bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sex Boys in a Balloon: V. F. Calverton and the Abortive Sexual Revolution
Authors: Wilcox Leonard
Published: January 2009

During the American sixties, the resurgent interest in Wilhelm Reich and the widespread impact of Marcuse'sEros and Civilisationencouraged the idea of coupling psychoanalysis and Marxism. Reich's works reminded radicals once again of the integral connection between political revolution and sexual freedom, while Marcuse's critique, a bold attempt of the mid-fifties to read Freud as a revolutionary utopian, suggested the desirability of a marriage between Marx and Freud, a marriage that would have seemed unnatural to many of the Old Left generation. Certainly, too, the writings of Norman O. Brown and Paul Goodman gave credence to the idea that sex, psychology, and radical politics were necessarily interrelated.
The State in the Bedroom: What Some Adults May Not Do Privately After Hardwick v Bowers
Authors: Cohan A. S.
Published: January 2009

The development and evolution since 1965 of a legally recognized right of privacy through decisions reached by the Supreme Court in the United States may be seen as evidence of one of two things. It represents either the Supreme Court's further usurpation of the authority of legislatures by its expansion of rights — areas never intended by the framers of the Constitution — or it demonstrates the creativity and sensitivity of Justices of the Court in finally making explicit what has been implicit in the broad language of the Constitution, namely, that a right of privacy has always belonged to the citizen. Whichever position one holds, there may be little doubt that the Court's excursion into this previously uncharted territory, with its subsequent “stops” along the journey at questions of contraception, abortion and, of concern in this essay, “unnatural” sexual acts, has given rise to considerable controversy and, in some instances, confusion.
“This Exchange of Epigrams”: Commodity and Style in Washington Square
Authors: Bell Ian F. A.
Published: January 2009

“But he has no sense of history!” is a cry that is all too familiar in many Jamesian commentaries. The following essay attempts to provide a corrective to this complaint by reading Washington Square as a critique of a particular moment in the development of the bourgeois temperament. It is not insignificant that this is the only novel for which James chose a specific locale as a title, because historical time and geographical place are the issues which overtly confront the reader, to an extent (excepting The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima) insisted upon as nowhere else in James's works. The time is, predominantly, the difficult period of the late 1830s and early 1840s, and the place is that area of lower Manhattan which awkwardly bastions itself against contemporary turbulence.

Dr. Sloper's deliberate choices of resistence are carefully located within a changing landscape, choices which match the period of Manhattan's most rapid expansion whereby the Island below Canal Street was condensed by overwhelming commercial pressure.
Gravity's Rainbow: Apocryphal History or Historical Apocrypha?
Authors: Marriott David
Published: January 2009

Nineteenth century novelists felt constrained to supply their readers with well-chosen epigraphs, and the personal canons from which they drew them, whilst seldom exclusively Biblical, provided a convenient index to their individual literary and philosophical predilections. Thomas Pynchon's canon is wilfully idiosyncratic and frequently apocryphal, but his epigraphs are no less apposite than George Eliot's; for in creating a fictional world out of what is largely palpable history Pynchon produces a homogenous medium which is neither fiction nor history. I have chosen the epigraph above because in addition to illustrating this admixture of fiction and history it also intimates to the reader an aspect of Pynchon's technique which may go some way towards explaining the rationale behind it. Some parts ofGravity's Rainbow, I think, might best be described as an attempt at writing a twentieth century “gospel.”

The Oxyrhynchus papyri, referred to in the epigraph actually exist. They were discovered in 1898 and 1904 in Egypt, and were fragments of purported sayings of Jesus of Nazareth dating from the second century A.D. Not until 1956, when the translation of a gnostic library discovered at Nag Hammedai in Egypt was completed, did it become clear that the Oxyrhynchus papyri were fragments of a work calling itself theGospel of Thomas.
The State's Attorney and the President: The Inside Story of the 1960 Presidential Election in Illinois
Authors: Kallina Edmund F.
Published: January 2009

In early 1975 the world of Chicago politics was stunned by the news that former Cook County State's Attorney Benjamin S. Adamowski had endorsed Mayor Richard J. Daley for a sixth term of office. Adamowski and Daley had long been opponents and their rivalry had dominated Chicago politics from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s. In 1960 it had even spilled over into the arena of presidential politics where it affected the closest and most controversial presidential election of the twentieth century.
Robert Munford and the Political Culture of Frontier Virginia
Authors: Beeman Richard R.
Published: January 2009

Robert Munford, the eighteenth-century Virginia squire and litterateur, has long served as both a symbol and subject of analysis for students of colonial American history and culture. In the nearly-barren ground of eighteenth-century American drama, Munford's plays, The Candidates and The Patriots, while never actually produced on stage during his lifetime, stand out as two of the most important attempts by a colonial American to use traditional dramatic techniques to illustrate distinctively American characters and themes. And for historians, these same two plays, which grew out of Munford's own experience in Virginia politics, have served as rich and evocative sources from which to reconstruct the operation and ethos of the political culture of revolutionary Virginia.
British Travellers and the Anglo-American Relationship in the 1850s
Authors: Crawford Martin
Published: January 2009

When William Ferguson, an English botanist and entomologist, called at the Detroit home of General Lewis Cass in June 1855, it was natural that during “ a very lengthened and interesting conversation,” the veteran American politician should mention “ the absurd books ” written by British travellers about the United States. “ They come over here,” said Cass, “ run over the country for three months, and think they understand it.” Such sentiments, of course, were commonplace by this time and Ferguson could not have been surprised by the frankness with which they were elucidated. Cass had reached political maturity during a period in which the British traveller became the focus for intense and hostile speculation in the United States. There was no more appropriate target for Jacksonian wrath, for example, than Mrs. Frances Trollope. HerDomestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832 and widely extracted in American newspapers, helped give broad popular legitimacy to the bitter critical dialogues which pervaded the Anglo-American intellectual community after 1815. During the Jacksonian period, therefore, the British traveller could claim an important role in the development of Atlantic perceptions and attitudes.
The Politics of Gender, Language and Hierarchy in Mamet's “Oleanna”
Authors: Macleod Christine
Published: January 2009

Ever since it was first staged in May 1992, Mamet's Oleanna seems, on both sides of the Atlantic, to have been perceived, publicised and reviewed almost exclusively as a manifestation of backlash sexual politics — that is, as a work characterised by outrage and hostility towards the agenda of contemporary feminism. Although the play entered the public arena too late to be addressed in Susan Faludi's 1992 study Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, its attitudes have typically been read as symptomatic of the same aggrieved and aggressive masculinity which Faludi diagnoses in such exemplary texts as Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990). The play also lends itself with deceptive ease to a comparison with one of Faludi's most alarming paradigms of backlash popular culture, the Hollywood blockbuster Fatal Attraction. Both narratives depict a fundamentally decent man, loyal to wife and family, who becomes the target of and is almost destroyed by the machinations of a vengeful single woman. In both cases the action culminates in an explosive physical assault on the offending female character. And, in performance, the violence of both denouements releases and apparently sanctions a similar surge of vicarious male aggression. Howls of “Kick her ass!” and “Kill the bitch!” were a regular occurrence at screenings of Fatal Attraction, and audience reaction to Oleanna has often followed the same pattern: Elaine Showalter reports a male acquaintance saying “I nearly climbed up on the stage to kick the shit out of the little bitch myself.”
Early Isolationism Revisited: Neutrality and Beyond in the 1790s
Authors: Rossignol Marie-Jeanne
Published: January 2009

The term “isolationism,” still used today in discussions of contemporary United States policy, is “ fittingly…identified with a revulsion against the entanglements of world war.” For analysts using this concept, isolationism means American withdrawal from political connections with the rest of the world (no treaties and permanent alliances) and idealism in foreign policy (no secret clauses or deals). They consider that it has characterized American foreign policy since the first president took office and was expressed in Washington's Farewell Address in 1796 for the first time. Although the term appeared only in 1922, it is thus applied to early American foreign policy, as Lawrence S. Kaplan does in the chapter entitled “Toward isolationism: the Rise and Fall of the Franco-American Alliance 1775–1801” of hisEntangling Alliances with None: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Jefferson. According to Kaplan, this speech “became an enduring symbol of America's isolation,” and he defines early “isolationism” as follows: “…a freedom to enjoy access to all ports interested in receiving American products. It meant further a freedom from subservience to any foreign power, of the kind which had forced them into the service of a maternal economy or of dynastic wars in the past. Finally, it extended to a self-image of virtue and innocence that would be protected by advancing principles of peaceful relationships among nations.”

Even if one thinks, like Albert K. Weinberg, that “isolationism” is a “poor theory,” which “has placed the discussion of American foreign policy in a sad predicament of obfuscation,” one has to admit with him that “mere scholars can change no social habit.”
Women's Place on the American Frontier
Authors: Walsh Margaret
Published: January 2009

Women's traditional place on the American frontier has been as invisible helpmate or at best as some shadowy figure who appeared occasionally when describing pioneer homes and lifestyles. Until recently, historians followed the individualistic and linear progression of Frederick Jackson Turner westward across the continent and found no need to discuss the activities of both sexes. Euro-American men were fully capable of explaining the frontier, both as authors and as subjects. But the American frontier is no longer one-dimensional. Increasing numbers of female historians have insisted on not only placing women in the midst of established pioneering ventures, but have widened western horizons to discuss different pioneers and new economic and social roles for women of all ethnic and racial groups. Women's place on the frontier has now become so central that it is impossible to make any sense of new settlement patterns without examining the experiences of both men and women and their relationships to each other.
Opposition in Congressional Committees: the Rights of the Minority Party
Authors: Lees John D.
Published: January 2009

Political scientists in the United States have in recent years become concerned with analysis of the rights and responsibilities of political opposition. This interest was initially stimulated by the much-quoted, and much-maligned, report of the Committee on Political Parties of the American Political Science Association in 1950 entitled Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System. It has been supplemented by the volume edited by Robert Dahl, Political Oppositions in Western Democracies. Academic rationale for this interest is reflected in the paradox posed by Dahl, who, having cited ‘ the right of an organized opposition to appeal for votes against the government in elections and parliament’ as being one of ‘the three great milestones in the development of democratic institutions’, is then obliged to admit that in the United States ‘it is never easy to distinguish “opposition” from “government”’, and that ‘it is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to identify the opposition’. Opposition in the United States political system is nonstructural because of the multiple access points for influence, and opportunities for preventing or inhibiting governmental action are numerous. No single institution illustrates this fact better than Congress. In speaking of Congress, commentators do not talk about ‘the opposition’. They may refer to ‘the minority party’ (and ‘the majority party’), yet even these terms cannot be used at times when the Senate and House are not controlled by the same party. Moreover, internal organizational and procedural patterns in the contemporary Congress allow many opportunities for minority coalitions to check executive policies favoured by a majority coalition in Congress, and such coalitions are often bipartisan.
Sociology and Literary Studies I. The Map of Society: America in the 1890s
Authors: Jackson John A.
Published: January 2009

This paper and the one that follows it were originally prepared for the 1968 Conference of the British Association for American Studies at Cambridge. They are companion pieces, and each was designed to outline initially an interdisciplinary approach to literary study and sociology, and then to follow this with an analysis of Stephen Crane's Maggie which does not make any claim necessarily to have achieved fulfilment of the precepts set out in the preface.
Sociology and Literary Studies II. Romance and Reality in Maggie
Authors: Bradbury Malcolm
Published: January 2009

We all well know that American Studies offers a particularly fascinating and complex example of the difficulties and challenges involved in an interdisciplinary and area studies approach. There may, indeed, be an element of chance in the fact that this touches so sharply on the links that can be established between literature and other studies (literature and sociology, literature and history): the chance that literature was somehow in there from the beginning, in the early days of the subject, and has still held its place in the area-studies map. So, when Henry Nash Smith asked us once if American Studies could develop a method, he looked for his answer in the intervening ground between literary criticism and sociology; and though he found it hard to arrive at his desired method, he suggested that it would lie in some form of cultural anthropology. The divisions between the various disciplines–above all, the varying roles they allowed to consciousness in their interpretation of society and culture–seemed to him to pose profound problems. So, he said, a new method would have to come piecemeal, through a kind of principled opportunism; but he did assume that we could want to turn to works of literature, and the complex interactions between a writer and his environment that constitute a whole literary career, as an important centre of the study, a significant expression of the culture. The problems in fact are large, since in liberal-democratic society literature performs some of the most complex contours of art that have ever existed. But that very fact is part of the interest of the problem and, while Professor Smith's approach raises certain difficulties, on some of which the first part of the present argument turns, I am happy to take the issue raised–that literature can be seen as a social manifestation, that as a creative manifestation it does uniquely reveal central aspects of a culture–as a very important one.
Cultural Reflections on American Linguists from Whitney to Sapir
Authors: Bush Clive
Published: January 2009

At the World's Fair Congress of Anthropology in Chicago in 1915 Professor O. T. Mason explained the ethnological exhibit in the following terms: “The aim was to have each leading linguistic stock of peoples represented by collections of art products and by groups of life-size figures engaged in characteristic arts and industries serially in the alcoves.” A certain cultural confidence is manifest. Language is seen as the basis for “stocks” of peoples (stocks being a favourite classificatory measure for Darwinists and Financiers), and museum humanoids, engaged in representative and atomised industrial tasks, presented in serial order, become authoritative ways of coding behaviour, language and culture.
Andrew Carnegie and the Discourse of Cultural Hegemony
Authors: Munslow Alun
Published: January 2009

Can cultural change be explained as a function of discourse? A discourse is any language territory, whether a mode of thinking, talking or writing, which presupposes shared assumptions between its producer and consumer. This means that the relationship between language and ideology is dependent upon the nature of a particular discourse. This paper offers comments on this question with reference to the formation of the post-bellum American business culture and its ideology by examining the written works of one of its leading exponents, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Working from the assumption that this business culture was serving the interests of a new ruling group at the expense of subordinate Populist-Producer ones, does an evaluation of the business-man's discourse reveal how it helped create that ideological domination? Both Hayden White and Michel Foucault have claimed that culture can be explored by reference to the primary figurative modes of discourse, particularly the tropes of metonymy and synecdoche. Basic to this rhetorical approach to cultural formation is its assumption that ideology is a function of discourse, even though White, the most devoted practitioner of the theory of the poetic foundation of cultural practices, recognises Foucault's insight that discourse resides in the world and is bound up with property ownership, power and the imposition of force. Assuming that power is embedded in a dominant social formation, business spokesmen like Carnegie, working to maintain the authority of a particular class, did so through a range of discursive cultural practices that contended with others for dominance. In the Gramscian model of cultural change Andrew Carnegie was anorganic intellectualin as much as he functioned according to the interests of the newfundamentalclass of the wealthy industrial bourgeoisie.
H. L. Mencken and American Cultural Masculinism
Authors: Schaum Melita
Published: January 2009

H. L. Mencken's antagonism to women's issues seems paradoxical in a man so committed to emancipation and the reexamination of conventional social roles — the very goals for which the women's movement was fighting during the early decades of the twentieth century. The apparent discord of Mencken's attacks on suffragettes, his deprecating depictions of womanhood, and his thinly veiled vilification of women as a source of cultural mediocrity have spurred critics to explain, reformulate, or deny Mencken's disturbing prejudice. Edward A. Martin quixotically suggests that Mencken only “posed as an antifeminist,” while Charles A. Fecher wonders why “today's advocates of ‘women's liberation’ have not resurrected In Defense of Women” — Mencken's lashing satire on the female in America, grossly misread by Fecher as a tribute to women's “intelligence.” But Mencken was not “posing” as an antifeminist any more than he was pretending to be anti-Philistine. His views of women were not only consistent with his own cultural philosophy but joined a paradigm of masculinism underlying the definition of American culture during these years.

This essay does not deny Mencken's considerable contributions to the scene of American letters in the early twentieth century. Alarm at the recently published diaries — which illustrate Mencken's disposition to be “careless of the decencies” in his random remarks on African-Americans and Jews — while justified, often de-contextualizes his opinions from the wider cultural atmosphere. Regarding his views on women as well, I argue that metaphoric and broadly philosophical foundations place many of his views within a larger climate of opinion seeking to link the rise of the feminine with intellectual mediocrity.
Local Leadership in the Early Civil Rights Movement: The South Carolina Citizenship Education Program of the Highlander Folk School
Authors: Ling Peter
Published: January 2009

Between 1953 and 1961 Myles Horton's Highlander Folk School developed the Citizenship Education Program (CEP) beginning in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Within the program from 1957 onwards Septima Clark and Bernice Robinson developed Citizenship Schools centered on literacy classes. By slowly developing local leaders, like Esau Jenkins, the CEP evolved as an educational framework for social mobilization, which was later used by the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. In the summer of 1961, since the Folk School faced closure by Tennessee state authorities, Highlander transferred the CEP to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Between 1961 and 1970, hundreds of civil rights activists from across the South attended the SCLC's Citizenship School teacher training courses at the Dorchester Center near Savannah in south-east Georgia. Moreover, in the mid-1960s the Southwide Voter Education Project enabled civil rights activists from across the region to study the political organization that the CEP had spawned in Charleston county as a model for their own community work. Given its widespread influence, the CEP's work was a vital aspect of the Civil Rights Movement itself and constituted Highlander's chief contribution to it.
Thomas McGuane: Nature, Environmentalism, and the American West
Authors: Ingram David
Published: January 2009

The recent writings of Thomas McGuane show a particular interest in environmentalist concerns, examining the role played by inherited mythologies of the frontier in the ecology and politics of the contemporary American West. McGuane's explorations reveal complex and ambivalent responses to these subjects, in part liberal, radical and conservative.

This essay will discuss these issues in relation to contemporary American attitudes to nature. The basis for my approach will be to assume that conceptions of “nature” are socially constructed, and that “nature” and “culture” are separate but mutually interdependent. The relationship between human societies and the natural world will therefore be considered as an ongoing process in which the term “nature” must not be wholly subsumed under that of “culture.” Environmental history is, as Donald Worster puts it, “a story of reciprocity and interaction rather than of culture replacing nature.”

Thomas McGuane's writings tend both to repeat and to question what may be called “traditional” or “Romantic” attitudes to nature. In particular, he combines both aesthetic and utilitarian perspectives: nature as a scene of spiritual restoration through the appreciation of beauty, and as the object of technological mastery and control. In practice, these two approaches are historically interrelated, in that they are both responses to, and constructions of, nature produced within an urban capitalist society. As Walter J. Ong has argued, a necessary precondition for Romantic attitudes to nature is a society that has confidence in its capacity to dominate nature, through the use of the very industrial technologies such attitudes ostensibly reject.
Jonathan Edwards and the “American Difference”: Pragmatic Reflections on the “Sense of the Heart”
Authors: Jacobson David
Published: January 2009

Early in Freedom of the Will Jonathan Edwards formulates a description of logical necessity that has important implications for the way we understand both his philosophical and theological method. He describes the principal forms of necessary meaning, delineating three modes of necessity: philosophical, moral and natural. Of these, the first is most important, for it indicates that, at the highest level, meaning is determined according to the structure of a proposition. Edwards states that “philosophical necessity is nothing different from certainty,” and the form of certainty, he tells us, “[is] nothing else than the full and fixed connection between the things signified by the subject and predicate of a proposition.”
Andrew Lang versus W. D. Howells: a Late-Victorian Literary Duel
Authors: Demoor Marysa
Published: January 2009

It was fate's infallible sense of the ironic which induced Andrew Lang to contact William Dean Howells as a potential contributor to the newly founded Longman's Magazine in October 1882. Ironic, that is, in the light of later events, for the two men barely knew one another at the time, Howells having been introduced to Lang two months previously, at one of Edmund Gosse's celebrated Sunday parties. Had Lang waited for Howells to show his colours, he would, no doubt, have refrained from hauling this Trojan horse into the Longman camp. Indeed, Howells's notorious disparagement of Dickens and Thackeray appeared that same year, in the Century Magazine for November 1882. All but a nonentity to the British public before, the American author thereby achieved fame, almost overnight, as the powerful vindicator of the new American prose and a merciless denunciator of the established British novelists.
Under Reduced Circumstances: Space and Place for the Aging
Authors: Mondale Clarence
Published: January 2009

We only half-understand how meaning depends upon geography. We usually think of meaning in global terms, as having to do with the universals of truth, goodness, and beauty. But global meanings are anchored in the unselfconscious geography of everyday life, the “rhythmic functional patterns” by which we order time and space. Those patterns change over the lifetime of the individual, profoundly altering what life means to him.
Mr. Roberts and American Remembering; or, Why Major Major Major Major Looks Like Henry Fonda
Authors: Beidler Philip D.
Published: January 2009

Although the idea may be hard for us to imagine fifty years later, especially given the historical weight of the subject, the first of the great postwar entertainment classics to come out of the American experience of World War II took shape initially as a set of comic short stories by Thomas Heggen about the backwater Pacific Navy. Gathered into a slim 1946 novel, the stories became the basis of a hit Broadway play of 1948; and that play in turn became the basis of an extraordinarily popular 1955 movie. The classic so described, of course, was Mr. Roberts, with the titular hero eventually so thoroughly identified with the actor playing him on stage and screen that by the end of the decade in question, a New York Times Reviewer would observe of the actor, Henry Fonda, “it now appears he is Mr. Roberts.”
Alien Nation: White Male Paranoia and Imperial Culture in the United States
Authors: Kennedy Liam
Published: January 2009

As “the American century” comes to a close provocative jeremiads have become a growth industry in the United States, with just about every leading newspaper and numerous popular magazines, books, radio and television programmes depicting a nation in serious social and economic decline. A generalised sense of crisis emerges from the myriad causes of this perceived decline at home and abroad. Domestically, commentators feed ideological debates and moral panics about problems of crime, drugs, family values, ethno-racial balkanisation and multiculturalism. Externally, the uncertain endings of the Cold War and emergent economic leadership of Asiatic nations have encouraged requiems for the American Empire. These discourses of decline evidence a public paranoia about significant economic, political and social changes which have disrupted the coherence and cohesiveness of national myths and ideologies of Americanness. One notable feature of this paranoia is that it has led to a growing recognition of whiteness as a social category and more particularly of white male selfhood as a fragile and besieged identity. I want to comment on some general features of this paranoia as a signifier of whiteness and examine how it has been treated as an issue of representation in Hollywood film.
Naming of Parts; or, The Comforts of Classification: Thomas Jefferson's Construction of America as Fact and Myth
Authors: Manning Susan
Published: January 2009

Henry Reed's poem of the Second World War offers a studied, ironic catalogue of some parts of experience silencing others. Here are observable facts, given as imperative command; knowledge of their use is for the future, rather than a possession of the present, however: one of the many things we (or you) have not got. Here also is the beauty of nature and its utter irrelevance to the human struggle. “Naming of Parts” excludes more than it includes: what is not said constantly overbears and threatens to break through what is. But the balance of information is precariously maintained, the unspeakable, the horror which is the truth of the war being disguised, expressed, and controlled in the naming of parts.

In a very different register, William Gass writes in his Habitations of the Word,

Lists, then, are for those who savor, who revel and wallow, who embrace, not only the whole of things, but all of its accounts, histories, descriptions, justifications.
The Limits of Progressivism: Louis Brandeis, Democracy and the Corporation
Authors: Cullis Philip
Published: January 2009

The Progressive movement's confrontation with big business was dominated by a paradox. Reformers constantly warned about large corporations, denouncing their capacity to abuse workers, cheat consumers, brutalise competitors and undermine the democratic system. But, despite such rhetoric, the movement did little to diminish the social, political and economic power of big business. This discrepancy has, of course, attracted many historians' attention. For some, Progressivism's “failure” stemmed from reformers' ambivalent attitude towards big business and industrialisation: while angry about the malignant results of big business, Progressives agreed that any campaign to reverse the process of industrialisation would be futile and potentially harmful. For New Left historians, such as Gabrial Kolko, Martin Sklar and James Weinstein, the explanation for the shortcomings of Progressivism is even more straightforward. They claim that, despite their disingenuous declarations in favour of democracy and equality, most Progressive leaders never intended to challenge the power of America's corporate elite.
Private Acts/Public Policy: Alfred Kinsey, the American Law Institute and the Privatization of American Sexual Morality
Authors: Allyn David
Published: January 2009

Alfred Kinsey has long been recognized for his crucial role in the history of American sexual science. Kinsey's massive studies of American sexual behavior changed the way social scientists studied sexuality by breaking from the accepted social hygienic, psychoanalytic, psychiatric and physiological approaches. Scholars have noted that Kinsey's efforts paved the way for the work of Masters and Johnson and contributed to a postwar climate of “openness” about sexual behavior. In effect, Kinsey's studies signaled the final triumph of scientific candor over the nineteenth century “conspiracy of silence.” Furthermore, Kinsey's quantitative approach advanced what Paul Robinson has called the “modernization of sex,” and Kinsey's discussion of homosexuality inspired both the homophile movement of the 1950's and the anti-homosexual moral panic of the same decade. Yet for all of Kinsey's significance, his part in shaping the social policies of the 1950's and the “sexual revolution” of the 1960's has received surprisingly little historical analysis.
Blacks and Blackface on the Irish Stage, 1830–60
Authors: Riach Douglas C.
Published: January 2009

Newspaper files for the period 1830–60 indicate that a number of American Minstrel Shows visited Ireland at a time when the Irish Anti-Slavery movement was particularly vigorous. The shows occasioned considerable comment in the press, but, surprisingly, little or none among the abolitionists, who were usually avid readers of anything in the press pertaining even remotely to the U.S.A. and the Negro. Yet the popular Irish image of the Negro must have been in part determined by such performances, and for this reason they deserve some attention. Irish audiences were also, in this period, treated to dramatizations of episodes in Negro life and to the exhibition, as curiosities, of African tribesmen; but by far the most common was the American Minstrel Show.
What Books Survive from the 1930s?
Authors: Cowley Malcolm
Published: January 2009

An age of faith — such as the 1930s appear to be in retrospect — is almost certain to become an age of quarrels among the faithful. They divide into bitterly hostile sects, each with a different leader and each hoping for support from one group or another among the infidels. Such quarrels disfigure the pattern of the 1930s, especially toward the end. Looking back from another age, however, one is surprised to find how much the American writers in different factions, as well as those standing apart from any faction, radical or conservative, were affected by the same fears and aspirations for human society. ‘ There is a great destiny ’, Emerson says in his journal for 1841,

which comes in with this as with every age, which is colossal in its traits, terrible in its strength, which cannot be tamed, or criticized, or subdued. It is shared by every man and woman of the time, for it is by it they live. As a vast, solid phalanx the generation comes on, they have the same features, and their pattern is new in the world. All wear the same expression, but it is that which they do not detect in each other. It is this one life which ponders in the philosophers, which drudges in the laborers, which basks in the poets, which dilates in the love of the women….
Siegfried Giedion, Modernism and American Material Culture
Authors: Tallack Douglas
Published: January 2009

The Swiss architectural critic and historian of technology, Siegfried Giedion, was born in 1893 and died in 1968. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941) and Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1948) are his two most well-known books and both came out of time spent in the United States between 1938 and 1945. World War Two kept Giedion in America though he, unlike many other German-speaking European intellectuals, came home and in 1946 took up a teaching position at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich where he later became professor of art history. While in the United States he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (1938–39), saw them in print as Space, Time and Architecture, and also completed most of the research in industrial archives and patent offices for Mechanization Takes Command. These two books are an important but, for the past twenty years, a mostly neglected, analysis of American material culture by a European intellectual, whose interests in Modernism included painting — notably Cubism and Constructivism — as well as architecture and planning. The period which saw the publication of Giedion's key works is, itself, an overlooked phase in the trans-Atlantic relationship between Modernism and modernization.
The Flight from the Good Life: Fahrenheit 451 in the Context of Postwar American Dystopias
Authors: Seed David
Published: January 2009

Surveying the American scene in 1958, Aldous Huxley recorded his dismay over the speed with which Brave New World was becoming realized in contemporary developments: “The nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh century After Ford, has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner.” Having struck a keynote of urgency Huxley then lines up a series of oppositions between limited disorder, individuality and freedom on the one hand, and order, automatism and subjection on the other in order to express his liberal anxieties that political and social organization might hypertrophy. Huxley sums up an abiding fear which runs through American dystopian fiction of the 1950s that individuals will lose their identity and become the two-dimensional stereotypes indicated in two catch-phrases of the period: the “organization man” and the “man in the grey flannel suit. ” William H. Whyte's 1956 study diagnoses the demise of the Protestant ethic in American life and its replacement by a corporate one which privileges “belongingness. ” The result might be, he warns, not a world controlled by self-evident enemies familiar from Nineteen Eighty-Four, but an antiseptic regime presided over by a “mild-looking group of therapists who, like the Grand Inquisitor, would be doing what they did to help you.”
The Issue of State Power: The Council on Foreign Relations as a Case Study
Authors: Parmar Inderjeet
Published: January 2009

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has long been recognised as one of the most influential of modern American institutions. Indeed, for some scholars at least, the relationship between the Council and the federal government has been a troubling one. A private group that is exclusive and unrepresentative in membership, funded by large corporations and foundations, highly secretive about its operations, and ensconced in the centres of state power, raises serious issues of principle for a democracy. At its crudest, the question is who “controls” whom, the state or the unofficial group? Allowing for a more complex relationship between an official policy elite and outside advisors, just what are the points of convergence or divergence between these “internal” and “external” bureaucrats, as Chadwick F. Alger has called them? Such issues draw attention to the nature of the state itself, and, whatever the proper role of the CFR in the American system of government, its existence provides an opportunity to examine a number of major ideas about power and the state.
Labour's Love Lost: Observations on the Historiography of Class and Ethnicity in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Way Peter
Published: January 2009

In the fall of 1828, Irish labourers digging Pennsylvania's Mainline Canal at Clark's Ferry, near Harrisburg, rioted when their employers — the Mammoth Contracting Company of New York — fell behind in wage payments by as much as $400 to skilled workers. The men soon returned to work, but in April the following year demanded a raise in wages from 80¢ to $1 until they paid off debts to local storeowners accumulated over the winter. The contractors refused, but the next day a freshet partially washed out the dam on the Susquehanna and threatened the canal works. The labourers, many of whom had been unemployed for some time, refused to repair it until their wage request was met. Canallers from the surrounding area arrived to join the protest. The contractors attempted to erect a temporary dam with a few loyal hands, but were attacked by strikers with rocks and clubs. Likewise, skilled workers who remained aloof were forced to halt work and join the turnout. The river broke through the dam causing $8–10,000 damage, but still the workers persisted in their strike.
“Them Damn Pictures”: Americanization and the Comic Strip in the Progressive Era
Authors: Yaszek Lisa
Published: January 2009

As William Tweed noted over a century ago, the cartoon, with its combination of graphic and text, can be a dangerous political weapon. Indeed, the Tammany Hall boss's career was destroyed when he was arrested for kidnapping in 1875 — an arrest made by a police officer who recognized Tweed from a newspaper cartoon. Likewise, when comic strips first appeared in the American sensation papers of the 1890s, they too were seen as having important, and potentially threatening, political and social ramifications. Journalists such as Oswald Villard condemned newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst for using the comic strip as a cheap ploy to boost circulation, claiming that it compromised journalistic integrity. Meanwhile, genteel reformers waged their own war against comic strips, worried that the slapstick action and irreverent content would erode middle-class American values and “foster a spirit of disrespect and insubordination… by their glorification of cheeky, iconoclastic urchins.”
J. Edgar Hoover and the “Red Summer” of 1919
Authors: Ellis Mark
Published: January 2009

J. Edgar Hoover directed the Bureau of Investigation (BI), later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, from 1924 until his death in 1972. His autocratic style of management, self-mythologising habits, reactionary political opinions and accumulation of secret files on real, imagined and potential opponents have been widely documented. The views and methods he advocated have been variously attributed to values he absorbed as he grew up and to certain peculiarities of his personality. Most biographers trace his rapid rise to prominence in the BI to his aptitude for investigating alien enemies during World War I, and radicals during the subsequent Red Scare. He was centrally involved in the government's response to the alleged threat of Bolshevism in America, and, although he later denied it, he co-ordinated the notorious Palmer raids of January 1920, in which thousands of aliens were rounded up and several hundred were deported.
The Johnson Administration and the British Labour Government: Vietnam, the Pound and East of Suez
Authors: Dumbrell John
Published: January 2009

Recent accounts of Anglo-American relations in the mid-1960s revolve around the supposed existence of “deals” made between President Lyndon Johnson and Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The memoir of Edward Short, Wilson's Chief Whip, goes so far as to describe a “deal” done before the 1964 general election, whereby the US would support the pound in return for an undertaking not to devalue if a Labour Government were to be returned. Clive Ponting, Philip Ziegler and Ben Pimlott all accept that a “deal” or “secret agreement” — Pimlott's phrase — had been made by the early summer of 1965. The US would organise a multilateral rescue for the sinking pound, in return for British policies of deflation at home, retention of overseas military commitments, and (limited) support for the Vietnam war. The 1965 “deal” appears to have been reinforced during the sterling crisis of July 1966, only to come adrift in 1967. Wilson's own account has him rejecting the excessive demands accompanying an American sterling rescue in 1967, and devaluing as — in effect — an assertion of British sovereignty.
Reconstructing American Studies: Transnational Paradoxes, Comparative Perspectives
Authors: Giles Paul
Published: January 2009

While American Studies continues to be a popular subject in universities and colleges on both sides of the Atlantic, several influential critics have recently expressed some sense that its methodological direction appears increasingly uncertain. To be sure, there never was a time when this field's methodology has not been problematic: arguments about what American Studies should include, and indeed whether its eclectic narratives could reasonably be said to constitute an academic discipline at all, have circulated many times since the rapid growth of the subject in the late 1940s. This development has been well documented over the last few years. Philip Gleason has shown how the end of the Second World War led to a patriotic desire to identify certain specifically American values and characteristics; this led to various mythic idealizations of the American spirit in seminal critical works of the 1950s; and this in turn was followed by a more empiricist reaction in the 1960s and 1970s, when social scientists and historians of popular culture were concerned to demystify those earlier, holistic images of a “virgin land” and an “American Adam.” These are old controversies, and I do not intend to rehearse them in detail here. From the perspective of the early 1990s, what is more urgent is to consider how, or indeed if, the field of American Studies might continue to make an important contribution to our understanding of the United States, as well as a significant intervention within the world of learning more generally.
The New Deal Realignment and the Italian-American Community of Philadelphia
Authors: Luconi Stefano
Published: January 2009

The formation of the New Deal coalition has been the subject of much scholarly discussion, as have the theories of voting behaviour which have informed that discussion. This essay seeks to investigate both the history and the theory. First, it analyses the timing and mechanics of the participation of Philadelphia's Italian-Americans in the Roosevelt coalition. Italian-Americans were a key component of the Democratic majority nationwide, and as pre-New Deal Republican bailiwicks that began to turn Democratic in the 1930s, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia are ideal settings to study the forging of the Roosevelt coalition not only on the federal but also on the state and local level. Secondly, the essay tests some hypotheses about the New Deal realignment. It suggests that none of the standard hypotheses convincingly explains what was happening in Philadelphia's Italian-American community in the 1930s and 1940s.
Endecott and the Red Cross: Puritan Iconoclasm in the New World
Authors: Bremer Francis J.
Published: January 2009

The place was Salem, noon on an autumnal day in 1634 as Nathaniel Hawthorne told the story. The town's train band has assembled to be put through its paces. Fluttering in the wind is the military ensign featuring the royal colours – the red cross of St. George on a white field. Captain John Endecott receives a message from Roger Williams, who has just returned from Boston. The note tells of a plan by the king to send a governor general to rule Massachusetts and establish episcopacy. “Endecott,” writes Hawthorne, “gazed round at the excited countenances of the people, now full of his own spirit, and then turned suddenly to the standard-bearer, who stood close behind him:”

‘Officer, lower your banner!’ said he.
Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie: American Prophet-Singers and their People
Authors: Pascal Richard
Published: January 2009

Dylan Thomas, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Van Gogh, Paul Tillich, Wolfgang Borchert, Joyce, Kate Chopin: these are only some of the writers and artists in whose work the example or influence of Walt Whitman has been detected over the past few years, and as anyone who has kept abreast of Whitman criticism will be instantly aware, the list could be lengthened considerably. Comparison and influence studies are such a common feature of Whitman scholarship, and he is so firmly established as one of the most provocative mid-nineteenth-century forerunners of modern literature and art, that it would seem virtually impossible to provide a hitherto unexplored instance which is worth more than a glance. Yet the name of the great twentieth century singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie has never been advanced in this context, even though similarities between the two figures have been noted in passing by commentators on Guthrie at least since the publication in 1943 of the latter's autobiography, Bound for Glory. Such neglect must be ascribed at least in part to a lingering academic bias against the study of popular culture in general and of song lyrics in particular.