (thankfully) goes beyond painting to include a landscape architect, a printmaker, and a building.  And his theoretical argument, that over time, certain landscape imagery can become a repository for so many different people's interpretations of national identity that it becomes a symbol for the nation - well, that sounds cultural studies-y enough for me.

Daniels' first example, St. Paul's Cathedral, made the most sense to me.  After the Great Fire in 1666 destroyed an older cathedral, London commissioned Christopher Wren to design and build a new one.  Legend has it that when Wren was to place the first stone for the new cathedral in 1675, the laborer they sent out to find a stone came back with a piece of gravestone that was inscribed with a single word: RESURGAM, "I rise again."  This same word was written above the South transept of the rapidly-built new Cathedral along with a phoenix; in a mere 35 years, London, Christlike, had risen from the ashes in the form of St. Paul's.

Over the centuries, St. Paul's took on a variety of uses and meanings.  In 1789, the King went in State to St Paul's for a Thanksgiving service - the first official royal visit in 75 years - and the Cathedral and its surroundings were a blaze of lights; St. Paul's had been transformed into a symbol of monarchical power and English strength and solidarity in the wake of the French Revolution.  And throughout the 19th-century, as the British empire grew, panoramas from (and of) the Cathedral's dome situated it at the center of London and at the center of empire; it became a symbol of both British power abroad and Little England at home.

By World War II, St. Paul's was such a treasured symbolic landscape that Churchill ordered it to be saved at all costs; during the Blitz in 1940, while the rest of the Cathedral's neighborhood went up in flames, an Allied Watch of firefighters did indeed save it - they minimized the damage, anyway.  And the most famous image of the Blitz is a photograph published in the Daily Mail, which shows St. Paul's rising, phoenixlike, above the smoke.

Though he couldn't have made the comparison (this book was published in 1993), this beautiful image reminds me of another incredibly powerful landscape image - the photograph of the twin towers right before they fell.  This photograph, like that one, makes a strong case for the relationship between landscape imagery and national identity, both in the heart of the viewer and in the political and cultural ferment that developed in response to it.

9: Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (round 1)

Having just read James Miller's book on the 1960s, and  knowing that The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution was published in 1967, all I could think about while reading this book is what Bailyn thought about the social and political ferment all around him.  Was he hiding in an archive somewhere deep in the Harvard library system and researching the Revolution while his students were outside protesting in the streets?  Or was all that political unrest what drove him into the archives in the first place, and if that was the case, was he for social and political change, or against it?

Truthfully, I can't quite tell (though I can guess) what his position was, but I do think his research was driven by a desire to understand and explain the present.  Using close readings of some 400+ pamphlets published in the colonies between 1760 and 1776, Bailyn makes two major arguments about the American Revolution.  First, he argues that the Revolution was steeped in the intellectual, historical, and political traditions of Europe, and thus it was not as radical of a break with the past as we like to think.  Second, he argues that it was "ideological," or motivated by a desire to protect and extend a uniquely American worldview, and thus it was not as lofty and intellectual and idealistic as we like to think, either.

There are some obvious problems with Bailyn's method.  Most notably, he claims to want to recreate the world of the Revolutionary generation, but he does so primarily by reading political pamphlets, and of these, he really only focuses on those that supported the revolution because, as he says, no one cares about the losers.  And, judging by some of the truly amazing conspiracy theories he uncovers, this approach would be kind of like listening to either NPR or Rush Limbaugh and assuming they spoke to the worldview of most Americans (which, let's face it, they don't).

However, he also comes up with some really fascinating stuff.  He argues that the American Revolution was inspired by an Enlightenment belief in liberty after all (and not, as Charles Beard claimed, by class warfare) and by religious beliefs in American exceptionalism (with a nod to his former mentor, Perry Miller), but also by a strain of British oppositional thought that he dates to the English Civil War and the Commonwealth period.  Drawing on little-known (to us) British writers like Algernon Sidney, Henry Neville, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and Benjamin Hoadly, Bailyn shows that this oppositional strain had two goals: to hold up and protect the liberty and freedom of the individual, and to expose the corruption, decay, and abuses of power in the over-centralized British government.  He then traces these two goals to American pamphleteers Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Otis (among others) and argues that, through them, Americans became increasingly suspicious of a vast British conspiracy to reclaim the colonies and take away their liberties.  And what better reason to start a revolution than to disconnect your pure, virtuous, simple new homeland from an ugly, corrupt, tyrannical, decaying, conspiratorial imperial power BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE??! 

Yeah.  That's what I thought.

While the whole conspiracy angle might be a bit much, Bailyn's connection between these oppositional British thinkers and the American Revolution does have important implications for the 1960s (and for today, too.)  Once he's made the connection, he goes on to talk about how a democratic government works.  In his view, a democracy functions via the productive tension between regulatory institutions and a populace of active, informed individuals; by making our voices heard, we can constantly readjust the regulatory institutions so that they both respect our civil liberties and control for abuses.  It's like we are in a perpetual revolution.  If the people rise up in an angry, unthinking mob (or lapse into uninformed submission), however, the system ceases to function, because in either case the government becomes too powerful.  The book reads, to me anyway, as both a cautionary tale about our responsibilities as American citizens and a narrative of faith in the flexible, evolving democratic system that the Revolution set in motion.

You can check out round 2 here.

George Mariscal - Brown Eyed Children of the Sun

George Mariscal’s Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun responds to critiques of the Chicano Movement (the Movimiento) as a failed, regressively nationalist social movement by reconstructing it in terms of postmodern discourse.  Using Raymond Williams’ claim that ideology and material practice/ discourse are mutually constitutive, and Foucault’s claim that “overlapping ideologies and discourses produce figures, practices, and languages functioning under a generalized rubric,” Mariscal analyzes a variety of texts, including images, poetry, speeches, student essays, newspaper articles and writings by both English- and Spanish-speaking activists to “map the complex ideological field that was the Chicano Movement of the Viet Nam war era” in terms that he hopes will help 21^st century Chicano/a activists form their own context-dependent identities and social movements.  (23, 21)  Because he is interested in the relationship between discourse and ideology in the Movimiento and in constructing a Foucauldian “archaeology” rather than a chronological historical narrative, Mariscal refuses to develop a linear narrative or to reify the Chicano Movement around a single ideology, group, or even defining feature.   Instead, he analyzes primarily written and visual texts by both participants and contemporary observers  to complicate key movement concepts and symbols (or people) such as nationalism, race, Che Guevara, Cesar Chavez, Aztlan, and UCSD.  The end result of this discourse analysis is a conception of the Movimiento as a fragmented ideological fabric whose participants are themselves fragmented, multiple, and heterogeneous.