One area of literary culture from this period presented a striking puzzle. Whereas most serious writers looked at mass culture with disdain and alarm, there were important exceptions. I came to ask myself why the most accomplished African American writers had tried their hand at both high literary writing and “low” mass culture. James Weldon Johnson, for instance, left behind a stellar career as a black educator to try to break into the world of commercial theater in New York, before eventually turning to serious literature. The poet Paul Laurence Dunbar also wrote black musicals that became wildly popular, even though the narrator of his novel The Sport of the Gods condemns such productions as tawdry. Even W. E. B. DuBois tried his hand at creating a popular pageant. But virtually no white writer from this period participated in both high literary culture and mass culture (although Mark Twain came close).And there is another factor in this puzzle. African American writers and intellectuals—far more than white writers—faced a tangible threat from mass culture. Commercial culture flooded homes and public spaces with defamatory images of black people. Before the Civil War, minstrelsy was largely confined to small theaters and carnivals; now racist depictions appeared on trading cards, clocks, dolls, advertisements, cartoons, and early cinema. This period also saw an epidemic of lynching, of course, and those violent events were often turned into a grotesque form of entertainment.Why, then, would black artists be drawn to commercial culture? One reason, of course, was necessity. High culture institutions were largely closed to black artists. And many lacked the education necessary to qualify for highbrow culture—though even highly educated black artists were largely shut out, too. But racial exclusion is not the whole story. Despite the insidious racism in so much of mass culture, African Americans still found ways to invent new kinds of creativity in areas like popular theater, mass-market music, and dance. One of my chapters focuses on the part of mid-town Manhattan dubbed “Black Bohemia” in this period. Several decades before Harlem became a center for higher artistic achievement, in this part of New York black performers established a thriving area of clubs and theaters where commercial culture was the cutting edge. And while literary intellectuals like Dunbar, Johnson, and DuBois recognized the strains of racist ridicule in so much of popular culture, they also realized that commercial productions were often less rigid than either science or high culture when it came to recognizing black creativity.Frantic Panoramas tries to offer a kind of prehistory of our own media-saturated culture. A hundred years ago, the advent of mass culture created a kind of crisis among intellectuals and the educated classes, a crisis not unlike our current uncertainty about digital culture.During the period I examine, literary culture was clearly losing its central role in defining reason and public opinion. Instead, consumer-driven media and writing “untouched by criticism,” as Henry James put it, were pushing literary authorities to the margins. This was a crisis for literature, but it was also an opportunity: losing their public influence, I argue, eventually prompted writers to create new kinds of critical thought. The challenge forced literary culture to renew itself and acquire new ways to understand modern society.Today our digital culture seems to be pushing print culture itself to the margins. The history I examine suggests this could be an opportunity for literature: digital literacy still relies on language and reading practices, so it might well generate new kinds of reading habits and literary forms. And the new literature might circulate widely.But will these new reading practices still be critical? That is a lot harder to predict, because our whole idea of what “critical” thinking is has been developed in and through a world created by print.