A new literary history of America

1507, the name "America" appears on a map / Toby Lester

1521, Mexico in America / Kirsten Silva Gruesz

1536, 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, Anne Bradstreet / Wai Chee Dimock

1670, The American jeremiad / Emory Elliott ; 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

1693-1694, 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

Late

1740s 1814, Two national anthems / John Picker

1765, Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur / Leo Damrosch

1773, Phillis Wheatley / Rafia Zafar

1776, The Declaration of Independence / Frank Kelleter

1784, 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 / Jeffrey 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

1804, The matter of Haiti / Kaiama Glover

1809, Cupola of the world / Judith Richardson

1819, The Missouri crisis / John Stauffer

1820, Landscape with birds / Christoph Irmscher

1821, Sequoyah, the Cherokee syllabary / Lisa Brooks ; Junius Brutus Booth / Coppélia Kahn

1822, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the Ojibwe firefly, and Longfellow's "Hiawatha" / Davie Treuer

1825, Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School / Alan Wallach

1826, Songs of the republic / Steve Erickson ; Cooper's Leatherstocking tales / Richard Hutson

1826; 1927 Transnational poetry / Stephen Burt

1827, Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon / Terryl L. Givens

1828, David Walker, Appeal, in Four Articles" / Tommie Shelby

1830, Jump Jim Crow / W.T. Lhamon, Jr.

1831, The Cherokee Nation decision / Philip Deloria

1832, President Jackson's bank veto / Dan Feller

1835, Democracy in America / Ted Widmer ; William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee / Jeffrey Johnson ; The Sacred harp / Sean Wilentz

1836, The Alamo and Texas border writing / Norma E. Cantú ; Richard Henry Dana, Jr. / Kirsten Silva Gruesz

1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar / James Conant

1838, "The Divinity School Address" / Herwig Friedl ; The slave narrative / Caille Millner

1841, "The murders in the Rue Morgue" / Robert Clark

1846, James Russell Lowell's "Biglow papers" / Shelley Streeby ; Henry David Thoreau / Jonathan Arac

1850, The Scarlet letter / Bharati Mukherjee ; Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist Movement / Lawrence Buell; Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville / Clark Blaise

1851, Moby-Dick / Greil Marcus ; Uncle Tom's Cabin / Beverly Lowry

1852, Hawthorne's "Blithedale romance" and utopian communities / Winifried Fluck ; Frederick Douglass, "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" / Liam Kennedy

1854, 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, The journeys of Little women / Shirley Samuels

1865, Lincoln's second inaugural address / Ted Widmer ; "Conditions of repose" / Robin Kelsey

1869, Carl Schurz / Michael Boyden

1872, All men and women are created equal / Laura Wexler

1875, The Winchester rifle / Merritt Roe Smith

1876, Melville in the dark / Kenneth W. Warren ; The art of telephony / Avital Ronell

1878, "How to make our ideas clear" / Christopher Hookway

1879, John Muir and nature writing / Scott Slovic

1881, Henry James, Portait of a lady / Alide Cagidemetrio

1884, Mark Twain's hairball / Ishmael Reed ; The linotype machine / Lisa Gitelman ; The Southwest imagined / Leah Dilworth

1885, The problem of error / James Conant ; Limits to violence / James Dawes ; Writing New Orleans / Andrei Codrescu

1888, The introduction of motion pictures / Jonathan Lethem

1889, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court / Yael Schacher

1893, Chief Simon Pokagon and Native American literatuer / David Treuer

1895 / Ida B. Wells, A red record / Jacqueline Goldsby

1896, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of lowly life / Judith Jackson Fossett ; Queen Lili'uokalani / Rob Wilson

1897, The Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Monument / Richard Powers

1898, Literature and imperialism / Amy Kaplan

1899; 1924, McTeague and Greed / Gilberto Perez

1900, Henry Adams / T.J. Jackson Lears ; The Wizard of Oz / Gerald Early ; 1900; 1905, Sister Carrie and The house of mirth / Farah Jasmine Griffin

1901, Charles W. Chesnutt, The marrow of tradition / John Edgar Wideman

1901; 1903, The problem of the color line / Arnold Rampersad

1903, "The real American has not yet arrived" / Aviva Taubenfeld ; The invention of the blues / Luc Sante ; One sees what one sees / Daniel Albright

1904, Henry James in America / Ross Posnock

1905, Little Nemo in Slumberland / Kerry Roeder ; 1906, The Azusa Street revival / RJ Smith ; The San Francisco Earthquake / Kathleen Moran

1911, "Alexander's Ragtime Band" / Philip Furia

1912, Lifeboats cut adrift / Alan Ackerman ; The lure of impossible things / Heather Love ; Tarzan begins his reign / Gerald Early

1913, A modernist moment / Bonnie Costello

1915, D.W. Griffith, The birth of a nation / Richard Schickel ; Robert Frost / Christian Wiman

1917, The philosopher and the millionaire / Richard J. Bernstein

1920, Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" / Daphne A. Brooks

1921, Jean Toomer / Elizabeth Alexander

1922, T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence / Anita Patterson

1923, Chaplinesque / David Thomson

1942, F.O. Matthiessen meets Russell Cheney / Robert Polito ; The Johnson-Reed Act and ethnic literature / Yael Schacher

1925, The great Gatsby / Lan Tran ; Sinclair Lewis / Jeffrey Ferguson ; The Scopes trial / Michael Kazin ; Dorothy Parker / Catherine Keyser

1926, Fire! / Carla Kaplan ; Hardboiled / Walter Mosley ; The Book-of-the-Month Club / Joan Shelly Rubin

1927, Carl Sandburg and The American songbag / Paul Muldoon ; "Free to develop their faculties" / Jeffrey Rosen

1928, Dilsey Gibson goes to church / Werner Sollors ; John Dos Passos / Phoebe Kosman ; The mouse that whistled / Karal Ann Marling

1930, "You're swell!" / Robert Gottlieb ; The silent enemy / Micah Treuer ; Grant Wood's American gothic / Sarah Vowell

1931, Nevada legalizes gambling / David Thomson

1932, Edmund Wilson, The American jitters / Anthony Grafton ; Arthur Miller / Andrea Most

1932, The River Rouge plant and industrial beauty / John M. Staudenmaier, S.J. ; Ned Cobb / Robert Cantwell

1933, Baby Face is censored / Stephanie Zacharek ; FDR's first Fireside Chat / Paula Rabinowitz

1934, Robert Penn Warren / Howell Raines

1935, The Popular Front / Angela Miller ; The skyscraper / Sarah Whiting ; Alcoholics Anonymous / Michael Tolkin ; Porgy and Bess / John Rockwell

1936, Gone with the wind and Absalom, Absalom! / Carolyn Porter ; Two days in Harlem / Adam Bradley ; Life begins / Michael Lesy

1938, Superman / Douglas Wolk ; Jelly Roll Morton speaks / Marybeth Hamilton

1939, Billie Holiday, "Strange Fruit" / Robert O'Meally

1939; 1981, Up from invisibility / Josef Jařab

1940, "No way like the American way" / Erika Doss

1940-1944, Preston Sturges / Douglas McGrath

1941, An insolent style / Carrie Tirado Bramen ; Citizen Kane / Joseph McBride ; The word "multicultural" / Werner Sollors

1943, Hemmingway's paradise, Hemingway's prose / Keith Taylor

1944, The second Bill of Rights / Cass R. Sunstein

1945, Bebop / Ingrid Monson ; Thomas Pynchon and modern war / Glenda Carpio ; The atom bomb / Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi

1946, Integrating the military / Gerald Early

1947, Tennessee Williams / Camille Paglia

1948, Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics / David A. Mindell ; Saul Bellow / Ruth Wisse

1949-1950, "The birth of the cool" / Ted Gioia

1950, "Damned busy painting" / T.J. Clark

1951, A poet among painters / Mark Ford ; The catcher in the rye / Gish Jen ; James Jones, From here to eternity / Lindsay Waters ; A soft voice / M. Lynn Weiss

1952, Elia Kazan and the blacklist in Hollywood / Michael Ventura ; C.L.R. James / Donald E. Pease

1953, The song in country music / Dave Hickey

1954, Wallace Stevens, Collected poems / Helen Vendler

1955, "The self-respect of my people" / Monica L. Miller ; A.J. Liebling and the Marciano-Moore fight / Carlo Rotella ; A generation in miniature / Richard Cándida Smith ; Nabokov's Lolita / Stephen Schiff

1956, "Roll Over Beethoven" / James Miller

1957, Dr. Seuss / Philip Nel

1959, "Nobody's perfect" / William J. Mann

1960, "Psycho" / William Beard ; More than a game / Michael MacCambridge

196 1, JFK's inaugural address and Catch-22 / Charles Taylor ; The author as advertisement / David Thomson

1962, Bob Dylan writes "Song to Woody" / Joshua Clover ; "White elephant art vs. termite art" / Howard Hampton

1963, "Letter from Birmingham Jail" / George Hutchinson

1964, Robert Lowell, "For the Union Dead" / Peter Sacks ; "The last stand on earth" / Gary Kamiya

1965, The Council on Interracial Books for Children / Dianne Johnson ; The autobiography of Malcolm X / David Bradley

1968, Norman Mailer / Mary Gaitskill ; The illusory babels of language / Hal Foster ; The plight of conservative literature / Michael Kimmage

1969, Eilzabeth Bishop, Complete poems / Laura Quinney ; The first Asian Americans / Hua Hsu ; The eye of Vietnam / Thi Phuong-Lan Bui

1970, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker / Cheryl A. Wall

1970; 1972, Linda Lovelace / Ann Marlowe

1973, Loisaida literature / Frances R. Aparicio ; Adrienne Rich, Diving into the wreck / Maureen N. McLane

1975, Gayl Jones / Robert O'Meally

1981, Toni Morrison / Farah Jasmine Griffin

1982, Edmund White, A boy's own story / Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum ; Wild style / Hua Hsu ; Maya Lin's wall / Anne M. Wagner ; Harriet Wilson / Saidiya V. Hartman

1985, 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 / Stephen Burt

2003, Richard Powers, The time of our singing / Greil Marcus

2005, Hurricane Katrina / Greil Marcus & Werner Sollors

2008, Barack Obama / Kara Walker.