bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
American Liberalism and the Atlantic World, 1916–17
Authors: Crockatt Richard
Published: January 2009

“ Liberal ” is a familiar term in contemporary American political debate. Like all political labels it is used in a variety of ways: pejoratively by liberalism's opponents, approvingly by its advocates, or simply as a descriptive term by political commentators and pollsters. The 1976 Presidential campaign offers numerous illustrations. George Wallace dismissed liberals as “ pointy heads … who couldn't ride a bicycle straight.” Georgia State Senator Julian Bond defined his position during the primaries in these terms: “ Liberal voters long tired of losing election battles may want to lay down their liberalism and convert to Carter. I'll stick to Udall.” Interestingly, Udall himself was hesitant about calling himself a “ liberal ” and attempted to dump the label, preferring “ progressive ” on the grounds that “ it seems to bounce off the people better.” The media obviously were not impressed and continued to rate him and his fellow politicians according to their “ liberal ” or “ conservative ” bias. Clearly “ liberal ” is a term we cannot do without, however great the confusions surrounding it.
Ronald Reagan's Place in History
Authors: Mervin David
Published: January 2009

The former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O'Neill, has observed “I hate to say it about such an agreeable man, but it was sinful that Ronald Reagan ever became President.…I've known every president since Harry Truman and there's no question in my mind that [Reagan] was the worst.” This is a severe indictment by a highly qualified observer. Nevertheless it is an opinion that will be challenged here. It will be argued in this article that far from being the “worst” of recent presidents Ronald Reagan, despite his failings, was more effective in office than most who have held the position in the last fifty years. However, as a preliminary to our analysis it may be useful to summarize the apparently formidable case against Reagan.
Writing and Rewriting in Henry James
Authors: Horne Philip
Published: January 2009

In one of James's best-known stories, “The Middle Years” (1893), the mortally ill author Dencombe, staying at Bournemouth for the sake of what remains of his health, gets an advance copy of his latest – and almost certainly his last – novel, which is called The Middle Years. Looking over what might have been thought to be his finished and dismissed work on his clifftop bench, Dencombe revises it:

Dencombe was a passionate corrector, a fingerer of style; the last thing he ever arrived at was a form final for himself. His ideal would have been to publish secretly, and then, on the published text, treat himself to the terrified revise, sacrificing always a first edition and beginning for posterity and even for the collectors, poor dears, with a second.
American Communists in the Popular Front Period: Reorganization or Disorganization?
Authors: Sylvers Malcolm
Published: January 2009

The disintegration of the American Communist Party in the Cold War years is normally ascribed to the repression mounted by most liberals together with the McCarthyites, followed by the general crisis of the international communist movement in 1956 provoked by de-Stalinization and the invasion of Hungary. The recent new histories of the CPUSA, which deal primarily with the 1930s, have replaced the view of the Party as an essentially passive agent directed by Moscow and filled with powerhungry leaders and politically-innocent members by one which sees it as composed of politically-conscious ordinary Americans who were active elements in a society in which they were rooted. This new perspective, which accepts communism as a legitimate part of the United States experience, for the most part sees CP developments in the thirties as constructive.
American Attitudes to Death
Authors: Jackson Charles O.
Published: January 2009

In 1959 Herman Feifel edited a volume of interdisciplinary essays titled The Meaning of Death. The collection was a valuable contribution in a neglected area. It also marked an apparent change in national mood. After an extended period, death was once more a respectable academic topic of discussion and consideration. In the decade that followed a considerable amount of work was published in this field, ranging from such scholarly yet compassionate volumes as Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' On Death and Dying to a literature of social criticism epitomized in Jessica Mitford's best-seller, The American Way of Death. By 1970, one scholar would observe, more material had appeared on death, grief, and bereavement in the five years following Feifel's book than had appeared in the previous hundred years.
Black Freedmen and the Cherokee Nation
Authors: Gammon Tim
Published: January 2009

Blacks were a significant minority of the Cherokee Nation throughout the nineteenth century, first as slaves and later as freedmen. An 1830s census shows that the Cherokee Nation at that time consisted of: 13,536 Indians; 147 intermarried white males; 73 intermarried white females; and 1,277 slaves. In 1860 there were approximately 23,000 Cherokees and 2,500 blacks in the Cherokee Territory. And according to the United States Census of 1890 the total population of the Cherokee Nation was 56,309, including 5,127 persons of Negro descent.
Washington, D.C.: The Political Geography of a Federal Capital
Authors: Fifer J. Valerie
Published: January 2009

The political status of the District of Columbia is once again the subject of debate in the United States. The District, which forms Washington's central city enclave, an area of some 69 square miles, is closer now than ever before to achieving its oldest political ambition, that of full representation in Congress. A bill to allow such representation by Constitutional amendment was passed for the first time by both the House and the Senate in 1978. Since then, State legislatures have begun to consider ratification of the Amendment with the result that this long-standing issue has entered a new phase.

Throughout its existence, Washington, D.C. has had a more distinctive and more complex political geography than is commonly supposed. Until the recent decision to support the measure, Congress had consistently opposed the idea of giving full voting rights to the District of Columbia. When the city of Washington was created at the end of the eighteenth century, the legal detachment of a Federal District from the States by means of cession was regarded as crucial to its future role as the permanent seat of government, and to the exclusive legislative control Congress was to exercise over such a district. As a result, the lack of Congressional representation became an early source of discontent, and for nearly two hundred years, D.C. has been trying to escape this particular consequence of its unique position within the federal structure.

Washington, D.C. has been called “both the most American and the least American city in the United States,” and this paradox is apparent in the States' often ambivalent views of the nation's capital.
A Vocabulary of Ethnic Perception: Content Analysis of the American Stage Irishman, 1820–1860
Authors: Knobel Dale T.
Published: January 2009

“The Americans,” observed a European expatriate in 1837, “do not laugh at honest bluntness, or good-natured simplicity.… If Jonathan is to laugh, he must have a point given him, or, in other words, he must laugh to some purpose.” To Vienna-born Francis Grund, contemporary comic melodrama and its first cousin minstrelsy demonstrated beyond all doubt that his adoptive countrymen were decidedly “fond of laughing at the expense of their neighbors.” “English, French, Dutch, and German,” he noted, “are in turn made to suffer the stings of American wit.… The Irish, of late, has [sic] become very popular.” Grund's commentary reflected both the frequency with which ethnic characters of all sorts were portrayed upon the mid-nineteenth century American stage and, in particular, the emerging public taste for the stage Irishman. A tourists' guidebook to New York City published in 1850 pointed out that six of its seven principal theaters had been turned over to the “burlesque and broad fun” of melodrama and minstrelsy and to Irish character pieces especially. Twice during the 1830s, the British actor Tyrone Power conducted triumphal tours of the United States by relying upon a repertoire of Irish parts.
Whitman and the American Democratic Identity Before and During the Civil War
Authors: Thomas M. Wynn
Published: January 2009

“I consider the war of attempted secession, 1860–1865, not as a struggle of two distinct and separate peoples,” wrote Whitman in Specimen Days and Collect, “but a conflict (often happening, and very fierce) between the passions and paradoxes of one and the same identity.” He interpreted the Civil War as a violent expression of the persistent conflict between democratic and broadly anti-democratic tendencies within the one “identity” of American republicanism; and he emphasized that this conflict was as much a subtle feature of social and political life in the North as it was in more blatant form the underlying cause of the war between North and South.

The ante-bellum years had seen the political life of the North dominated by Democrats against whom, in “The Eighteenth Presidency,” Whitman had directed some of his coarsest and most unforgiving (if unpublished) invective:

Office-holders, office-seekers, robbers, pimps, exclusives, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men,…deaf men, pimpled men, scarr'd inside with the vile disorder, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth.
Proust, Ruskin, James and le Désir de Venise
Authors: Tanner Tony
Published: January 2009

“It is a great pleasure to write the word:” thus Henry James starts his 1882 essay on Venice. To write the word is to inscribe the name; to inscribe the name is to evoke the place; to evoke the place is – well, “a pleasure.” Or simply – pleasure. But what kind of pleasure? And what is the complex relationship between place, name, and word? In that essay James goes on to assert that “of all the cities of the world [Venice] is the easiest to visit without going there.” He is referring of course to his – to our, to everyone's – inescapable saturation with images and associations of Venice from books and pictures. Venice, of all cities in the western world, is the already written, the already seen. The pleasure of Venice, the pleasure which is Venice, is pre-scribed, pre-viewed. The name permanently pre-empts the place, and, as I shall suggest in relation to Proust, the word finally pre-empts the name. In the discourses with which Proust and James were familiar the word/name “Venice” was a site of semantic excess, over-filled with desires, anticipations, dreams, expectations, experiential appropriations. At the same time it was a site of semantic evacuation, disillusion, loss, deprivation, decline and declinations, experiential expropriations.
New Jerusalem Abandoned: The Failure to Carry Mormonism to the Delaware
Authors: Stott G. St. John
Published: January 2009

Under the Mormon scheme of things in 1831, somewhere in Indian territory (somewhere it was thought, west of Independence, Missouri) a city was to be built by those who accepted the gospel restored through Joseph Smith, Jr., God's prophet for the latter days. It was to be a city of refuge – a place where the saints would be safe from both the corruptions of the day and the judgement that was to fall upon the world – and a city of righteousness, endowed with the Spirit of the Lord.
The Correspondence of Benjamin Rush and Granville Sharp 1773–1809
Authors: Woods John A.
Published: January 2009

Granville Sharp (1735–1813) was the son of Thomas Sharp, Archdeacon of Northumberland, and grandson of John Sharp, Archbishop of York. He first became well known through his persistent efforts to secure a judgement from the courts that no man could be a slave in England—efforts which were crowned with success in the Somerset case of 1772. Sharp's attack on slavery attracted the attention of the Philadelphia Quaker, Anthony Benezet (1713–84), one of the pioneer opponents of slavery in the colonies. Benezet and Sharp opened a correspondence about colonial opposition to the slave-trade, especially the Virginia petition to the Crown against it. This correspondence in its turn induced Benjamin Rush (1745–1813), a physician in Philadelphia, to write to Sharp. Thus began the exchange of letters, destined to continue for thirty-six years, which is printed here.
The Americanization of Sigmund Freud: Adaptations of Psychoanalysis before 1917
Authors: Matthews F. H.
Published: January 2009

The early reactions by American intellectuals to the psychoanalytic ideas of Sigmund Freud offer an interesting case study in the ‘Americanization’ of ‘foreign’ ideas. While the heyday of Freudian influence on the lay intelligentsia came after the World War—probably in the 1920s—and the maximum penetration of specialized disciplines by Freudian concepts came after 1930, already by 1917 identifiable and influential groups of thinkers had discovered Freudian ideas, and had reacted to them. The reaction sometimes took the form of outright rejection, but more often that of some form of assimilation, some attempt to use Freudian doctrine in support of a pre-existing ideology, or even to recast present doctrine in the light of Freud's theories. These early reactions foreshadowed the kinds of polemical and ideological utility which psychoanalysis would have on a larger scale after 1920; these first adaptations and reworkings of Freudian ideas prefigured such latter accommodations of Freud to America as Neo-Freudianism and ‘adjustment psychology’. Psychoanalysis quickly became an accepted polemical tool in literary and political debate. To neoromantic radicals it offered a new method of personal salvation by sloughing off skins of civilized repression. On a more complex level of thought, it became one element in the construction of a positivist and determinist system of psychology. At the same time, and sometimes by the same men, it was used—and radically revised—in the ideological endeavour to assimilate deterministic psychology to the persistent optimistic, activist moral code, which many scholars were anxious to harmonize with their new science.
The American Past: Is it Still Usable?
Authors: Pole J. R.
Published: January 2009

The past, in the course of its ever-recurring encounters with the demands inflicted on it by the present, enjoys one inestimable advantage: it cannot answer, it is not even listening. ‘We ask and ask, thou smilest and art still’, we might almost say, giving to Arnold's ponderous lines a touch of unintended meaning. In spite of appearances to the contrary, even the American past is in the same position. Even after the lapse (the ‘revolution’, as Gibbon would have said) of more than three and a half centuries of continuous settlement, the historian who has been educated entirely in the tradition and the environment of the United States needs rather more than his European contemporary's normal degree of subtlety if he is to free himself from the peculiarly American version of the space-time continuum.
Precision and Pseudo Precision inThe Crucible
Authors: Fender Stephen
Published: January 2009

Writing almost four years afterThe Cruciblewas first performed, Arthur Miller seemed uncertain how to describe the ethics of the society he had tried to reproduce in the play. He notes, for example, that the Puritans' ‘religious belief did nothing to temper [their] cruelty’ but instead ‘served to raise this swirling and ludicrous mysticism to a level of high moral debate’. ‘It is no mean irony’, Miller continues, ‘that the theocratic persecution should seek out the most religious people for its victims.’
Federalist Party Unity and the War of 1812
Authors: Hickey Donald R.
Published: January 2009

There is no comprehensive study of Federalist opposition to the War of 1812. The fragmentary studies that exist suggest a party divided between New England extremists on the one hand and moderates in the Middle and Southern States on the other. In this interpretative framework, Federalists to the south and west are invariably portrayed as “good” Federalists, that is, as patriots who consciously and decisively rejected New England's leadership in order to support the war or at least maintain a discreet neutrality. A closer examination of the subject, however, suggests that this view is largely false.
Fugitive Slaves in Britain: The Odyssey of William and Ellen Craft
Authors: Blackett R. J. M.
Published: January 2009

Early on a December morning in 1848, long before anyone else stirred, two slaves, a man and woman, made their bid for freedom from a plantation, just outside Macon, Georgia. She, almost white, was dressed as a slave master, he as her valet. In four days they were in Philadelphia; three weeks later they moved to the safer city of Boston where they remained until the passing of the infamous Fugitive Slave Bill in September 1850 forced them to flee to England. Nineteen years were spent under the “ mane of the British lion ” free from the “ claws of the American eagle.” Finally, after the Civil War they returned as farmers to their native Georgia. Their bold odyssey in 1848 brought them fame and renown. It was a story of love, determination and resilience, the virtues of frontier America, conquering all odds. No other escape, with the possible exception of Frederick Douglass' and Josiah Henson's, created such a stir in ante-bellum America as did the Crafts'.
Youth, Class, and Consumerism in Dreiser's An American Tragedy
Authors: Spindler Michael
Published: January 2009

Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian film-maker, called An American Tragedy “ as broad and shoreless as the Hudson … as immense as life itself.” It allowed, he wrote, “ almost any point of view of itself.” This rare quality of multi-faceted massiveness has fathered a large number of critical studies, which all vary in their reading of the text and the significance they attribute to Dreiser's protagonist, Clyde Griffiths. For Irving Howe, Clyde represents “ the passivity, rootlessness and self-alienation of urban man,” while for F. O. Matthiessen, he is “ a victim of the contemporary American dream.” Richard Lehan views him deterministically as “ a young man … caught in and finally destroyed by the crush of conflicting forces,” while Ellen Moers generalizes him into “ the Everyman of desire.” These interpretations acknowledge Clyde's representative stature, but make only imprecise gestures towards its origins. The vagueness they suffer from has its root in an individualist emphasis upon the character and fate of the protagonist and a corresponding lack of specificity in describing the social framework with which that character interacts. Eisenstein regarded Clyde's crime as “ the sum total of those social relations, the influence of which he was subjected to at every stage of his unfolding biography and character.” An analysis of these “ social relations,” particularly as elaborated in the closely integrated themes of youth, class, and consumerism, is a prerequisite to a more exact identification of Clyde's social representativeness.
The Treatment of American Indian Materials in Contemporary American Poetry
Authors: Easy Peter
Published: January 2009

The use of American Indian oral literature as a source of inspiration or as a guide to composition, and the continuing attempts at translation from this literature have grown rapidly in the past ten years. While there have been efforts at direct translation of Indian songs and poems for many years, it is only a comparatively recent development which has seen some contemporary American poets not only beginning to formulate new approaches to translation but also discovering the possibilities of using some aspects of American Indian oral culture in their own original poetry. Ethnopoetics has emerged as a general term to describe a poetic movement of sorts dedicated to the exploration of the potential of primitive oral literature and its translation into English. Like many general labels, it is an incomplete and unsatisfactory term with which to describe the wide variety, and varying quality, of work being produced by poets associated with the movement; however it is a term adopted by the poets themselves and is respected as such.
Cotton Mather and the Meaning of Suffering in theMagnalia Christi Americana
Authors: Halttunen Karen
Published: January 2009

When Cotton Mather'sMagnalia Christi Americanawas finally published in London in 1702, the anxious historian set a day of thanksgiving to God, “ for His watchful and gracious Providence over that Work, and for the Harvest of so many Prayers, and Cares, and Tears, and Resignations.” From 1693 to 1697, Mather had labored over the seven books of his immense ecclesiastical history of New England. Readers of theMagnaliahave often dismissed the work as unwieldy, pedantic, incomprehensible. As one anonymous critic complained in 1818, it is “ a chaotick mass of history, biography, obsolete creeds, witchcraft, and Indian wars, interspersed with bad puns, and numerous quotations in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, which rise up like so many decayed, hideous stumps to arrest the eye and deform the surface.”

Despite the difficulties presented by theMagnalia, however, American colonial historians have recognized Mather's history as the “ greatest effort in the century to organize the experience of this people.” Cotton Mather was one of the many second- and third-generation ministers who feared that the New England people were declining in piety and descending into moral corruption.
Educating the Heathen: the Foreign Mission School Controversy and American Ideals
Authors: Andrew John
Published: January 2009

“ Never in all past ages did a prospect so glorious rise to the view of any nation, as that which is disclosed to our own.” So wrote a reviewer in the years following the War of 1812, and he echoed the millennial feelings of his countrymen. Awash in a surge of post-war nationalism, and buffeted by the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, Americans struck out in search of themselves, their culture, and their future. Within a generation, the same reviewer proclaimed, “ fifty or sixty millions of men will have poured themselves over our country, carrying civilization and the arts to the extreme corner.”

This spirit energized people in all sections, and in the Northeast missionary activity grew to significant proportions. Numerous state missionary societies formed, and by 1812 a larger body — the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) — had been organized to carry this spirit across the country and throughout the world. Board organizers had as their vision a world transformed, but one transformed along the lines of an idealized New England community. Religion would guide men's lives, and a spirit of morality would infuse the operations of government. They saw before them the dawning of a new age.
On Being a Free Person and a Citizen by Constitutional Amendment
Authors: Lucie Patricia
Published: January 2009

In 1865, when Americans asked, “ What shall be done about the freed Negro? ” few of them realized that the question was a fragment of a larger one, “ What shall be done to define and secure the rights of all Americans? ” For despite its regional variations, slavery had a more coherent legal identity than freedom. There were as many different standards of citizenship as there were state and local laws regulating the ownership of property, personal mobility, the criminal code, family relationships, and court procedures. Travel from one state to another could considerably alter a person's legal standing. Even in the one state there was no unitary concept of citizenship and many Americans knew a kind of freedom which would not serve the freed slave well as a model. Married women were severely restricted in their contractual capacity and hence in their freedom to earn a living or own and dispose of property. In some states they had few custodial rights over their children and in others none. They were limited in their access to judicial remedies by laws and customs which prevented them bringing suit in some instances, restricted their right to testify, prohibited their service on juries, and even “ protected ” them from answering for some crimes for which the law held their husbands responsible. Free Negroes in the ante-bellum North, paupers of all races in all states, and Chinese settlers on the West Coast could all have furnished examples of the way in which discriminatory state legislative classifications deprived them of rights. The states operated a sliding scale of citizenship rights which routinely placed some and potentially could place all Americans at a considerable distance from what Republicans argued in 1866 were the rights of all.
Dr. Stephen Graham's Narration of the “ Duplin Insurrection ”: Additional Evidence of the Impact of Nat Turner
Authors: Sadler Lynn Veach
Published: January 2009

When Liberty Hall, as it came to be called, the ancestral home of the Kenan family, was being restored some years ago in Kenansville (Duplin County), North Carolina, among the many books left in the library was discovered an accounts ledger used by two members of the Chauncey Graham family. The most significant feature of this complex book is the obscurely-entered, first-hand account of a supposed slave insurrection and its consequences. The author is Dr. Stephen Graham, and the uprising that he depicts in Kenansville can be linked to the furor unleashed by the Nat Turner rebellion.

The ledger is approximately fifteen inches long and six inches wide. Its dark binding remains intact; but the front and back, both of which contain longhand notations and arithmetical calculations, are practically illegible now.

Inside, the owner is identified as Chauncey Graham [Jr.]; and the book is said to have been started in January 1800 in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. Dr. Graham recorded his patients' names, the work he did for them (e.g., extracting teeth), and prescriptions he gave them, as well as the ways by which he was paid (e.g., four pounds of butter; one cord of wood; or, less frequently, by cash).
Frontierism, Capital, and the American Loyalists in Canada
Authors: Temperley Howard
Published: January 2009

Everyone agrees that the American Loyalists had a hard time of it. Not only were they on the losing side in a long and cruel war — in their case rendered particularly bitter by virtue of being a civil war — but when hostilities ended they found themselves deprived of possessions, forced into exile, severed from relations and friends, and obliged to adapt to unfamiliar customs and surroundings. For those who took refuge in what remained of British North America, as approximately half of them did — some 40,000 in all — starting over again involved special difficulties. Winters there were long and cold, and the territories in which they found themselves were mostly still in a state of nature, uncultivated, unmapped, and in some cases virtually unexplored. Indeed, how suitable these lands were for settlement was at first by no means clear. “ Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Canada,” observed William Cobbett, who visited the Maritimes shortly after the arrival of the first exiles, “ are the horns, the head, the neck, the shins and the hoof of the ox, and the United States are the ribs, the sirloin, the kidneys, and the rest of the body.” This was not entirely true, but it was a notion which must have crossed the minds of many of the refugees themselves as, wintering in their camps, they contemplated the wilderness around them.
The Motif of Luck in Hemingway
Authors: Nageswara Rao E.
Published: January 2009

Hemingway's convictions and beliefs about the larger scheme of the world are generally informed by the tendency to see human action and the human predicament in terms of a circle, a convenient way of affirming his persistent conviction that one cannot consciously order or direct one's life in a chosen manner, chiefly because of the ironic and virtually constant discrepancy between one's expectations and accomplishments. This helpless plight is accurately described by Robert Jordan as a forced ride on an unusual merry-go-round:

It is a vast wheel set at an angle, and each time it goes around and then is back where it starts. One side is higher than the other and the sweep it makes lifts you back and down to where you started. There are no prizes either, he thought, and no one would choose to ride this wheel. You ride it each time and make the turn with no intention ever to have mounted. There is only one turn; one large, elliptical rising and falling turn and you are back where you have started. We are back again now, he thought, and nothing is settled.

The rider has no choice in making this circular trip; neither does he accomplish anything worthwhile. There is no aim, no purpose, and no meaning discernible in this whirl. This image of the wheel seems to be central to Hemingway's view of man's place in the world as it is revealed in his fiction and non-fiction.
Spatial Patterns of Residential Segregation in a Southern City
Authors: Flowerdew Robin
Published: January 2009

The black population of an American city is usually thought of as concentrated in the inner city, close to downtown, in areas characterized by ageing housing, high population density and slum conditions. General treatments of black residential areas in American cities tend to make little distinction between conditions in different parts of the country. But although it is true that the black ghetto is a ubiquitous and surprisingly similar feature of Northern and Western cities, there are good grounds for regarding the experience of Southern cities as significantly different. This distinction has been noted by the Taeubers and by Rose, but has not yet been developed in detail.

The main objective of this paper is to develop an alternative model of the spatial pattern of residential segregation appropriate to Southern cities, and to describe its applicability to Memphis, Tennessee. First the standard model of ghetto development will be outlined, and some reasons suggested why it may not be applicable in the South. After developing a model applicable to Southern cities, some of its practical consequences for ghetto residents will be indicated. Then Memphis will be examined to see how far the suggested model reflects experience there. In addition to a discussion of the spatial form of black residential areas in Memphis, some of the historical and contemporary processes controlling their development will be outlined.
The Divided Mind of James Baldwin
Authors: Bigsby C. W. E.
Published: January 2009

Lionel Trilling once observed that there are certain individuals who contain the “ yes ” and “ no ” of their culture, whose personal ambivalences become paradigmatic. This would seem to be an apt description of a man whose first novel was published twenty-five years ago, a man whose career has described a neat and telling parabola and whose contradictions go to the heart of an issue which dominated the political and cultural life of mid-century America: James Baldwin. And it is perhaps not inappropriate to seize the occasion of this anniversary and of the publication of his new novel, Just Above My Head, to attempt a summation of a writer, once an articulate spokesman for black revolt, now living an expatriate existence in southern France.

To date, Baldwin has written six novels: Go Tell it on the Mountain (1954), Giovanni's Room (1956), Another Country (1962), Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), Just Above My Head (1979); four books of essays: The Fire Next Time (1963), Nobody Knows My Name (1964), Notes of a Native Son (1964), No Name in the Street (1972); two plays: Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964), Amen Corner (1968); and one book of short stories: Going to Meet the Man (1965). Born in Harlem in 1924, he left in 1948 for France, driven out by despair of the racial situation. He returned in 1957 and in the heady days of the Civil Rights movement found himself a principal spokesman — his polemical essay, The Fire Next Time, appearing at a crucial moment in black/white relations. Outflanked by the events of the late sixties, he retreated again to Europe. His more recent novels have failed to spark the popular or critical interest of his earlier work.
Elizabeth Packard: Nineteenth-Century Crusader for the Rights of Mental Patients
Authors: Himelhoch Myra Samuels , Shaffer Arthur H.
Published: January 2009

In the United States the movement to build public asylums for the insane began in the early nineteenth century. Demographic changes, a growing sensitivity to social and medical problems, a surge of philanthropic giving by elite groups, and knowledge of significant medical and psychiatric developments in France and England all combined to give rise to a movement to establish both general and mental hospitals. Shocked by the conditions of insane persons in family attics, county poorhouses, and local jails, state after state assumed the burden of providing free or low-cost institutionalization for this afflicted class. Expensive large asylums began appearing in the rural heartlands of the more prosperous states before the Civil War, reflecting the popular view that insanity was a disease, requiring segregation from society and long-term medical care. Previously only deviants who had broken criminal or poor laws were likely to be deprived of their liberty. Under the new system the state reached out to a larger, less deviant and non-criminal population, whose boundaries were not well-defined. Given the increasing health and welfare needs of an industrializing society, and the lack of alternative solutions for the mentally disabled, it was inevitable that the asylum populations would continue to expand.
The “Populist” Films of Frank Capra
Authors: Phelps Glenn Alan
Published: January 2009

What is the nature and distribution of power in American society? This question, as much as any other single issue, has been the source of wideranging debates among American social scientists throughout the last twenty-five years. The question is tantalizingly simple. In fact, the titles of two notable contributions to the debate, Who Rules America? and Who Governs?, put the issue even more succinctly while losing little of the flavor of the original question. The controversy is more than just a basis for scholarly esoterica politely parried back and forth in the professional literature for a limited audience. Indeed, the debate has been carried on with great passion and commitment because how one answers this question will largely determine one's perceptions about American politics.

For example, if one were to reply by saying that power is basically noncumulative and that it is widely distributed among many groups and individuals, then certain other conclusions would follow: the Constitution is essentially a democratic document which institutionalizes this broad distribution of power; elections are the means by which power is transferred among competing groups; public policy represents an accurate reflection of the general will through this inter-group competition; and the American political system is essentially democratic because opportunities for participation, and thus power, are open to all.
Sir William Johnson and the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 1768
Authors: Marshall Peter
Published: January 2009

The conduct of Sir William Johnson at the treaty of Fort Stanwix was regarded unfavourably by contemporaries and has been strongly criticized by historians. There is little to choose between the Board of Trade report of April 1769 and the view of Professor Billington, who holds that the Superintendent ‘mercilessly fleeced the Indians who trusted him as their protector’ while concluding ‘one of the worst treaties in the history of Anglo-Indian relationships’. There was ample cause for bewilderment and anger. Johnson had obtained a boundary line which deviated in three major particulars from that which he had been instructed to secure. This act of disobedience was a consequence of the need of land speculators to gain control of regions forbidden to them by royal instructions but vital to their financial hopes. Johnson, in his own right a great landlord and speculator, sacrificed his public duties to private gain, even though this involved the betrayal of innocent Indians.
Marmontel on the Government of Virginia (1783)
Authors: Renwick John
Published: January 2009

The similarities that existed between the political and social theories of the newly independent Americans in the 1780s and those of the liberal-minded French under the Ancien Régime have, for many years, been a subject of fairly repetitive discussion. The parallels have been traced, the influences classified, and the practical debts (even to individual French thinkers) time and again acknowledged. The comparisons have in fact attracted the interest and attention of so many types of scholars that the work has been done with a thoroughness that is not surprising. And upon examination of the relevant works it would certainly appear that the critical attention given to the subject, on the national scale, has been so complete that its various aspects have been, long since, almost exhausted.
American Diplomats and Irish Coercion, 1880–1883
Authors: Edwards Owen Dudley
Published: January 2009

In former years there existed a widespread assumption that, throughout the nineteenth century, the United States was an isolationist power. Its policy, according to this thesis, had been articulated in Washington's Farewell Address, was accorded bipartisan acquiescence in Jefferson's First Inaugural, and was reaffirmed in the Monroe Doctrine. Until the Spanish–American war of 1898 isolationism prevailed, confident and more or less unchallenged; and then it suddenly collapsed, virtually without a struggle, leaving the Americans free to enter without inhibition on their new status of world power.
Prohibition: a Sociological View
Authors: Mennell S. J.
Published: January 2009

Prohibition was a fascinating episode in American history which has attracted the attention of a number of writers. This paper does not seek to present any new historical evidence. Perhaps, in history as well as in photography, over-enlargement can lead to loss of definition, so the object is to assess what evidence is appropriate in answering various questions about Prohibition.
A Time for Parting: the Negro during the Coolidge Years
Authors: Blair John L.
Published: January 2009

Calvin Coolidge became President on the morning of 3 August 1923. He was to hold that office for five years, six months, and thirty days, during which time he would have a splendid opportunity to secure the destiny of his party. Some of the activities of several of the more seedy characters of the Harding Administration were about to become public knowledge, while the one-interest basis on which Republican power rested was becoming increasingly obvious. In the scandals which followed his accession, Coolidge acquitted himself well, the ‘anti-propaganda’ technique he adopted in fighting the revelations bringing him, it might be argued, an even greater victory at the polls in 1924 than he otherwise would have received. But the party's destiny went well beyond the Twenties, and the success, or lack of it, which would greet the Republicans in the decades beyond depended in large fashion on Coolidge's efforts to pry his party from the rut in which it had firmly planted itself. For by the time Coolidge entered the White House the Republicans had violated a basic canon of practical politics by allowing themselves to become the spokesmen of one interest, to the neglect of those others which, if they ever got together, could easily put an end to Republican dominance. More broadly, the party by this time was a rather exclusive vehicle in which, oblivious to others around them, serenely rode whites, Anglo-Saxons, and Protestants. There were others in this vehicle but by the post-war period they were mostly in the rumble seat, and none too happy about it.
Race, Class and Power: the New York Decentralization Controversy
Authors: Kushnick Louis
Published: January 2009

Racial and religious tension and conflict in New York City have dramatically increased over the past few years. Charges of ‘black anti-Semitism’ and ‘white racism’ abound, while meaningful communication between the races is less than it has ever been. The general context within which the situation has developed has been that of the growth of the Black Power concept and the resulting black challenge to the white economic, political and educational power structures. This challenge, so different from the glorious days of the civil rights decade of the 1950s when blacks and whites marched together in the South, represents a realization among black leaders that the basic problems of jobs, housing and education in the urban ghettos of America have to be solved before there can be any real progress of black Americans as a group. This, however, brings them into conflict with whites with vested interests to protect, and the resulting controversy has been bitter. An example of the break-up of the old civil rights coalition following the presentation of a challenge to white self-interest can be seen in the mobilization of the majority of Reform Democrats of the FDR–Woodrow Wilson Club to defeat plans to pair PS84, a predominantly white elementary school, and a nearby black and Puerto Rican school. David Rogers, in 110 Livingston Street, quotes one disappointed club member saying: ‘All their old liberalism went by the boards. They are liberal in the abstract, and when the problem is far away, say in Selma, Jackson or Birmingham, but not for their children or their schools and neighbourhoods.’ The same, as we shall see, could be said of the ‘liberal’ United Federation of Teachers.
Some Co-ordinates in Billy Budd
Authors: Ketterer David
Published: January 2009

It may be that an element of contradiction is integral to any outstanding literary work. A major writer, in presenting one philosophical viewpoint or attitude directly, cannot help, by virtue of his sensitivity and breadth of awareness, but present the alternative angle indirectly. Nevertheless, although the narrative may shuttle ambiguously between two such poles, there should finally be no doubt as to which side of the argument the author inclines to. A limited degree of ambiguity makes for vitality. A total ambiguity makes for inferior art. If this criterion is acceptable the reputation of Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor may deserve revaluation. Critical opinion, which turns upon Melville's attitude towards Captain Vere, appears to have reached a stalemate, in spite of the recent publication of the Hayford-Sealts authoritative edition of the story which the editors hope ‘will narrow the ground of disagreement and widen that of understanding’. A division still exists between the ‘straight’ readers who see Vere as exonerated and the ironists who believe that Melville is subtly undercutting the validity of Vere's stand.
Eliot, Whitman and American Tradition
Authors: Hobsbaum Philip
Published: January 2009

Few critics have attempted to answer the question most often asked by those who grew up to find the revolutionary young poets of the Twenties embalmed as Elder Statesmen of the Fifties. Is Eliot really a great poet? What are the indisputably major poems and how do we read them? Why—a question so far ignored by all Eliot commentators—why has Eliot had so little influence on the younger English poets? This last question is even more relevant now that we can see that 1918–55 produced in England little more than a few good but essentially minor poets. And the fact that the emphasis must now be placed on (for example) Empson, Graves and Betjeman, rather than the fashionables with which we were plagued in our youth, does not render the question any the less relevant. There are certainly points of difficulty in Eliot's technique that make it possible to understand at least some of the resistance to his poetry when it first started to come out. J. C. Squire's review of The Waste Land is well enough known: ‘a grunt would serve equally well’. And, as Mrs Leavis has pointed out, George Gordon's inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford was little more than a series of gibes at Eliot as representative of the ‘moderns’. Still, these men were not fools. Granted that their reaction was a mistaken one, ought we not to enquire how exactly the mistake came about?
Charles A. Beard: The English Experience
Authors: Braeman John
Published: January 2009

During his life, as after his death, Charles A. Beard was a controversial figure. An unsympathetic Allan Nevins dismissed him as the exponent of “a smart, hard materialism.” His former student and long-time friend Raymond Moley regarded him as the exemplar of a “hard-bitten realism,” a realism heavily laced with skepticism toward “orthodoxy — even his own earlier orthodoxies.” His “real spirit,” the “essential ‘style’ of the man,” his friend and neighbor Matthew Josephson found, “was realistic, skeptical, pragmatic.” Yet there was another side to Beard. He had, an admirer wrote, “a deep concern about human beings, a profound respect for human dignity.” The philosopher Irwin Edman, who took his course in American government when an undergraduate at Columbia, recalled how he conveyed to his students not simply his “passionate concern for an understanding of the realities of government,” but his “ideal of government: the liberation of the energies of men.” The problem, his wife perceptively recognized, was that Beard was such “a highly complicated person” that he “cannot be classified into any mere category of man, thinker, historian. He was not mentally static enough for that simplification.”

Beard's multifarious accomplishments and activities were more than sufficient to fill the lifetimes of several men.
William Howard Russell and the Confederacy
Authors: Crawford Martin
Published: January 2009

The Timesof London had kept a close watch on the developing American sectional conflict of the 1850s. Despite charges of ignorance which were persistently levelled against it, the quality of its American intelligence in the years leading up to the war remained consistently high. Since 1854 a young New York lawyer, Bancroft Davis, had provided informative weekly reports on political, diplomatic and economic affairs, whilst between July 1856 and December 1857 the paper possessed in Louis Filmore an experienced and talented Special Correspondent in the United States. After Lincoln's election, however, it became clear that Davis, who was based in New York City, was not up to dealing with a political crisis of the magnitude of secession and to this end William Howard Russell, the hero of the Crimea and the most famous reporter of his day, was despatched to the United States asThe Times's new Special Correspondent. Russell arrived in New York on 16 March 1861 and less than a month later embarked upon what was to prove a highly successful tour of the Confederate States.
Local Government, Suburban Segregation and Litigation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas
Authors: Johnston R. J.
Published: January 2009

A major characteristic of the social and spatial morphology of urban areas in advanced capitalist societies is the residential segregation of different socioeconomic, life style, and ethnic groups. The basic rationale for this segregation is common to most societies, as is its production via the operation of housing markets. In addition, however, each country has its own particular characteristics which accentuate the general processes. One such characteristic in the United States is the nature of the local government system in most States.

The aim of this paper is to identify die main features of that system as they apply to the geography of residential separation. The discussion is set within die context of the general processes of American local government and indicates how these have encouraged segregation. The paper then turns to a discussion of the use of the courts and die Fourteendi Amendment to challenge the amalgam of housing market and local government processes, and evaluates the likely outcome of the series of challenges.