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This chapter considers some dramatic changes in the population of working women by the beginning of the 20th century, as well as continuities of the same ideals that had animated the earliest female industrial workers. It juxtaposes the hopes for self-culture of a generation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who worked in the sweatshops of New York with those of the earlier Lowell workers, and explores the fiction that they wrote and that was written about them. It looks closely at Emma Goldman as an extreme manifestation, both celebrated and notorious, of the consequences of working women's aspirations to literariness and self-reliance. Like Margaret Fuller, Goldman edited a literary periodical, Mother Earth, asserted the romantic primacy of her individual mind, and ignored the sexual restrictions of her time. Like Fuller's working-class contemporaries, she appropriated from the romantic ideals of transcendentalism principles probably not developed with someone like herself in mind. Like those factory workers, too, she was a passionate reader and writer and, like them, she was the subject, sometimes admired, frequently ridiculed, of other people's fascinated fictions.

Recent work in cultural psychology has begun to explore theoretical frameworks that involve the mutual inclusion of self and culture in action. These frameworks draw on the concepts of dialogue and experience-based inquiry to illustrate the ways that learning in and through our experiences offers the potential and possibility for changing our perceptions of both self and other. This chapter discusses these ideas in relation to music performance and cultural diversity in education. It begins by describing some of the challenges that music performance educators face as they respond to the growing and problematic cultural-political agendas associated with multiculturalism.

This chapter concerns the pedagogy of Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854). When Thoreau moved to Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, his goal was to maximize his independence. America, from his perspective, had failed. To maximize his independence, Thoreau radically reduced the size of his world. He minimized his social and financial obligations, and chose to live in an artificially circumscribed environment. He also developed a practice of writing and rewriting that refined his perception of his environment. Writing became an instrument of attentiveness and suppression—a way to improve his vision and restrict its range. At Walden and in Walden there was little or no conflict between receptivity and sovereignty. Thoreau could be open to his surroundings and in control—vulnerable and secure. This was the beginning of Thoreau's utopia of one: a world small enough to be received in its entirety.

This chapter looks at men's chat-room exchanges alongside the emergence of a self-help culture and the formation of global masculinity wedded to U.S. expansion, free trade, and empire. It also draws from interviews with men at the Vacation Romance Tours. In line with website images and narratives, for U.S. men, Latin American women's bodies figure as pure bodies and superior genes that are highly valued within a capitalist culture that men describe as devoid of domestic care, affection, and intimacy. American men's access to foreign markets and bodies promises to patriotically rejuvenate not only their identities (across race, class, and regional differences) but also the national stock and to provide an alternative to lonely and alienating lifestyles. The ethnographic interviews and web narratives explored here offer some clues as to how personal fantasies naturalize the global marketplace as the moral and patriotic force that propels men abroad.