bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Crèvecoeur Revisited
Authors: Cunliffe Marcus
Published: January 2009

Almost every twentieth-century discussion of American history, literature, culture or character makes reference to J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur'sLetters from an American Farmer, a book first published in 1782. Anthologies usually find space for an excerpt from Crèvecoeur. A particular favourite is the third chapter, ‘ What Is An American? ’ Here is the best-known, the most-quoted, the almost tediously familiar paragraph from that chapter:

What, then, is the American, this new man? He is neither an European nor the descendant of an European …Heis an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the East; they will finish the great circle … The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. This is an American.
American Communes, 1865–1914
Authors: Fogarty Robert S.
Published: January 2009

Emerson's notation in his journal: ‘ They look well in July. We will see them in December ’ about the prospects for Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands venture reflects a commonplace caution about communal ventures. Namely, that the heat of co-operative passion is often insufficient to sustain a community through later problems of crowded circumstances, changing perspectives and weak natures.
Determinants of American Migration: Methods and Models in Mobility Research
Authors: Stephenson Charles
Published: January 2009

While the question of geographic mobility has long been a mainstay of American historical writing and American myth-making – as evidenced by Turner and his disciples and the general obsession widi the frontier – until recently most historians have done little systematic investigation into it. Nor, indeed, have they been aware either of the enormous degree of movement within the country, or of the complex issues involved in determining why people have moved as they have. However, with the rise of what generally is termed the ‘ new urban ’ or ‘ new social ’ history, historians have begun to view migration as a question central to their analysis. Social scientists recognized the importance of migratory behaviour for many years and have employed sophisticated analytical techniques in their efforts to explain migration patterns, but recently historians approached the problem from another direction.
New Light on the Chancery Side of Virginia's Evolution to Statehood
Authors: Singleton Marvin K.
Published: January 2009

The assertion that ‘Equity in the early American colonies is a subject that still awaits complete research’ is more true of some colonies than of others. Because of marked differences in founding and internal growth, the colony-by-colony approach has been conceded to be appropriate; but this piecemeal approach has resulted in the overwriting of Massachusetts's meagre and testy involvement with the chancery style of justice, while Virginia's much richer involvement has received too little treatment.
Henry Carter Adams: A Case Study in the Emergence of the Social Sciences in the United States, 1850–1900
Authors: Coats A. W.
Published: January 2009

Few scholars would nowadays question the importance of the United States in the world of learning; but the process whereby that nation attained its present eminence still remains obscure. Among thecognoscenti, it is generally acknowledged that American scholarship had come of age by the early 1900s, whereas fifty years earlier there had been only a handful of American scholars and scientists of international repute, and the country's higher education lagged far behind its European counterpart. Yet despite the recent popularity of intellectual history and research in higher education, which has produced a veritable flood of publications touching on various aspects of this theme, the heart of the process—the emergence of the academic profession—is still inadequately documented and imperfectly understood.
The Artistic Conscience of Vachel Lindsay
Authors: Massa Ann
Published: January 2009

Vachel Lindsay's description of himself as ‘the “Casey At-the-Bat” of American poetry’ sums up his reputation during his lifetime (1879–1931) and today. Perhaps only half-a-dozen of his poems—‘General William Booth Enters into Heaven’, ‘The Congo’, ‘Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan’, for example—are regularly read; and the rest of his diverse literary output, from 1909 to 1931, of nine collections of poems (and a mid-wayCollected Poems), five prose works, numerous short stories, articles and private periodical publications, remains virtually unknown.
Climate, Health and Black Labor in the English Americas
Authors: Puckrein Gary
Published: January 2009

“ Son George,” Sir Henry Colt wrote his progeny in the summer of 1631, “ I have taken pains day and night to collect this journal … because if you will prove a seaman and undertake voyages [to the New World] you may learn how to employ your time at sea, and who to thank for your conservation.” Appended to the diary were “ some rules for diet and health … the way being dangerous because of the change in climates, especially about the tropics.” Among other things, Sir Henry cautioned the younger Colt that he would find the “ torrid zone or middle region temperate enough,” but the most dangerous place would be the “ tropics under which you must pass for pestilent fevers … which have killed many in the hot season of year.” To reduce the possibility of sickness which was likely to occur as a result of travel into warm climates, Colt prescribed some precautionary measures.

Sir Henry Colt lived in an age when such modern terms and concepts as anopheles mosquito, malaria, yellow fever, and immunization zones had little or no meaning. In his day, physicians had not established a connection between anopheles mosquito and malaria, or aedes mosquito and yellow fever. When counseling his son on how to remain healthy in the Americas, Colt had no reason to warn him that anopheles and aedes mosquitoes often served as hosts for parasites which were deadly to human beings, and hence the bites of these insects could be dangerous.

Colt and his contemporaries did, however, hold coherent medical views about disease and its origins which informed their behavior in the New World.
Slave Trading in the Ante-Bellum South: An Estimate of the Extent of the Inter-Regional Slave Trade
Authors: Tadman Michael
Published: January 2009

The domestic slave trade has always bulked large in discussions of the character of American ante-bellum slavery. Assumptions and arguments about the nature of master-slave relations, about family separations, and about the slave family have necessarily had much to do with slave sales and with the extent and character of the domestic traffic in slaves. All this has, however, been despite the fact that no satisfactory quantitative estimate of the trade has been available. Indeed, the standard work on the American domestic slave trade, Frederic Bancroft's Slave Trading in the Old South (1931), has recently been challenged in the studies of Calderhead (1972) and of Fogel and Engerman (1974), and those studies have in turn been questioned by, for example, Gutman and Sutch in Reckoning with Slavery (1976).

The present study will seek to offer a more satisfactory estimate of the trade than has so far been available, and will argue that the trade accounted for the substantial majority (somewhere between 56 and 69 per cent) of the more than one million net inter-regional slave movements which took place in the South over the period 1820 to 1860.
Theories of American Labour Violence
Authors: Jeffreys-Jones Rhodri
Published: January 2009

Labour violence is an indication of the nature of any society at a given time, and has been a catalyst of tensions and harbinger of change on many occasions in America since 1865. Furthermore, it has had in that country a braking effect on social reform. These aspects of labour violence have received their fair share of recognition and attention. Their investigation has uncovered a mass of useful evidence. For this reason, it is today possible to view labour violence with better understanding, and to approach directly the problem of its causes.

Although historians have tried to explain labour violence, they have mostly done so obliquely or on the basis of unquestioned assumptions. Recently, for example, Herbert G. Gutman referred to labour violence repeatedly in his collection of essays Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, but focussed on “ patterns ” of disorder rather than on its causes, and belittled even these patterns by stating that they “ deserve brief attention.” Philip Taft, a long-surviving member of the John R. Commons school of labour history, tackled the problem of labour violence in American history because of renewed public interest in the subject occasioned by the race riots of the 1960s, but simply assumed throughout his work that wage-earners resorted to violence in response to oppressive conditions. The same undifferentiated assumption appeared in earlier work on labour violence, most notably in 1931 in Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America by the Jugoslav socialist immigrant, Louis Adamic. Adamic wrote absurdly that the racketeering of the Al Capone era was a “ phase of class conflict.”
American Art and the New Deal
Authors: Harrison Helen A.
Published: January 2009

The current nostalgic interest in the 1920s and '30s has brought about more than the revival of period fashion and interior decoration in America. For anyone concerned with die visual arts it has illuminated the most exciting and prolific decade diat country has ever seen. During die Depression the official approach to art and die artist was radically different from anything before or since, and probably from anything in the Western world. That this should have come about is in itself amazing, die more so as it was done through Congressional legislation, supported by the President.
The American Novelist and American History: A Revaluation of All The King's Men
Authors: Gray R.
Published: January 2009

Robert Penn Warren is a writer of extraordinarily diverse talents and interests. He is, among other things, one of the founders of the New Criticism, a poet and a poetic dramatist of national reputation (he won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his nineteen volumes of verse), and a gifted teacher. Above all, though, he is a writer whose moral and philosophical bias is towards the kind of historical specificity and social density which is perhaps the special preserve of the novel. This more than anything else accounts for the exceptional range and volume of his fictional writing and for the usual association of his name with one book in particular which is, by common consent, his finest achievement: All The King's Men, first published in 1946. Occasionally, a case has been made for the superiority of one of his other novels, and there have been one or two attempts to locate the centre of his work in the poetry. But these have been scattered, infrequent, and in the event, I think, unconvincing. All The King's Men remains his masterwork, and perhaps his most characteristic piece of fiction too, so that any assessment of Warren the imaginative writer has ultimately to focus upon it.
The Method of Rossen's Late Films
Authors: Millar Daniel
Published: January 2009

Robert Rossen served a decade's apprenticeship as a writer before he turned director in 1947; and he scripted or co-scripted seven of his own ten films. Yet virtually all this writing was adaptation; the only exceptions were a couple of Warner Bros. gangster movies, Marked Woman (1937) and Racket Busters (1938), based on real events, and the historical epic, Alexander the Great (1956), of which the same might be said. Even the projects he did not carry through – The Treasure of Sierra Madre, Billy Budd, Robert Penn Warren's Night Rider – were also adaptations, except his last, unfinished script, Cocoa Beach, which (excepting early stage plays) would have been his first original. Yet, if inconsistent, his impulse to personal creative expression was strong and at times almost overbearing – his place in Andrew Sarris's category of ‘Strained Seriousness’ seems less surprising than some of his company there (Norman Jewison, for instance). So presumably he was able, more often than not, to find and use literary material which expressed or partly predigested what he wanted to say, as in The Hustler (1961), or else the material somehow helped him to discover this, as with Lilith (1964).
Rudyard Kipling on America
Authors: Brogan Hugh
Published: January 2009

Kipling's ripest comments on the United States are to be found in the late (1926) short story, ‘The Prophet and the Country’. The tale begins with the breakdown of the narrator's car on the Great North Road late one summer night. A passing American offers shelter in his trailer, and a tow in the morning: which offers are accepted. The generous fellow-traveller is Mr Tarworth, a former realtor from Omaha, Nebraska, five years a widower. He drops a few hints about the Collective Outlook of Democracy, the Herd Impulse, and ‘the counterbalancing necessity for Individual Self-Expression’ and then launches artlessly into the story of his life. His own Primal Urge for Individual Self-Expression, we learn, came to him on his way home from his wife's funeral, when he had a Revelation qua Prohibition. Prohibition is the sin of Presumption, foisted on the American male by the American female. The sin will be duly punished, because to protect any race from the ‘ natural and God-given bacteria’ of civilization is to induce a condition of virginity which is terrifyingly vulnerable. ‘Immunise, or virg'nise, the Cit'zen of the United States to alcohol, an' you as surely redooce him to the mental status an' outlook of that Redskin. That is the Ne-mee-sis of Prohibition.’ Such had been Mr Tarworth's Revelation. The next question was, how to convey it to his fellow-countrymen. He decided to make a movie, even if ‘the Movies wasn't a business I'd ever been interested in, though a regular attendant’.
The Qualified Affirmation of Saul Bellow's Recent Work
Authors: Bailey Jennifer M.
Published: January 2009

Since the publication of Mr Sammler's Planet in 1969, it has been difficult to anticipate the development of Saul Bellow's fiction. Although this novel is Bellow's most disappointing work, its obvious limitations are anticipated in Herzog. There is a strong thread of ambiguous irony which, in Bellow's most recent novel, has deepened into unintentional parody. This is, I would suggest, a symptom of Bellow's inability to balance his protagonists' subjective reality with a convincing version of their social milieu.
William Appleman Williams and the ‘American Empire’
Authors: Thompson J. A.
Published: January 2009

During the last decade William Appleman Williams has become one of the most influential of contemporary American historians. In particular, the comprehensive interpretation of United States foreign policy which he originally expounded inThe Tragedy of American Diplomacy(Cleveland and New York, 1959; revised edition, New York, 1962) has attracted many adherents in these years of the Vietnam war and the rise of the ‘New Left’. A school has developed and in a number of monographs and articles Williams's interpretative framework has been applied to various episodes and aspects of American foreign policy. Now Williams has edited a volume of essays, largely by members of this school, which ‘can be used as the basic guide for a course in American foreign relations’. Its appearance, following the recent publication in this country of Williams's own substantial work on the background to the Spanish-American War and America's acquisition of the Philippines, provides an appropriate occasion for a general review of the interpretation.
Harbingers of Progressivism: Responses to the Urban Crisis in New York, c. 1845–1860
Authors: Heale M. J.
Published: January 2009

Half a century before Jacob Riis and Jane Addams groped for the conscience of the nation with their exposures of urban misery, a few determined citizens were already fighting the long battle to liberate the huddled wretches of the cities. In Boston some of the techniques of the later social agencies were anticipated as early as the 1830s by Joseph Tuckerman's Association of Delegates from the Benevolent Societies, but it was New York City which really pointed the way to the future. In the twenty years before the Civil War a number of bodies were founded in the city which in time became permanent welfare institutions. They were in large part the products of conditions similar to those which produced the scientific philanthropy, Social Gospel, settlement house and other social movements of the late nineteenth century, and, like those movements, they anticipated many of the attitudes of the social workers of the Progressive era. It would be a mistake to press the parallel between ante-bellum reform and social Progressivism too far, but the two phenomena shared some common characteristics. Like many Progressives, the urban reformers of the ante-bellum years tended to come from pious middle-class backgrounds, and a number of them began life as missionaries before being drawn into social work. They were a fact-finding generation, investigating social problems with an unprecedented thoroughness, energetically uncovering evidence and compiling statistics with which to open the eyes of an indifferent public. They were very conscious of the social chasm between the rich and the poor and they did what they could to bridge it.
Walter Scott and Washington Irving : ‘ Editors of the land of Utopia ’
Authors: Sutherland Kathryn
Published: January 2009

Much has been made of Washington Irving's literary debts to Walter Scott. Influence there was, stretching back long before that day late in August 1817 when the laird of Abbotsford came limping up the gravel walk to greet his American visitor. But the relationship cannot be adequately expressed as Irving's discipleship to Scott. There were obligations on both sides.
A note on The Blithedale Romance, or ‘ Call him Fauntleroy ’
Authors: Swann Charles
Published: January 2009

‘ FIVE-AND-TWENTY years ago, at the epoch of this story, there dwelt, in one of the middle states, a man whom we shall call Fauntleroy; a man of wealth, and magnificent tastes, and prodigal expenditure.’ This is the opening of chapter XXII of The Blithedale Romance which gives us old Moodie's story. We are told how ‘ Fauntleroy ’ led a life of conspicuous expenditure, and finding himself growing poor, ‘ he recoiled from this calamity ’:

To avoid it – wretched man! – or, rather, to defer it, if but for a month, a day, or only to procure himself the life of a few breaths more, amid the false glitter which was now less his own than ever – he made himself guilty of a crime. It was just the sort of crime, growing out of its artificial state, which society (unless it should change its entire constitution for this man's unworthy sake) neither could nor ought to pardon. More safely might it pardon murder.
A Guide to Manuscripts relating to America in Great Britain and Ireland
Authors: Crick B. R. , Alman Miriam
Published: January 2009

This bibliographical work has become so important and so standard a tool internationally for scholars working in American history and literature that one recognizes with some surprise the passage of fifteen years since its original publication and an even longer period since its compilation. It was the first large-scale project undertaken by the young British Association for American Studies which was only in the third year of its existence when the work began. With a munificent grant from the United States Information Service and under the general supervision of H. L. Beales, as many as five full-time researchers were engaged on it in its final stages and a great deal of part-time assistance was also available. Two useful by-products to appear before the Guide were ‘ A Survey of Library Resources in the United Kingdom for the Teaching of American History and Literature in the Universities ’ in the Journal of Documentation, 14 (1958), 103–18, and the ‘ Union List of American Newspapers in Great Britain and Ireland ’ edited by B. R. Crick and Ann Daltrop and issued in October 1958. The latter was brought up to date two years ago and reissued as ‘ American Newspaper Holdings in British and American Libraries ’; it was edited by D. K. Adams and produced for the British Association for American Studies by the David Bruce Centre for American Studies in the University of Keele.
Plessyv. Ferguson Re-examined
Authors: Maidment Richard A.
Published: January 2009

The United States Supreme Court's decision inPlessy v. Fergusonfalls into that category of unfortunate opinions which have few defenders. Its only supporters currently are those who affirm their belief in and advocate the merits of legally-enforced racial segregation as state social policy. This support, however, is bereft of intellectual substance and is correctly ignored or dismissed by most scholars. Reputable students of the court have without exception been unremittingly hostile to the opinion of the court, because of the presumed socially deleterious ramifications of the judgement. Furthermore, the opinion of Mr Justice Brown has been criticized for logical and legal shortcomings and has been labelled by one scholar as being an exercise in ‘conservative sociological jurisprudence’.3It is the purpose of this paper to suggest that Brown's judgement has been misrepresented. Despite the fact that the decision gave a constitutional imprimatur to racial segregation, the logic of the opinion owes more to a philosophy of judicial restraint and respect for precedent than to a belief in conservative sociology or racial superiority. The court was inPlessymerely affirming its understanding that the Louisiana statute under review was consonant with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and was not commenting on the merits of racial segregation as governmental policy.
Hawthorne: History versus Romance
Authors: Swann Charles
Published: January 2009

‘What is American about American Literature?’ is a question that is repeatedly answered too easily. A frequently offered solution is the claim that the dominant form of the nineteenth-century American novel is the Romance. Joel Porte, for example, confidently entitles his book on Cooper, Poe, Hawdiorne, Melville, and James The Romance in America. Porte begins his study with a sweeping assertion that the battle is over, the problem solved:

Thanks to a series of major critical studies that have appeared in the past decade and a half, it no longer seems necessary to argue for the importance of romance as a nineteenth century American genre. Students of American literature – notably Richard Chase – have provided a solid theoretical basis for establishing that the rise and growth of fiction in this country is dominated by our authors' conscious adherence to a tradition of non-realistic romance sharply at variance with the broadly novelistic mainstream of English writing. When there has been disagreement among recent critics as to the contours of American fiction, it has usually disputed, not the existence per se of a romance tradition, but rather the question of which authors, themes, and stylistic strategies deserve to be placed with certainty at the heart of that tradition.
The Morphology of Remigration: New England University Men and Their Return to England, 1640–1660
Authors: Stout Harry S.
Published: January 2009

Richard Mather's promising pastoral career in England suddenly ended in 1634 with the wholesale suspensions inaugurated by Archbishop Laud. With no choice other than submission to the Church of England, Mather set sail for New England and, in so doing, joined a large scale folk migration that was to total over 15,000 people in the decade between 1630 and 1640. Encouraged by the early successes of the ‘ Great Migration ’ to New England, Mather took the birth of his son in 1639 as a sign and named him Increase ‘ on the Account of the great Increase of every sort, which God favoured the country with about the time of his nativity ’. A year after Increase's birth, Richard Mather's joy was once again chastened when there ensued a remigration to England such that, in Increase Mather's words, ‘ since the year 1640, more Persons have removed out of New England, than have gone thither ’. Leading in the removal from New England were nearly half of the highly trained ministers and university men who, in large measure, accounted for the uniqueness of the New England settlements.
The Madman as Hero in Contemporary American Fiction
Authors: Woolf Michael P.
Published: January 2009

In this paper I want to engage in a speculative manner with a number of issues, both moral and stylistic, that reverberate around the contemporary novel. I have chosen to focus this discussion on the idea of the mad hero because, in the concepts of madness and the heroic, vital elements in contemporary aesthetics coincide.
Nativism and Western Myth: The Influence of Nativist Ideas on the American Self-Image
Authors: Cohen Bronwen J.
Published: January 2009

In his seminal workVirgin Land(1950), Henry Nash Smith depicted the bymbolic meaning that Americans attached to their Western empire during the nineteenth century. The West appealed to the American imagination variously as a possible passage to India, a land to be filled, farmed and civilized and a land to lend territorial grandeur to the existing American nation. But a certain squeamishness pervaded the attitudes of many upper-class Easterners to Western society itself, and only towards die end of the nineteenth century did they begin to show a marked enthusiasm for life in the West, and for their own pioneering origins.
The Dangers of Femininity in Willa Cather's Fiction
Authors: Bailey Jennifer
Published: January 2009

When she was twenty-one, Willa Cather wrote, “The mind that can follow a ‘mission’ is not an artistic one. An artist can know no other purpose than his art.… The feminine mind has a hankering for hobbies and missions.” From the outset of her writing career as a journalist, Cather was intensely conscious of what to her seemed a difficult anomaly: being a serious writer and being a woman. She believed that women were conditioned to think and write in a literal and “horribly subjective” fashion, so that their literary productions were “an infernal mess.” When she embarked on a full-time writing career at the age of thirty-nine, she insisted that to avoid a feminine mind, one must avoid a feminine way of life:

One must have the power of refuse most of the rest of life … to be free, to work at [my] table — that is all in all. …. There are fates and fates but one cannot live them all. Some would call mine servitude but I call it liberation. Miss Jewett too, turned away from marriage.

Cather's single-minded determination to succeed and her uncompromising way of life that would ensure success as a writer rather than a woman writer prompted her to reject her background in her first pieces of fiction. She lived in rural southern Nebraska for seven years, from the ages of ten to seventeen, and in some early short stories she portrayed small-town life on the Plains as narrow, spiritually crushing and dominated by terrible physical hardship.

Jennifer Bailey is Lecturer in American Literature in the Department of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD.
The Lineaments of Antebellum Southern Romanticism
Authors: O'Brien Michael
Published: January 2009

It is a curiosity of modern scholarship that the only general work on antebellum Southern Romanticism is Rollin G. Osterweis'Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, which has been in print since 1949, is still read, and still –if only for want of a competitor –used. Yet much has changed in understanding of the social and intellectual history of the Old South, and even more of the phenomenon of Romanticism. These changes, natural enough over the span of two intellectual generations, have made many of that book's presumptions questionable; so a second look at the problem seems worthwhile, to clear the ground and to indicate fresh directions. For Osterweis wrote within the assumptions of the 1940s about the nature and shortcomings of Romanticism. He was guided by Irving Babbitt, who scorned Romanticism as a puling and exaggerated passion instigated by Rousseau, a disaster for rational men: at best silly, as with the jousts of antebellum Virginia; at worst dangerous, as with the secession convention of South Carolina. But Osterweis was Babbitt with a difference. While Babbitt and, more weightily, Ernst Cassirer had thought that Romanticism had led the world astray and it was still astray, with Hitler the avatar of Hegel as chilling evidence, Osterweis cheerily regarded Romanticism as a movement that had expired with the nineteenth century, a fossil safe to mock. To this perspective, largely adopted from Jacques Barzun'sRomanticism and the Modern Ego(1943), Osterweis added the view of Arthur Lovejoy, who had insisted that Romanticism, while possessing a core notion of diversity and flux, should most safely be regarded as multiple: there were Romanticisms, not a Romanticism.
No Legal Impediment: Access to Abortion in the United States
Authors: Cohan A. S.
Published: January 2009

If a pregnant woman in the United States wishes to terminate her pregnancy, she may do so unimpeded by the state during the first trimester of the pregnancy, so long as the termination is performed by a registered medical practitioner. In the second trimester, she must have closer consultation with her physician than in the first three months, but the choice of an abortion still resides with her. State interest in that period may be concerned only with the safety of the procedure for the mother since abortion during the second trimester is more life-threatening to the mother than in the first. Only in the last trimester of her pregnancy does the state interest in that choice become paramount because the state finds itself in the position of being advocate for the foetus which, in thelater stages of pregnancy, may be viable outside of the mother's womb.
Politics and the Social Order in the Work of John O'Hara
Authors: Sigelman Lee
Published: January 2009

Classic works of fiction almost always raise “penetrating questions about the foundations and effects of the political regime, i.e. human nature and its implications for society.” But popular fiction, too, can be an instrument of social and political understanding. As Gore Vidal has argued:

Writers of fiction, even more than systematic philosophers, tend to reveal unconscious presuppositions. One might even say that those writers who are the most popular are the ones who share the largest number of common assumptions with their audience, subliminally reflecting prejudices and aspirations so obvious that they are never stated and, never stated, never precisely understood or even recognized. John O'Hara is an excellent example of this kind of writer.
Flannery O'Connor's Short Stories: The Assault on the Reader
Authors: Foster Shirley
Published: January 2009

Writing in her autobiography about Southern fiction at the turn of the century, Ellen Glasgow argued that it needed more violence and toughness to counteract its tendency towards “insidious” sentimentality; as she defined it later, such literature could be redeemed only by “Blood and irony.” Nearly fifty years later, she might have been gratified to see how a fellow Southern woman writer had answered this need. Violence and irony are endemic in O'Connor's short stories, which depict brutality, physical abuse, murder, and betrayal perpetrated by characters who are often termed “grotesques” –physical freaks, idiots, and maniacs. But they owe their striking impact not only to the violence which they embody in terms of character and event, but also to the violence which they enact on the reader. They implement a shock technique, dependent not so much on the nature of the fictional material, whose horrorsare objectified by a skilfully controlled comic/ironic tone, as on exploitation of the reader's preconceptions.The disjunctions of the stories, which "work," in O'Connor's words, by portraying "an action that is totally unexpected,"are reproduced in the reader's subjection to an abrupt shattering of expectation, producing a profound sense of unease or bewilderment. Thus the most exceptional and original aspect of the violence in O'Connor's fiction is found in its manipulative relationship with the audience who,as one critic has expressed it, may feel "cheated,"4 not to say victimized,by the author's mocking tyranny.
Social Scientists and American Indian Autobiographers: Sun Chief and Gregorio's “Life Story”
Authors: Brumble H. David
Published: January 2009

Social scientists collected many, many American Indian autobiographies during the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, autobiographies of Apaches, Navajos, Hopis, Zunis, Papagos, Kiowas, Sioux, a Kwakiutl, autobiographies of shamans, shepherds, hunters, farmers, men, and women. Many of these are now moldering in the dark reaches of forgotten file cabinets, but a remarkable number were published, and for this we must be grateful. These narratives are to us a legacy, affording us some sense of what it means to see the world and the self according to ancient habits of mind.
Whatever Happened to the Slave Family in the Old South?
Authors: White John
Published: January 2009

Writing in 1853 Harriet Beecher Stowe, defending the veracity of her famous novel, declared:

The worst abuse of slavery is its outrage upon the family; and as this writer views the subject it is one which is more notorious and undeniable than any other.
Evolution and the New World Vision in the Music of Charles Ives
Authors: Geselbracht Raymond H.
Published: January 2009

‘The composer’, begins the chapter on music in Harold Stearns's 1922 compendium, Civilization in the United States, ‘here lives in an atmosphere that is, at the worst, good-natured contempt. Contempt, mind you, not for himself … but for his very art …At best, what he gets is unintelligent admiration, not as an artist, but as a freak’. The best that the composer can expect, the article continues, is that by expressing himself he may, by some miraculous accident, express the great remote and inarticulate ‘American soul’. This same year, 1922, saw the publication, at the author's expense, of 114 Songs by the remote but very articulate composer and insurance agent, Charles E. Ives. This book of songs was a result of an effort, as the composer put it, to clean house – to hang out on the line for all to see the result of twenty-five years of ignored composition. When the songs and other compositions of this incredibly creative period were sorted, one would find, as the Stearns article suggested, an expression of the American soul, no longer so remote and inarticulate.
Return of the Native: Some Reflexions on the History of American Indians
Authors: Bolt Christine
Published: January 2009

Indian activists have recently complained about the pernicious attentions of white Indian ‘experts’, but they are likely to endure these attentions so long as their people retain a distinct cultural identity and national status. Unlike anthropologists and administrators, historians have not shaped the public policies applied to the native Americans, and so their expertise has seemed comparatively harmless. Yet having played a considerable part in misrepresenting the Indians, scholars have a duty to set the record straight with a minimum of unprofessional moralizing.
Red Scare Politics: California's Campaign Against Un-American Activities, 1940–1970
Authors: Heale M. J.
Published: January 2009

The explanations for the red scare of the Cold War years have often been concerned with the direction taken by anti-Communist pressures. These have sometimes been represented as welling up from below, perhaps in the form of grassroots anxieties and resentments directed at well-to-do liberals and intellectuals, or as Catholic and immigrant enmity towards the Soviet Union. Such populistic currents may be portrayed as disturbing the normal routines of American politics. More often in recent years anti-Communist sentiments have been presented as elite-inspired influences working their way down in the polity, such as the anti-Soviet rhetoric and policies of the Truman administration, or the partisan opportunism of Republican politicians. The American political process itself may then be held to account. There have been a few attempts to test these interpretations by studies at state level, although it is not self-evident that such studies will favour either of these explanations. Indeed, the more detailed the study the more it is likely to acknowledge the complexity of American anti-communism. The evidence of California suggests that the second great red scare arose out of the convergence of pressures both from aboveandfrom below, in a process involving at least three different political dimensions.
Black Culture in William Faulkner's “That Evening Sun”
Authors: Kuyk Dirk , Kuyk Betty M. , Miller James A.
Published: January 2009

When a white writer portrays a black character, racial stereotypes and literary patterns almost always reveal their power. The portraits of blacks take forms that are by now archetypal: the mammy, Stepin Fetchit, the buck, the unspoiled primitive, the member of the oppressed black proletariat…. Such forms come all too easily to white writers; but “modern realism,” as Erich Auerbach called it, comes hard. Thus, white writers can seldom present a “tragically conceived life” of a black character and set that life solidly in a black culture. In portraying blacks, white writers tend toward the sentimental, the satiric, and the didactic rather than “objective seriousness, which seeks to penetrate to the depths of the passions and entanglements of a human life, but without itself becoming moved, or at least without betraying that it is moved” (Auerbach, 457 and 490). Although William Faulkner often tumbles – and sometimes leaps – into those pitfalls, occasionally he avoids them altogether. When he does so, however, readers find his work particularly hard to understand. His story “That Evening Sun” is a case in point.
The Puritan Errand Re-Viewed
Authors: Delbanco Andrew
Published: January 2009

In the twenty years since Perry Miller's death there have been many new beginnings in the field he inspired. We have witnessed an impressive recovery of the Puritans' gift for metaphoric adventure, and a number of town and family studies have given us a fuller sense of Puritan life “from the bottom up.” More recently, there have appeared some sensitive explorations of “lay piety,” and of the expressive significance of artifacts, shaped space, dress, gravestones, and the like — “evidence as powerful as any sermon of the deeper values that existed in tension at the core of seventeenth-century New England culture.” Yet despite these advances and the many spirited revisions of Miller's own views on more traditional issues in intellectual history such as the precise nature of “non-separating congregationalism,” the validity of “declension” as a way of describing generational change, and the importance of Ramistic rationalism to Puritan thought, a suspicion is in the air that we may be stalled.
The Plot of Hawthorne'sThe Marble Faun
Authors: Goldman Arnold
Published: January 2009

The Marble Faun'splot is alleged to be “Gothic” and impenetrable, its topography and history “guide-book,” its author external to his subject, too foreign (that is, American), too old (fifty-five), tired and ill to have had anything but a tourist's or artists' colony view of the Roman and Tuscan setting. Anyway, this charge runs, Hawthorne wrote Romances, fictions distanced from actuality and history, not outward-referring novels anchored in a context of exterior realities.

In fact Hawthorne sets the action of his Roman novel in a complex field of Italian history, past and present. There is not only an evocation of the pre-classical and imperial history of Rome and its Christian, Medieval and Renaissance periods; the status of the Papally-dominated, Frenchgarrisoned city is carefully delineated. Hawthorne mobilises not only the panoramic history which has been sensed but insufficiently discriminated but also the contemporaneous politics of the Roman, and Tuscan, states. Nor is the novel set in no particular time, but in fact on a very precise time-scale, and it may even be datable, from Monday, 5 April 1858, to Thursday, 3 March 1859 (see the Appendix at the end of this essay, pp. 403–4).The Marble Faun'scontemporaneity remains unacknowledged.
An Uncertain Destiny: Indian Captivities on the Upper Connecticut River
Authors: Calloway Colin G.
Published: January 2009

The prospect of being taken captive by Indians was one of the greatest terrors for pioneers on the American frontier. From seventeenth-century Massachusetts to twentieth-century Hollywood, Indian captivity has been regarded as a fate worse than death, and western frontiersmen advocated saving the last bullet for oneself to prevent it. Whites inhabiting the trans-Mississippi west in the nineteenth century had in fact every reason to dread falling into Indian hands and a good idea of what was in store for them: among the nomadic tribes of the Great Plains, male captives were tortured (before being put to death), female captives were invariably subjected to sexual and physical abuse and generally condemned to a life of drudgery, while captive children might be killed out of hand or taken into the tribe. In the northeastern woodlands, however, the fate in store for whites captured by Indians was by no means so certain. A study of the experiences and narratives of captives on the upper Connecticut River during the era of Indian raids from Canada suggests that to be captured by Indians in northern New England was a terrifying and traumatic experience, but was certainly no guarantee of death, torture, abuse, or even mistreatment.
Willy Loman and The Soul of a New Machine: Technology and the Common Man
Authors: Brucher Richard T.
Published: January 2009

As Death of a Salesman opens, Willy Loman returns home “tired to the death” (p. 13). Lost in reveries about the beautiful countryside and the past, he's been driving off the road; and now he wants a cheese sandwich. But Linda's suggestion that he try a new American-type cheese — “It's whipped” (p. 16) — irritates Willy: “Why do you get American when I like Swiss?” (p. 17). His anger at being contradicted unleashes an indictment of modern industrialized America:

The street is lined with cars. There's not a breath of fresh air in the neighborhood. The grass don't grow any more, you can't raise a carrot in the back yard. (p. 17).

In the old days, “This time of year it was lilac and wisteria.” Now: “Smell the stink from that apartment house! And another one on the other side…” (pp. 17–18). But just as Willy defines the conflict between nature and industry, he pauses and simply wonders: “How can they whip cheese?” (p. 18).

The clash between the old agrarian ideal and capitalistic enterprise is well documented in the literature on Death of a Salesman, as is the spiritual shift from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Carnegie to Dale Carnegie that the play reflects. The son of a pioneer inventor and the slave to broken machines, Willy Loman seems to epitomize the victim of modern technology.
A New England Gentleman: Theodore Lyman III, 1833–1897
Authors: Taylor P. A. M.
Published: January 2009

Few small bodies of men have been more carefully studied, in recent years, than Boston's upper class. Winning their first fortunes in overseas trade, then transferring their capital to textiles and railroads, that class laid the foundations of America's Industrial Revolution as well as extending its own wealth and power. From such an economic base, so modern scholars assure us, they consolidated their class through marriage, through placing their sons in family firms or in the learned professions, and through guaranteeing the continuity of their fortunes, against incompetence or the claims of creditors and daughters' husbands, by the device of the family trust. They reached out to control or create institutions, whether Harvard, the Boston Athenaeum, or Massachusetts General Hospital. They played an important part in city government. In addition, it is alleged, they sought to control the masses through charities and the public school system. If all this characterized the first half of the nineteenth century, modern scholars assure us that in the second half atrophy set in as the city's growth slowed, as investments became more conservative, as political power was lost, as defensiveness and imitation replaced creativity. It must be added that some observers in those days, inside and outside the class, took the same view.

Many of the facts are beyond dispute. Hugh M. Blaisdell, the self-made businessman in Robert Grant's novel The Chippendales, was correct in saying that Boston “hasn't a first-class fortune,” though many in the second class.
West, Copley, and Eighteenth-Century American Provincialism
Authors: Allard Joseph
Published: January 2009

It is a common notion that American painting in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was derivative and provincial. It was an artistic period marked by failure and frustration during which the promising artist, usually after a study tour in Europe, was met with indifference or misunderstanding. He either just managed to scrape a living, often by having to compromise his talents in search of an audience, or was forced to abandon painting altogether and turn to other pursuits. The only successful American painters, in this view, were those who became established in Europe; and they somehow no longer seem to be American. The best of the group were Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, whose European careers have been consistently misunderstood, until very recently, through geographical and historical myopia. European art historians have given them short shrift because they were, after all, provincial painters with the good fortune to practise in a European capital. American art historians have neglected their European work because (from the American point of view) it was English art they practised.
The Soldier at the Heart of the War: the Myth of the Green Beret in the Popular Culture of the Vietnam Era
Authors: Spark Alasdair
Published: January 2009

If you kill for money you're a mercenary. If you kill for pleasure you're a sadist.
If you kill for both you're a Green Beret.
(Sign at a Special Forces Camp, Me Phuc Tay, Vietnam.)
On 11 March 1983, at a provincial court at Nakhon Phanon in Thailand, Lieutenant-Colonel James Gritz, an ex-Green Beret and highly decorated Vietnam veteran, received a suspended one-year prison sentence for the illegal possession of a sophisticated radio transmitter. Gritz had been using the radio, in connection with a series of secret raids into Laos he had organized to search for some of the 2,500 American servicemen still unaccounted for at the end of the Vietnam War. Though Gritz found no trace, persistent rumour has it that some are still alive, held captive in communist prison camps in Laos, Kampuchea, and Vietnam.