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At the same time that journalists and editors were celebrating the vibrant new urban culture emerging in the United States at the point of mid-century, several commentators were criticizing the slavish dependence of American architects on classical or medieval styles. Those promoting an indigenous American architecture found an ardent advocate in the Boston-born sculptor Horatio Greenough with his new “functionalist” theory. However, the most fervent celebrant of the “triumph of the real” during the 1850s was a writer hardly known today: Charles Godfrey Leland who became the spirited editor of Philadelphia's struggling Graham's Monthly late in 1856. Leland brought a fresh conviction that America had reached a transitional stage in its cultural history. Leland discovered in Walt Whitman the epitome of the vigorous new cultural outlook he advocated. By rooting romantic idealism in an affection for everyday realities, Whitman became the most potent catalyst for change in 19th-century American culture with genteel conservatism and domestic sentimentalism.

Chapter 6 provides a reading of how the subversive potential of the figure of the witch was utilized to attack the oppression of women. It commences with a discussion of Jules Michelet’s La Sorcière (1862), then considers how medical discourse on historical witches as hysterics was conflated with slander of feminists as hysterical and caricatures of them as witches. After that follows a treatment of American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, who presented the early modern witch cult as a Satanic rebellion against patriarchal injustice, and folklorist Charles Leland, who drew approbatory parallels between witches and the feminism of his day. The chapter demonstrates how Gage borrowed from both Michelet and Blavatsky in her texts. Finally, visual representations of the witch are discussed, focusing on how she was a symbol of female strength in both positive and negative ways in the sculptures and paintings of male as well as female artists.

This chapter discusses Luciferian Witchcraft, which is to a great extent a spin-off from the Wicca movement, but with a satanic twist. While Wicca has created a “medium tension” towards society, by utilizing the negative witch figure as its central metaphor, Satanism has generated a stronger such tension by focusing on the strongly negative figure Satan. Both, however, are part of a larger movement where partly similar renegotiations of cultural symbols are being conducted. The interpretation of Lucifer is of central interest, as Lucifer can be seen to act as a crossover deity that appears with different meanings both within non-satanic as well as satanic interpretations of witchcraft. The chapter concludes that Luciferian Witchcraft can be seen as an example of the typological difficulties of positioning Satanism as an autonomous milieu within the larger Dark Magical subculture.

This chapter asserts that traditional American Natives believed that the earth is the residing place of narrative, and that people, earth, and narrative are different manifestations of the same creative force. It contends that Native-like land narratives, which offer commentary on the cardinal directions, the winds, vegetation, and sacred places, are present in the Bradford history and operate there in much the same way they as function in Native sacred texts. Furthermore, Algonquians, according to Charles Leland and Evan T. Pritchard, like Navajos, believed in the concept of inner forms as detailed by Susan Scarberry-Garcia in Landmarks of Healing, since they believed that their sacred places either contained the spirits of their old gods, such as Glooskap, or called up likenesses of former leaders, such as the rock formation in the Assonets which resembled the Massasoit Osamequin.

This chapter studies Charles Leland Bagley, a professional musician who traveled to Los Angeles in 1893. Bagley's experiences as a musician in Los Angeles are intertwined with the stories of other early working musicians in Los Angeles. The chapter takes a look at the various jobs a musician could have, and introduces the La Fiesta De Los Angeles, an event that helped the city achieve the Spanish “days of the dons” image it sought to project. It also looks at Bagley's experiences in opera and ragtime.

Prior to the arrival of European strangers from the east, the ocean possessed a generative richness that contrasted starkly with the predictable darkness and despair of the interior woodlands. Wabanaki oral traditions paint the sea as a rich repository of natural resources awaiting human manipulation, but Native stories also imbue the ocean with capricious forces that lurk just below the surface. Artifacts, legends, and eyewitness accounts reveal that Indians carried out death-defying feats to pursue mammoths of the deep and enemies of distant lands. Climate studies also point to seismic shifts in ocean levels and temperatures that transformed marine ecosystems and the human populations long dependent on them. At once life sustaining and life threatening, the sea’s duality hovered over people throughout the Dawnland’s ancient past and would shape the context of possibilities within which they situated new peoples and things from the east.