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.

1801, Jefferson's first inaugural address / Jan Ellis Lewis --

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, Portrait 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 literature / 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 --

1961, 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.