Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
1507 The name “America” appears on a map
1521, August 13 Mexico in America
1536, July 24 Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
1585 “Counterfeited according to the truth”
1607 Fear and love in the Virginia colony
1630 A city upon a hill
1643 A nearer neighbor to the Indians
1666, July 10 Anne Bradstreet
1670 The American jeremiad
1670 The stamp of God’s image
1673 The Jesuit relations
1683 Francis Daniel Pastorius
1692 The Salem witchcraft trials
1693–1694, March 4 Edward Taylor
1700 Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph
1722 Benjamin Franklin, The Silence Dogood Letters
1740 The Great Awakening
Late 1740s; 1814, September 13–14 Two national anthems
1765, December 23 Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur
1773, September Phillis Wheatley
1776 The Declaration of Independence
1784, June Charles Willson Peale
1787 James Madison, Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention
1787–1790 John Adams, Discourses on Davila
1791 Philip Freneau and The National Gazette
1796 Washington’s farewell address
1798 Mary Rowlandson and the Alien and Sedition Acts
1798 American gothic
1801, March 4 Jefferson’s first inaugural address
1804, January The matter of Haiti
1809 Cupola of the world
1819, February The Missouri crisis
1820, November 27 Landscape with birds
1821 Sequoyah, the Cherokee syllabary
1821, June 30 Junius Brutus Booth
1822 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the Ojibwe firefly, and Longfellow’s Hiawatha
1825, November Thomas Cole and the Hudson River school
1826, July 4 Songs of the republic
1826 Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales
1826; 1927 Transnational poetry
1827 Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon
1828 David Walker, Appeal, in Four Articles
1830, May 21 Jump Jim Crow
1831, March 5 The Cherokee Nation decision
1832, July 10 President Jackson’s bank veto
1835, January Democracy in America
1835 William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee
1835 The Sacred Harp
1836, February 23–March 6 The Alamo and Texas border writing
1836, February 28 Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
1837, August 15 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”
1838, July 15 “The Divinity School Address”
1838, September 3 The slave narrative
1841 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
1846, June James Russell Lowell’s Biglow Papers
1846, late July Henry David Thoreau
1850 The Scarlet Letter
1850, July 19 Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist Movement
1850, August 5 Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville
1851 Moby-Dick
1851 Uncle Tom’s Cabin
1852 Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance and utopian communities
1852, July 5 Frederick Douglass, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?”
1854 Maria Cummins and sentimental fiction
1855 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
1858 The Lincoln-Douglas debates
1859 The science of the Indian
1861 Emily Dickinson
1862, December 13 The journeys of Little Women
1865, March 4 Lincoln’s second inaugural address
1865 “Conditions of repose”
1869, March 4 Carl Schurz
1872, November 5 All men and women are created equal
1875 The Winchester Rifle
1876, January 6 Melville in the dark
1876, March 10 The art of telephony
1878 “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”
1879 John Muir and nature writing
1881, January 24 Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
1884 Mark Twain’s hairball
1884, July The Linotype machine
1884, November The Southwest imagined
1885 The problem of error
1885, July Limits to violence
1885, October Writing New Orleans
1888 The introduction of motion pictures
1889, August 28 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
1893 Chief Simon Pokagon and Native American literature
1895 Ida B. Wells, A Red Record
1896 Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life
1896, September 6 Queen Lili‘uokalani
1897, Memorial Day The Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Monument
1898, June 22 Literature and imperialism
1899; 1924 McTeague and Greed
1900 Henry Adams
1900 The Wizard of Oz
1900; 1905 Sister Carrie and The House of Mirth
1901 Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition
1901; 1903 The problem of the color line
1903, May 5 “The real American has not yet arrived”
1903 The invention of the blues
1903 One sees what one sees
1904, August 30 Henry James in America
1905, October 15 Little Nemo in Slumberland
1906, April 9 The Azusa Street revival
1906, April 18, 5:14 a.m. The San Francisco Earthquake
1911 “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”
1912, April 15 Lifeboats cut adrift
1912 The lure of impossible things
1912 Tarzan begins his reign
1913 A modernist moment
1915 D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation
1915 Robert Frost
1917 The philosopher and the millionaire
1920, August 10 Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues”
1921 Jean Toomer
1922 T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence
1923, October Chaplinesque
1924 F. O. Matthiessen meets Russell Cheney
1924, May 26 The Johnson-Reed Act and ethnic literature
1925 The Great Gatsby
1925, June Sinclair Lewis
1925, July The Scopes trial
1925, August 16 Dorothy Parker
1926 Fire!!
1926 Hardboiled
1926 The Book-of-the-Month Club
1927 Carl Sandburg and The American Songbag
1927, May 16 “Free to develop their faculties”
1928, April 8, Easter Sunday Dilsey Gibson goes to church
1928, Summer John Dos Passos
1928, November 18 The mouse that whistled
1930 “You’re swell!”
1930, March The Silent Enemy
1930, October Grant Wood’s American Gothic
1931, March 19 Nevada legalizes gambling
1932 Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters
1932 Arthur Miller
1932, April or May The River Rouge plant and industrial beauty
1932, Christmas Ned Cobb
1933 Baby Face is censored
1933, March FDR’s first Fireside Chat
1934, September Robert Penn Warren
1935 The Popular Front
1935 The skyscraper
1935, June 10 Alcoholics Anonymous
1935, October 10 Porgy and Bess
1936 Gone with the Wind and Absalom, Absalom!
1936, July 5 Two days in Harlem
1936, November 23 Life begins
1938 Superman
1938, May Jelly Roll Morton speaks
1939 Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit”
1939; 1981 Up from invisibility
1940 “No way like the American way”
1940–1944 Preston Sturges
1941 An insolent style
1941 Citizen Kane
1941 The word “multicultural”
1943 Hemingway’s paradise, Hemingway’s prose
1944 The second Bill of Rights
1945, February Bebop
1945, April 11 Thomas Pynchon and modern war
1945, August 6, 10:45 a.m. The atom bomb
1946, December 5 Integrating the military
1947, December 3 Tennessee Williams
1948 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics
1948 Saul Bellow
1949–1950 “The Birth of the Cool”
1950, November 28 “Damned busy painting”
1951 A poet among painters
1951 The Catcher in the Rye
1951 James Jones, From Here to Eternity
1951 A soft voice
1952, April 12 Elia Kazan and the blacklist in Hollywood
1952, June 10 C. L. R. James
1953, January 1 The song in country music
1954 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems
1955, August 11 “The self-respect of my people”
1955, September 21 A. J. Liebling and the Marciano-Moore fight
1955, October 7 A generation in miniature
1955, December Nabokov’s Lolita
1956, April 16 “Roll Over Beethoven”
1957 Dr. Seuss
1959 “Nobody’s perfect”
1960 Psycho
1960, January More than a game
1961, January 20 JFK’s inaugural address and Catch-22
1961, July 2 The author as advertisement
1962 Bob Dylan writes “Song to Woody”
1962 “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art”
1963, April “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
1964 Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead”
1964, October 27 “The last stand on Earth”
1965, September 11 The Council on Interracial Books for Children
1965, October The Autobiography of Malcolm X
1968 Norman Mailer
1968, March The illusory babels of language
1968, August 28 The plight of conservative literature
1969 Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems
1969, January 11 The first Asian Americans
1969, November 12 The eye of Vietnam
1970 Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker
1970; 1972 Linda Lovelace
1973 Loisaida literature
1973 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck
1975 Gayl Jones
1981, March 31 Toni Morrison
1982 Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story
1982 Wild Style
1982 Maya Lin’s wall
1982, November 8 Harriet Wilson
1985, April 24 Henry Roth
1987 Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey
1995 Philip Roth
2001 Twenty-first-century free verse
2003 Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing
2005, August 29 Hurricane Katrina
2008, November 4 Barack Obama
Contributors
Index
