bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Biodiversity and livelihood in land-use gradients in an era of climate change - outline of a Nepal-Swiss research project
Authors: Scheidegger Christoph , Nobis Michael P , Shrestha Krishna K
Published: March 2011

The Swiss National Science Foundation has recently granted a project where we propose to study how different levels of land-use intensity (from primeval forests to arable fields) and climate do affect biodiversity on the southern slope of the Nepalese Himalayas. We will investigate replicated land-use gradients at various altitudes in three regions with a different regional climate, and in particular, different levels of seasonal precipitation. Our core study region will be the Manaslu Conservation Area characterized by an oceanic climate and this region will be compared to a hyper-oceanic region in Annapurna Conservation Area and a semi-oceanic region of the Sagarmatha (Everest) region. By using a quasi-experimental landscape approach organisms will be investigated in six valleys covering different precipitation regimes, altitudinal gradients over 1600 m representing different temperatures, and four land use types ranging from closed forests to open landscapes. These organisms will include plants, lichens, mushrooms, butterflies and birds. Population data of Red Listed mammals (flagship species) will be collected during the project by local authorities. The functional connectivity of forest fragments along land-use and climate gradients will be assessed for two intensively studied species, the epiphytic lichen Lobaria pindarensis and the tree species Taxus wallichiana. DOI: 10.3126/botor.v7i0.4368Botanica Orientalis – Journal of Plant Science (2010) 7: 7-17
Anti-diabetic potential of crude extracts of medicinal plants used as substitutes for Swertia chirayita using in vitro assays
Authors: Phoboo Susanna , Bhowmik Prasanta C , Jha Pramod Kumar , Shetty Kalidas
Published: March 2011

Swertia chirayita is a highly traded medicinal plant of Nepal widely used for its anti-diabetic potential. In this study, two herbs (Swertia nervosa and Andrographis paniculata) often used as adulterants and substitutes of Swertia chirayita were analyzed for their antioxidant activity, α-glucosidase inhibitory potential and total phenolic content and compared with that of Swertia chirayita. Aqueous and 12% ethanolic extracts of the three herbs showed moderate to high antioxidant activity and moderate α-glucosidase inhibitory potential. HPLC/ DAD revealed the presence of swertiamarin and mangiferin in all the Swertia species, while Andrographis paniculata contained cinnamates such as cinnamic acid, p-coumaric acid and chlorogenic acid. The antioxidant activity and α-glucosidase inhibitory potential was evident in the two herbs indicating their relevance as substitutes for Swertia chirayita for potential early stage management of type-2 diabetes and related complications. Key-words: Andrographis paniculata; antioxidant activity; cinnamates; mangiferin; Swertia nervosa; swertiamarin; α-glucosidase; type-2 diabetes. DOI: 10.3126/botor.v7i0.4373Botanica Orientalis – Journal of Plant Science (2010) 7: 48-55
The Dossier as Hornet's Nest
Authors: Mathews Robin , Steele James
Published: March 2011

THREE REVIEWS OF MATHEWS AND STEELE The Struggle for Canadian Universities. Professors Robin Mathews and James Steele of Carleton University have compiled a dossier of material relating to the recent controversy they precipitated when they raised the question of the increasing num­ber of non-Canadians teaching at Canadian universities. This material is conveniently assembled in this volume under the rather dramatic and certainly value-laden title, The Struggle for Canadian Universities, but the title should not deter any reader, for within these pages is expounded a problem which is of fundamental importance to the future of Canadian higher education. Professors Mathews and Steele have assembled those documents which they feel present both sides of the story, and thus they include letters and statements which in many cases are violently opposed to their own views. For this they are to be commended; however, the authors' viewpoint is stated over and over until the reader knows beforehand what their answer will be to a particular dissenting view­point. If this was an intentional ploy used to refute opposing views, the authors have succeeded in making their own views seem the stronger. Still, the authors have put together a book that enables the individual reader to come to his own conclusions.
Continental Co-Existence: The American Approach as Seen by a Canadian
Authors: THOMSON DALE C.
Published: March 2011

A couple of years ago, the Policy Planning Council, now merged with the Secretariat of the State Department, set out to prepare a statement on relations with Canada. The task proved so vast that the result was largely an enumeration of facts, and was never made available to the public. In the course of their recent foreign policy review, the Canadians did not even go that far. "We . . . came to the conclusion/' Mitchell Sharp told the House of Commons Committee on External Affairs and National Defence on May 12,1970, "that relations between Canada and the United States were so broad and far-reaching that it would not serve very much purpose to try to summarize them in a single paper/' When I became Director of Canadian Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, I was surprised to find that neither government had a comprehensive document, public or confidential, outlining the way in which the policy of one country was formulated with regard to the other. Accordingly, three of us at the Center of Canadian Studies, Roger Swanson, a research assistant, Gerald Wright, a ph.d. student, and I, joined forces to try to remedy this defect, at least as far as United States' policy toward Canada is concerned. On April 20, 1970, I presented our findings to the House of Commons Special Committee on External Affairs and National Defence. This article adds to them, and carries our analysis a stage further.
The Artist and the Government: The P.W.A.P.
Authors: BERNSTEIN JOEL H.
Published: March 2011

With the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the mass unemployment that hit the United States, drastic changes took place in the relationship of the Federal Government to the art community. By 1933, over 12,000,000 Americans were unemployed and the majority of the artists, who in good times were at best a marginally successful economic group, were exceptionally hard hit because of diminished private patronage. This was unfortunate because it was a period of exciting regional production and renewed interest in mural work that had been stimulated by the Mexican experiment that was started in 1926. At that time, Mexico, under the leadership of President Obregon, began to hire muralists at workmen's wages to decorate public buildings and the best murals of Jose Orozco and Diego Rivera resulted.1
Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, By Studs Terkel.
Authors: HOAR VICTOR
Published: March 2011

Harold Clurman called them "The Fervent Years." Leo Gurko, "The Angry Decade" Louis Filler, "The Anxious Years" Isabel Leighton, "The Aspirin Age" Edmund Wilson, "American Jitters" For Studs Terkel, the years of the Great Depression were, quite simply, "Hard Times"
E pluribus one loved folly: Observations on American Criticism
Authors: RANS GEOFFREY
Published: March 2011

John F. Lynen, The Design of the Present. Yale University Press, 1969. $13.75. 456 pp. Joel Porte, The Romance in America. Wesleyan University Press, 1969. $8.00. 235 pp. Critics of American literature have, over the last twenty years especially, developed megalomaniac tendencies; for many of them nothing less than an overview will suffice as a frame for their remarks on individual authors. Two recent volumes exemplify the trend. Both show the way in which overviews usually produce overkill. The heart sinks as Joel Porte curtseys to Professors Fiedler, Feidelson, R. W. B. Lewis, Chase, Levin, and Hoffman. Even as he explains how his study differs from the others', he makes it sound depressingly the same sort of thing.
Adam's Rib
Authors: MATTHEWS JEAN
Published: March 2011

Anne F. Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics 1830-1930, University of Chicago Press. 1970. $5.95. 247 pp. Emily Jane Putnam, The Lady: Studies of Certain Significant Phases of Her History, University of Chicago Press. 1969; first published 1910. $5.95.323 pp. Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement, University of Washington Press. 1969; first published 1923. $10.50. 504 pp. Far more than the history of the old world, the history of the new has been overwhelmingly masculine. If the black schoolboy discovers from his texts that History is something made by whites, then the American schoolgirl (and how much more the Canadian girl!) finds that it is some- thing made by men. No Queens, no Empresses, no courtesans, no concu- bines, no militant saints; no Catherine, no Elizabeth, no Tz'u Hsi, no Madame de Pompadour, no Madame de Stael, no Rani of Jhansi, no Joan of Arc. Even the occasional Presidential mistresses appear to have been domestic little women, quite lacking in political ambition, and Canadian politicians seem to have been more susceptible to drink than to women. One of the more interesting aspects of the present Black revolution is the the attempt to rescue the historical Black man from invisibility and now some historians are trying to do the same thing for the American woman. The title of a recent collection of historical documents on women is sig- nificant: The American Woman: Who Was She?
"But the Penalty of Adam": Cooper's Sense of the Subversive
Authors: RANS GEOFFREY
Published: March 2011

Nevertheless, the community will live on, suffer and be deluded: it may even fancy itself within reach of perfection, but it will live on to be disappointed. james fenimore cooper: New York The opening passage of Faulkner's "The Bear" embodies not merely the clue to that particular story, but a central concern of the American, his response to the land he stands upon, that abides from the moment of wonder at the beginning imagined by Nick Carraway
Form in Salinger's Shorter Fiction
Authors: SLETHAUG G. E.
Published: March 2011

In nearly all the fiction of J. D. Salinger, the characters have difficulty accepting the use of conventions, whether they govern literature, sports, or life itself. Such an individual as Franny Glass objects to social forms that unnecessarily restrain her individual will. Ironically, however, she finds it equally difficult to reject such forms and consequently reaches a point where, being caught between the opposing forces of form and form- lessness, she is unable to function. It is this dilemma and its solution which is the informing vision of the greater part of Salinger's important short fiction, including "The Laughing Man/' Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour - An Introduction.
Review Essay: Lessons of the Master
Authors: MCRAE RUSSELL , KRAFT JAMES
Published: March 2011

Leon Edel. Henry James: The Master 1901-1916. J. B. Lippincott Company. 1972. $12.95. 591 pp. I The fifth and final volume of Leon Edel's psychoanalytically informed reconstruction of the life and art of Henry James has appeared. It has taken more than twenty years to complete this ambitious and enormously difficult enterprise, but it has been well worth the waiting. The difficulty was all Leon Edel's; the informed reader can depend on experiencing nothing but the keen pleasure of intellectual and emotional satisfaction. It is gratifying to report that the exciting and portentous expectations aroused by the previous four volumes have been fulfilled; Leon Edel has demonstrated that authentic knowledge and genuine wisdom can be achieved about the meaning of imaginative literature. This is the finest biography of a writer that has been written, saturated with the author's humane yet honest sympathy for his subject, tempered into an organic unity by his balanced intelligence. Only one person has examined the experience of Henry James with greater personal immediacy and more ruthless precision, and that was Henry James himself.
The Imagistic Evolution of James's Businessmen
Authors: HINZ EVELYN J.
Published: March 2011

When in The Ivory Tower, his final but unfinished attempt to treat "the magnificent theme en disponibilite"1 - the portrait of the American busi- nessman - Henry James introduces two dying millionaires, the one, Frank Betterman, who renounces his wealth and denounces it as the poison which has "sickened him// and the other, Abel Gaw, who clings to his money, like a "ruffled hawk, motionless but for his single tremor, with his beak, which had pecked so many hearts out, visibly sharper than ever, yet only his talons nervous/'2 there can be no doubt that James's concept of the capitalist has undergone a radical change since his portrait of Christopher Newman as The American. Hence the importance of survey studies like those of Michael Millgate and Jan. W. Dietrichson,3 for not only is the developmental approach essential to a legitimate definition of James's concept of the business type but also an adequate appreciation of James's attitude toward such controversial figures as Adam Verver de- pends upon a recognition of his location in the general context. The pur- pose of the present study is also to explore the development of James's presentation of the businessman but this time through an examination of his use of a particular type of imagery to characterize him. Common to all of James's portraits of the capitalist, I hope to demonstrate, is imag- ery associated with "appetite" in a broad sense, while the changes in his attitude toward the type are discernible in his progressive alterations in this specific image pattern.4 What in general I hope to trace is the way the vulgar aesthetic taste of a Christopher Newman becomes the ruthless gourmand appetite of an Adam Verver who in turn prepares the way for the vulturous Abel Gaw.
The Irony of National Union: Violence and Compassion in "Drum-Taps"*
Authors: SNYDER JOHN
Published: March 2011

The prevailing conception of Whitman is that he celebrates absolute com- munion between the self and others: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,1 For those who see him this way, the message that all men are one by virtue of the unity of Being served both as inspiration for his first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) and as his triumphant valediction at the onset of old age. The ecstatic lyricism of "Song of Myself" (1855) and "Passage to India" (1871) controls their estimation of his career.
The Arnheim Trilogy: Cosmic Landscapes in The Shadow of Poe's Eureka
Authors: PITCHER E. W.
Published: March 2011

Edgar Allan Poe had been prospecting in the field of metaphysical realities from the earliest moments in his writing career, but only in the final ten years of his life did his speculations take coherent shape, and his sugges- tions assume the status of convictions. There is a direct line of develop- ment from "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" (December, 1839) to Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848) - from the vagueness of the one to the myriad of details in the other. Limitations of space here prohibit a full accounting of the steps taken by Poe in his progress from a mere glimpsing of the "supernal realm" to a full mapping of the spatial and temporal cosmic plan. However, I wish to intimate the importance of such develop- ments for our understanding of the revisions that changed "The Land- scape Garden" into "The Domain of Arnheim," and that led Poe to supplant both with "Landor's Cottage."
Homosexuality and Spiritual Aspiration in Moby-Dick
Authors: HERBERT, JR T. WALTER
Published: March 2011

There is now widespread agreement that Melville depicts homosexual affection in the passages of Moby-Dick that treat Ishmael's developing friendship with Queequeg and in a later chapter entitled "A Squeeze of the Hand." Among critics who have sought to deal directly with the homosexual motif there is the further agreement that psychoanalytic concepts offer the greatest promise of yielding a persuasive interpreta- tion.1 Psychoanalytic doctrine is attractive as a way of illuminating the significance of these passages because of its claim to describe powerful unconscious forces; and the critics who have followed this line typically present the homosexual materials as embodying meanings of which Melville was only partly aware. Newton Arvin and Leo Marx, for example, hold that the homosexual theme emerges from a depth of Melville's mind where psychic opposites clash. Arvin conceives Ishmael, and Melville himself, to be plagued by an obscure inward contest between Eros and Thanatos; to him the homoerotic passages convey love's vic- torious battle against death.2 To Marx the issues have a collective social significance; he finds in Moby-Dick the divided mentality of American culture generally, its partition into "two kingdoms of force," a realm of mechanistic aggression opposing a pastoral world of idyllic sentiment. In treating "A Squeeze of the Hand," however, Marx offers a Freudian inter- pretation of pastoralism itself; he sees the chapter as Melville's "deepest penetration into the psychic sources ... of sentimental pastoralism.... The basis of this feeling, it now appears, is what Freud no doubt would have called an infantile pleasure ego."3
Stereotyping and the Pacific Railway Issue, 1845-65
Authors: MINER H. CRAIG
Published: March 2011

An individual may find it impossible to share his most subtle perceptions with his closest friend, much less with his block, town or nation. There- fore, when a group mandate, or consensus, is required regarding a public issue, communication is apt to take the form of stereotypes. To certain members of society, mostly those well-versed in the details of the prob- lem at hand, these stereotypes appear to be oversimplified, generalized, and distorted shadows of reality. So they are, especially if one assumes non-relative truth and omniscient observers. They have been defined as constructs realistic enough to make identification plausible, and romantic enough to make it desirable.1 Yet no historian concerned with defining an issue as it was understood by the public at a given time in the past can neglect study of the stereotyped arguments then popular.
Dependence and Interest: The Political Economy of the First British Empire
Authors: BUMSTED J. M.
Published: March 2011

Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson, eds. Essays on the American Revolution. Chapel Hill and New York: The University of North Carolina Press and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973. 320 pp. Alison Gilbert Olson. Anglo-American Politics 1660-1775: The Relationship Between Parties in England and Colonial America. New York and Ox- ford: Oxford University Press, 1973. 192 pp. James A. Henretta. "Salutary Neglect": Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. 381 pp. Joseph Albert Ernst. Money and Politics in America 1755-1775: A Study in the Currency Act of 1764 and the Political Economy of Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973. 403 pp. P. Langford. The First Rockingham Administration 1765-1766. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. 318 pp. Bernard Bailyn. The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974. 423 pp. The United States of America is about to celebrate its two-hundredth birthday, although there seems considerable uncertainty about the enter- prise. Unlike the Revolutionary Centennial of 1876 and the Civil War Centennial of 1961-1965, the Bicentennial of the American republic appears likely to pass virtually without notice, cynically ignored by pro- fessional historians and average citizens alike. The key to the apathy undoubtedly lies in the present mood of the American people. In 1876 the United States was in the first flower of a full-blown industrial revolution after the resolution of the searing divisions of Civil War. America was growing, prospering, and on the eve of appearance on the world stage as a first-rank power, capable even of its own colonial pretensions. In 1876, Americans were confident. They were complacent about their present (though some labelled it the "Age of Greed"), enthusiastic about their future, and secure in their past. The Revolution was accepted in 1876 by Americans for what Thomas Jefferson told the world it was in the Declaration of Independence - an attempt to achieve the high ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by overturning the despotism of a wicked monarch. Historians of the time substantiated such an interpretation. The ideals had been worth fighting for, and by and large, they were held to have been realized. Times have changed. Most Americans now wonder whether the revolutionary ideals have been attained, and debate whether recourse to violence can ever be justified.
The American Indian as Soldier, 1890-1919
Authors: WHITE W. BRUCE
Published: March 2011

It seems almost paradoxical that in late nineteenth-century America, when In- dian resistance was almost at an end and the Indian was popularly depicted as a vanishing race, white Americans were so concerned about the "Indian prob- lem." It was such a troubling matter, in all likelihood, because the Indian was not vanishing quickly enough; in addition, most of those who wrote of "disappear- ance" and even "extermination" were actually speaking of assimilation or amalgamation. They hopefully assumed the eradication of a culture Americans had never been compelled to understand, and which appeared to conflict so sharply with the economic individualism of American capitalism.
Dorothy Parker Revisited
Authors: LABRIE ROSS
Published: March 2011

For some reason, the writings of Dorothy Parker have been for the most part overlooked by critics in spite of the fact that her work continues to sell well and to go into fresh editions. Part of the reason is doubtlessly the general feeling that her writing belongs to the twenties and thirties and cannot easily be transplanted, even though in fact she continued to publish until the end of the fifties. Reread- ing Dorothy Parker in 1944, for example, Edmund Wilson was nostalgically reminded of the freedom of the twenties which made her writings so "personal and direct."1 In many ways she was a child of the twenties with her mixture of wit and scepticism, her uneven taste, and her concern with the American myths of glamour and success.
Eudora Welty: A Dance to the Music of Order
Authors: GRAY R. J.
Published: March 2011

Despite changes in her immediate loyalties Eudora Welty has never really altered her sense of how life should be; there is a kind of consistency of argument in her work which makes it comparatively easy for commentators to define it in terms of a few specific principles - and to claim that she demonstrates (in the best sense possible, of course) the predictability of the committed. For all this consistency, though, her work could never be described as lifeless, as lacking in tension or conflict; and that because her very principles force her to see experience in terms of a continual conflict, an irrepressible struggle between those structures or frameworks man uses to arrange life for him and the idiosyncratic, fundamen- tally irrational nature of man himself. The human personality, as Welty sees it, is defined by its spontaneity and consequent unpredictability; and this means that no forms, no idea, can ever express it completely - can ever subdue it, that is, and compose it into a lasting order.
Of Power and Contemptuousness
Authors: LEMON J. T.
Published: March 2011

Robert A. Caro. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. 1246 pp. In 1968 Robert Moses lost his last position as power broker of New York City. He had been born eighty years before in New Haven, where his father was a relatively successful merchant. His mother was all powerful in the family, so much so that she moved the family to New York where she could exercise her instincts for power, notably through the settlement house movement. She always had her way, a characteristic acquired by Robert, her middle and favourite child. At Yale and Oxford he excelled. His doctoral thesis on The Civil Service of Great Britain advocated the restructuring of the bureaucracy on merit instead of pat- ronage, yet within a highly educated upper class - a brilliant combination of liberal individualism with Tory exclusiveness. Returning to New York he tried to implement these ideas at home. Blocked by Tammany Hall, he turned to the state legislature where he was hired to report on its structure. Ironically, through a Tammany leader, Governor A1 Smith, Moses became a key figure; in fact, he became second in command as state secretary. As he gained power he divested himself of much of his idealism, though he kept to his strong centralizing views. He gained a reputation as the best bill drafter, meaning that he could conceal a bill's real content, all to deceive the opposition.
Frontier Violence and the American Mind
Authors: ADAMS, JR. GRAHAM
Published: March 2011

Richard Slotkin. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860. Middle- town, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. 670 pp. Michael Paul Rogin. Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and The Subjugation of the American Indian. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. 373 pp. W. Eugene Hollon. Frontier Violence: Another Look. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. 279 pp. During the relatively placid decade of the 1950's historians tended to stress the underlying unity and cohesiveness of American history. Then a period of racial strife, campus turmoil, political assassination, and Viet Nam sparked research into new themes. Those which received attention included violence in America, the white man's treatment of the Indian, and a new look at the importance of the frontier. All three books under review share these concerns. Slotkin and Rogin follow similar intellectual paths while Hollon sets a divergent course.
Black Mountain Breakdown
Authors: HAGERMAN EDWARD
Published: March 2011

Martin Duberman. Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community. New York: Anchor Books, 1975. 578 pp. It is perhaps surprising that a relatively obscure experiment in the subculture of American intellectual and institutional life should assume growing mythical powers in Canada; more so when the experiment ended some twenty years ago. Yet the "Black Mountain" phenomenon has become a symbolic friction point of Canadian literary life; and there are rumours that the Canadian artistic commun- ity west of Winnipeg has an uneasy relationship with the Black Mountain heritage. George Bowering is still feeling the heat from the anti-Black Mountain revolt of his peers which went so far as to stage a counter-award ceremony to his Governor General's award. And Frank Davey, Black Mountain poet and the most prominent literary theorist from the Black Mountain heritage in Canada, is rumoured to be in hiding somethwere in the labyrinth of York University. Yet Black Mountain identification may give Bowering and Davey and the "Tish" poets and critics an otherwise denied niche in Canadian literary history - albeit as a negative reference group. For those Canadian poets and critics who feel more comfortable when poets assume their places in historical groups and critical categories, Martin Duberman's important book on the Black Mountain commun- ity, now reissued in paperback, will help them place Irving Layton in American intellectual history as a Black Mountain poet.
Understanding Hollywood's Indian Rhetoric
Authors: Harrington John
Published: March 2011

Intellectual etiquette requires damning the way Hollywood has treated every group and nationality. Pierre Berton's Hollywood's Canada is only a recent example, Berton predictably bemoans the ways in which Hollywood has unfairly fabricated Canada's cinematic identity. Everyone apparently agrees that Hollywood is a factory churning out misrepresentations, yet the books and articles cataloguing Hollywood's transgressions keep coming. Lamenting Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans is an especially durable critical pastime. The public did not need to await today's critics to tell it that movies portray Native Americans inaccurately and demeaningly. Criticism of Hollywood's Indian rhetoric has accompanied the rise of America's film industry. Issues of Moving Picture World from as early as 1911 offer several examples. One article reproaches producers for "unrealistic protrayals of the American Indian,"1 while another notes that a delegation of Native Americans visited President Taft to seek congressional investiga- tion and regulation of the false portrayal of Indian life and character in movies.2 A third reports the protest of a California tribe against one movie's depicting Indians in war paint at a time when they were peacefully farming.-1 Yet another calls for a series of authentic films to record the lives of a race rapidly approaching extinction.4 Other articles during the same year follow similar lines, adding to a long bibliography. Recent articles and books, such as The Only Good Indian.... The Hollywood Gospel by Ralph and Natasha Friar,5 continue to catalogue the movie industry's abuses of the history and culture of Native Americans.
Wealth and Income in American History: The Persistence of Inequality
Authors: Vadney T. E.
Published: March 2011

Lee Soltow. Men and Wealth in the United States. 1850-1870. "Yale Series in Economic History." New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. 206 + xx pp. Stanley Lebergott. The American Economy: Income, Wealth, and Want. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. 382 + viii pp. Recent studies of wealth and income in the United States have three character- istics in common. First, such works are increasingly ingenious in both the identification and manipulation of data. Second, though differing in detail, they outline a pattern of radical inequality in the distribution of income and wealth. And third, they are stronger as descriptions of inequality in America than as explanations of its origins and persistence.1 Lee Soltow's Men and Wealth in the United States, 1850-1870 and Stanley Lebergott's The American Economy: Income, Wealth, and Want2 share these characteristics, yet still manage to contribute something new. Soltow provides an unprecedented survey of the distribution of real and personal property for the United States as a whole in the mid-nineteenth century, and for one region, the South, employs information on slave ownership to carry the analysis back to 1790. Lebergott focusses on the twentieth century and compiles an encyclopedia of different ways of looking at economic disparity. Together the two books encompass more than one hundred years of history and confirm the pattern of extreme inequality found by other researchers.
Liberalism in Crisis
Authors: Finkel Alvin
Published: March 2011

Walter W. Heller. The Economy: Old Myths and New Realities. New York: Norton, 1976. 224 pp. Neil W. Chamberlain. Remaking American Values: Challenge to a Business Society. New York: Basic Books, 1977. 193 pp. Not so very long ago it was believed that the neoclassical synthesis of market principles with Keynesian fiscal and monetary thought had solved the dilemma that seemed to pull capitalist economies into periodic depression during which men and machines sat idle. The moderate nature of ihe swings of the economic cycle after World War II were a welcome contrast to the inter-war experience which had produced successively: a post-war depression until 1923, a previously unparalleled economic expansion from 1924 to 1929, and a decade of depression that only world-wide mobilization for war was able to end. But the 1970's have jolted the theorists of a new crisis-free capitalism: mild inflation has not been alternated with mild unemployment. Instead an ever-higher rate of unemployment has coexisted with immoderate inflation. The end of the neo-classical economic miracle has also created many problems for liberal ideologues in the United States, anxious that the failure of government intervention to continue to smooth out the economic cycle not lead to a reduction in such intervention and a return to the ante-bellum status quo.
The American Enlightenment
Authors: Segal Howard P.
Published: March 2011

Henry Blumenthal. American and French Culture, 1800-1900: Interchanges in Art, Science, Literature, and Society. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975. 554 + xv pp. Henry Steele Commager. The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment. Garden City: Anchor Press—Doubleday, 1977. 342 pp. Henry F. May. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. 419 + xix pp. Ironically, while American intellectual history in recent years has suffered a loss of prestige and popularity at the hands of the quantitative and the "new" social historians, some of the finest works ever published in the field have appeared—for example, Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood's Creation of the American Republic, and David Brion Davis's two volumes on The Problem of Slavery. Indeed, as historians have increasingly emphasized the role of non-cognitive forces- economic, sociological, and above all psychological—these same works have insisted upon the significance in history of ideas themselves. Furthermore, they have contributed to a field allegedly reserved for quantitative and social historians: comparative history.
Families, Communities and American History
Authors: Cassidy Keith
Published: March 2011

David J. Russo. Families and Communities, A New View of American History. Nashville: The American Association for State and Local History, 1974. 322 + x pp. One of the most striking developments in American historiography in recent years has been the enormous growth of interest in social history and the corresponding relative decline in attention paid to political topics. While the causes and full consequences of this shift are beyond the scope of this essay, it is clear that one of its results will ultimately be a substantial revision in general surveys of American history. The book under review, while not a text itself, is a sustained argument for the need to produce radically new general accounts of American life, and an outline of what such accounts should look like. It deserves careful attention, not merely because the particular approach offered by the author has some plausibility, but even more because it raises the general question of how recent research should affect the writing oil American history.
Intimacy and Hawthorne
Authors: Colson Theodore
Published: March 2011

Kenneth Dauber. Rediscovering Hawthorne. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. 235 + xii pp. Kenneth Dauber's Rediscovering Hawthorne starts with an immense promise. Historical-biographical criticism and formalistic New Criticism, Dauber says, had not really touched what excited him most in Hawthorne's work; what had was that Hawthorne's works are "a vehicle to effect intimacy." Dauber begins with Hawthorne's preface to the third edition of Twice-Told Tales which says that Hawthorne's sketches are attempts to "open an intercourse with the world." Dauber proposes to make a new kind of study which will break new ground in thinking about genre. According to him, "critics have divided literature into certain formal categories, genres described structurally or thematically, but with no reference to affectivity. They miss about a work what precisely engages them in it. Worse, they fail to see 'works' that are all around in the interstices of those which they have defined" (p. 228). The book jacket blurb says that Mr. Dauber "lays the foundation for a new theory of genres."
Puritan Theories of History In Hawthorne's Fiction
Authors: White Paula K.
Published: March 2011

Traditionally, interest in the nature of Puritan influence on Nathaniel Haw- thorne has centered upon two issues: the accuracy of his historical settings and the centrality of themes of good and evil in his work.1 As I intend to demon- strate, however, it is the Puritans' historical views, rather than their theological views or "quaint" practices, which provide a sense of Puritanism in the Hawthorne canon. Although Puritan historical views are bound to religious concepts, more importantly they predicate philosophical theories of history, and it is this theoretical or secular construct which Hawthorne explores in his fiction and which explains his characteristic literary techniques.2
The Commitment to Equality in American Life: Undefined and Unrealized but Undeniable
Authors: Daniels Bruce C.
Published: March 2011

J. R. Pole. The Pursuit of Equality in American History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978. 380 + xv pp. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are the most familiar words in American history and unquestionably among the most fateful ever written in the western world. For their felicity and commitment they have inspired universal admiration by Americans, who have given them near scriptural reverence, and by those non-Americans who have pursued visions of social justice in a world of injustices. It is a consum- mate irony, therefore, that this ringing sentence, which is absolutely central to the American experience and so inspirational to the dispossessed of the world, should remain undefined two centuries after it became the manifesto of the first large-scale revolution in modern history. All shades of the American political spectrum claim it as their own, and not infrequently, conservatives, liberals and socialists fighting one another to gain control of revolutionary movements in emerging nations each attach it to their banner.1 It is doubtful if any author, including one as visionary as Thomas Jefferson, could have foreseen an impact as significant as this, but the words were not cheap rhetoric meant only to move an aspiring nation to fight a war; they contained a commitment, undefined to those who adopted the Declaration of Inde- pendence and have lived for two centuries in the nation it created, unrealized to those who identify themselves as reformers or who view life from the under- side of society, but undeniable to those who study American history.
Annie Howells and The Vacation of the Kelwyns
Authors: Doyle James
Published: March 2011

William Dean Howells' posthumously published novel The Vacation of the Kelwyns (1920), as Richard Chase has pointed out, is a charming narrative with a "pervasive quality of reminiscence, calm wisdom, and idyllic pleasure in life."1 Based loosely on the author's recollections of the summer of the American Centennial, the novel was obviously inspired by the same over- whelmingly retrospective mood reflected in his five volumes of personal reminiscences beginning with A Boy's Town (1890) and ending with Years of My Youth (1916). In form and style The Kelwyns is very discursive and informal, although its leisurely digressions and frequent authorial comments consort quite agreeably with the languid atmosphere which pervades the work as a whole. It is possible, furthermore, to discern considerable unity in the three motifs which Ho wells brings together into a suggestive, interconnected pattern. These three motifs include the familiar study of commonplace people and incidents which was Howells' most prominent stock in trade, a semi-allegorical love story ending in a reconciliation of contrasting character types, and certain extraordinary elements which seem related to the literary traditions of the romance. Parallels and antecedents for these three elements can be found in varying proportions in Howells' earlier work, and theoretical justification for their use in The Vacation of the Kelwyns can be discovered in his eclectic statements about the art of fiction. But the unusual form and tone of the novel can also be partially explained by an appeal to its biographical background. Specifically, the meaning of The Vacation of the Kelwyns is illuminated by various records relating to the author's relationship with his younger sister Annie.
Hoodwinking the World: Two Views of Melville's Piazza Tales
Authors: Redekop Ernest H.
Published: March 2011

William B. Dillingham. Melville's Short Fiction 1853-1856. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1977. 390 pp. Marvin Fisher. Going Under: Melville's Short Fiction and the American 1850s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. 216 pp. In August, 1851, two months before the publication of Moby-Dick, The Literary World published Melville's review of Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse, an essay as significant for its revelation of Melville as for its elevation of Hawthorne to supremacy in American letters. Melville feasted on "these Mosses" as on the bread and wine of communion, "incorporating" their stuff into his being, feeling the "germinous seeds" and the "strong New England roots" of Hawthorne growing into his soul. Unquestionably, he saw himself much as he saw Hawthorne, whose "great power of blackness" he admired, as he admired "those deep far-away things" in Shakespeare, "those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality."1 He had just written a book "broiled" in hell-fire, as he described it to Hawthorne, and its secret motto, he hinted, was "Ego non baptiso te in nomine—but make out the rest yourself...."2 So he identified himself with Shakespeare and Hawthorne in his pursuiit of "the great Art of Telling the Truth—even though it be covertly, and by snatches" and became, like them, a hunter: "For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a sacred white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself...."3
John Hay's Diplomacy: Some New Perspectives and An Old Classic
Authors: Accinelli R. D.
Published: March 2011

Kenton J. Clymer. John Hay, The Gentleman as Diplomat. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1975. 314 + ix pp. Howard I. Kushner and Anne Hummel Sherrill. John Milton Hay, The Union of Poetry and Politics. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977. 217 pp. John Hay was, until his death in 1905, one of the most notable figures in American national life. His circle of friends and acquaintances was as note- worthy as it was varied and extensive. His dazzling record of achievement in a remarkable assortment of roles—journalist, poet, novelist, historian and diplomat —was unmatched among his contemporaries. As versatile as he was talented, he was a man of many interests, opportunities and accomplishments.
The Old Adams
Authors: Waterston Elizabeth
Published: March 2011

Earl N. Harbert. The Force So Much Closer Home. New York: New York University Press, 1977. 224 pp. It takes temerity to write yet another biography of Henry Adams. Earl Harbert's The Force So Much Closer Home must jostle for a place on a shelf already laden with books by Samuels, Stevenson, Jordy, Hochfield, Wagner, Conder and Lyon. This new volume claims a place on that shelf because of its emphasis on the way Henry Adams studied, focused and redirected the force of his own family tradition. Adams pored over the family records as assiduously as any modern "Adams scholar"—with as sharp an eye on the ironic discrepancies between public and private papers, but with a naturally sharper sense of the "mystery of his birthright." Harbert in turn collates Adams' writings with those records.
The New Gynology: Writing on Women and Literature in the United States
Authors: Hoople Robin P.
Published: March 2011

Elaine Showalter. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977. 378 pp. Marlene Ann Springer, ed. What Manner of Woman: Essays on English and American Life and Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1977. 357 4- xx pp. In a famous dictum, D. H. Lawrence said: "never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The tale has an independence, an integrity, a life of its own; the teller has feet of clay. Two recent books, What Manner of Woman and A Literature of Their Own, part of a wave of literature reflecting women's experience in a hostile society, tell a tale instructive, chilling, revelatory of a long tradition of oppression and misery that encourages resistance to tyrants. Sometimes, to the detriment of the tale, the tellers intrude and attempt to choreograph the readers' responses. What Manner of Woman, edited by Marlene Springer, is a collection of essays attempting to cover women in literature and society—in England from the fourteenth century to the present; in the United States from the seventeenth century to the present—in thirteen essays and an introduction. A Literature of Their Own, by Elaine Showalter, is an historical treatment of women writers in England from the Brontes to Margaret Drabble. While What Manner of Woman must make its mark through the uneven resultant of multiple scholarship, A Literature of Their Own focuses a single mind. Both books survey broad universes, putting a heavy impost on the authors to approach exhaustiveness and yet pay adequate attention to detail.
Veblen and Toronto
Authors: Cuff Robert D.
Published: March 2011

John P. Diggins. The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory. New York: The Seabury Press. 1978. 257 + vii pp. In 1909 the University of Toronto rejected a job application from Thorstein Veblen. His marital difficulties had already torpedoed a four-year stay at the University of Chicago from 1902 to 1906, and now, at forty-two years of age and the author of two books, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), Veblen, enmeshed once again in "woman trouble," faced the loss of his Associate Professorship at Stanford. "What is one to do," Veblen explained to friends who had become annoyed with him over the issue, "if the woman moves in on you?"1
Banks in Canadian-American Relations
Authors: Glazier Kenneth M.
Published: March 2011

John Fayerweather. The Mercantile Bank Affair: A Case Study of Canadian Nationalism and a Multinational Firm. New York: New York University Press. 1974. 444 pp. John Hutcheson. Dominance and Dependency: Liberalism and National Policies in the North American Triangle. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. 1978. 182 pp. In 1967 Canadians were enthusiastically preparing for the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Confederation. While the wave of national pride was rising, culminating in Expo '67 in Montreal, an event took place which nearly spoiled the mood of the party. The First National City Bank of New York (Citibank) announced that it was planning to take over the Mercantile Bank of Canada (a small Netherlands-controlled bank). Canadians had become accustomed to the American take-over of various production components in the economy: manufacturing, mining and petro- leum, But for a U.S. bank to have an important foothold in the Canadian banking structure was something else. It not only aroused the concern of the Canadian chartered banks and the business community but of the man in the street in Montreal and Moose Jaw. The Mercantile Bank affair became the subject of discussion not only in the corporate board rooms but in the living rooms of many Canadians. Canadians have a peculiar feeling about their banks. Since there are only ten chartered banks in Canada, they are easily identified, and Canadians have a personal rela- tionship to their banks and are proud of their record of stability. Canadians are a cautious people. They feel secure with their money in a Canadian bank and are sensitive about any events which may change that feeling. When an American bank planned to enter that area of Canadian life, the reaction was swift and strong. Canadians rallied to the defense of a strong pillar of Canadian society—their banks.