Toward a topography of national trauma: mapping the past onto the future of American nationalism

Since the inception of the United States, many of those who have spoken for and to the nation have struggled to define and defend a coherent American nationalism. This article proposes that one of the reasons for this lies in the fault lines inherent in the invented traditions that underpin American, as many other nationalisms. Determined by warfare and by the desire for land, and frequently defined in racial terms, they have undermined more than they have stabilized the nationalist structures they seek to support through what they have excluded from the national imaginary. In common with other settler nations, in fact arguably with most Western nations, America's nationalist narratives struggle to serve as cohesive foundation myths. They represent the lasting legacies of national trauma derived from the nation's violent colonial past and the severing of the imperial bond in the eighteenth century, chattel slavery, and the civil war it caused, and westward expansion and the imperative toward hemispheric control. Through the mapping of a topography of national trauma predicated on these national traditions and located within the tensions arising from warfare, land, and race, scholars can better comprehend the still frequently acrimonious debates over American nationalism that persist today.     

19世纪末20世纪初美国大众化杂志的发展

19世纪末20世纪初,美国大众化杂志迅速兴起和发展。大众化杂志有如下几个特点:迎合大众口味;内容贴近社会现实;价格低廉;有一个稳定增长的、数量较大的读者队伍。美国大众化杂志的兴起和发展,是当时美国社会政治经济状况决定的,并对20世纪初美国黑幕揭发运动的兴起和发展,以及20世纪初美国社会的变革和转型起了重要的促进作用。     

Performing national identities in everyday life: Popular motivations and national indifference in 19th-century Amsterdam

This article demonstrates how and when the nation—whether in the shape of concrete national symbols or as an abstract frame of reference—became relevant to ordinary people. It focuses on the experiences and activities of Amsterdam citizens in the second half of the 19th century. Central to the analysis is the apparent contradiction between ‘banal’ or ‘everyday nationalism’, in which nationalist symbols and rhetoric appeared to successfully reach their audience because of their omnipresence in daily life, and ‘national indifference’, as referring to the absence of national identification among the masses. It argues that in order to overcome the dichotomies between elites and masses and national and non-national performances, we should focus on the popular incentives for national identification, rather than on the ideological content and the (physical or symbolic) borders of the national community.     

Some Popular Superstitions of the Ancients

This article provides an introductory discussion of the ways in which popular perceptions of artworks, artists, and the creative process have generated a repertoire of recurring motifs. Sometimes reinforced by art historical research and documentary evidence and sometimes at variance with all such scholarship, the tropes of ‘artlore’ constitute a catalogue of persistent story types that spring from visual interpretation experienced within a shifting cultural context.