bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Lord Lothian and American Democracy: An Illusion in Pursuit of an Illusion
Authors: Jeffreys-Jones Rhodri
Published: March 2011

There is a distinction between those attributes of a diplomat which make him an ambassador from a people, an expert on the affairs and policies of his own country, and those less usual ones which make him an ambassador to a people, an expert on the affairs and policies of his host country. On the "horses for courses" principle, it has been suggested that, just as one's man in Paris ought to be able to distinguish between a Van Gogh and a Gauguin, so his colleague in Washington should appreciate the intricacies of log-rolling; in France, he must exude distinction, in America, know about the peculiar variants of that country's democracy. Since public opinion is often held to exert a distinctively powerful influence on U.S. foreign policy, and U.S. foreign policy has been of special significance to Britain in this century, it is reasoned that a British ambassador equipped with knowledge of American society and politics might be well qualified to do his job.1
CONSUMER CAPITALISM AND CULTURE: THE AMERICAN WAY
Authors: Hagerman Edward
Published: March 2011

Simon Bronner. Grasping Things: Folk Material Culture and Mass Society in America. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1986. xv + 247 pp. Daniel Horowitz. The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. xv + 254 pp. Roland Marchand. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. xxii + 448 pp. The implications of mass consumer capitalism for American social values from the late nineteenth century to the present have proved a challenging quest for interdisciplinary studies. The most rudimentary queries raise fundamental epistemological considerations that divide disciplines in theoretical and methodologi- cal debate. The consequence has been a somewhat eclectic proliferation of interpretation that, even within the various philosophical, ideological and meth- odological traditions, still struggles for agreement on questions as well as method. The three works under review, two by cultural historians and one by a folklorist, reflect the different ground on which interpretation stands, while they provide examples of how each approach raises questions that should stimulate the others sat the level of their basic assumptions and complementary use of data.
THE DOUBLE VOICE OF EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Authors: Morton Richard
Published: March 2011

A. Owen Aldridge. Early American Literature: A Comparatist Approach. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. xi + 323 pp. Sargent Bush, Jr. The Writings of Thomas Hooker: Spiritual Adventures in Two Worlds. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980. x + 387 pp. Patricia Caldwell. The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. x + 210 pp. Emory Elliott. Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. xi + 324 pp. Edward M. Griffin. Old Brick: Charles Chauncy of Boston, 1705-1787. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980. xiii + 248 pp. Myra Jehlen. American Incarnation: The Individual, The Nation, The Continent. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. xii + 253 pp. James T. Schleifer. The Making of Tocqueville's "Democracy in America." Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. xxv + 387 pp. Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark. Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1981. xii + 272 pp. Illus. Scholarship in the 1980s has been busy redefining American writings before Emerson. Knowing, from the work of an earlier generation of critics, that Colonial and Revolutionary writers were sophisticated, self-aware and serious, readers have tried to find the traditions, habits of thought and rhetoric that link the Puritans with the "Connecticut Wits, " or Franklin with Transcen- dentalism, or the Mathers with Jefferson and the Federalist Papers. The eight books currently under review attempt various aspects of this task; a common theme is the movement from an intellectual duality to an intergration—to the Emersonian "affirmation of unity."
OUT OF HOUSE AND HOME; TWO NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE AMERICAN FAMILY
Authors: Todd Barbara
Published: March 2011

Clifford Edward Clark, Jr. The American Family Home, 1800-1960. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986. xvi + 281 pp. Illus. Colleen McDannell. The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. xvii + 193 pp. Illus. The family, we are told, "makes a house a home." Each of these books shows how ideals of the American family shaped the homes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and though each author treats themes that have been dis- cussed elsewhere, each achieves new insights by adopting an original perspective and providing new lines of evidence.
annals of academic culture
Authors: Weiland Steven
Published: March 2011

Louise L. Stevenson. Scholarly Means to Evangelical Ends: The New Haven Scholars and the Transformation of Higher Learning in America, 1830-1890. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. xi + 221 pp. Roger L. Geiger. To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900-1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. x + 325 pp. David O. Levine. The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 1915-1940. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. 281 pp. Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott. New School: A History of the New School for Social Research. New York: The Free Press, 1986. xiv + 314 pp. Ellen W. Schrecker. No Ivory Tower. McCarthyism and the Universities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. viii + 437 pp. One of the anomalies of American scholarship, with its concentration in colleges and universities, has been the relative neglect of higher education itself as an historical subject. While ranging widely over almost every feature of American cultural life, scholars have been reluctant to look critically at the making of their own professional circumstances. It is only in the past two decades that the development of American higher education has become established as a central theme in intellectual history, now compelling scholars in allied fields to recognize its significance.
THE 'FOURTEEN DOORS' OUTWARD OF WILLIAM JAMES'S PHILOSOPHY
Authors: Cotkin George
Published: March 2011

Gerald E. Myers. William James: His Life and Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. 627 pp. Illus. Eugene Fontinell. Self, God, and Immortality: A Jamesian Investigation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. 297 pp. William James. Essays in Psychical Research. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 684 pp. Frederick J. Down Scott, ed. William James: Selected Unpublished Correspondence, 1885-1910. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986. 603 pp. William James was once likened, by his sister Alice, to a house with fourteen doors, all opening outward. The expansive spirit and open nature of the man and his philosophy continue to interest and puzzle. On the one hand, William James was a philosopher grappling with the perennial, and largely technical, problems of epistemology and philosophical psychology. On the other hand, he was a cultural figure, for whom philosophy was simply a form of expression, a particular means of presenting his own "passionate vision." James occupied both worlds, the worlds of the professional and of the public philosopher, at the very historical moment when most academic philosophers were abandoning the public forum for the secure and insulated confines of the ivy-walled university. The diversity of the volumes under consideration here is an indication of James's precarious balance within, and ultimate transcendence of, two worlds of discourse.
"SOME THINGS THAT STAY THERE BE": REFLECTIONS ON EMILY DICKINSON
Authors: Heath W.G.
Published: March 2011

It is not surprising that one of Emily Dickinson's most stimulating commentators is the contemporary American poet, Adrienne Rich. Dickinson is one of several women in history who have served as important "touchstones" in Rich's own personal odyssey. Her essay, "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickin- son," speaks with a personal urgency that stems from Rich's need to understand how Dickinson solved the problem of being a woman poet in a patriarchal society, a problem that Rich herself has wrestled with. Dickinson's solution, Rich concludes, lay in consciously arranging her life so as to allow her gifts as a poet the fullest possible expression: "It was a life deliberately organized on her terms."1 Seen in this light, Dickinson ceases to be the eccentric, passive creature she was once thought to be, and stands instead, in Rich's words, "as a practical woman, exercising her gift as she had to, making choices."2
A POTPOURRI OF BUSINESS HISTORY
Authors: Ingham John N.
Published: March 2011

Clifford Browder. The Money Game in Old New York: Daniel Drew and His Times. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1986. viii + 319 pp. Illus. Robert Sobel. IBM vs. Japan: The Struggle for the Future. New York: Stein and Day Inc., 1986. 262 pp. Benjamin J. Cohen. In Whose Interest: International Banking and American Foreign Policy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. xi + 347 pp. Clifford Browder's book on Daniel Drew is an attempt to rehabilitate a nineteenth- century businessman who was reviled in his own day, and largely forgotten in our own. Browder cautions the reader that Drew should not be forgotten. He justifies this belief on three counts: that Drew has been much lied about; that he is a "richer and more complex character than the caricature" usually presented; and that by understanding him, one may get "a hold on the time and place that produced him . . ." (3) This, then, is a "life and times biography" of the old style, something which has largely gone out of fashion in business history in recent years.
ROLE MODELS? THE CONTINUING RELEVANCE OF THE "NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS"
Authors: Matthews Fred
Published: March 2011

Susan Stout Baker. Radical Beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930s. Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1985. xxi 4- 268 pp. Howard Brick. Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. xiii 4- 280 pp. Terry A. Cooney. The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934-1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. xi + 350 pp. David Seideman. The New Republic: A Voice of Modern Liberalism. New York: Praeger, 1986. xiii + 205 pp. Alan M. Wald. The New York Intellectuals: the Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. xvi + 440 pp. Stephen J. Whitfield. A Critical American: The Politics of Dwight Macdonald. Hamden, Ct.: Archon Books, 1984. x + 179 pp. It has been argued that the appearance of a formidable stack of books about a small group of writers may be a sign of approaching obscurity, of the turning-point in the history of thought at which their capacity to appear contemporary, to serve as role models, disappears. So R. W. Johnson predicts the decline of the Parisian intellectuals of the 1960s.1 And so it may be with the subjects of this daunting pile, an incomplete selection of works focused on writers active around New York City from the 1930s until now, many of whom achieved first fame in the pages of the legendary journal Partisan Review, with its electrifying mix of Trotskyism, anarchism and belief in the social and ethical value of artistic modernism.
THE CONTESTED LEGACY OF JONATHAN EDWARDS IN ANTEBELLUM CALVINISM: THEOLOGICAL CONFLICT AND THE EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT IN AMERICA
Authors: Noll Mark A.
Published: March 2011

For some time, historians of American culture have realized that there are at least two stories for intellectual life in the antebellum period. One is the "American Renaissance" of Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, the Transcendentalists, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman, a story of marginal national consequence before the Civil War, but of great significance for twentieth-century commen- tary.1 More recently, historians with a feel for the intellectual terrain south of Boston and west of the Hudson have been telling a second story, in which religion is far more central. The study of post-Revolutionary, pre-critical theologians is still in its early stages, but it has advanced far enough to reveal an interesting account.2 A few of these largely neglected ministers and professors were men of unusual critical acumen. Many more were consequential, if not exactly brilliant, casuists, less ignorant about European matters and less naïve about their own intellectual activity than once was thought by the likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes or Vernon Louis Parrington.
THE COLONY WITHIN: THE RHETORIC OF WEALTH AND LABOR IN NOVELS OF THE GILDED AGE
Authors: de Paul Stephen
Published: March 2011

Arun Mukherjee. The Gospel of Wealth in the American Novel: The Rhetoric of Dreiser and Some of His Contemporaries. London: Croom Helm, 1987. 229 pp. Mary G. Grimes, ed. The Knights in Fiction: Two Labor Novels of the 1880s (T. Fulton Gantt, "Breaking the Chains," and Frederick Whittaker, "Larry Locke, Man of Iron"). Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. 330 pp. Claude Levi-Strauss suggested that industrialized societies are driven by a process of differentiation among classes. When the home front can no longer tolerate this differentiation, the nation advances out into the world, creating colonies to fulfill the need. But these societies can expand, this theory also implies, only after an earlier period of internal colonization of one class by another. Long before the imperial penetration of a frontier, there will first arise the internal, psychological and economic conflict between economic groups. The United States of the late nineteenth century could be said to have been such a society.
"THERE SEE INDUSTRY AND WEALTH COMBINED"
Authors: Emerson Roger L.
Published: March 2011

June Sprigg and David Larkin; Photographs by Michael Freeman. Shaker Life, Work, and Art. New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1987. 272 pp. Illus. Robert P. Emlen. Shaker Village Views: Illustrated Maps and Landscape Drawings by Shaker Artists of the Nineteenth Century. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1987. ix + 198 pp. Illus. The Shakers must be about the best-documented sect among the communal religious Utopians of nineteenth-century America. Certainly they left the greatest number of diverse artifacts, buildings and records. Books and articles exist on their communities, religious beliefs, buildings, work, food, art, songs, dress and on the manifold experiences of the Shakers themselves as they lived through millenarian, spiritualist and quietest phases of their movement. Much of this material has appeared since the publication in 1977 of Mary L. Richmond's two volume Shaker Literature: A Bibliography. These books are handsome additions to that literature which will continue to grow because of the museums now thriving at former and still active Shaker settlements in Sabbathday, Maine; Canterbury, New Hampshire; Hancock and Harvard, Massachusetts; Mount Lebanon and Old Chatham, New York; and Shakertown and Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. Both volumes are nicely designed and well printed on glossy paper which shows their illustrations to advantage. The text by Sprigg and Larkin provides an introduction to the Shakers and their world which is brief, clear and readable, although occasionally a bit repetitive. Those who have read much on Shakerism will find here little that is new save the approximately 200 color photographs by Michael Freeman and the five by others and used with their permission. These were mostly taken at the eight locations listed above, but a few are of objects and manuscripts elsewhere in private collections. These sunny pictures give a somewhat idealized view of their subjects, as they clarify the text and give substance, tone and beauty to the account of people who sought grace in clean designs, as well as in lives dedicated to their communities and to their God. They are also images with a wider relevance, since the Shakers shared objects, techniques and skills, standards and an appreciation for elegant and useful things with the nineteenth-century culture from which many were recruited and to which they all belonged. Freeman's pictures remind this New Englander of just how much the Shakers had in common with the craftsmen and farmers among whom they lived and whose material culture they shared even while refining it.
"REPUBLICAN MACHINES" OR PESTALOZZIAN BILDUNG? TWO VISIONS OF MORAL EDUCATION IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC
Authors: Kornfeld Eve
Published: March 2011

In recent years, a vigorous historiographical debate has swirled around the basic vision and goals of antebellum American educational reformers. Revisionist histories have strongly challenged traditional portraits of democratic educational missionaries spreading the American dream; recent revisions have focussed instead upon the goals of social control and cultural hegemony implicit in middle-class reformers' attempts to save poor children from themselves and their parents. To some historians, the moral crusades of the mid-nineteenth century seem to indict rather than to ennoble the crusaders. This paper attempts to shed a little more light on this controversy, by lengthening the historical perspective and illuminating the shades and contrasts within earlier American visions of moral education1.
DISCORD OVER DIPLOMACY: FDR AND NEW DEAL FOREIGN POLICY
Authors: Adams, Jr. Graham
Published: March 2011

Patrick J. Hearden. Roosevelt Confronts Hitler: America's Entry into World War II. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1987. xii + 328 pp. Illus. Norman M. Littell, ed. Jonathan Dembo. My Roosevelt Years. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987. xxi + 422 pp. Illus. Frederick W. Marks III. Wind Over Sand: The Diplomacy of Franklin Roosevelt. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. xiv + 462 pp. Illus. Franklin D. Roosevelt stirred up storms of controversy during his own lifetime. Now, almost half a century since his death, scholars are still debating New Deal foreign policy issues. Frederick W. Marks and Patrick J. Hearden present differing interpretations of Roosevelt's diplomacy from the perspective of professional historians. Norman Littell's diary gives us the day-by-day reactions of a highly-placed government official who lived through those momentous times. All three help to shed light on this rich and complex era in American history.
WASHINGTON IRVING'S PROBLEMS WITH HISTORY AND ROMANCE IN ASTORIA
Authors: MacLaren I.S.
Published: March 2011

"... The stories of these Sinbads of the wilderness made the life of a trapper perfect romance to me."1 Thus Washington Irving introduced his account of Astoria, the first American attempt at continental commercialism. John Jacob Astor, a Rhenish immigrant who became the United States's first businessman "to attain colossal wealth," launched his dream from New York over a three-and-one-half year period beginning in the summer of 1810, when a ship load of landlubbering fur traders set off round Cape Horn to rendezvous near the mouth of the Columbia River with a boat brigade travelling overland from St. Louis.2 As its scene grew ever more remote, the dream darkened into nightmare: the commercial vision of not only a transcontinental but a pan-Pacific fur trade ran afoul of a series of misfortunes, lamentable misdirection and poor execution.
"LORDS OF THE ASCENDANT": MERCANTILE BIOGRAPHY AND IRVING'S ASTORIA
Authors: Leander MacGregor Alan
Published: March 2011

The Jacksonian period of the 1830s shows the emergent forces of liberal capitalism rising to economic dominance. The emerging values of this new commercial hegemony were supported by many apologists, but other voices, speaking for the "genteel" older cultural matrix of inherited wealth and established culture, expressed dismay at, even abhorrence toward, the commonplace culture that Jacksonian economic and social democracy was creating.
FLANNERIANA
Authors: Asals Frederick
Published: March 2011

Rosemary M. Magee. Conversations with Flannery O'Connor. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1987. xxvii + 118 pp. Edward Kessler. Flannery O'Connor and the Language of Apocalypse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.163 pp. At a time when the latest orthodoxy in academic literary circles is the vexed topic of "the canon," no recent American writer appears more surely canonical than Flannery O'Connor. Inclusion in the Library of America is probably as close to the rite of canonization as one gets these days, and she is the only writer of her generation so elevated, the youngest to have a volume next to such fixed stars as Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, James and Faulkner. Skeptics might insinuate that she has simply been dead long enough to be "safe," but surcease has not helped such others as her fellow Georgian Carson McCullers, whose luster seems to have faded considerably since her death. It seems a very long time now since I, as a graduate student, sat in the dimmed office of the chairman of my department not long after O'Connor's death and broached the subject of a thesis on her fiction. Did I really think she was worthy of such an honor, he solemnly asked me, and I quite as solemnly affirmed my belief that she was. Now one picks up the newspaper to find Alfred Kazin calling her "one of the few American novelists of my time I am sure will be read well into the next century." He is far from alone.
UP FROM "TWONESS": FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND THE MEANING OF W.E.B. DUBOIS'S CONCEPT OF DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS
Authors: Blight David W.
Published: March 2011

Even the educated colored: the long school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. Toni Morrison, Beloved, 1987 A nation's identity is derived from the ways in which history has, as it were, counterpointed certain opposite potentialities; the ways in which it lifts this counterpoint to a unique style of civilization, or lets it disintegrate into mere contradiction. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, 1950
SHAKING ALL THE CORNERS OF THE SKY: THE GLOBAL RESPONSE TO THE GASTONIA STRIKE OF 1929
Authors: Bake Christina L. , Baker William J.
Published: March 2011

In the spring of 1929, thousands of textile workers in Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina went on strike, protesting the deterioration of wages and working conditions in the mills. The notorious "stretch-out" system, imposed by management two years earlier, came especially under fire, but strike efforts in the Appalachian mountain town of Elizabethton, Tennessee, in the textile centers of Gastonia and Marion, North Carolina, and in dozens of smaller piedmont mill towns all met with little success. One strike after another failed in the face of mill owners determined to retain their entrepreneurial autonomy, local police and state militia aggressively committed to traditional patterns of law and order, and public opinion hostile to "outside agitators." The world looked on, aghast, at these Southern scenes of resistance to change.1
BEYOND DECONSTRUCTION: AMERICA, STYLE AND THE ROMANTIC SYNTHESIS IN EMERSON
Authors: McNeely J. Trevor
Published: March 2011

For much of this century Emerson has not fared well at the hands of critics. Philosophical optimism without apparent ambiguity is not an intellectual stance that is congenial either to the modernist or postmodernist tempers. For more than fifty years, therefore, Emerson has faced a barrage of revisionist criticism which has been determined, at the very least, to disturb his complacency, if unable quite to dislodge the idol from the pedestal on which his own century placed it. In the academy Emerson rests at present in a kind of limbo—the Transcendentalist movement of which he is the personification remains the defining philosophy of America, while our age affects a sophistication to which Transcendentalism's romantic certainties have become an embarrassment.
THE USES OF EMERSON
Authors: Munk Linda
Published: March 2011

Stanley Cavell. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. xxxix + 151 pp. Len Gougeon. Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. xiii + 408 pp. Albert J. von Frank, ed. The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 1. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989. 415 pp. Teresa Toulouse and Andrew Delbanco, eds. The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 2. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. xv + 413 pp. Eleanor M. Tilton, ed. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. VU. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. xviii + 623 pp. To his Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, the Carus Lectures of 1988, Stanley Cavell appends an address of 1985 titled "Hope against Hope." There Cavell speaks of two "unhappy things": the issue of nuclear war (a matter held "in common with every thinking person on earth"); and the somewhat obscure matter of "the inability of our American culture to listen to the words, to possess them in common, of one of the founding thinkers of our culture, Ralph Waldo Emerson . . ." (129). Emerson's detractors (John Updike is one) refuse him the title of philosopher, as does his supporter Harold Bloom, who praises Emerson, not so much for the wrong reason, as for what Cavell terms "a stinted reason." Bloom's form of praise, Cavell says, "helps to keep condescension towards [Emerson] in respectable orbit. It helps to keep our culture, unlike any other in the West, from possessing any founding thinker as a common basis for its considerations" (133). Our current estimate of Emerson, according to Cavell, depends on an "endlessly repeated rumor that Emerson was not much of a thinker." And he adds parenthetically: "How eager his culture has been, top to bottom, to nourish this rumor! What's in it?" (138).
OPPORTUNITY AND URBANISM: POPULATION GROWTH IN NEW ENGLAND'S SECONDARY CITIES, 1790-1860
Authors: Daniels Bruce C.
Published: March 2011

For nearly two decades historians have argued that southern New England became an overcrowded society in the mid-eighteenth century. Population growth, soil depletion and the closing of the frontier in western Connecticut and Massachusetts diminished economic opportunity sufficiently to cause major dislocations and demographic readjustments. Hard data exist to show a large migration of southern New Englanders to New York, New Hampshire and Vermont in the Revolutionary era, and to the new West in the 1790s and afterwards. Although less conclusive and the subject of some debate, much other data suggest an increase in poverty, a decline in birth rates, as well as a correlation between political and religious unrest and declining economic opportunity. Much of this research was, of course, implicitly anticipated by the work of Frederick Jackson Turner: his view of the frontier as a "safety valve" for the East so obviously presupposes the conclusions of the new social historians that one has to wonder in retrospect why the overcrowding thesis seemed so iconoclastic in the 1960s when it was first articulated.1
MYTHS ABOUT LINCOLN: PEELING THE ONION
Authors: Lightner David L.
Published: March 2011

Waldo W. Braden, ed. Building the Myth: Selected Speeches Memorializing Abraham Lincoln. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. vii + 259 pp. Mario M. Cuomo and Harold Holzer, eds. Lincoln on Democracy. New York, Harper Collins Publishers, 1990. xlvii + 416 pp. Robert W. Johannsen. Lincoln, the South, and Slavery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. xiii + 128 pp. James M. McPherson. Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. xiii + 173 pp. Mark E. Neely Jr. The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. xvii + 278 pp. Louis A. Warren. Lincoln's Youth: Indiana Years, Seven to Twenty-one [1959]. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1991. xxii + 298 pp. David Zarefsky. Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. xiv + 309 pp. In his inaugural address in 1861, Abraham Lincoln appealed to Southerners to abandon secession, pointing out that even if the North and the South were to separate politically, they still would be joined geographically: Physically speaking we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence, and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face; and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is it possible then to make that intercourse more advantageous, or more satisfactory, after separation than before?Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends?
Assessing the Field: An Oral History Interview
Authors: Tucker Bruce
Published: March 2011

The launching of a new editorship seemed like an opportune time to assess past achievements, current questions, and future research agendas in the field of American studies. In the following interview, Associate Editor Bruce Tucker asked American Quarterly's editor, Gary Kulik, for his views on recent rends in American studies scholarship. Kulik's remarks primarily address American studies in the United States, but the interview raises questions for CRAS readers. Are there identifiable patterns to the practice of American studies scholarship in Canada? Have Canadian scholars replicated the same generational differences in scholarship as their American counterparts? As the Canadian Association for American studies prepares for its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1995, we invite readers to think about theses questions and send us their views.
"Diogenes in Disguise": Inversion and Identity in The Confidence-Man
Authors: Wright Julia M.
Published: March 2011

Herman Melville's narrative, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (CM), is a convoluted work which defies fundamental conventions of the novel. There is no continuing plot or ensemble of characters to lend it coherence, but only a common setting for a collection of episodes, and even that is in flux. The narrative takes place on April Fool's Day aboard a riverboat, ironically named the Fidèle, which stops periodically for some of its passengers to disembark and for new passengers to board the ship. Although a few figures appear in more than one scene, particularly the enigmatic cosmopolitan, characters enter and leave the narrative in a manner which suggests the flow of passengers entering and leaving the Fidèle. Some characters, like some passengers, stay longer than others, but the composition of the sum is constantly varying. These fluctuations in the novel's cast of characters are further complicated by myriad confidence games, games which depend upon the possibility that someone can pretend to be someone else. This is the confidence man's masquerade, and each episode poses the same problem, namely how to determine if another person is being honest, whether about himself, about someone else, about some merchandise, or about a less tangible commodity such as an ideological position. As countless version of the confidence games are played out before the reader, even narration is rendered suspect: a "stranger" concludes the story that he has finished narrating with the comment, "There, I have done; having given you, not my story, mind, or my thoughts, but another's" (CM 135). Melville's narrative is riddled with such confidence men and a wide variety of confidence games, or at least it appears to be. While duplicity is always suspected, its presence is never confirmed or denied by a character who is free from the taint of that suspicion.
Gender, Race, and the Colonial Body: Carson McCullers's Filipino Boy, and David Henry Hwang's Chinese Woman
Authors: Martin Robert K.
Published: March 2011

Almost twenty years after its first production, Michel Tremblay's two- person play about a drag queen and her motorcyclist lover, Hosanna, was staged again in Montreal, this time by a woman director, Lorraine Pintal. In the interval, the play had become a classic of Québec nationalism, with the sexual disguises read as failure of political self-affirmation. The new produc- tion was significantly different from the 1973 production, which many people in the audience remembered. Most striking of the changes was an alteration in the ending when the drag queen Claude, or Hosanna, no longer undresses to reveal her "true self." As Renate Usmiani rather sententiously described the ending in her account of the early version, "both characters realize that the time for hiding places and disguises is past and they must assume real life and real identities" (96). Even if it originates in Tremblay's own accounts of the play, the notion of "real identities," would seem hard to sustain in 1991, especially when it is accompanied, as it is in Hosanna, by a claim to masculinity; Hosanna's five-time repeated final words of the play, as she "becomes" Claude again, "Chus t'un homme ["I'm a man."—author's translation]" (75), words that echo and make explicit the end of the first act, when Hosanna declares to her lover Cuirette, "Moé aussi j'arais envie de t'enculer! ["Me too, I want to fuck you."—author's translation]" (48).
Said's Orientalism and the Discourse of (Hetero) sexuality
Authors: Hastings Tom
Published: March 2011

The "Orient," writes Edward Said in Orientalism, has provided the West with "its deepest and most recurring images of the Other" (1). By tracing the power/knowledge configurations through which Europeans have historically mapped "otherness" onto the "Orient," Said takes a model of alterity from continental philosophy and deploys it in contemporary American political struggles. "My real argument," he writes, "is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political- intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with 'our' world" (12). "Orientalism" is thus defined by Said as "a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (3). The political ramifications of Said's theory of Orientalism for Anglo- American literary and cultural studies are far-reaching. With the publication of Orientalism in 1978 and his introduction of the discourse of Orientalism into the critical lexicon of American academia Said not only underwrote a study of the relationship of Eurocentrism (understood as including the United States) to colonialism, thus helping to undertake an anatomy of colonial discourse, but, concomitantly, helped to shake up what he calls the "politically quietistic" attitude of the American "literary-cultural establishment" to "real-world" issues such as imperialism which, he claims, it has refused to explore or discuss (Interview 38-39). Such a refusal is for Said an overtly political act for which he faults the academy and against which he personally positions himself and his project.
Almost Americans: Continental Sharing With the United States, the Great Academic hangeover and the Quest for Canadian Paradigms of U.S. History
Authors: Stuart Reginald C.
Published: March 2011

Given Canada's proximity to the United States, Canadians' tendency to define themselves as not Americans, and the almost overwhelming Ameri- can presence in Canada, one might expect to find a Canadian paradigm of U.S. history in virtually any work written by a Canadian. Historians in Canada have used paradigm theory to study history in general, so why not themselves? Furthermore, since the idea of a paradigm to explain historical change relies upon the identification of a given community with a distinct intellectual outlook, the sheer paucity of Americanist academics in Canada seems a significant advantage (Kuhn 1970, 174ff).
The Emancipation of the Negro and the Negro Spirituals From the Racialist Legacy of Arthur de Gobineau
Authors: Spencer Jon Michael
Published: March 2011

In terms of what Africa means to millions of African Americans today, the racialist legacy of Arthur de Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races ([1853] 1915) has followed us. It has followed us via a gene- alogy of African and New World African scholars who adapted Gobineau's idea of black essentialism. This legacy in the thought of Edward Wilmot Blyden, Alexander Crummell, W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Senghor, and others is the premise behind Anthony Appiah's com- plaints in In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992). Briefly, the problem Appiah identifies is that the Europeanist thought to which these black scholars subscribed left people of African descent with a self-denigrating notion: that we have an inherently (ontologically) distinct history, tradition, personality, and purpose which imprint upon our culture such traits as emotionality rather than intellectuality, sensuality rather than rationality, and inferiority rather than "superiority." While the intent of claiming that blacks were "distinct but equal" was to vindicate and liberate the Negro, these negritudinaires, so Appiah's argument goes, built their new myths about blackness on the foundation of Gobineau and thereby merely relativized the supposed inferiority of blacks.
The New [Tele] Scope of Columbus: San Carlos Apache, et al. vs. Mt. Graham International Observatory
Authors: Hanson Randel D.
Published: March 2011

We have entered a period of major changes. National identity is in crisis everywhere. And for the indigenous people, identity has too long been submerged by artificial borders. A lot of Berlin Walls are going to fall. (Rodrigo Contreras, World Council of Indigenous Peoples, cited in Chartrand 1991, 26-27) On 10 December 1992, United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros- Ghali welcomed over 200 indigenous peoples from across the world to New York City for inaugural ceremonies and meetings to mark 1993 as the "In- ternational Year of Indigenous Peoples." According to Bill Means of the International Indian Treaty Council, it was the first time that Indian peoples of the Americas were allowed to address the United Nations (UN). In connection with these meetings, a draft of a "Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People" was circulated for reviewing.1 If adopted by the UN General Assembly, this declaration would accord indigenous peoples world- wide the right of self-determination pursuant to international law, extend to them the set of human rights recognized in the Charter of the United Nations and in international human rights laws, and protect them from discrimination based on their indigenous identity. Coming shortly after the quincentenary of the Columbian voyages, these UN actions were both timely and long in delay. They are a response to demands by indigenous peoples of the world for representation within the system of nation-states, a system that has systematically denied their self-determination. Important as it is, adoption of the declaration represents only one among many tactics in the broader struggle for American Indian sovereignty.
Remembering Wendell Willkie's One World
Authors: Beidler Philip
Published: March 2011

Fifty years ago, people were purchasing the best-selling American book of World War II by the millions. Today, a handful of specialists could identify it. The book was Wendell L. Willkie's One World. A plea by the unsuccessful 1940 Republican presidential candidate for an enlightened postwar American internationalism, it was also an account of the author's globe-girdling 1942 tour of major war fronts—via a converted army air force bomber supplied by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, his likely opponent again in 1944—and of his talks with Allied leaders. Appearing in April 1943 in simultaneous cloth and paperbound editions, the book sold a million copies in two months and doubled that figure by the end of the year. Translated into sixteen languages, it shortly added another million to the sales total worldwide.
From Policy Research to Political Advocacy: The Changing Role of Think Tanks in American Politics
Authors: Abelson Donald E.
Published: March 2011

Introduction The relationship between political leaders and those who advise them is critically important to the study of governmental decision making. By providing their expertise to members of Congress, the Executive and the bureaucracy, policy advisors play a vital role in formulating and injecting ideas into the policy-making process. While policy makers in the United States continue to solicit the advice of experts in universities, interest groups, professional and business associations, corporations and law firms, they are relying increasingly on scholars from think tanks or policy research institutions to identify, develop, shape, and at times implement, policy ideas.
Darkness Visible: The Politics of Being Seen From Ellison to Zebrahead
Authors: Smith Craig V.
Published: March 2011

I want to begin this discussion of race in one recent American film, Zebra- head, with reference to two revealing statements that have come to my attention lately, from an advertizing campaign and from another film. First, the famous Michael Jordan commercials for Nike, featuring a range of awe- struck black and white boys intoning the mantra "If I could be like Mike;" the different resonances of this desire, from white boy to black boy, speak volumes about crossover, projection, identification, role models, and career paths for young African-American men. Second, two lines of dialogue from the 1993 film, Demolition Man, starring Wesley Snipes and Sylvester Stallone in another turn on the interracial male bonding/rivalry tradition traced by Ed Guerrero (1993). Discussing the social work Snipes's patho- logical violence is performing for his megalomaniac white master, the two men—"Phoenix" (Snipes) and "Dr Cocteau" (Nigel Havers)—have the follow- ing exchange: COCTEAU: (approvingly) "People are terrified of you." PHOENIX: (almost directly to the camera): "What's new? People have always been terrified of me."
Unionism in the Twentieth-Century United States: A Re-examination
Authors: Braeman John
Published: March 2011

Sidney Fine. "Without Blare of Trumpets:" Walter Drew, the National Erec- tors' Association, and the Open Shop Movement, 1903-57. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. x +384. Robert H. Zieger. The CIO 1935-1955. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. xii + 491. Colin Gordon. New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920- 1935. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 329. Conflict between workers and their employers over distribution of the fruits of production in democratic nations has taken place in two spheres: the electoral-representative and the labour market. The absence in the United States of a successful political party committed to and dependent for its support on the working class has placed a heavier burden upon unions as the protector of worker interests than in many industrialized countries. Much ink has been spilled to explain the first phenomenon. The preoccupation with answering Werner Sombart's query about why there was no socialism in the United States has tended to divert attention from the weakness of unionism in this country. That weakness was temporarily disguised by the surge in union membership from the 1930s until the latter 1950s. Union decline since, however, has sparked new interest in the sources of labour organizational failure.
Native American History: Problems of Success
Authors: Trigger Bruce G.
Published: March 2011

Matthew Dennis. Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European En- counters in Seventeenth-Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 280. Ian K. Steele. Warpaths: Invasions of North America. Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1994. Pp. xiv + 282. What is variously called Native American history, aboriginal history, or now, with increasing reluctance (because the term is rightly viewed as ethno- centric), ethnohistory constitutes the oldest and most highly developed of the minority histories that have transformed the practice of history in recent decades. While the study of Native American history began mainly in anthro- pology in the late 1930s, it has been taken up by growing numbers of his- torians and geographers who have brought their own important skills and in- sights to this enterprise. This research has not only shed light on facets of North American history that were hitherto ignored, but has also demonstra- ted that native peoples were effective and resourceful participants in shaping that history. This, in turn, has vastly and irreversibly transformed the tradi- tional Euro-American understanding of the role played by European colo- nists. Indian history is now recognized as essential for understanding the genera! course of North American history into modern times. It has even been argued that its most important achievement to date has not been what Euro-American scholars have found out about Native American behaviour, but its revealing of some of the profound biases and misunderstandings that have coloured non-native perceptions of native people and helped to shape Euro-American policies toward them (Trigger 1986).
The Poverty of Marxist Crisis Theory During the Great Depression
Authors: Phelps Christopher
Published: March 2011

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. (Gramsci 1971, 276) American society during the Great Depression offered no end of stimuli to economic thought. Financial crash and industrial stagnation threw millions out of work, growth was anemic at best until the Second World War, and the consequent conviction that Karl Marx's economic anticipations had been proven correct led unprecedented numbers of intellectuals to embrace Marxism. Under such circumstances one might expect the American left to produce an outpouring of economic analysis, and that, indeed, is the presupposition of many accounts. Louis Adamic recalled "elaborate analyses and diagnoses of the rapidly disintegrating socio-economic structure of the United States" during the first years of the 1930s (1938, 325). "In those days," Malcolm Cowley concurred, "everyone was trying to be an economist of sorts. Writers studied 'conditions,' as they called them, in various cities or industries and tried to publish their findings as pamphlets" (1981, 27).