On a September day in 1896, more than forty thousand people traveled by chartered railcars to a site fifteen miles north of Waco, Texas, where they prepared to watch a novel form of entertainment: the head-on collision of two locomotive trains. A sign in the newly built depot informed the visitors they had arrived in Crush, Texas, a name that managed to pay tribute to both the spectacular event and the man who had dreamed it up, William George Crush. This was not the first train wreck staged for spectators; William Crush was inspired by a similar event in Ohio...

William Dean Howells, in an 1888 editorial column for Harper’s Magazine, noted that four prestigious American periodicals—The Century, Scribner’s, the Atlantic Monthly, and his own Harper’s—had all simultaneously published new stories by Henry James. “The effect,” Howells writes, “was like an artist’s exhibition.” This “accidental massing” of James’s fiction, in other words, reminded Howells of a unique kind of public place, the museum or exhibit gallery: “one turned from one masterpiece to another,” viewing “a high perfection” on display in each one. Howells’s trope, comparing published fiction to a museum exhibit, was not in itself unusual. A century...

Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) gave new meaning and prominence to the word “culture.” “I shall not go so far as to say of Mr. Arnold that he invented it,” Henry James wrote of the word, “but he made it more definite than it had been before—he vivified it and lighted it up.”¹ Surely part of what “vivified” culture in the educated vernacular was Arnold’s pairing of the word with “anarchy” as its defining antonym. The red-flag urgency of “anarchy” made “culture” its cool and tranquil opposite, an antidote against social and political turmoil. Culture was conceived as...

In his Atlantic essay on the 1869 Boston theater season, “The New Taste in Theatricals,” Howells describes the actresses impersonating men in the popular comic plays called burlesques. Although “they were not like men, [they] were in most things as unlike women, and seemed creatures of a kind of alien sex, parodying both. It was certainly a shocking thing to look at them with their horrible prettiness, their archness in which was no charm, their grace which put to shame.”¹ For Howells, these cross-dressing performers were vivid proof of popular entertainment’s ability to deform even the most fundamental of human...

The birth of an American mass culture industry coincides with the “Long Death” of Native peoples’ sovereignty in the trans-Mississippi West. In 1871 the U.S. government halted the practice of making treaties with Native nations, closing down what had been an already circumscribed form of diplomatic recognition for tribal sovereignty. Diplomatic standing vanishes, while mediated representation explodes: in its new spaces of virtual existence, from newspaper photographs, dime novels, and Wild West shows to its apotheosis in the cinema, mass culture creates an expanding iconic life for Indians as they are steadily dispossessed of their lands and free lives.

Native...

In 1900, the debut issue of the Colored American Magazine featured an essay on Leo Gowongo, “A Magician of Note.” “He is a native of Antigua, B.W.I., with a mixture of Hindoo and Negro blood,” an editor explains, “a young man of pleasing appearance, with piercing eyes, and whose every action shows energy and intelligence.”¹ Readers are invited to assess this pleasing appearance for themselves: the article includes four photographs of Gowongo performing in his tailored black tuxedo. The evident pleasure the Colored American Magazine editors take in Gowongo’s polished professionalism may well reflect the importance the black elite invested...

Edith Wharton loved the sensation of speed. In The Custom of the Country, when Wharton writes of the “rush of physical joy” that comes from flying in an open car at twilight through the wintry boulevards of Central Park, the passage bespeaks her infatuation with motorcars and their mechanical power.¹ For Wharton, local motor flights and transatlantic travel were fundamental conditions of living. Henry James always pictured her “wound up and going”; in alarm and bemusement his letters define her through “her dazzling, her incessant braveries of far excursionism.”² Wharton loved speed, almost as much as she loved stillness—the...

John Dewey believed that art offers access to the real, but he was not prepared to give pride of place to realism. In 1890, at the height of the debates on literary realism, he professed to be agnostic: “We hear much, on this side and that, of realism. Well, we may let realism go, but we cannot let go reality. The importance and endurance of poetry, as of all art, are in its hold upon reality.” Dewey was persuaded that art had “outrun the slower step of reflective thought” in its ability to track the pace and intensity of modern...

In William Dean Howells’s novel A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), a literary editor and his wife leave the New York town house of a bright young woman and immediately witness a policeman grappling in the street with a female drunkard. The editor, stricken, asks how the two women can “really belong to the same system of things.”¹ In a 1904 fictional film by the Biograph Company, Photographing a Female Crook, two policemen wrestle a woman into place for a mug shot. As the camera moves in for a closer view, the woman distorts her face into a grotesque expression...