bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Physical origins of the stability of aromatic amino acid core ring‐polycyclic hydrocarbon complexes: A post–Hartree–fock and density functional study
Authors: Czyżnikowska Żaneta , Bartkowiak Wojciech
Published: April 2011

Noncovalent interactions between four aromatic amino acid core rings and polycyclic hydrocarbons (up to 58 carbon atoms) were investigated at the post–Hartree–Fock level of theory and with the aid of the density functional theory. In particular, the intermolecular interaction energy was partitioned into physically meaningful contributions using the hybrid variational–perturbational decomposition scheme. It was found that electrostatic interactions are completely quenched by associated exchange repulsion. In terms of magnitude, the latter component is 2–3 times larger than the former one. As a result, the complexes are solely stabilized by attractive dispersion forces. Moreover, the SAPT–DFT framework was employed with an eye toward a comparison of various approaches used to compute the dispersion energy. As part of a model study, the impact of the correct representation of the electron density on the description of intermolecular interactions was analyzed as well. It was shown that in the case of the investigated complexes, it is sufficient to augment the basis set with diffuse functions only in the region of the mutual overlap of molecules in stacked alignment. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem, 2011
Mechanical properties of 7–10 mm bone grafts and small slurry grafts in impaction bone grafting
Authors: Xu Zheng‐Jian , Chen Lian‐Yi , Zhong Cheng , Tan Yan‐Bin , He Rong‐Xin
Published: April 2011

We compared the mechanical properties of morselized cancellous bone grafts of two sizes: 7–10 mm bone and small slurry bone (about 2 mm). The in vitro test was designed to simulate the hammer and impactor system for impaction bone grafting used in hip arthroplasty clinical practice. The 7–10 mm bone grafts showed higher height, elastic modulus, and massive extrusion strength than those of the small slurry bone grafts. No difference was found in yield strength. The bone mineral density of the 7–10 mm grafts continued to increase during impaction and became higher than that of the small slurry bone grafts after 10 impactions. Our results demonstrated that the small slurry bone grafts exhibit worse mechanical properties as compared with the 7–10 mm bone grafts, which implies that the use of this material in reconstruction of a bone defect in the acetabulum should be limited. © 2011 Orthopaedic Research Society. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Orthop Res 29: 1491–1495, 2011
pH‐Responsive Micelles Based on Amphiphilic Block Copolymers Bearing Ortho Ester Pendants as Potential Drug Carriers
Authors: Tang Rupei , Ji Weihang , Wang Chun
Published: April 2011

Amphiphilic block copolymers (PEG‐b‐PEYM) bearing acid‐labile ortho ester pendant chains were synthesized by atom transfer radical polymerization, and the effect of chain‐length of the ortho‐ester‐bearing PEYM block on micelle properties was investigated. The length of the PEYM block affected the critical micelle concentration and pH‐dependent average particle size but not the kinetics of side‐chain hydrolysis. A hydrophobic dye, Nile red, was loaded in the micelles. Both the loading content and the size of the loaded micelles were influenced by the length of the PEYM block, whereas the release kinetics of Nile red was not. Provided that these acid‐labile micelles are completely cell compatible, they are potentially useful bio‐responsive nanocarriers for enhancing the efficacy of hydrophobic drugs.

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Osteopontin polymorphic susceptibility factor for Parkinson's disease among patients with Gaucher disease
Authors: Ribner Avigayil , Altarescu Gheona , Zimran Ari , Elstein Deborah
Published: April 2011

Background:

There is an increased incidence of Parkinson's disease among obligate carriers of the common glucocerebrosidase mutations, and among patients with Parkinson disease there is an increased number who are carriers of glucocerebrosidase mutations. A Gaucher mutation is considered a susceptibility factor for Parkinson's disease. Osteopontin single‐nucleotide polymorphism–66 is associated with Lewy body disease and considered a susceptibility factor. The aim of this study was to ascertain whether Gaucher patients with parkinsonism carry the osteopontin single‐nucleotide polymorphism‐66 polymorphic genotype TT to a greater extent than other Gaucher patients.

Methods:

Seventy adult patients with at least 1 allele having the common N370S Gaucher mutation including 10 patients with Parkinson's disease were included.

Results:

There was no statistically significant difference in incidence of the TT genotype in patients with clinically symptomatic Parkinson's disease (88.9%) and other Gaucher patients (72.1%).

Conclusions:

This may partly explain the increased incidence of Parkinson's disease associated with Gaucher mutations. © 2011 Movement Disorder Society
Cerebrospinal fluid Tau/α‐synuclein ratio in Parkinson's disease and degenerative dementias
Authors: Parnetti Lucilla , Chiasserini Davide , Bellomo Gianni , Giannandrea David , De Carlo Claudia , Qureshi Mohamed M. , Ardah Mustafa T. , Varghese Shiji , Bonanni Laura , Borroni Barbara , Tambasco Nicola , Eusebi Paolo , Rossi Aroldo , Onofrj Marco , Padovani Alessandro , Calabresi Paolo , El‐Agnaf Omar
Published: April 2011

Although alpha‐synuclein is the main constituent of Lewy bodies, cerebrospinal fluid determination on its own does not seem fundamental for the diagnosis of synucleinopathies. We evaluated whether the combination of classical biomarkers, Aβ1–42, total tau, phosphorylated tau, and α‐synuclein can improve discrimination of Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, Alzheimer's disease, and frontotemporal dementia. Aβ1–42, total tau, phosphorylated tau, and α‐synuclein were measured in a series of patients with Parkinson's disease (n = 38), dementia with Lewy bodies (n = 32), Alzheimer's disease (n = 48), frontotemporal dementia (n = 31), and age‐matched control patients with other neurological diseases (n = 32). Mean α‐synuclein levels in cerebrospinal fluid were significantly lower in the pathological groups than in cognitively healthy subjects. An inverse correlation of α‐synuclein with total tau (r = −0.196, P < .01) was observed. In the group of patients with Parkinson's disease, Aβ1–42, total tau, and phosphorylated tau values were similar to controls, whereas total tau/α‐synuclein and phosphorylated tau/α‐synuclein ratios showed the lowest values. Cerebrospinal fluid α‐synuclein alone did not provide relevant information for Parkinson's disease diagnosis, showing low specificity (area under the curve, 0.662; sensitivity, 94%; specificity, 25%). Instead, a better performance was obtained with the total tau/α‐syn ratio (area under the curve, 0.765; sensitivity, 89%; specificity, 61%). Combined determination of α‐synuclein and classical biomarkers in cerebrospinal fluid shows differential patterns in neurodegenerative disorders. In particular, total tau/α‐synuclein and phosphorylated tau/α‐synuclein ratios can contribute to the discrimination of Parkinson's disease. © 2011 Movement Disorder Society
Could thiazolidinediones increase the risk of heart failure in Friedreich's ataxia patients?
Authors: García‐Giménez José L. , Sanchis‐Gomar Fabián , Pallardó Federico V.
Published: April 2011

Clinical evidence and the recent decisions of the European Medicines Agency and the Food and Drug Administration challenge the safety of thiazolidinediones treatment. Recently, this treatment has been suggested for Friedreich's ataxia because thiazolidinediones improve neurological symptoms. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is the most prevalent cardiac feature and the cause of premature death in Friedreich's ataxia patients. We recommend that therapy with peroxisome proliferator‐activated receptor‐gamma agonists like thiazolidinediones be taken with caution, as they cause a decrease in the number of fast fibers and an increase in mitochondrial biogenesis in cardiac muscle because of the induction of peroxisome proliferator‐activated receptor‐gamma coactivator‐1α. Furthermore, the incidence of heart failure may increase when thiazolidinediones are combined with insulin, and moreover, they produce cyclooxygenase 2 inhibition, inducing a thrombotic response. Thus, patients are predisposed to adverse cardiovascular outcomes. In our opinion, the possible fatal consequences must be taken into account when peroxisome proliferator‐activated receptor‐gamma agonist drugs are considered as possible therapeutic agents for Friedreich's ataxia patients. © 2011 Movement Disorder Society
A new design and rationale for 3D orthogonally oversampled k‐space trajectories
Authors: Pipe James G. , Zwart Nicholas R. , Aboussouan Eric A. , Robison Ryan K. , Devaraj Ajit , Johnson Kenneth O.
Published: April 2011

A novel center‐out 3D trajectory for sampling magnetic resonance data is presented. The trajectory set is based on a single Fermat spiral waveform, which is substantially undersampled in the center of k‐space. Multiple trajectories are combined in a “stacked cone” configuration to give very uniform sampling throughout a “hub,” which is very efficient in terms of gradient performance and uniform trajectory spacing. The fermat looped, orthogonally encoded trajectories (FLORET) design produces less gradient‐efficient trajectories near the poles, so multiple orthogonal hub designs are shown. These multihub designs oversample k‐space twice with orthogonal trajectories, which gives unique properties but also doubles the minimum scan time for critical sampling of k‐space. The trajectory is shown to be much more efficient than the conventional stack of cones trajectory, and has nearly the same signal‐to‐noise ratio efficiency (but twice the minimum scan time) as a stack of spirals trajectory. As a center‐out trajectory, it provides a shorter minimum echo time than stack of spirals, and its spherical k‐space coverage can dramatically reduce Gibbs ringing. Magn Reson Med, 2011. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Quantification of myocardial blood flow using model based analysis of first‐pass perfusion MRI: Extraction fraction of Gd‐DTPA varies with myocardial blood flow in human myocardium
Authors: Ishida Masaki , Ichihara Takashi , Nagata Motonori , Ishida Nanaka , Takase Shinichi , Kurita Tairo , Ito Masaaki , Takeda Kan , Sakuma Hajime
Published: April 2011

For the absolute quantification of myocardial blood flow (MBF), Patlak plot‐derived K1 need to be converted to MBF by using the relation between the extraction fraction of gadolinium contrast agent and MBF. This study was conducted to determine the relation between extraction fraction of Gd‐DTPA and MBF in human heart at rest and during stress. Thirty‐four patients (19 men, mean age of 66.5 ± 11.0 years) with normal coronary arteries and no myocardial infarction were retrospectively evaluated. First‐pass myocardial perfusion MRI during adenosine triphosphate stress and at rest was performed using a dual bolus approach to correct for saturation of the blood signal. Myocardial K1 was quantified by Patlak plot method. Mean MBF was determined from coronary sinus flow measured by phase contrast cine MRI and left ventricle mass measured by cine MRI. The extraction fraction of Gd‐DTPA was calculated as the K1 divided by the mean MBF. The extraction fraction of Gd‐DTPA was 0.46 ± 0.22 at rest and 0.32 ± 0.13 during stress (P < 0.001). The relationship between extraction fraction (E) and MBF in human myocardium can be approximated as E = 1 − exp(−(0.14 × MBF + 0.56)/MBF). The current results indicate that MBF can be accurately quantified by Patlak plot method of first‐pass myocardial perfusion MRI by performing a correction of extraction fraction. Magn Reson Med, 2011. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Improved specificity of cartilage matrix evaluation using multiexponential transverse relaxation analysis applied to pathomimetically degraded cartilage
Authors: Reiter David A. , Roque Remigio A. , Lin Ping‐Chang , Doty Stephen B. , Pleshko Nancy , Spencer Richard G.
Published: April 2011

The noninvasive early detection of specific matrix alterations in degenerative cartilage disease would be of substantial use in basic science studies and clinically, but remains an elusive goal. Recently developed MRI methods exhibit some specificity, but require contrast agents or nonstandard pulse sequences and hardware. We present a multiexponential approach which does not require contrast agents or specialized hardware, and uses a standard multiple‐echo spin‐echo sequence. Experiments were performed on tissue models of degenerative cartilage using enzymes with distinct actions. MR results were validated using histologic, biochemical and infrared spectroscopic analyses. The sulfated glycosaminoglycan per dry weight (dw) in bovine nasal cartilage was 0.72 ± 0.06 mg/mg dw and was reduced through chondroitinase AC and collagenase digestion to 0.56 ± 0.12 and 0.58 ± 0.13 mg/mg dw, respectively. Multiexponential analysis of data obtained at 9.4 T permitted the identification of tissue compartments assigned to the proteoglycan component of the matrix and to bulk water. Enzymatic treatment resulted in a significant reduction in the ratio of proteoglycan‐bound to free water from 0.13 ± 0.02 in control cartilage to 0.03 ± 0.02 and 0.05 ± 0.06 under chondroitinase AC and collagenase treatment, respectively. As expected, monoexponential T2 increased with both degradation protocols, but without further specificity to the nature of the degradation. An important eventual extension of this approach may be to map articular cartilage degeneration in the clinical setting. As an initial step towards this, localized multiexponential T2 analysis was performed on control and trypsin treated excised bovine patella. The results obtained on this articular cartilage sample were readily interpretable in terms of proteoglycan‐associated and relatively free water compartments. In potential clinical applications, signal‐to‐noise ratio constraints will define the threshold for the detection of macromolecular compartment changes at a given spatial scale. The multiexponential approach has potential application to the early detection of cartilage degradation with the use of appropriate pulse parameters under high signal‐to‐noise ratio conditions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Hydrogen‐mediated nanostructuring of dilute nitride semiconductors
Authors: Trotta Rinaldo , Polimeni Antonio , Capizzi Mario
Published: April 2011

The deposition of hydrogen‐opaque metallic wires on GaAsN and subsequent hydrogen irradiation allows creating planar regions, where the properties of GaAsN are alternated with those of GaAs (i.e., hydrogenated GaAsN) in a fully controllable manner. We present here a breakthrough of this approach showing the possibility to fabricate a new class of semiconductor nanostructures. Firstly, we report on a detailed study of H kinetics in GaAsN. By combining secondary ions mass spectrometry (SIMS) measurements with a model developed for hydrogen diffusion in a crystal with high trap density (namely, N atoms), we demonstrate that a tight spatial control of H–N interaction in dilute nitrides is feasible. Then, we present the first nanostructures fabricated with the masked‐hydrogenation procedure. Specifically, we study the properties of H‐structured GaAsN/GaAs wires having different width. In the case of the narrowest metallic wires (w = 80 nm), photoluminescence (PL) shows a blueshift of the ground state energy and a 50‐fold increase in the PL efficiency. Moreover, time‐resolved micro‐PL displays a marked slow‐down of the carrier recombination dynamics in the single structure. This indicates the occurrence of carrier quantum confinement that leads to a reduced density of states of the system, which changes its dimensionality from 3D to 2D.
The Test of Time in School‐Based Mentoring: The Role of Relationship Duration and Re‐Matching on Academic Outcomes
Authors: Grossman Jean B. , Chan Christian S. , Schwartz Sarah E. O. , Rhodes Jean E.
Published: April 2011

The influence of match length and re‐matching on the effectiveness of school‐based mentoring was studied in the context of a national, randomized study of 1,139 youth in Big Brothers Big Sisters programs. The sample included youth in grades four through nine from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. At the end of the year, youth in intact relationships showed significant academic improvement, while youth in matches that terminated prematurely showed no impact. Those who were re‐matched after terminations showed negative impacts. Youth, mentor, and program characteristics associated with having an intact match were examined. Youth with high levels of baseline stress and those matched with college student mentors were likely to be in matches that terminated prematurely, while rejection‐sensitive youth and mentors who had previous mentoring experience were more likely to be in intact relationships. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Purely infinite C*-algebras arising from crossed products
Authors: RØRDAM MIKAEL , SIERAKOWSKI ADAM
Published: April 2011

We study conditions that will ensure that a crossed product of a C*-algebra by a discrete exact group is purely infinite (simple or non-simple). We are particularly interested in the case of a discrete non-amenable exact group acting on a commutative C*-algebra, where our sufficient conditions can be phrased in terms of paradoxicality of subsets of the spectrum of the abelian C*-algebra. As an application of our results we show that every discrete countable non-amenable exact group admits a free amenable minimal action on the Cantor set such that the corresponding crossed product C*-algebra is a Kirchberg algebra in the UCT class.
Deterministic and stochastic perturbations of area preserving flows on a two-dimensional torus
Authors: DOLGOPYAT DMITRY , FREIDLIN MARK , KORALOV LEONID
Published: April 2011

We study deterministic and stochastic perturbations of incompressible flows on a two-dimensional torus. Even in the case of purely deterministic perturbations, the long-time behavior of such flows can be stochastic. The stochasticity is caused by instabilities near the saddle points as well as by the ergodic component of the locally Hamiltonian system on the torus.
“My Soul Was with the Gods and My Body in the Village”: Zora Neale Hurston, Franz Boas, Melville Herskovits, and Ruth Benedict
Authors: Helbling Mark
Published: April 2011

In august, 1927, Zora Neale Hurston posed with Langston Hughes and Jessie Fauset at the foot of the statue of Booker T. Washington on the campus of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. Now, after six months of collecting African-American folklore – customs, games, jokes, lies, songs, superstitions, and tales – Hurston was ready to return to New York City and to finish her Bachelor of Arts in anthropology at Barnard. She had left New York City the previous February and had spent most of her time in and around her hometown of Eatonville and Tallahassee, Florida, before driving across the Florida panhandle to Mobile, Alabama. There she interviewed Cudjo Lewis, reputed to be the only living survivor of the last ship to bring slaves from Africa to America. By chance, Hurston also met Hughes, who had just arrived in Mobile by train from New Orleans. Soon after, she and Hughes drove up to Tuskegee, joined Fauset to lecture to summer students, then continued on their way to New York City.
Finding our Feet:On the Roadwith Anna Deavere Smith
Authors: Fraden Rena
Published: April 2011

“We … say of some people that they are transparent to us. It is, however, important as regards this observation that one human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of the country's language. We do notunderstandthe people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We cannot find our feet with them.”
In Pursuit of an American Image: A History of the Italian Renaissance for Harvard Architecture Students at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Authors: Meister Maureen
Published: April 2011

After a five-month sojourn in Rome, the author Henry James departed with “an acquired passion for the place.” The year was 1873, and he wrote eloquently of his ardor, expressing appreciation for the beauty in the “solemn vistas” of the Vatican, the “gorgeous” Gesù church, and the “wondrous” Villa Madama. Such were the impressions of a Bostonian who spent much of his adult life in Europe. By contrast, in June of 1885, the young Boston architect Herbert Langford Warren wrote to his brother about how he was “glad to be out of Italy.” He had just concluded a four-month tour there. He had also visited England and France, and he was convinced that the architecture and sculpture of those countries were superior to what he had seen in Italy, although he admired Italian Renaissance painting. When still in Rome, he told his brother how disagreeable he found the “Renaissance architecture in Italy contemporary with Michael Angelo and later under Palladio and Vignola,” preferring the work of English architects Inigo Jones and Wren. Warren appreciated some aspects of the Italian buildings of the 15th and early 16th centuries, but he considered the grandeur and opulence of later Renaissance architecture especially distasteful.
Worker-Writers on the WPA: The Case of New Bedford, Massachusetts
Authors: Bold Christine
Published: April 2011

When Joseph Freeman celebrated the standard 1930s' version of heroic worker-writers at the American Writers' Congress, he didn't seem to notice that the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a conflicted category. His vision assumed that the WPA empowered writers by aligning them with laborers, folding them into the celebration of physical labor promoted by the New Deal, an assumption that reverberated widely both at that political moment and in more recent discussions (Figure 1). This essay argues that bringing together the categories of worker and writer under New Deal sponsorship was a much less seamless, less heroic, and less masculinist operation than is generally asserted. It reconstructs the experiences of WPA writers with a local specificity heretofore missing from the discussion: in this case, the assortment of employees – the white-collar destitute, widows, impoverished gentility – on the New Bedford District Office of the Massachusetts Writers' Project. From this perspective, the experience of WPA employment was more in tension than in solidarity with working-class practices. The dynamics of government bureaucracy most often left project employees stranded between the categories of worker and writer, attempting (with limited success) to negotiate a resolution in both their social and their narrative positions.
The Time of the Crime: Cold Case Squads and American Social Memory
Authors: Wilson Christopher
Published: April 2011

In “A Crown of Feathers” (1972), Isaac Bashevis Singer tells the story of an orphan named Akhsa Holishitzer, doted upon by her Polish grandparents who manage the estate of a local gentile Prince inside the Pale. Akhsa grows into a young woman so attached to her grandparents that she cannot settle upon a mate, and thereby suffers a crisis of faith when they die. Longing for their return from the dead, haunted by conflicting dreams of their life plan for her, in her misery she finds herself drawn to the prohibited Book of Job, and from there to the New Testament stories of Jesus's resurrection. She converts to Christianity and gentile luxury, and thereby launches herself on a lifelong pilgrimage of ostracism, exile, and return to her own community. She begins her journey of self-doubt, however, by inaugurating a black mass that conjures up the very figure of Satan himself. Right to her deathbed, in fact, she will be haunted by words Satan tells her when she agonizes over the truths about death and the afterlife she is seeking. “‘The truth,’ Satan tells her, ‘is that there is no truth.’”
Instant History and the Legacy of Scandal: The Tangled Memory of Warren G. Harding, Richard Nixon, and William Jefferson Clinton
Authors: Payne Phillip
Published: April 2011

William Jefferson Clinton evoked considerable admiration and hostility as a public figure. More so, perhaps, than other recent presidents, Clinton has sparked an intense debate as to what his legacy will be. The Clinton biography found on the White House web page hints at the difficulties facing those who wish to interpret his life. After summarizing the nation's economic success during Clinton's two terms and mentioning major biographical events, the author writes:

In 1998, as a result of issues surrounding personal indiscretions with a young woman White House intern, Clinton was the second U.S. president to be impeached by the House of Representatives. He was tried in the Senate and found not guilty of the charges brought against him. He apologized to the nation for his actions and continued to have unprecedented popular approval ratings for his job as president.
Grice and Long: Steam-Car Builders
Authors: White John H.
Published: April 2011

The lack of convenient, cheap public transport had long been a serious shortcoming of city living. This need was partially answered around 1830 by the introduction of horse-drawn omnibuses, but by the late 1850s it was clear that a better form of urban transit—the horse car—promised to lift public transportation up and out of the mud. Large, reliable, commodious cars gliding smoothly over polished rails easily outran the squat omnibuses that were left far behind to jostle over the rutted city streets. The street railway, heralded as the new wonder of the age, promised to make fortunes for prudent investors and to ease the burdens of crosstown travel for ordinary citizens.
The Television Artistry of Norman Lear
Authors: Newcomb Horace
Published: April 2011

The November 10, 1975, episode of “Maude” was a brilliant presentation. Bea Arthur, the star, offered a tour-de-force performance, a one-woman show, a monologue in which she revealed to her psychiatrist her deepest fears, her most profound sense of self, of personal loss, and the search for personal meaning. The psychiatrist was present; we saw the back of his nodding head, an occasional movement of his hand scratching notes on a pad. He grunted at times. Arthur moved about a large ornate set. The office was decorated in high Victorian style with drooping plants, mirrors, heavy carved furniture, oriental rugs, and the psychiatrist's high-backed chair. This decor lent depth and richness to the scene, providing contrast to the single performance, the single moving actor.
Black and White Women in Interaction and Confrontation
Authors: Lerner Gerda
Published: April 2011

The parallels in the status of women and of Blacks have been noted by social scientists and historians, and recently, by theoreticians of the women's liberation movement. It is obvious that there are similarities in the status and history of the two groups, but these are offset by important differences. The analogy between Blacks in general and women is valid and useful as long as it is confined to the psychological effect of inferior status, but not when it is extended to a general comparison between the two groups.
“In the Coal Mines Far Away”: Russell Lee's Photographs of Mining Life
Authors: O'Connell Barry
Published: April 2011

James Agee would have us honor the lives of working men and women like those pictured in this portfolio from Russell Lee's 1946 photographs for the Medical Survey of the Bituminous-Coal Industry (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947). And so we should. Yet it is neither an easy gesture nor one we can enact out of the brief and casual glance most of us give such photographs. We are continually surfeited with images of other people's lives in America. Most of these images are calculated to create the illusion that we know the lives of the people portrayed while, in fact, we know very little about them. Surface appearance retails as substantial acquaintance. The images commonly produced by television, newspapers, and magazines not only invite us to pretend knowledge we lack; they also project an essentially prosperous image of America—if everyone cannot have all he wants, still everyone possesses all he needs. Lee's photographs of miners and their families, their homes and their work, their worship and their play are uncommon images. Like all photographs they catch only a moment in a person's existence. Nonetheless, Lee made a range of images that move beyond the moment to a portrait of the round of life among mining people. The faces, the moments, even the landscape, are past, and the way of life unfamiliar. For these reasons we may look quickly and then away for we do not know what to make of what we see.
Literature and Politics: The Case of Ezra Pound Reconsidered
Authors: Corrigan Robert A.
Published: April 2011

March 23, 1976, marked the sixty-eighth anniversary of one of literary history's most remarkable but least celebrated events—the invasion of Europe by Ezra Pound. That imaginative, excitable, and extremely talented Young Turk who stormed the gates of literary London in 1909, died in Italy in November, 1972, a calm, withdrawn, old man, living out the butt end of his life in a self-imposed vow of public silence. But if the poet's voice was stilled at last, his public's was not; fittingly enough, Pound left the literary world as he had entered it, in a swirl of bitter controversy and angry debate precipitated by the decision of the prestigeous American Academy of Arts and Sciences to deny him its coveted Emerson-Thoreau Medal. No one can say for sure whether Pound desired the prize. Many times in the past such honors seemed to have mattered greatly, but often they had been more desperately sought for him by members of that protective coterie of friends and relatives who clustered about in his Italian retreat. It is the relationship of Pound to these associates, the impact of his turbulent career upon his family and friends, and the effects of their well-meaning, if misdirected, efforts on his behalf, that need charting here; there is little need for yet another intricate route through that much surveyed ideomatic jungle he called hisCantos.
The Prophetic Voice of Allen Ginsberg
Authors: Hahn Stephen
Published: April 2011

In an old creation myth, the androgyne stretches out and folds over itself to create a void in which the universe is born. This image is illuminating when one reflects on the poetic endeavor of Allen Ginsberg during the last thirty years. When the poet speaks of the “poem of life butchered out of their own bodies,” as he does in “Howl,” he signifies something about the creative effort expended in his own poetry and about the struggle of self to articulate a “true philosophy of life.” The ambiguity of the phrase “poem of life” is instructive as well, for it indicates a commitment to art and life as mutually informing categories. As the struggle for articulation is the struggle of the self to assert—or discover in the sense of revealing—its being in the world, the writing of poetry becomes a mode of self-creation. It becomes, in the terminology of existentialism, a “life project.”
Moving in America
Authors: Abrahams Roger D.
Published: April 2011

Americans are movers. The rest of the world, looking on, has said this of us, and we can hardly argue with their perceptions, for we place such a positive value on mobility, tying it to personal and social progress. But we are hardly unambivalent about moving. In response to a need for roots, we cling to an agrarian family image of the good and proper and cooperative life lived in harmony with the seasons. Some of the most powerful fictions by which we negotiate for a common order are as fully explored in our folk and popular forms of expression—especially our songs and dances—as in our more sophisticated and complex works of art. It is in such conventional forms that we find the most consistent explanations of what it means, socially and psychologically, to travel on or to come home to stay.
A Textbook of the Genteel Tradition: Henry Ward Beecher'sNorwood
Authors: Smith Henry Nash
Published: April 2011

By the outbreak of the Civil War, the kind of highbrow psychological romance that Hawthorne and Melville had brought to a brilliant consummation in the 1850s had clearly lost favor both with critics and with the reading public. At the same time, middlebrow domestic fiction with a religious emphasis in the manner of Susan B. Warner'sThe Wide, Wide World(1850), and the “sensation novel” of physical adventure aimed at an even less literate audience, were gaining more and more readers. During the 1860s the field of American fiction was dominated by weekly story papers serializing this popular fiction, and the closely related series of dime novels published by the firm of Beadle & Adams and its competitors. Such material was ground out according to formulas in an essentially industrial process; it had little bearing on the development of serious literature.
Black Drama: Reflections of Class and Class Consciousness
Authors: Keyssar Helene
Published: April 2011

Just before the words and subway of Imamu Amiri Baraka's (LeRoi Jones') Dutchman rush to their violent climax, Lula, the Eve-emissary of the white middle-class, shrieks at Clay:

Come on, Clay … let's do the thing. Uhh! Uhh! Clay! Clay! You middle-class black bastard. Forget your social-working mother for a few seconds and let's knock stomachs. Clay, you liver-lipped white man. You would-be Christian. You ain't no nigger, you're just a dirty white man. Get up, Clay. Dance with me, Clay.
Cato's Mirror: The Face of Violence in American Autobiography
Authors: Stone Albert E.
Published: April 2011

Terence malick's remarkable film of 1974,Badlands, contains a sequence which vividly epitomizes the experience of American violence and deftly connects it to the impulse deep within even the most inarticulate of victims and violators to turn pain into art. Like its cinematically inferior predecessorBonnie and Clyde, Badlandsis based upon actual history—the Charles Starkweather case of 1958 in which a pair of Nebraska teenagers went on a murderous rampage, killing eleven persons including the girl's parents and baby sister. In the film, Kit and Holly flee to the prairie shack of Cato, Kit's fellow worker on the town garbage truck. Cato tries to sneak away and sound the alarm. Kit shoots his friend in the back. Cato staggers indoors, bleeding but silent, and collapses on the bed. As Kit and Holly circle aimlessly around the room, the dying man does something oddly significant—he picks up a mirror and carefully examines his face in its surface. Kit says nothing and Holly offers neither apology nor help. Instead she innocently inquires about Cato's pet spider. What does it eat? Does it ever bite? “It never bitme,” he gasps laconically. After he dies Kit drags the body into the shed, then stalks up and down outside gesturing vehemently to the corpse. Like other victims in this brilliant, disturbing film, Cato has been caught in the spiraling coils of Kit's almost voiceless and casual violence.
The Myth of the Republic and the Theory of American Literature
Authors: Hedges William L.
Published: April 2011

American Literary history conventionally interprets the sixty or seventy years between the Stamp Act crisis and the beginning of the “American Renaissance” by highlighting the theme of the “quest for nationality” or the effort to achieve “literary independence.” Accounts of what are considered the formative years of a native literary tradition trace the gradual development of a climate of opinion more conducive to American authorship andbelles lettresthan the one that prevailed in the colonial period. Revolutionary nationalism was obviously a major factor in the shift of attitude. Beginning even before the war, at Princeton, Yale, and a few other redoubts of civilization, and gathering momentum on a broad front after 1776, a campaign for an instant, if not indeed an indigenous, high culture gradually produced a shrillliterarynationalism. The persistent clamor for the Americanization of poems, plays, and novels helped beat back the long-standing puritanical fear of the imagination as an ambush of the devil. It also made headway in combating the closely related American prejudice against activity that seemed to serve no immediate practical purpose. Gradually a legion of enthusiastic amateur and semiprofessional authors ventured intobelles lettres, beyond the more utilitarian literary forms—history, biography, autobiography, sermon, promotional tract, almanac, and captivity narrative—which, together with religious verse, had predominated in the colonial period. However crudely constructed or awkwardly styled, American epic poems were written, as were long pastorals. By 1800 Americans had produced an abundance of satire in both verse and prose. With William Cullen Bryant's early work added to Francis Hopkinson's and Philip Freneau's, American lyric poetry achieved some respectability by 1820, the year of the completion of Washington Irving'sSketch-Book, with its two remarkable short stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” American theaters were producing native comedies and tragedies. Successful magazines were in operation. And the reading of novels had become a craze, which American writers were helping to nourish.
Ahab and Old Hickory
Authors: Stone Edward
Published: April 2011

He had planned merely a fanciful tale of the whale fishery and had written almost an entire first draft. Then Herman Melville had discovered Nathaniel Hawthorne the man and William Shakespeare the tragedian. The result was Moby-Dick, a hybrid, a medley, an extravaganza, but progressively a formal drama, possibly the first American tragedy. “How to effect so mighty a metamorphosis?” one imagines him asking himself as he began to rewrite his story. By retaining the original light material, yet preparing the reader for the later heroic prose and action. Even more: justifying these last. That this is what Melville did, we can surmise from a number of transitional passages in Moby-Dick that reveal him in the process of converting a story about life on an American whaling ship, its officers and crew, into a tragedy such as readers were accustomed to associate with Shakespeare, his kings and clowns. Yet it is, finally, a tragedy whose protagonist—it is time to propose—was inspired by the greatest hero of Melville's own times.
The Public's Obedient Servant, P. T. Barnum
Authors: Kennedy Susan Estabrook
Published: April 2011

Phineas Taylor Barnum was a strange breed of nineteenth-century Renaissance man. Although best known as showman and exhibitor of “curiosities,” Barnum enjoyed a multifaceted career including stints as editor, politician, reformer, and patron of a higher form of “the arts” than is usually associated with him. But in each of these endeavors, he represented a product of, and comment upon, his roots. If his enterprises grew and adapted in striking parallel to the social and political changes of the nineteenth century, they also represented a constant application of the peculiar down-eastern Yankee of Connecticut known as the “humbug.”
The Boxing Paintings of Thomas Eakins
Authors: Smith Carl S.
Published: April 2011

Late in the 1890s, accompanied by several of his friends, Thomas Eakins attended a number of prizefights at the Arena on the corner of Broad and Cherry Streets in Philadelphia, diagonally across from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and a few blocks from his Chestnut Street studio. Eakins was sufficiently intrigued by the matches he saw to befriend several of the participants and to ask them to pose for him. The results were three major canvases—Taking the Count (1898—Yale University Art Gallery, Whitney Collections of Sporting Art, New Haven, Conn.), Salutat (1898—Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.), and Between Rounds (1899—Philadelphia Museum of Art)—and about ten related sketches, studies, and portraits. Although since ancient times painters and sculptors have celebrated their periods' equivalent of the pugilist, Eakins' boxing paintings are completely original in their conception. Indeed, one can think of few works by a serious artist of Eakins' era as far removed from the lofty propriety that dominated nineteenthcentury American art as are these treatments of nearly nude boxers. The boxing paintings reflect Eakins' special fondness for sport and vigorous activity in his life and art, as well as his sometimes controversial belief in portraying the unidealized human figure; but they go beyond these interests insofar as they are complicated compositions by a mature master who is using his craft to examine his life and career.
“What's American About America?”: A Structuralist Approach
Authors: Blair John G.
Published: April 2011

The quotation marks in my title offer homage to John A. Kouwenhoven for a stimulating essay he published under that name more than twenty years ago. In it he brought under one intuitive umbrella such diverse Americana as the Manhattan skyline, the gridiron town plan, the skyscraper, jazz, the Constitution, Mark Twain's writing, Walt Whitman'sLeaves of Grass, assembly-line production, and chewing gum. What united them all, he felt, was their embodiment of process—the ongoing changingness that was the essence of America. Brilliant as the essay may be, it remains inspired journalism because Kouwenhoven had no method to propose except his own cultivated intuition. In this essay I shall speak of several of the same American phenomena but in a context intended to meet the need for a theory and a method to guide the complex business of making sense of American distinctiveness.
The American Male: His Values and His Voids
Authors: Townsend R. C.
Published: April 2011

Washington, D.C., was unusual, unique. It was the one place in the America Henry James visited in 1904–5 where “men existed.” And to James, “that rich little fact became the key to everything.” Everywhere else men were at work, were in business, and had left “society”—“but a rough name,” he says, “for all theotherso numerous relations with the world he lives in that are imputable to the civilized being”—had left all that to women. It was a “windfall” and she was quick to take advantage, but it was also, James knew, a trap. Predator she may seem, clutching here, “pouncing” elsewhere in the passage, but “her situation, under this retrospect, may affect the inner fibre of the critic himself as one of the most touching on record … she was to have been after all but the sport of fate.” The American Man goes off, off to work or into silence, may feign sleep or, as James also has it, sulk like Achilles, and women may have “turned away with so light a heart after watching the Man, the deep American Man, retire into his tent and let down the flap,” but they do not win: “The abdication of the Man proves ever (after the first flush of their triumph) as bad really for their function as for his.”
“There Ought to Be Clowns”: American Humor and Literary Naturalism
Authors: Hill Hamlin
Published: April 2011

In 1882 Henry James wrote a review of Zola's Nana that criticized the French Naturalist because he lacked a sense of humor: “In the eyes of ‘naturalism’ enjoyment is a frivolous, a superficial, a contemptible sentiment.…. M. Zola disapproves greatly of wit; he thinks it is an impertinence in a novel, and he would probably disapprove of humor if he knew what it is.” And Zola, in “Naturalism in the Theatre,” was uncomplimentary about a leading playwright's comic scenes; he called Sardou a bad dramatist because “we never get anything except outrageously enlarged vaudeville skits, the comic force of which comes entirely from caricature.” Nevertheless, Zola suggested that a reader might “shudder or laugh” as long as the dramatist “disappears; … keeps his emotions to himself; … simply sets forth what he has seen.”
“What Went You Out into the Wilderness to See?”: Nonconformity and Wilderness in Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana
Authors: Brumm Ursula
Published: April 2011

By the end of the seventeenth century, the beginnings of the new world were already history. They found their historian in Cotton Mather, one of the original settlers' most prominent descendants. Mather is an important source for our understanding of that early period, but for a long time his principal role has been that of the ugly Puritan. He was, as a third-generation Mather and a representative of the Puritan establishment at the end of the seventeenth century, an irritation and an annoyance to his contemporaries. Posterity has gathered together all its charges against Puritans in general and heaped them on his head. Mather seems in fact to have been well qualified for the scapegoat's role: ambitious and sensitive, vain and extraordinarily diligent, greatly learned and fond of showing it, all the while acutely conscious of his reputation and eager for the admiration of his contemporaries. All these traits have been so many points of attack for his critics and despisers.
The American Landscape as Totem
Authors: Jehlen Myra
Published: April 2011

The idea that America constituted anew world that fulfilled both the divine and the natural design has been the subject of numerous studies, including the classics Virgin Land by Henry Nash Smith and The American Adam by R. W. B. Lewis. I start from these but go back instead of forward: back, or down, in that my concern with the astonishing imaginative feat that translated a new country's rise into the discovery of a new world lies in the underlying form of this vision rather than in its particular features. With the interior of the landscape already well mapped, I would like to walk its perimeter.
The Experienced Emblem: A Study of the Poetry of Emily Dickinson
Authors: Monteiro George , Armand Barton Levi St.
Published: April 2011

Emily Dickinson once said that her way of looking at things was “New Englandly.” The expression has often provided her readers and critics with both a wedge into her sometimes gnomic poems and a check against their occasional temptations to fly off into interpretative fancy. What seeing “New Englandly” entailed, however, was never explained by the poet. For most readers it has come to mean in the broadest sense that her work should be interpreted in the context of and as part of New England's intellectual, religious, and literary history. But Ne England also has a social and cultural history, and it is of course only logical that Emily Dickinson should have her own place in that history, albeit an original one.
The Politics ofForce of Evil:An Analysis of Abraham Polonsky's Preblacklist Film
Authors: Brinckmann Christine Noll
Published: April 2011

Force of evil was the first film Abraham Polonsky directed, and it is not without structural flaws. It is, however, a rare work of art in that it is poetical, popular, and political at the same time. Unlike other political art in which the balance between message and aesthetic form is usually uneven and the difficulties the artist had in creating an imaginative framework around his or her statement can be felt throughout,Force of Evilshows no seams. Although revealing the corruption of the capitalist system, the information it gives cannot be subtracted from its fictional, emotional impact, and although its effect on the viewer is agitational, there is no proposition for practical action.