Timeline

Complete Table of Contents

★
Introduction
Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors
★
1507
The name “America” appears on a map
Toby Lester
★
1521, August 13
Mexico in America
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
★
1536, July 24
Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
Ilan Stavans
★
1585
“Counterfeited according to the truth”
Michael Gaudio
★
1607
Fear and love in the Virginia colony
Adam Goodheart
★
1630
A city upon a hill
Elizabeth Winthrop
★
1643
A nearer neighbor to the Indians
Ted Widmer
★
1666, July 10
Anne Bradstreet
Wai Chee Dimock
★
1670
The American jeremiad
Emory Elliott
★
1670
The stamp of God’s image
Jason D. LaFountain
★
1673
The Jesuit relations
Laurent Dubois
★
1683
Francis Daniel Pastorius
Alfred L. Brophy
★
1692
The Salem witchcraft trials
Susan Castillo
★
1693–94, March 4
Edward Taylor
Werner Sollors
★
1700
Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph
David Blight
★
1722
Benjamin Franklin, The Silence Dogood Letters
Joyce E. Chaplin
★
1740
The Great Awakening
Joanne van der Woude
1740s, September 13-14 1814, Yankee Doodle goes to town; Francis Scott Key writes The Star-Spangled Banner
★
1765, December 23
Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur
Leo Damrosch
★
1773, September
Phillis Wheatley
Rafia Zafar
★
1776
The Declaration of Independence
Frank Kelleter
★
1784, June
Charles Willson Peale
Michael Leja
★
1787
James Madison, Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention
Mitchell Meltzer
★
1787–1790
John Adams, Discourses on Davila
John Diggins
★
1791
Philip Freneau and The National Gazette
Jefrey L. Pasley
★
1796
Washington’s farewell address
François Furstenberg
★
1798
Mary Rowlandson and the Alien and Sedition Acts
Nancy Armstrong
★
1798
American gothic
Marc Amfreville
★
1801, March 4
Jefferson’s first inaugural address
Jan Ellen Lewis
★
1804, January
The matter of Haiti
Kaiama Glover
★
1809
Cupola of the world
Judith Richardson
★
1819
The Missouri crisis
John Stauffer
★
1820, November 27
Landscape with birds
Christoph Irmscher
★
1821
Sequoyah, the Cherokee syllabary
Lisa Brooks
★
1821, June 30
Junius Brutus Booth
Coppelia Kahn
★
1822
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the Ojibwe firefly, and Longfellow’s Hiawatha
David Treuer
★
1825, November
Thomas Cole and the Hudson River
Alan Wallach
★
1826, July 4
Songs of the republic
Steve Erickson
★
1826
Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales
Richard Hutson
★
1826; 1927
Transnational poetry
Stephanie Burt
★
1827
Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon
Terryl L. Givens
★
1828
David Walker, Appeal, in Four Articles
Tommie Shelby
★
1830, May 21
Jump Jim Crow
W. T. Lhamon, Jr.
★
1831, March 5
The Cherokee Nation decision
Philip Deloria
★
1832, July 10
President Jackson’s bank veto
Dan Feller
★
1835, January
Democracy in America
Ted Widmer
★
1835
William Gilmore Simms, The Yemasseee
Jefrey Johnson
★
1835
The Sacred Harp
Sean Wilentz
★
1836, February 23–March 6
The Alamo and Texas border writing
Norma E. Cantú
★
1836, February 28
Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
Kirsten Silva Gruesz
★
1837, August 31
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”
James Conant
★
1838, July 15
“The Divinity School Address”
Herwig Friedl
★
1838, September 3
The slave narrative
Caille Millner
★
1841
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
Robert Clark
★
1846, June
James Russell Lowell’s Biglow Papers
Shelley Streeby
★
1846, late July
Henry David Thoreau
Jonathan Arac
★
1850
The Scarlet Letter
Bharati Mukherje
★
1850, July 19
Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist Movement
Lawrence Buell
★
1850, August 5
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville
Clark Blaise
1851, Moby-Dick
★
1851
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Beverly Lowry
★
1852
Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance and utopian communities
Winfried Fluck
★
1852, July 5
Frederick Douglass, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?”
Liam Kennedy
★
1854, March
Maria Cummins and sentimental fiction
Cindy Weinstein
★
1855
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Angus Fletcher
★
1858
The Lincoln-Douglas debates
Michael T. Gilmore
★
1859
The science of the Indian
Scott Richard Lyons
★
1861
Emily Dickinson
Susan Stewart
★
1862, December 13
The journeys of Little Women
Shirley Samuels
★
1865, March 4
Lincoln’s second inaugural address
Ted Widmer
★
1865
“Conditions of repose”
Robin Kelsey
★
1869, March 4
Carl Schurz
Michael Boyden
★
1872, November 5
All men and women are created equal
Laura Wexler
★
1875
The Winchester Rifle
Merritt Roe Smith
★
1876, January 6
Melville in the dark
Kenneth W. Warren
★
1876, March 10
The art of telephony
Avital Ronell
★
1878
“How to Make Our Ideas Clear”
Christopher Hookway
★
1879
John Muir and nature writing
Scott Slovic
★
1881, January 24
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
Alide Cagidemetrio
★
1884
Mark Twain’s hairball
Ishmael Reed
★
1884, July
The Linotype machine
Lisa Gitelman
★
1884, November
The Southwest imagined
Leah Dilworth
★
1885
The problem of error
James Conant
★
1885, July
Limits to violence
James Dawes
★
1885, October
Writing New Orleans
Andrei Codrescu
1888, The introduction of motion pictures
★
1889, August 28
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Yael Schacher
★
1893
Chief Simon Pokagon and Native American literature
David Treuer
★
1895
Ida B. Wells, A Red Record
Jacqueline Goldsby
★
1896
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life
Judith Jackson Fossett
★
1896, September 6
Queen Lili‘uokalani
Rob Wilson
★
1897, Memorial Day
The Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Monument
Richard Powers
★
1898, June 22
Literature and imperialism
Amy Kaplan
★
1899; 1924
McTeague and Greed
Gilberto Perez
★
1900
Henry Adams
T. J. Jackson Lears
★
1900
The Wizard of Oz
Gerald Early
★
1900; 1905
Sister Carrie and The House of Mirth
Farah Jasmine Grifin
★
1901
Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition
John Edgar Wideman
1901-1903, The problem of the color line
★
1903, May 5
“The real American has not yet arrived”
Aviva Taubenfeld
★
1903
The invention of the blues
Luc Sante
★
1903
One sees what one sees
Daniel Albright
★
1904, August 30
Henry James in America
Ross Posnock
★
1905, October 15
Little Nemo in Slumberland
Katherine Roeder
★
1906, April 9
The Azusa Street revival
R. J. Smith
★
1906, April 18 , 5:14 a.m.
The San Francisco Earthquake
Kathleen Moran
★
1911
“Alexander’s Ragtime Band”
Philip Furia
★
1912, April 15
Lifeboats cut adrift
Alan Ackerman
★
1912
The lure of impossible things
Heather Love
★
1912
Tarzan begins his reign
Gerald Early
★
1913
A modernist moment
Bonnie Costello
★
1915
D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation
Richard Schickel
★
1915
Robert Frost
Christian Wiman
★
1917
The philosopher and the millionaire
Richard J. Bernstein
★
1920, August 10
Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues”
Daphne A. Brooks
★
1921
Jean Toomer
Elizabeth Alexander
★
1922
T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence
Anita Patterson
October 1923, Chaplinesque
★
1924
F. O. Matthiessen meets Russell Cheney
Robert Polito
★
1924, May 26
The Johnson-Reed Act and ethnic literature
Yael Schacher
★
1925
The Great Gatsby
Lan Tran
★
1925, June
Sinclair Lewis
Jefrey Ferguson
★
1925, July
The Scopes trial
Michael Kazin
★
1925, August 16
Dorothy Parker
Catherine Keyser
★
1926
Fire!!
Carla Kaplan
★
1926
Hardboiled
Walter Mosley
★
1926
The Book-of-the-Month Club
Joan Shelley Rubin
★
1927
Carl Sandburg and The American Songbag
Paul Muldoon
★
1927, May 16
“Free to develop their faculties”
Jefrey Rosen
★
1928, April 8, Easter Sunday
Dilsey Gibson goes to church
Werner Sollors
★
1928, Summer
John Dos Passos
Phoebe Kosman
★
1928, November 18
The mouse that whistled
Karal Ann Marling
★
1930
“You're swell!”
Robert Gottlieb
★
1930, March
The Silent Enemy
Micah Treuer
October 1930, Grant Wood's American Gothic
★
1931, March 19
Nevada legalizes gambling
David Thomson
★
1932
Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters
Anthony Grafton
★
1932
Arthur Miller
Andrea Most
★
1932, April or May
The River Rouge plant and industrial beauty
John M. Staudenmaier, S.J.
★
1932, Christmas
Ned Cobb
Robert Cantwell
★
1933
Baby Face is censored
Stephanie Zacharek
★
1933, March
FDR’s first Fireside Chat
Paula Rabinowitz
★
1934, September
Robert Penn Warren
Howell Raines
★
1935
The Popular Front
Angela Miller
★
1935
The skyscraper
Sarah Whiting
★
1935, June 10
Alcoholics Anonymous
Michael Tolkin
★
1935, October 10
Porgy and Bess
John Rockwell
1936, Gone with the Wind and Absalom, Absalom!
★
1936, July 5
Two days in Harlem
Adam Bradley
★
1936, November 23
Life begins
Michael Lesy
★
1938
Superman
Douglas Wolk
★
1938, May
Jelly Roll Morton speaks
Marybeth Hamilton
★
1939
Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit”
Robert O’Meally
★
1939; 1981
Up from invisibility
Josef Jarab
★
1940
“No way like the American way”
Erika Doss
★
1940–1944
Preston Sturges
Douglas McGrath
★
1941
An insolent style
Carrie Tirado Bramen
★
1941
Citizen Kane
Joseph McBride
★
1941
The word “multicultural”
Werner Sollors
★
1943
Hemingway’s paradise, Hemingway’s prose
Keith Taylor
★
1944
The second Bill of Rights
Cass R. Sunstein
★
1945, February
Bebop
Ingrid Monson
★
1945, April 11
Thomas Pynchon and modern war
Glenda Carpio
★
1945, August 6, 10:45 a.m.
The atom bomb
Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi
★
1946, December 5
Integrating the military
Gerald Early
December 3 1947, Tennessee Williams
★
1948
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics
David A. Mindell
★
1948
Saul Bellow
Ruth Wisse
★
1949–1950
“Birth of the Cool”
Ted Gioia
★
1950, November 28
“Damned busy painting”
T. J. Clark
★
1951
A poet among painters
Mark Ford
1951, The Catcher in the Rye
★
1951
James Jones, From Here to Eternity
Lindsay Waters
★
1951
A soft voice
M. Lynn Weis
★
1952, April 12
Elia Kazan and the blacklist in Hollywood
Michael Ventura
★
1952, June 10
C. L. R. James
Donald E. Pease
★
1953, January 1
The song in country music
Dave Hickey
★
1954
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems
Helen Vendler
★
1955, August 11
“The self-respect of my people”
Monica Miller
★
1955, September 21
A. J. Liebling and the Marciano-Moore fight
Carlo Rotella
★
1955, October 7
A generation in miniature
Richard Cándida Smith
★
1955, December
Nabokov’s Lolita
Stephen Schiff
★
1956, April 16
“Roll Over Beethoven”
James Miller
★
1957
Dr. Seuss
Philip Nel
★
1959
“Nobody’s perfect”
William J. Mann
★
1960
Psycho
William Beard
★
1960, January
More than a game
Michael MacCambridge
★
1961, January 20
JFK’s inaugural address and Catch-22
Charles Taylor
★
1961, July 2
The author as advertisement
David Thomson
★
1962
Bob Dylan writes “Song to Woody”
Joshua Clover
★
1962
“White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art”
Howard Hampton
★
1963, April
“Letter from Birmingham Jail”
George Hutchinson
★
1964
Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead”
Peter Sacks
October 27 1964, The last stand on Earth
★
1965, September 11
The Council on Interracial Books for Children
Dianne Johnson
★
1965, October
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
David Bradley
★
1968
Norman Mailer
Mary Gaitskill
★
1968, March
The illusory babels of language
Hal Foster
★
1968, August 28
The plight of conservative literature
Michael Kimage
★
1969
Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems
Laura Quinney
★
1969, January 11
The first Asian Americans
Hua Hsu
★
1969, November 12
The eye of Vietnam
Thi Phuong-Lan Bui
★
1970
Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker
Cheryl A. Wall
1970, 1972, Linda Lovelace
★
1972
Loisaida literature
Frances R. Aparicio
★
1973
Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck
Maureen N. McLane
★
1975
Gayl Jones
Robert O’Meally
★
1981, March 31
Toni Morrison
Farah Jasmine Grifin
★
1982
Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
★
1982
Wild Style
Hua Hsu
★
1982
Maya Lin’s wall
Anne Wagner
★
1982, November 8
Harriet Wilson
Saidiya V. Hartman
★
1985, April 24
Henry Roth
Mario Materassi
★
1987
Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey
Seo-Young Chu
★
1995
Philip Roth
Hana Wirth-Nesher
★
2001
Twenty-first-century free verse
Stephanie Burt
★
2003
Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing
Greil Marcus
2005, August 29, Hurricane Katrina
★
2008, November 4
Barack Obama
Kara Walker