1507: the name "America" appears on map / Toby Lester --
1521, August 13: Mexico in America / Kirsten Silva Gruesz --
1536, July 24: Alvar Nauanez 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 Witch Trials / Susan Castillo --
1693-1694, March 4: Edward Taylor / Werner Sollors --
1700: Samuel Sewall, the Selling Joseph / David Blight --
1722: Benjamin Franklin, The Silence Dogood Letters / Joyce E. Chaplin --
1740: the great awakening / Joanne Van Der Woulde --
Late 1740s; 1814, September 13-14: two national anthems / John Picker --
1765:, December 23: Michel-Gullaume Jean de Craevecoeur / Leo Damrosch --
1773, September: Phillis Wheatley / Rafia Zafar --
1776: the Declaration of Independence --
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 / Jeffrey L. Pasley --
1796: Washington's farewell address / Fran?cois Furstenberg --
1798: Mary Rowlandson and the Alien and Sedition Acts / Nancy Armstrong --
1798: American gothic / Marc Amfreville --
1801, March 4: Jefferson's first inaugural addresss/ Jan Ellen Lewis --
1804, January: the matter of Haiti / Kaiama Glover --
1809: cupola of the world / Judith Richardson --
1819, February: 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 --
1822: Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the Ojibwe firefly, and Longfellow's Hiawatha --
1825, November: Thomas Cole and the Hudson River school / Alan Wallach --
1826, July 4: songs of the republic / Steve Erickson --
1826: Cooper's Leatherstocking tales / Richard Hutson --
1826; 1927: transnational poetry / Stephen Burt --
1827: Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon / Terry L. Givens --
1828: David Walker, Appeal, in Four Articles / Tommie Shelby --
1830, May 21: Jump Jim Crow / W.T. Hamon, 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 Yemassee / Jeffrey Johnson --
1835: the Sacred Harp / Sean Wilentz --
1836, February 23-March 6: the Alamo and Texas border writing / Norma E. Cantau --
1836, February 28: Richard Henry Dana, Jr. / Kirsten Silva Gruesz --
1837, August 15: 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 Mukherjee --
1850, July 19: Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist Movement / Lawrence Buell --
1850, August 5: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville / Clark Blaise --
1851: Moby-Dick / Greil Marcus --
1851: Uncle Tom's Cabin / Beverly Lowry --
1852: Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance and utopian communities / Winfried Fluck --
1852, July 5: Frederick Douglas, "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 --
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 --
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 --
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 / Jonathan Lethem --
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; 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, May 5: "the real American has not yet arrived" / Aviva Taubenfeld --
1903: the invention of the blues / Luc Sante --
1904, August 30: Henry James in America / Ross Posnock --
1905, October 15: Little Nemo in Slumberland --
1906, April 9: the Azusa Street revival / RJ 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 --
1921: Jean Toomer / Elizabeth Alexander --
1922: T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence / Anita Patterson --
1923, October: chaplinesque / David Thomson --
1924: F.O. Mattiessen 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 / Jeffrey Ferguson --
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" / Jeffrey 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 --
1930, October: Grant Wood's American Gothic / Sarah Vowell --
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 Rogue 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! / Carolyn Porter --
1936, July 5: two days in Harlem / Adam Bradley --
1936, November 23: Life begins / Michael Lesy --
1938, May: Jelly Roll Morton speaks / Marybeth Hamilton --
1939: Billie Holiday, "Strange Fruit" / Robert O'Meally --
1939; 1981: up from invisibility / Josef Jaerab --
1940: "no way like the American way" / Erika Doss --
1940-1944: Preston Sturges --
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.
1947, December 3: Tennessee Williams / Camille Paglia --
1948: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics / David A. Mindell --
1949-1950: "the 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 / Gish Jen --
1951: James Jones, From Here to Eternity / Lindsay Waters --
1951: a soft voice / M. Lynn Weiss --
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, September 21: A.J. Liebling and the Marciano-Moore fight / Carlo Rotella --
1955, October 7: a generation in miniature / Richard Candida 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 --
1963, April: "Letter from Birmingham Jail" / George Hutchinson --
1964: Robert Lowell, "for the union dead" / Peter Sacks --
1964, October 27: "the last stand on earth" / Gary Kamiya --
1965, September 11: the Council on Interracial Books for Children / Dianne Johnson --
1965, October: the Autobiography of Malcolm X / David Bradley --
1968, March: the illusory babels of language / Hal Foster --
1968, August 28: the plight of conservative literature / Michael Kimmage --
1969: Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems --
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 / Ann Marlowe --
1973: Loisaida literature / Frances R. Aparicio --
1973: Adrienne Rich, Driving into the wreck / Maureen N. McLane --
1975: Gayl Jones / Robert O'Meally --
1981, March 31: Toni Morrison / Farah Jasmine Griffin --
1982: Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story / Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum --
1982: Wild Style / Hua Hsu --
1982: Maya Lin's wall / Anne M. Wagner --
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 / Stephen But --
2003: Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing / Greil Marcus --
2005, August 29: Hurricane Katrina / Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors --
2008, November 4: Barack Obama / Kara Walker.