bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Counterculture Politics and Popular Culture Studies
Authors: Banes Ruth A.
Published: March 2011

Michael J. Bell. The World From Brown's Lounge: An Ethnography of Black Middle Class Play. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. 191 + xii pp. Karen Haltunnen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. 262 + xviii pp. Bernard Mergen. Play and Playthings: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. 281 + xi pp. Richard Gid Powers. G-Men: Hoover's F.B.I, in American Popular Culture. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. 356 + xix pp. Janice A. Radway. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. 274 + x pp. William L. Van Deburg. Slavery and Race in American Popular Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. 283 + xiii pp. David E. Whisnant. All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in a Changing Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.340 + xv pp. Two general trends characterize recent American Studies scholarship in the United States: an awareness of cultural pluralism and a covert political stance. American Studies has become a socially-conscious discipline informed by the values and aims of academicians who were socialized and educated during the culturally-turbulent 1960s. As Gene Wise's cultural history of the American Studies movement explains: 'After the middle of the sixties, it was hard to assume that America was an integrated whole; division and conflict, not consensus, seemed to characterize the culture."1 During the late sixties, when popular culture studies emerged as a branch of American Studies, the United States was troubled by moral and ethical concerns. Among the numerous issues which attracted public attention were middle-class hypocrisy, cultural imperialism, social injustice, the abuse of political power, and materialistic values—issues which are recalled in the studies of popular culture to be reviewed here.2
Chinese and Japanese in North America: The Canadian and American Experiences Compared
Authors: Daniels Roger
Published: March 2011

This essay examines two streams of migrants to North America: one from China and one from Japan. While this conflation may outrage some nation- alistic historians on both sides of the border, it is certainly justified from the point of view of the migrants who, for a long time, largely ignored the international boundary. It was notorious for decades in the Pacific Northwest that the four chief Chinese communities near the border—Port Townsend and Port Angeles in Washington State and Victoria and Vancouver in British Columbia—did a thriving business in goods and persons with little regard to the law that made the southern and northern shores of Juan de Fuca Strait parts of separate nations. Moreover, if the strait itself or the docks and piers on either side of it were too heavily patroled, there was always the convenient chain of San Juan Islands or, on the mainland, miles of unguarded common frontier.1 For Japanese migrants, too, the border was not a great inconvenience. The reminiscences of one Japanese pioneer illustrate the point nicely. Kihachi Hirakawa, a twenty-six year old bachelor, took advantage of an 1890 rate war between Yokohama ticket agencies which cut fares from fifty to twenty-five yen, to come to "America." He found out about the opportunity just three days before the ship's departure, which was not enough time to get a passport. A ship's officer told him: "A passport was not necessary, and if I paid my fare I would be accepted. Then I asked if I could land without a passport at Vancouver, B.C., and the officer replied, 'Maybe...but I am not sure.'"
American Parties: Shifting from First to Second
Authors: Peeler David P.
Published: March 2011

John J. Duffy and H. Nicholas Muller, III. An Anxious Democracy: Aspects of the 1830s. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982.172 + xiii pp. David G. Pugh. Sons of Liberty: The Masculine Mind in Nineteenth-Century America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.186 + xxii pp. J.C.A. Stagg. Mr. Madison's War: Politics, Diplomacy and Warfare in the Early Republic, 1783-1830. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. 538 + xviii pp. William Preston Vaughn. The Antimasonic Party in the United States, 1826-1843. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983.244 + x pp. Major L. Wilson. The Presidency of Martin Van Buren. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1984.252 + xiii pp. These books are an odd lot. One deals with a war, another with a minor political party, still another with attitudes about sexuality, a fourth with a presidency, and the fifth with something as indefinite as "aspects of the 1830s." Yet beneath this apparent disharmony runs a surprisingly consistent set of concerns, for, in one way or another, these are all books about politics. More specifically, they deal with changes that occurred when the United States moved from its first to second party systems, a time when the Republican and Federalist parties of the founders were superseded by the Democratic and Whig parties of Andrew Jackson and his contemporaries.
On "Over-reading" and "Under-reading" Films
Authors: Zucker Carole
Published: March 2011

Stanley Cavell. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Universtiy Press, 1981.283 pp. William Luhr. Raymond Chandler and Film. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1982. 208 pp. Gerald Mast. Howard Hawks: Storyteller. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.406 pp. Perhaps the most provocative section in Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness turns around the question of "reading in" or "over-reading a text," terms often employed to invalidate the writings of Cavell and his colleague William Rothman. Cavell, who is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, writes: "In my experience people worried about reading in, or overinterpretation, or going too far, are, or were typically afraid of getting started.... My experience is that most texts, like most lives, are underread, not overread....Reading in, therefore, going too far, is a risk inherent in the business of reading and venial in comparison with not going far enough, not reaching the end; indeed it may be essential to knowing what the ending is" (p. 37). At base, it is the argumentation in this passage that has driven a wedge between Cavell and many contemporary film scholars. Interpreting, unless of a specific type (feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist) has become devalued as a critical activity. Cavell believes that a personal response to art is valid (and that film is an art, not a science as structuralist and post-structuralist critics would have one believe); for Cavell the reading of a film by the spectator has at least as much—if not more— significance as the film itself. In this heightened estimation of the reading process, Cavell is not unlike the group of reader-response critics (Fish, Iser, et al.) who have come to prominence in the last ten years and whose work is beginning to be acknowledged among film scholars. The act of reading- particularly when informed by the breadth of knowledge Cavell brings to his work—is not merely an adjunct to film; it is, in and of itself, a work of art. In the same vein, Cavell indirectly chastises formalist critics (for whom the value of art resides solely in the object) when he writes: "So many remarks one has endured about the kind and number of feet in a line of verse, or about a superb modulation, or about a beautiful diagonal in a painting, or about a wonderful camera angle, have not been readings of a passage at all but something like items in a tabulation, with no suggestion about what is being counted—or what the total might mean. Such remarks, I feel, say nothing, though they may be, as Wittgenstein says, about naming, preparations for saying something..." (pp. 36-37). It is no wonder, then, that Pursuits of Happi- ness has roused considerable antipathy among formalist-materialist critics. In Cavell's work the "spectator" is once again human; Cavell the spectator sees and writes with a refreshing abundance of insight, intelligence and originality.
O'Neill, Wilder, and American Drama
Authors: Smith Robert S.
Published: March 2011

C.W.E. Bigsby. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama: Volume One. 1900-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.342 pp. Jackson R. Bryer, ed. With introductory essays by Travis Bogard. "The Theatre We Worked For": The Letters of Eugene O'Neill to Kenneth Macgowan. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. 274 pp. Horst Frenz and Susan Tuck, eds. Eugene O'Neill's Critics: Voices from Abroad. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. 225 pp. Gilbert A. Harrison. The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1983. 403 pp. Linda Simon. Thornton Wilder: His World. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979. 298 pp. These five books offer a view of two major practitioners of the theater in the twentieth century, and an overview of the stir around them. The two biographies of Thornton Wilder reveal a humble man of eclectic enthu- siasms and catholic interests. The exchange of letters between Eugene O'Neill and Kenneth Macgowan sheds light on the needs of a developing playwright and his theater. The appraisals and encomia from abroad permit a reassessment of O'Neill from a variety of fresh angles. Bigsby's critical introduction offers a unified thematic approach to the theater which is both selective and penetrating.
The Auteurist's Tears
Authors: Testa Bart
Published: March 2011

Robert Philip Kolker. A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. 395 + xii pp. Richard Maltby. Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1983.417 pp. Thomas Allen Nelson. Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. 268 pp. William Rothman. Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.371 pp. That field of critical inquiry into the cinema that bears the name "the auteur theory" is supposed to have been thoroughly uprooted and thrown away, its space in film scholarship seeded with salt, by French theorists and their British followers in the interval between "May '68" and the rise of the critical discourse that lately calls itself post-modernist.1 Of course, we are told, the "auteur theory" was nothing of the sort; it was just an unfortunate name chosen in 1962 by the American film critic Andrew Sarris in order to make the idea clearer to his readers and slapped on the original La politique des auteurs that had served as the "critical policy" of Cahiers du cinema in the period between Francois Truffaut's not-quite-a-manifesto in 1954 and the rise of the French New Wave about five years later. We are also told that Sarris scraped the authenticity off of the French original, its combative posture, when he translated Cahiers'' polemical thrust as a "theory."
EAGLE OVER THE ARCTIC: AMERICANS IN THE CANADIAN NORTH, 1867-1985
Authors: Morrison William R.
Published: March 2011

Critics of the American imperialist impulse of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have pictured the United States as a country expanding greedily in every direction, engulfing a large part of Mexico, and more distant territories from Puerto Rico to Hawaii. Even Canada, America's most inoffen- sive neighbour, felt the breath of the imperialist whirlwind after Confedera- tion, particularly in the north during the Alaska boundary dispute of 1903.
SHAPING THE MODERN AMERICAN CITY
Authors: Kapelos George
Published: March 2011

Reyner Banham. A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986. ix + 266 pp. IIlus. Tod A. Marder. The Critical Edge: Controversy in Recent American Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press for The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 1985. 203 pp. Illus. Philip Johnson/John Burgee: Architecture 1979-1985, intro. by Carleton Knight III. New York: Rizzoli International Publications Inc. 192 pp. Illus. The common thread in these three very different books is architecture, but seen from three diverse perspectives: architectural research, history and current practice. Taken together they reflect the lively debate among architects, critics and the general public on the state of the profession in the United States today.
labor history at the crossroads: the mid-life crisis of working-class studies in america
Authors: Palmer Bryan D.
Published: March 2011

Susan Porter Benson. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. xvi + 322 pp. Susan G. Davis. Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. 248 pp. Illus. Richard Jules Oestreicher. Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875-1900. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. xix + 263 pp. Robert A. Slayton. Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986. xiv + 278 pp. The project of rewriting and reconceiving the development of the American working class is now barely two decades old. Yet advances in our knowledge have been considerable, just as the disciplinary boundaries fencing in the study of labor, once constructed of labor economics and bits and pieces from the outposts of history and sociology, have been broken down, expanding the possibilities for those concerned to take the working-class experience seriously. As these volumes reveal, urban studies, sociology, folklore and communications are now receptive to historical analyses of class formation, while much of the most innovative writing in historical inquiry addresses the nature of class relations.
A PLANTING AND TRADING SOCIETY
Authors: Egnal Marc
Published: March 2011

Allan Kulikoff. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1986. xviii + 449 pp. David W. Galenson. Traders, Planters and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. xiv + 230 pp. An emphasis on quantitative data and an interest in New World slavery link these two books. However, the two works are of strikingly different quality. Allan Kulikoff s study of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chesapeake is an important contribution to early American social history, while David W. Galen- son's analysis of the Royal African Company's commerce in slaves is a narrowly- conceived work that adds little to our knowledge. Kulikoff's sprawling Tobacco arid Slaves discusses the transformation of Maryland and Virginia society between about 1650 and the 1780s, and examines the impact of these changes on both whites and blacks. According to Kulikoff, the Chesapeake in the mid-seventeenth century was a region marked by the "domi- nance of small planters" (37), individuals whose farms were worked by family members and one or two white servants. However, between 1680 and 1740, this bucolic, egalitarian political economy faded, and was replaced by a society with striking extremes in wealth and a slave labor force. The region's seemingly endless need for workers prompted the turn to slaves, and the rising number of blacks soon dissuaded immigrant whites from electing the Chesapeake. A class of small farmers survived, with these yeomen now supplementing their family's labor by purchasing one or two slaves. But the dominant group politically and economically became the gentry, whose members often owned a dozen or more slaves and more than a thousand acres of land.
NEWS FROM 'AN INERT FIELD OF ENQUIRY'
Authors: Kellow Margaret M.R.
Published: March 2011

Anthony J. Barker. Captain Charles Stuart: Anglo- American Abolitionist. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. xv + 328 pp. James Brewer Stewart. Wendell Phillips: Liberty's Hero. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. xiii + 355 pp. Illus. Is there anything left to say about abolitionism and if there is, is there any point in saying it? The waning of antislavery studies from the heady days of 1960s "neoabolitionism" has been widely observed and the subject of some lamenta- tion.1 In the early 1970s, an opportunity for reflection, synthesis and integration seemed a good thing. From the vantage point of the mid-1980s, however, the hoped-for syntheses have been slow in appearing. Commentators express fears that abolitionist studies have somehow lost their way. The source of the malaise has been variously identified as the consequence of a misguided fixation on the search for inner meanings or, conversely, as a failure to come to terms with the personal experience of individual abolitionists.2 Without challenging these issues directly, the two studies under discussion manifest vigorous and productive scholarship. New perspectives and new bodies of evidence have been tapped to generate important insights, a development which should encourage those still laboring in the field and give pause to those who have concluded that abolitionism has been exhausted as a fruitful area of inquiry.
IN PRAISE OF MINOR AUTHORS
Authors: Labrie Ross
Published: March 2011

J.D. Brown. Henry Miller. New York: Ungar, 1986. xi + 147 pp. David Castronovo. Thornton Wilder. New York: Ungar, 1986. xi + 174 pp. Christopher C. Dahl. Louis Auchincloss. New York: Ungar, 1986. xi + 276 pp. Barbara C. Ewell. Kate Chopin. New York: Ungar, 1986. xvi + 216 pp. Edward Wagenknecht. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: His Poetry and Prose. New York: Ungar, 1986. v + 266 pp. General literary studies of the sort published by Ungar and Twayne are par- ticularly useful in the case of minor authors, providing sometimes the only available overview of the life and work of significant writers. Set against the more specific, thesis-driven studies that make up much of contemporary literary criticism, the Ungar and Twayne books provide a potentially more open and eclectic approach towards literary figures than is often found.
THOMAS CHANDLER HALIBURTON'S 'MACHINE IN THE GARDEN': APPLYING LEO MARX'S CRITICISM OF AMERICA TO HALIBURTON'S CLOCKMAKER
Authors: MacDonald R.D.
Published: March 2011

In a recent symposium, Robert L. McDougall has puzzled over T.C. Haliburton's being a reactionary tory and yet an advocate of technological progress: "How come ... we find this [early nineteenth-century Nova Scotian writer] whose notion of Utopia seems to be an agrarian economy, stable to the point of inertia and supported by an industrious yeomanry benevolently watched over by country squires—how come such a man takes such an interest in building railways and moving things around?"' McDougall believes that Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America may point the way to an answer: and so with Marx in mind, McDougall decides that Haliburton was "not more American but more North American than I had thought him to be," for he takes Haliburton's preoccupation with "technology and communications" to be "American" or "North American." Thus in Haliburton's opening sketch of The Season's Ticket (1860), McDougall sees an American's faith that technology, railways, shipping lanes and harbours can bind the Eastern and Western provinces of British North America together and further (shades of Whitman's "Passage to India") can join them beyond to the East, "China, Japan, the Sandwich Islands, Australia and Hong Kong" (156). But McDougall also points beyond this to the "big" side of Haliburton's toryism: "The vision is of course suffused with Haliburton's imperial ardour: these will be British routes, made safe for com- merce by a great navy" (156).
THE OLD SOUTH AND THE NEW
Authors: O'Brien John T.
Published: March 2011

John B. Edmunds, Jr. Francis W. Pickens and the Politics of Destruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. xiii + 256 pp. Illus. Fred Arthur Bailey. Class and Tennessee's Confederate Generation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. x + 205 pp. Maps. Gail Williams O'Brien. The Legal Fraternity and the Making of a New South Community, 1848-1882. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. xi + 231 pp. Questions of change and continuity naturally engage historians, but those who study the nineteenth-century South have been especially persistent in taking their measure. Few southern historians can resist juxtaposing the Old and New South because of the crises of secession, Confederate defeat, Emancipation and Recon- struction, because the defenders of its antebellum culture and the heralds of the New South creed were so vocal, and because clattering textile mills scattered throughout the Upper South by the 1880s bore noisy witness to the region's new- found commitment to industrialization. Yet if much sound and fury attended the death throes of the Old South and the birth pangs of the New, historians have differed radically in their assessments of the profundity of the changes, their timing, and the persons and classes most responsible for hurrying or staying change. In quite different ways, the books under review shed light on the still- contested field of change and continuity below the Mason-Dixon line.
FROM EMPIRE TO ANTIPODE: LIBERALISM, REPUBLICANISM AND REINHOLD NIEBUHR'S JEREMIAD ON RECENT AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY
Authors: Nelson Richard
Published: March 2011

The debate over the place of John Locke and liberalism and republicanism in Anglo-American political culture, is by now an old and historiographically familiar one. From Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century to the Romantic historians of the nineteenth century and the Progressives of the twentieth, Locke and republicanism have often been associated with moments of cultural conflict. And as proxies for those conflicts, they have been defended or denigrated, or squared off against each other, in attempts to define American identity.1
NEW DIRECTIONS IN AMERICAN URBAN HISTORY
Authors: Rutherdale R.A.
Published: March 2011

Howard Gillette Jr. and Zane L. Miller, eds. American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. vi + 328 pp. Patricia Mooney Melvin. The Organic City: Urban Definition and Community Organization, 1880-1920. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. xii + 227 pp. Philip Abbott. Seeking Many Inventions: The Idea of Community in America. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987. x + 214 pp. As a distinct field of inquiry, American urban history is now reaching a point at which many contributors are pausing to reflect on what has been accomplished in the field and on what new directions need to be established. As Howard Gillette Jr. points out in his introduction to our first selection in this review, "Central to the timing of this book is the transitional nature of urban history as a distinctive field of study"(l). And yet, from the time of its dramatic growth in the 1960s, American urban historiography has always been in a state of transition. Innovative methodologies and theories are still being advanced by those on the forefront of pioneering efforts. But despite the multiplicity of hypotheses, directions and conclusions which were pursued in the 1970s, most urban historians felt increasingly secure about the legitimacy of their collective endeavour as the decade progressed. The birth in 1974 of the Journal of Urban History, the numerous serial publications in urban studies launched by academic presses, and the advent of a variety of university programs in the field all seemed to be more than hopeful signs. Urban historians were already consolidating their positions and gathering into rival schools of thought. Back in 1971, when Stephan Thernstrom boldly challenged the very legitimacy of urban studies, his voice stood out as one of lonely dissent. But now, it appears, the academic consolidation which urban history achieved in the 1970s is facing formidable criticism from several fronts. Notable practitioners such as Theodore Hershberg of the once- thriving Philadelphia History Project, or Sam Bass Warner Jr., who formerly was dedicated to the reformist potential of urban history, have reached bleak conclusions concerning the survival of their respective approaches. Stephan Thernstrom's critique is no longer quite so isolated. But this new collection of fourteen essays has not been compiled to examine a sub-discipline entering a period of crisis or decline; instead, these articles serve to identify, through their retrospective examinations of past work, new methodological and ideological directions for American urban historiography. The authors' respective messages strike an optimistic chord. Their advocacy of new interpretative approaches seeks to build on past accomplishments rather than to abandon failed efforts.
"RECOGNIZING WILLA CATHER"
Authors: Peterman Michael A.
Published: March 2011

L. Brent Bohlke, ed. Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. xvii + 202 pp. Illus. James Woodress. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. xx + 583 pp. Sharon O'Brien. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. xvi + 464 pp. Susan J. Rosowski. The Voyage Perilous: Willa Gather's Romanticism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. xvii + 284 pp. In several senses, the scholarly pursuit of a writer's life is a more demanding and consuming undertaking than an exercise in literary criticism. It certainly is more interesting to more people. With major writers, those demands upon the biographer increase significantly, for "major" as a label connotes not only authorial output but a complexity and elusiveness in the subject sufficient to draw and fascinate large numbers of readers. The biographer must search out a large body of material and gain some kind of command over, and impose some sort of order upon, the bulk of that Output; the sheer detective work of sniffing out pertinent and overlooked material and data can extend over years, even decades. At the same time, the biographer must rise above the data in order to establish his or her own position vis-à-vis both the subject and the shape to be given to that the subject's work. Will he be defendant or assassin? Will he hang his biographical garment on a thesis, a psychoanalytical theory, a cultural truism, a moral outlook, or an aesthetic premise? Faced with the opportunity to look with increasingly closer magnification at the work and life of his subject, what and how and in what way will he choose to see?
RADIO DAYS
Authors: Belgrad Daniel
Published: March 2011

R. LeRoy Bannerman. Norman Corwin and Radio: The Golden Years. University: University of Alabama Press, 1986. xiii + 275 pp. Illus. Susan J. Douglas. Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. xxix + 322 pp. Illus. Television and the printed word often get the lion's share of attention from media scholars. However, at least two recent works address the history of American radio, a medium whose cultural significance should not be under- estimated. R. LeRoy Bannerman's book is a straightforward biography of the radio dramatist, Norman Corwin. It focuses on the decade, 1938-1948, when Corwin's influence was at its peak. Susan J. Douglas's Inventing American Broadcasting is more analytical in purpose. Her narrative interweaves the technological, organizational and ideological developments that preceded commercial radio broadcasting. It describes how identifiable interest groups molded early electric-wave technology into the mass entertainment medium we know today.
COOPER'S STATUS AND STATURE NOW
Authors: Seymour House Kay
Published: March 2011

Let's start right off by defining status and stature. Status is, according to my dictionaries, one's position in society, or a profession, or a community. It consequently depends on what others think of you-what, particularly in the United States, that ubiquitous and omnipotent THEY that Cooper so loathed, think of you. Being dependent on public opinion, status (what THEY think at a given moment) is subject to change-often quickly. And a change in status is often signaled by the acquisition or the loss of what we know as status symbols—BMWs, platinum credit cards, corner offices, or whose boss must pick up the phone first.
COOPER TODAY: A PARTISAN VIEW
Authors: Ringe Donald A.
Published: March 2011

The two hundredth anniversary of James Fenimore Cooper's birth is an appropriate time for us to consider the current state of scholarship on his life and works. How far have we come? Where are we now? And what are the prospects for the future? Some of the conclusions are obvious. Much has been accomplished. The publication between 1960 and 1968 of the six- volume Letters and Journals put the study of Cooper's life on a firmer basis than it had ever been before, and the appearance of each volume in the SUNY edition of Cooper's writings adds further to the foundation by providing the scholar with accurate texts of his books, both fiction and non- fiction; with textual commentaries that reveal much about both his revisions and the history of the texts; and with historical introductions that establish the genesis, composition, publication, and contemporary reception of each of the books. We lack only a modern biography and additional volumes of the SUNY edition to place the study of Cooper on the most solid of historical grounds. We can only hope that this work, so well begun by the late James Franklin Beard, can be completed in the not too distant future.
COOPER AND THE LITERARY DISCOVERY OF THE SEA
Authors: Philbrick Thomas
Published: March 2011

It comes as something of a shock to those who return to Cooper in maturity to find that eleven of his thirty-two works of fiction are full-fledged novels of the sea, books in which the characters are not hunters, squatters, Indians and soldiers, but merchant seamen, sealers, man-of-war's men, packet masters and pirates. Their settings are not frontier settlements like Templeton or wilderness outposts like Fort William Henry, not the forest or the prairie, but Narragansett Bay, New York Harbor, the English Channel and the Straits of Sunda. They are informed not by the lore of the hunt and the warpath but by the technology of seamanship and the principles of naval tactics. The areas of nautical experience with which they deal are so diverse that together they comprise a virtual microcosm of the great world of maritime activity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Cooper's accounts of colonial smuggling, Caribbean piracy, the China trade, the Antarctic seal fishery and the transatlantic packet service supply a vivid informal history of American nautical enterprise. He extends his range to European maritime experience in two of these novels: The Wing-and-Wing tells the story of a French privateer in the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic wars, while The Two Admirals carries its readers back to the mid-eighteenth century and the complex fleet actions of the Royal Navy.
COOPER'S EMBLEMS OF HISTORY/FICTION
Authors: Redekop Ernest H.
Published: March 2011

A series of Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury strips shows the all-together-too- historical Donald Trump ordering the decorating of the gigantic bathrooms on the Trump Princess. Wallowing in post-modernist kitsch, the Trump imagination moves unhesitatingly and without historical hang-ups from the parting of the Red Sea to the more recent coronation of Catherine the Great and (without pausing) to the almost contemporary eviction of his tenants. The depiction in the foyer to what is presumably the Grand Bathroom of the labors of Hercules in the manner "of Michelangelo. Or Picasso. One of those famous guys" adds entirely new meaning to the efforts of someone like Pope's Belinda. The truly magic realism of his proposed two-dimensional library is its apparent ability to transform all historical, philosophical, mythical and literary complexities into an image for public consumption. The unashamed vanity of the text is only matched by the even more unbridled egotism of the sub-text, which tells us that all art, and indeed all history, may be appropriated easily and instantly if you have enough money and enough chutzpah. Trudeau's brilliant pun, "Trump l'oeil," conflates the problem faced by any critic of historical novels in dealing with the relations among historical fact, fictional representation, natural and human emblems and ever-slippery "truth." It is a kind of conceptual cloverleaf, in which history, fiction, landscape and human artifacts intersect.
HOW PRESIDENTS LEAD
Authors: Kenski Henry G
Published: March 2011

Fred I. Greenstein, ed. Leadership in the Modern Presidency. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.430 pp. J. Richard Snyder, ed. John F. Kennedy: Person, Policy, Presidency. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Books, 1988. xix + 144 pp. Few topics are as important as the leadership qualities of American presidents. Two recent books make important contributions to our understanding of the positive and negative qualities underlying presidential performance. The more comprehensive and scholarly is a volume edited by Fred Greenstein. In it nine eminent political scientists and historians present their assessments of the leadership styles and organizational talents of presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. Greenstein also writes a short introduction, as well as an impressive summary chapter on nine presidents in search of a modern presidency.
FANNY (STILL) EXPURGATED
Authors: Scott John Anthony
Published: March 2011

Monica Gough, ed. Fanny Kemble: Journal of a Young Actress. Foreword by Elizabeth Fox-Gertovese. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, xxiii + 196 pp. On 2 September 1832 Frances Anne Kemble, famous British actress, arrived in New York with her father, Charles, for a theatrical tour. She kept a record of the transatlantic voyage and the first ten months of her American experience, published in 1835 in two volumes of almost 600 pages entitled simply Journal. Composed before Kemble's marriage to Pierce Butler in 1834, the Journal is a significant contribution to Victorian letters. In his 1835 review, Edgar Allan Poe noted the book's "sound sense," its "vivacity of style, beautiful descriptions . . . forcible observations." In an age bursting with travel books, Poe praised Kemble's as "one of the most attractive (as it is the most original) ... recently published." The Journal, too, is a valuable source for the Kemble biographer, not only for the picture that it gives of Kemble herself, but for the way in which it illuminates the history of the Shakespearian stage on both sides of the Atlantic. This Journal, of course, is not to be confused with the equally important Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, which Kemble published twenty-eight years later.
INTRODUCTION
Authors: Tucker Bruce
Published: March 2011

Most of the essays in this issue were read as papers at the October, 1990, annual meeting of the Canadian Association for American Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. Organized around the theme of the North American city, the conference brought together historians, political scientists, literary specialists and activists from Canada and the United States to discuss contemporary scholarship in American urban studies. This conference was not an isolated event but part of a larger North American effort to assess and chart future agendas for American urban studies. In December 1988, urban specialists at the American Historical Association's annual meeting in Cincinnati established the Urban History Association to stimulate interest and research in urban history in all periods and geographical locations. In October 1990, the Chicago Historical Society hosted two conferences to discuss research in urban studies by historians and museum professionals.1 Although much of the impetus for this new momentum seems to have come from historians, the diversity of papers at the Concordia conference suggests that the current revitalization of urban studies knows no disciplinary boundaries.
LE VAGABONDAGE ET LA LOI: LE CONTROLE DES CLASSES DANGEREUSES A LA NOUVELLE-ORLEANS, 1850-1885
Authors: Vandal Gilles
Published: March 2011

Des études récentes démontrent que les changements idéologiques, les boule-versements sociaux et la capacité des élites locales de manipuler le processus législatif au détriment des autres classes ou groupes sociaux avaient dans le passé, comme elles l'ont encore aujourd'hui, une profonde influence sur l'évolution des lois criminelles. C'est ainsi que le code pénal est régulièrement remodelé et que certains comportements sociaux sont périodiquement criminalisés ou décriminalisés selon l'idéologie, les problèmes sociaux et les forces sociales en présence. Les lois criminelles reflètent donc les craintes et les valeurs d'une société donnée à un moment précis de son histoire et représentent ainsi une source essentielle pour analyser l'arrivée de nouveaux modes de contrôle social. Mais plus encore, l'étude de l'évolution des lois criminelles permet à l'historien de voir comment de nouvelles définitions de la criminalité sont liées à de nouveaux rapports sociaux.1
BUFFALO/BALTIMORE, ATHENS/DALLAS: JOHN BARTH, DON DELILLO AND THE CITIES OF POSTMODERNISM
Authors: Carmichael Thomas
Published: March 2011

In his reflections upon the spirit of place in recent fiction, John Barth remarks that the setting as metaphor is a function of the discourse within which it is situated. Perhaps predictably, Barth insists that the proper function of the trope of place in contemporary fiction is to be found in a postmodern reconciliation of competing claims: "realism and antirealism, linearity and nonlinearity, continuity and discontinuity"; however, as the narrator of Poe's "The Man of the Crowd," reminds us, to decipher the figurai truth in an urban landscape might well mean the pursuit of a text that will "not permit itself to be read."1 Nevertheless, Barth's reflections suggest the ways in which, in both his own fiction and in the work of Don DeLillo, the site of the narrative's unfolding is always the sign and context of a particular postmodern attitude. As the scene of the dead repetitions of history and of the dispersal of the self, the city in the fiction of both authors is an exemplary sign of the anxieties of the postmodern condition, one which surely echoes the panicky amnesia of the culture of the simulacrum and the "[postmodern] fascination with a degraded landscape."2 But this is only one side of the postmodern rewriting of the city; in postmodern fiction we also confront the ironic encoding of the city as a positive site of resistance to the master tropes of cultural authority, and particularly those of the modernist tradition. Both these attitudes can be found in postmodern fiction, and often they are found together in the same text as signs of the ambivalence that resides at the heart of postmodern culture.
GROUND ZERO: THE CITY, THE BOMB AND THE END OF HISTORY
Authors: Larabee Ann E.
Published: March 2011

At the height of violence during the Persian Gulf War, MacNeil/Lehrer introduced its war coverage with this striking backdrop: a target image with the words "Ground Zero" printed across it. Viewers knew very well what "Ground Zero" was: the ancient, exotic city of Baghdad, where a fairy-tale, dark-skinned demon lurked underground in a hardened bunker, magically avoiding surgical strikes. Despite the Bush administration's high moral ground on civilian casualties, the nuclear referent was omnipresent in wartime's political spectacle. Bush's New World Order, born from neo- conservative proclamations of the end of history, was represented in an archetypal nuclear sign: concentric circles imposed on a city.
PHOTO-OPPORTUNITY: PHOTOGRAPHY AS TECHNOLOGY
Authors: Maynard Patrick
Published: March 2011

How useful were the 1989 celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the announcement of photographic processes for reviewing American conceptions of photography? There were large and important shows with hefty catalogues, notably "On the Art of Fixing a Shadow," put on jointly by Washington's National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago, and moving to The Los Angeles County Museum at the end of the year. The Museum of Modern Art waited for 1990 with its "Photography Until Now" review arranged by John Szarkowski. The most ambitious project, "The Art of Photography, 1839-1989," with almost 500 pictures and an over-400-page catalogue, was deployed only at Houston's Museum of Fine Arts before departing for Canberra and London, where it had actually been planned. There were smaller shows, such as "A Panorama of Photography: 150 Years Since Daguerre" by the Worcester Art Museum and "Capturing an Image: a Century and a Half of Fine Photography," shared between the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard's Fogg Museum. Art museum colloquia included "Memory of Light" at the Detroit Institute (with various photo exhibits) and another, exhibiting rare and valuable images at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, to which someone neglected to invite me.
Introduction to Part II
Authors: Matthews Jean V.
Published: March 2011

The essays in Part II of Reinterpreting the American Experience: Women, Gender, and American Studies further exemplify some of the themes that emerged in Part I. The "different voice" of women, for example, appears strongly in Catherine Lundie's discussion of ghost stories by American female writers, as does an emphasis on empathy as a mode of knowledge. The female protagonists in these stories are seldom really terrified by the ghosts they encounter; they tend, rather, to empathize with them, and the anguish they feel comes from this sympathetic identification. Their empathy, in turn, is rooted in the common female experience of being present but never really heard. They can understand how it feels to be ghosts among the living.
Domestic Discontents: Feminist Reevaluations of Psychiatry, Women, and the Family
Authors: Carson Mina
Published: March 2011

In 1972, Phyllis Chester framed an indictment of American psychiatrists: "They are more willing to pity women than to respect them; more comfort- able with unhappy women than with angry women" (246). She offered this judgment in her book Women and Madness (1972), an angry and path- breaking reassessment of women's relation to the psychological "helping professions." Chesler invoked the fates of women, some famous (Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath), some not so famous (Elizabeth Packard, Ellen West), who had sought or been forced to seek psychological assessment and treatment, and who, in the course of "treatment," had been physically, emotionally, and/or sexually abused within interlocking "mental health" systems powered by male-determined constructions of female roles and capacities. When women came up against psychiatry, Chesler asserted, women lost.
"One Need Not be A Chamber-to be Haunted-": American Women's Supernatural Fiction
Authors: Lundie Catherine
Published: March 2011

It has long been recognized that in the nineteenth century, the literary possibilities of the supernatural were capitalized on by representatives of the "American pantheon,"1 Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James. The supernatural provided them with a forum in which to investigate other- wise unapproachable moral and psychological issues. Yet these men were not alone; countless women writers also had enormous success with super- natural writing. Harriett Beecher Stowe, Harriett Prescott Spofford, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are just a few of the women who wrote ghost stories in Victorian America. Their exclusion from critical discussions of the American ghost story is somewhat odd, and can perhaps be accounted for by a general critical prejudice against nineteenth- centuiy American women's writing. Twentieth-century critics have a long history of equating "popular nineteenth-century American woman writer[s]" with "sentimental nonentity."2 The omission is doubly distressing in light of the fact that British women writers of the supernatural have never lacked for partisans. As Jessica Amanda Salmonson notes, "women's dominion over the ghost story in Victorian England has been widely acknowledged." And, she adds wryly, "though few seem to have noticed it, this was true in the United States as well" (1989, xii).3 With very few exceptions, however, American anthologists of the ever-popular ghost story continue to margin- alize women writers, or to exclude them from their collections altogether.4
Crossing Borders: The Influence of American Women's History on the Writing of Canadian Women's History
Authors: Kealey Linda
Published: March 2011

Any Canadian who has crossed the border into the United States feels a certain trepidation at the point of entry, particularly those who lived through the era of Woodstock, the Vietnam War, student protest or, more recently, the antidrug campaigns. There is a sense of crossing into genuinely "foreign" territory, into a country with a different system of government, different social and political traditions, and different expectations. A recent Canadian film by Bruce McDonald, Highway 61 (1991), contains a quintessential scene that underlines these clashes of cultures, recognizing some commonalities between Canadians and Americans, yet at the same time accentuating the ambivalences. In the film, an unlikely pair of protagonists—a young, naive, small-town barber and a tough, experienced woman roadie, drive up to the border with a coffin strapped to the roof of his car. The barber had dis- covered the body in an old bathtub in his back yard; the roadie, fleeing with drugs from a heavy-metal rock band, arrives in town and convinces the bar- ber, the undertaker, and the town that she is the sister of the dead man. Contriving to be alone with the body, the resourceful woman plants the dope in the corpse and sets off for New Orleans hitchhiking with the coffin. Enter the young barber, itching to free himself from a staid existence and longing to take to the open road and see America (Highway 61 stretches from northern Ontario to New Orleans), and a modern picaresque journey begins.
Missions and Women's History: A Tale of "Reflex Influences"
Authors: Skidmore Patricia
Published: March 2011

Leslie A. Flemming, ed. Women's Work for Women: Missionaries and Social Change in Asia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989. Patricia Grimshaw. Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth Century Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989. Patricia R. Hill. The World Their Household: The American Woman's Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870-1920. Ann Arbor: Uni- versity of Michigan Press, 1985. Jane Hunter. The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn- of-the Century China. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. When turn-of-the-century Americans and Canadians set out to convert the world to Christianity in one generation, they had no qualms about including women in their work. In fact, North American women's mission work would not only convert and civilize the secluded, benighted women of the heathen world, but it would also deepen the spiritual lives of all concerned. The "reflex influence" of mission work, as they called it, would cause women in mission societies at home and in mission stations abroad to appreciate Godliness and civilized behaviour codes. Several detailed studies have appeared during the last decade that lead to the conclusion that the "reflex influences" of mission work were not exactly what contemporaries expected.