bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Generations, Narration, and Periodization: Epochs and Applications in Historical Practice
Authors: Rutherdale Robert
Published: March 2011

Elliott West. Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1997, reprint, 1989. Pp. xvii + 301 and bibliography and illustrations. Harvey J. Graff. Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America. Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press, 1995. Pp. ix + 347 and appendix. Glenn Wallach. Obedient Sotis; The Discourse of Youth and Generations in American Culture, 1630-1860. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. Pp. vii + 213 and bibliography and illustrations. Children, adolescents, and youth. How have they been seen by adults? How have they seen themselves and responded to their surroundings? And how can such broad questions be taken as evidence of America's past, from the Puri- tans, to the resettlement of the American West, to the present day? Since the dissemination of Philippe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood (1960), studies of growing up have produced enormous debate across a spectrum of historical practices, from studies of birth weights among social historians to cultural readings of adolescent angst in the popular press.1 Considering how his- torians of growing up try to interpret how their subjects have approached maturity often reveals as much about changing professional practices as it does about the complex histories of childhood and maturation themselves. With this in mind, I have divided my attention between observations on what these three books contribute to our understanding of growing up in America, and what each presents as examples of shifting modes in academic writing.
Region and Nation: New Studies in Western U.S. History
Authors: Peterson del Mar David
Published: March 2011

Hal S. Barron. Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870-1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. xiv + 286 and note on sources and illustrations. Catherine McNicol Stock. Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the- Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Pp. xiii + 261 and bibliography and illustrations. Dee Garceau. The Important Things of Life: Women, Work and Family in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 1880-1929. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Pp. x + 201 and selected bibliography and illustrations. Not so long ago, conventional wisdom held that doing a dissertation on a topic that might be construed as western U. S. history was risky. To study one of the towns ringing Boston was to do national history (Thernstrom 1964; Dawley 1976). To study a western county, city, or even a state was to do regional history. In practical terms, this meant that one would have trouble finding a job or a publisher east of Lincoln. Those interested in studying places west of the Mississippi should therefore be encouraged that two of the three books reviewed here are published by the University of North Carolina Press and that the authors of dissertations on Wyoming and the Dakotas could end up teaching in Tennessee and Connecticut, respectively. Acade- mics, it seems, are taking western history seriously.
Resistance to Theory: American Studies and the Challenge of Cultural Studies
Authors: Lewis Randolph
Published: March 2011

In 1990, George Lipsitz issued an eloquent challenge to American studies scholars. Diagnosing the latest in the never-ending series of crises confronting the field, Lipsitz announced that American studies was in a "period of creative ferment and critical fragmentation."1 In this state of flux, Lipsitz identified an important opportunity: American studies scholars could revamp their approach to culture and bring "theory" into a discipline long noted for its resistance to European intellectual imports more recent than de Tocqueville. With a note of optimism, Lipsitz predicted that the early 1990s would offer an "opportunity to reconnect with some of the important aims and intentions of our field in new and exciting ways." In essence, he was calling for American studies to overcome its ongoing resistance to theory, which was preventing the field from engaging broader issues in the manner of the more theoretically driven cultural studies (Lipsitz 1990a, 615).
"The Safeness of Standing Alone": Alfred Stieglitz, Camera Work, and the Organizational Roots of the American Avant-Garde
Authors: Mancini J.M.
Published: March 2011

The Secessionist Idea is neither the servant nor the product of a medium. It is a spirit. Let us say it is the Spirit of the Lamp; the old and discolored, the too frequently despised, the too often discarded lamp of honesty; honesty of aim, honesty of self-expression, honesty of revolt against the autocracy of convention. The Photo-Secession is not the keeper of this Lamp, but lights it when it may[.] ("The Editors' Page," Camera Work 18 (April 1907), 37) The Secessionists care little for popular approval, insisting upon works, not faith, and believing that their share having been done in producing the work, the public must now do the rest. A few friends, and these of understanding mind, a few true appreciators, this is all they expect and all they desire. (Hartmann 1904, 47)
Ransom Revisited: The Aesthetic of Regionalism in a Globalized Age
Authors: Wyile Herb
Published: March 2011

Regionalism is as reasonable as non-regionalism, whatever the latter may be called: cosmopolitanism, progressivism, industrialism, free trade, interregionalism, internationalism, eclecticism, liberal education, the fed- eration of the world, or simple rootlessness; so far as the anti-regional philosophy is crystallized in such doctrines. Regionalism is really more reasonable, for it is more natural, and whatever is natural is persistent and must be rationalized. (John Crowe Ransom ([1934] 1984, 47)
The Wisconsin Phalanx: A Forgotten Success Story
Authors: Hunt Andrew E.
Published: March 2011

'Why is there no socialism in the United States?' asked the influential German economic historian Werner Sombart in 1906 ([1906] 1976). Since Sombart posed the question, historians of every ideological stripe have attempted to furnish an answer. Some scholars have focussed on politics, seeking to explain why 'more radical third parties have consistently floundered. Others have turned to labour history, investigating the failure of unions to promote socialist ideology in America. A third, smaller contingent has studied the hundreds of nineteenth-century Utopian socialist experiments in the United States in an attempt to understand the dynamics of life and work in alternative economic orders. Why these communes eventually dis- appeared became a central theme in most works.
"Squandered on Communism": Shostakovich During the Cold War
Authors: Rabinowitz Peter J.
Published: March 2011

Introduction: Sixteen-Inch Guns and Just Plain Music Covering the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, Newsweek smugly remarked that "political party conventions elsewhere do not, as a rule, concern themselves with culture. The Soviet Communist Party has a long record of jumping in—and on—culture with both feet" ("Thaw Exposed" 1956, 88). Especially with forty years of hindsight, it is a striking comment; and given the ways in which political conservatives, who so persistently denounced Soviet political intervention in the aesthetic, have today made culture a central focus of their own political program, it would be easy to take pleasure in revealing the inconsistency in their position.
L'exclusion de la «porte ouverte», les préférences raciales des patrons et la chronologie de la Grande Migration, 1865-1925
Authors: Ouellet Nelson
Published: March 2011

ABSTRACT. This study deals with the relationship between employers' racial preferences in the steel industry and the timing of the northern migration of African Americans. It assesses the impact the U.S. government policy on im- migration had on the place blacks occupied in the industrial economy of the North. The study is based on a careful reading of articles, reports, and editorials published in the Iron Age between 1880 and 1925, and the many contributions made by scholars of immigration, labor, black, economic, and political history in the last thirty years. Furthermore, to avoid presenting African Americans as victims, I have treated the efforts made by black leaders to promote the cause of their own race as workers in the face of American employers. Basically, the results of this study are aimed at improving his- torians' understanding of the Great Migration, and offering new options on the paradoxes of Americanization.
Nellie Bly, Jules Verne, and the World on the Threshold of the American Age
Authors: Ruddick Nicholas
Published: March 2011

There was a model of the terrestrial globe, some forty feet in circum- ference, therefore about the size of an ordinary three-story house: the reduction from reality was one millionth. It was not only the globe of the school-room magnified,—it was a synopsis of the conditions and the resources of this world of ours: the course of the rivers, the chains of the mountains, the infractuosities of the coast and the appalling expanse of the sea, the extent of the forbidden region which guards the poles could be seen and comprehended; the mineral products were indicated by dots of different colors for the different species: the lines of navigation and railway travel and telegraphic communication could be traced. The globe slowly revolved, and the spectators, hushed and subdued for the most part by the grandeur of the scheme, passed round it by a spiral gallery of three grades, by which they could look down on the north pole and up at the southern one. ("Loitering Through the Paris Exposition" 1890, 367)
Race and Reading: The Burden of Huckleberry Finn
Authors: Kaye Frances W.
Published: March 2011

For the great mass of admiring readers, because Huck and Jim are friends, and because Jim is finally emancipated, the novel's ambiguities are simply dissolved in an overflow of relief and warm fellow-feeling.... Huckleberry Finn continues to be our favorite story about slavery and race because it gives us no more of this reality than we can bear. (Robinson 1986, 119) Race and slavery, as almost all readers now acknowledge, are central to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the great American novel. Twain's episodic, beautiful, ambivalent, cruel, and liberating tale of the Mississippi Valley in 1840 has become the universal story of bondage and freedom and the most widely taught novel in the United States. Yet if we read the novel carefully, against the context of the time Twain was writing in as well as in the context of our own time, we must recognize, with Forrest Robinson, that "it gives us no more of this reality than we can bear," that it enables its American readers to approach the most profoundly troubling issue in their history without risk of being overcome with the fear and guilt that attach to the subject. We return to the novel not because of what it resolves, but because it seduces us with a comedic image of resolution that we cannot quite accept, but that we permit, by a lie of silent assertion, to stand in place of much darker revelations. (Robinson 1986, 217)
Who Are We? Africa and the Problem of Black American Identity
Authors: Adeleke Tunde
Published: March 2011

Introduction In The Roots of African-American Identity: Memory and History In The Antebellum Free Communities, Elizabeth Raul Bethel (1997) identifies two critical events that shaped black American consciousness and identity in the nineteenth century. The first was the Haitian revolution of 1791-1804, which resulted in the overthrow of French plantocratic hegemony by black slaves. For blacks in the United States and elsewhere, the revolution represented both a "model of political agency and racial achievement" that was denied to them, and the potency and possibilities of nationalism in the context of new world experience. It consequently nurtured optimism on the prospect of transcending enslavement (Bethel 1997, 82). The second was the 1807-1808 federal legislation prohibiting ships flying under the U.S. flag from engaging in the importation of slaves. Blacks welcomed this as signaling an end to the long sufferings brought upon Africans by enslavement and the transplantation process. This enthusiastic and joyous response betrayed a growing consciousness of affinity with Africans. The legislation thus induced optimistic expectations about the future of Africa and her descendants abroad, and many blacks began to envision eventual reunification with a lost African identity (81-82).
Reading Toni Morrison's Jazz: Rewriting the Tall Tale and Playing with the Trickster in the White American and African-American Humour Traditions
Authors: Andrews Jennifer
Published: March 2011

"It's like humor: You have to take the authority back; you realign where the power is." (Morrison 1994, 245) Jazz is the subject of numerous scholarly articles which explore a wide variety of topics, including how Morrison uses jazz music and its rhythms to shape her text,1 what the sex of her unnamed narrator might be,2 and how the novel depicts the daily realities of city living for those African Americans who migrated northward to Harlem during the 1920s.3 Published in 1992, Jazz is the second novel of a recently completed trilogy4 that describes the history of African Americans from slavery onward, a legacy of dispossession which has had a dramatic effect on subsequent generations. In Jazz, this search for identity is examined through the stories of Violet and Joe Trace, a couple that moves to Harlem to improve their standard of living. Abandoned by his mother at birth, Joe tries to fill this void in New York with the affections of a younger woman, Dorcas, whom he eventually murders. Using a first-person narrator, Morrison's novel provides a retrospective look at the lives of Violet, Joe, and Dorcas, and explores the events that led to her death.
The Adventures of Patriot Hunters: Danger, Memory, Place, and Virtue at the Windmill
Authors: Dunning Thomas P.
Published: March 2011

I will define adventure abstractly, as I have before in discussing the adventure tale, calling it a series of events that outrages civilised or domestic morality and that challenges those to whom these events happen to make use of powers that civil life forbids to the ordinary citizen, powers restricted (in a home country) to the police, the secret services, the army. For in the prototypal case, to engage in adventure means to engage in violence, but associated with violence are certain kinds of virtue, like leadership, cunning, endurance, courage, and so on. Adventure shows us heroes, men acting with power. Perhaps the central virtue in that list is courage—meaning ... the physical kind. (Martin Green 1993, 4)
Twentieth-Century American Culture and the Persistence of Religion
Authors: Crouse Eric
Published: March 2011

James Gilbert. Redeeming Culture; American Religion in an Age of Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997. Linda Kintz. Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions That Matter in Right-Wing America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Daniel Wojcik. The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America. New York: New York University Press, 1997. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution demonstrates that the founding fathers, aware of the volatile nature of religious debate, refused to promote formal ties between church and state. The First Amendment's ban on religious establishment, however, has not prevented religion from being a major and persisting force in American life. French philosopher and traveller Alexis de Tocqueville observed, in the 1830s, that "there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men [and women] than in America" (quoted in Noll 1995, 67-68). Only months from the turn-of-the millennium, de Tocqueville's words still ring true to a surprising degree.
Beyond Identity Politics?
Authors: Nowlin Michael
Published: March 2011

Susan Gubar. Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xxiii + 327. Elaine K. Ginsberg, ed. Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Pp. 298. Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel, eds. Race and the Subject of Mascu- linities. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Pp. 419. Responding to Norman Mailer's now infamous piece The White Negro (1957), James Baldwin wrote that "the roles that we construct are construct- ed because we feel that they will help us to survive and also, of course, because they fulfill something in our personalities; and one does not, there- fore, cease playing a role simply because one has begun to understand it" ([1961] 1985,291). Baldwin's maxim here might serve as a healthy reminder that contemporary academic cultural criticism committed to destabilizing conventional and historically motivated identity categories—especially cate- gories of race, gender, and sexual orientation—need not have significant political consequences. As much of this work is performed and consumed in a relatively insular academic context, it can afford to be more or less oblivious to pragmatic issues of belief, or to the tenacity of binary modes of thought or of regulatory fantasies of what is normal and natural (never more oper- ative than in flamboyant styles of rebellion).
Rhetorics of Blackness, Rhetorics of Belonging: The Politics of Representation in Black Canadian Expressive Culture
Authors: Walcott Rinaldo
Published: March 2011

My concern is with differences within minoritisation and the possibilities of articulating affiliation or solidarity on the grounds of differences that may not be 'resolved' but have to be worked through and worked with, causing structures of ambivalence and 'supplementary' moves. (Homi Bhabha 1998a, 40) This world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species. The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality, and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. (Frantz Fanon 1963, 39-40) The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension. (Frantz Fanon 1963, 247) Introduction: Black Appearances/Appearances of Blackness At the Juno awards in 1999, a Black Canadian rap group performed for the first time in the prime-time segment of the show. This breakthrough occurred, because Rascalz, the group invited to perform, refused the Juno they had won in 1998. Their refusal was premised on the insistence that the lack of urban music in the prime-time segment of the telecast was not in keeping with the enormous popularity of urban music. Rascalz, a Vancouver- based rap group, was nominated for and won best rap song in 1998 and 1999. Their song, "Northern Touches" which is a west coast/east coast collaboration, with a number of Toronto rappers appearing on the track, marks Canada as both a Black space and a space of belonging for Black "Northern Touches" criss-crosses Canada to activate an appearance of a contingent, national Black presence. It should not be surprising that musicians inaugurated this contingent, national Black intimacy, especially rappers, since they, above all, seem to have a unique and committed sense of space and place. A common trope in rap music is to cite places and spaces as a kind of mapping of position. But, if the Rascalz appearance on the Juno awards was ample evidence of a Black presence in sonic Canada, mentioning this moment of Black appearance would be useless. What is important about the moment of the Rascalz appearance is what the visual and spectacular appearances of blackness mean for Canada and Canadian-ness.
"Yonder they do not love your flesh." Community in Toni Morrison's Beloved: The Limitations of Citizenship and Property in the American Public Sphere
Authors: Byrne Dara
Published: March 2011

Americans' fear of being outcast, of failing, of powerlessness; their fear of boundarylessness, of Nature unbridled and crouched for attack; their fear of the absence of so-called civilization; their fear of loneliness, of aggression both external and internal. In short, the terror of human freedom—the thing they coveted most of all. (Morrison 1992, 37) Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison's Reconstruction-era slave narrative, locates freedom in the autonomous act of death, which transforms the impetus of the nineteenth-century American public sphere, the slave population, by perma- nently nullifying potential capital gains from the slave's production output. By exercising sovereignty of self and revoking the imposition of Western economic classifications on the body, death enables the slave to shift the lo- cus of power away from the master.
Onward Kitchen Soldiers: Mobilizing the Domestic During World War I
Authors: Gordon Marsha
Published: March 2011

Hear the bugle call, The Call to those who stay at home; You are soldiers all, Though you may never cross the foam. . . During World War I, social mobility was promised to American women through governmental propaganda campaigns that became the basis for a cultural re-imagining of women's social roles. On a national level, the Amer- ican home and the women who purportedly ran the American home became crucial components in the mobilization of allied forces. The various propa- ganda materials that bombarded American women in the late teens of this century served to enlighten and direct. In retrospect, however, they also dis- close the often-conservative motives that lurked behind such aggressive campaigning. Propagandistic efforts to negotiate "woman power" into the American "war machine" operated simultaneously with efforts to contain this newly sought "woman power," creating an almost impossible paradox for the patriotic American woman. The Great War not only permanently altered the home but also caused dramatic shifts in women's roles both inside and out- side of that space. Using women's magazines of the period, song lyrics, journal entries, historical accounts of the war by scholars as well as parti- cipants, and the publications of various governmental agencies of the time, this study will demonstrate that the home became an increasingly militarized and commercialized space, occupied by kitchen soldiers whose call to arms placed them and their labour in a newfound position of national importance.
Cultural Paranoia, Conspiracy Plots, and the American Ideology: William Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night
Authors: Rose Barbara
Published: March 2011

During his self-imposed exile in Mexico City, William Burroughs was known locally as el hombre invisible: the invisible man. Yet this purposely nondescript identity, as Robin Lydenberg observes, was paradoxical (1991, 233). With the help of Jack Kerouac, Burroughs was notorious before he was famous: he first entered Beat mythology not as a writer of experimental texts but as a member of an underground world of drugs, guns, sex, and crime. The Beats, moreover, were in many ways a creation of the media, who hounded Kerouac, giving him literary celebrity rather than literary fame. Burroughs, too, became a sensational figure when Naked Lunch (1962) be- came a cause célèbre. Because of the notoriety of his subject matter and the eccentricity of his techniques, he has until recently often been rejected as an American writer worthy of consideration. But his official status is changing as his novels increasingly appear on the university syllabus, more biographies are published, and a much publicized film is made of his most famous novel.
Oral History: An Interview with Peter Buitenhuis
Authors: Tucker Bruce
Published: March 2011

As part of the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the Canadian Review of American Studies (1995), the editors are pleased to present this latest in the series of interviews of former editors and presidents of the Canadian Asso- ciation for American Studies (CAAS). The following interview is with Peter Buitenhuis, a professor emeritus from Simon Fraser University. He is a graduate of Oxford and Yale, and has taught at Yale, the University of Toronto, McGill, Simon Fraser University, and the University of California at Berkeley. His continuing work on writers and propaganda in World War II is a sequel to The Great War of Words: British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914-1933 (University of British Columbia Press, 1989). This interview took place in Vancouver on 20 October 1995.
Advertising Business, Advertising Culture
Authors: Walden Keith
Published: March 2011

Thomas Frank. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 287 and illustrations. Pamela Walker Laird. Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University- Press, 1998. Pp. xiv + 479 and illustrations. Roland Marchand. Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery m American Big Business. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: The University of California Press, 1998. Pp. xi + 461. Considering the centrality of advertising to modern life, historians have barely scratched its surface. Perhaps the sheer volume of evidence and restricted access to private records have been deterrents, but the intersection of business and cultural history may also be awkward. The former looks for 'hard' data about organizational structures, technological processes, and capital investment; the latter sifts opaque 'texts' for ambiguities and contra- dictions. As the traditional compartmentalization of knowledge breaks down, it is not surprising advertising history is attracting more interest, although practitioners often have pronounced leanings toward one side of the juncture. In Pamela Laird's Advertising Progress, the business history component is much more central and satisfying. She begins with a simple question: why did the iconic mainstays of nineteenth-century advertising—smoking factories, bewhiskered industrialists, and sumptuous nudes—disappear in the twentieth century? Where Jackson Lears's Fables of Abundance (1994) emphasizes an ongoing tension in advertising between carnivalesque and rational impulses, Laird sees dramatic transformation, occurring primarily between 1870 and 1920. For her, there was no single or simple pattern to the metamorphosis. Advertising changed as retailers and manufacturers grappled with diverse problems of distribution brought on by industrialization.
Hollywood's Hester Prynne: The Scarlet Letter and Puritanism in the Movies
Authors: Daniels Bruce C.
Published: March 2011

Whoever would seek the soul of New England has to reckon with the mean- ing and influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. More than the sermons of Cotton Mather or the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, more than the poetry of Robert Frost or the histories of Samuel Eliot Morison, Hawthorne's slim tale of adultery and punishment holds the promise of revealing deep truths about God's covenanted people and the nation they helped create. Written in the nineteenth century about the seventeenth cen- tury, The Scarlet Letter has been the twentieth century's textbook on Puri- tanism and the Puritan legacy to America. Nor do its truths stop there. Through Hester and Pearl Prynne, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth, we locate the specific New England soul in a sexuality, psy- chology, and tragedy that transcends time and space.
Opposition to the 22nd Amendment: The National Committee Against Limiting the Presidency and its Activities, 1949-1951
Authors: Lemelin Bernard
Published: March 2011

On March 24, 1947, as a posthumous slap at Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his unprecedented four terms in the White House, the Republicans of the 80th Congress passed the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution limiting presidents to two terms. With the ratification by a 36th state (Ne- vada), it finally became law on February 26, 1951. According to Massachu- setts Congressman Joseph Martin of the Grand Old Party, this landmark event represented nothing less than a "victory for the people and their re- publican form of Government [and] a defeat for totalitarianism and the en- emies of freedom" CNew York Times, February 28, 1951). For his part, Harry S. Truman, after his presidency, vehemently opposed such an amendment, describing it as "bad" (H. Truman 1959), "stupid" (M. Truman 1989, 237), and "one of the worst that has been put into the Constitution, except for the Prohibition Amendment" (H. Truman I960, 44).1 In his view, "there are clearly times when more than two terms are both necessary and wise" (M. Truman 1989, 5). Among the organizations also critical of this measure, the National Committee Against Limiting the Presidency, founded in 1949, was certainly the most active.
Getting on With the Americans: Changing Canadian Perceptions of the United States, 1939-1945
Authors: GRANATSTEIN J. L.
Published: March 2011

The Second World War is regularly trumpeted as the period in which Canada came of age. The nation contributed very substantially to the Allied victory in men, materiel, and foodstuffs, and as a result of this effort Canada emerged from the war as perhaps the leader of a group of middle powers. There was a very great distance between a middle and a great power, to be sure, but there can be no doubt that fortunate geo- graphical circumstance and economic power had combined to give Canada a status far beyond anything she had enjoyed before.
From Conservative Alternative to Vanishing Frontier: Canada in American Travel Narratives, 1799-1899
Authors: DOYLE JAMES
Published: March 2011

To many nineteenth-century Americans, Canada was an enigma. "Neither a republic nor a monarchy, but merely a languid expectation of something undefined."1 declared Charles Dudley Warner on the basis of a visit to Cape Breton Island in 1874, and his remark is typical of the bemused disapproval which American observers often expressed after a brief look at one corner or another of the northern provinces. Warner was one of several noteworthy American authors who visited Canada in the nineteenth century. Writers as various as Henry Thoreau, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Hamlin Garland - as well as many less noteworthy figures - tried to express their experience of Canada in some way that would satisfactorily characterize the country, particularly by relating it to their own national experience. The resultant range of opinion is a virtual summary of nineteenth-century American political and social thought, from an extreme conservative enthusiasm for a well-ordered hierarchical society, through republican suspicion of a British colony with a large Roman Catholic population, or sympathy with a sparsely populated and westward-expanding frontier nation, to doubts and regrets about the ultimate direction of civilization in North America.
Many Poes
Authors: HAYNE BARRIE
Published: March 2011

Daniel Hoffman. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1972. $7.95. 339 pp. "Many books, many Poes," Daniel Hoffman remarks in his preface to another one, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. The truth of the statement is self-evident, calling to mind Harry Levin's witticism (in a book itself partly concerned with Poe) that the Moby-Dick industry had almost replaced whaling as New England's preoccupation. Poe over the years has attracted a different kind of industry, the industry of critics (or poets) who respond to Poe the man as they see him behind Poe the writer, and who tend to identify or violently quarrel with a personality often enough of their own making. Is it permissible to forecast the replacement of the practice of psychoanalysis by the practice of studying Edgar Allan Poe?
The Uses of American Fiction
Authors: ADOLPH ROBERT
Published: March 2011

Kenneth S. Lynn. Visions of America: Eleven Literary Historical Essays. Westport, Conn. Greenwood Press, 1973. $9.50. 205 pp. Although the classic American novelists have usually been sharp critics of their society, the criticism has seldom been overtly political. Melville protested injustices in the navy, Mark Twain supported labour unions and expressed a bitter anti-imperialist feeling, but the best of these authors - Hawthorne, Melville, James, Twain, Faulkner - were for the most part aloof, disdainful conservatives, antinomians, or simply unpolitischer Menschen. The Dickenses, Tolstoys, Malraux, Manns, Silones, and Grasses - novelists of the very first order with passionate political concerns and activities - have not appeared in North America.
John Glassco in Montparnasse: The Twenties Again
Authors: LABRIE ROSS
Published: March 2011

John Glassco. Memoirs of Montparnasse, intro- duction by Leon Edel. Toronto and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. $6.50. 241 pp. "My soul, so far as I understand it, has very kindly taken colour and form from the many various modes of life that self-will and an impetuous temperament have forced me to indulge in." This mellow rationale from George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man served as the point of de- parture for John Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse. Basking in the sense of freedom bequeathed by Moore's book, Glassco writes with equal candour that "the best rule of conduct is impulse, not reason" Although Glassco claims to have patterned his book after Moore's, the final effect of the Memoirs is one of firmer structuring than in Moore's rather digres- sive work, though it is less of a portrait of the artist than Moore's is.
Two Approaches to the Study of Utopia
Authors: VEYSEY LAURENCE
Published: March 2011

Michael Fellman. The Unbounded Frame-. Freedom and Community in Nineteenth Century American Utopianism. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973. $10.00. 203 pp. Rosabeth Moss Kanter. Commitment and Com- munity: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1972. $10.00. 303 pp. These two recent books, one of them a highly traditional intellectual history and the other a pioneering work of sociology, allow us to assess the virtues and limitations of two widely differing approaches to the study of a topic such as American utopianism.
The Padrone and the Immigrant
Authors: HARNEY ROBERT F.
Published: March 2011

The Padrone is a stock figure in North American immigrant studies, the image of an alien boss or labour agent exploiting alien workers wide- spread. For turn-of-the-century nativists, the existence of 'padrone sys- tems' ranked high among the proofs that the 'new' immigrants from the Mediterranean had no aptitude for American freedom, and for a long time the aura of padronism clung to many ethnic businessmen; more recently, historians have viewed the padrone system as a natural bridge between the greenhorn immigrant and American capitalism's voracious appetite for cheap labour. It comes as a shock, therefore, to realize that, despite a rich primary literature and an apparent consensus about the padrone's role,1 the word padrone remains more pejorative than definitional. This paper looks at some of the contradictions and misconceptions that surround 'padronism'.
We Band of Brothers - Woodrow Wilson's War Managers
Authors: CUFF ROBERT D.
Published: March 2011

One of the central questions which run through the vast literature gen- erated by recent interest in the so-called military-industrial complex is how to characterize the relationship among the major institutional orders of American society and the nature of the elites who predominate within them. Early writing on the subject, such as C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite (New York, 1956) and Fred J. Cook's The Warfare State (New York, 1962), reflected a contemporary preoccupation with the dramatic rise of military leaders in central government councils during and after World War II. Recent critics, in contrast, assign comparatively more influence on defense matters to civilian advisors, though interpretations vary as to the characteristics of this state-based, civilian elite, including differences over its location within the state, its relationship to private business interests, and the general motivation of its members.
God is Dead: Avant-garde Theology for the Sixties
Authors: RATHBUN JOHN W.
Published: March 2011

The God is Dead movement does not seem to have survived the decade of its birth, thus providing another echo of God's response to Nietzsche. Its cut was modishly sixties. Entranced by the descriptive phrase, people tended to slight its substance. But the substance itself was often hesitant and provisional, deficient in full explication of argument, and at times downright limp. Indeed, the substance appeared at times so spindly that critics diagnosed a bad case of intellectual rickets. Even Paul M. van Buren has remarked that we can "push the flaccid remains to the back of the drawer reserved for mementos of our more foolish exploits."1 Yet the movement has not lost all vitality. Books recently published - Gustave Todrank's The Secular Search for a New Christ, Michael Novak's A Theology for Radical Politics, John Cooper's The New Mentality, and Aaron Ungersma's Escape from Phoniness - all testify to a surviving pre- occupation with issues raised by the God is Dead movement.
Three American Lives
Authors: DOUGLAS ANN
Published: March 2011

Joseph J. Ellis. The New England Mind in Transi- tion: Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, 1696-1772. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1973. 292 pp. Louis R. Harlan. Booker T. Washington: The Mak- ing of a Black Leader 1856-1901. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. 379 pp. Kathryn Kish Sklar. Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973. 356 pp. Samuel Johnson, an eighteenth century Episcopalian minister who was the first president of Columbia College, Catharine Esther Beecher, a nine- teenth century pioneer in women's education and "domestic economy," and Booker T. Washington, the conservative leader of the black move- ment for self-advancement and self-education at the turn of the century, are the subjects of the three biographies under review. These figures have more in common than might at first seem apparent. All three were mem- bers of what one could call minority groups in their respective societies. They aspired to and achieved leadership positions. Their work and thought occupied a place somewhere between the realms of popular and élite culture. They sought to bring about change through fundamentally conservative means. Despite their minority group status, or perhaps be- cause of it, none of them had any real faith in the democratic process. They compromised in sometimes nearly crippling ways with the dominant powers of their milieu. Finally, all three pose a similar question for the modern biographer: what approach is most appropriate for the treatment of a figure pivotal in what must be defined not as a counter-culture but as a subculture in his or her world?
The Malady of American Racism: A South African Perspective*
Authors: GILIOMEE HERMANN B.
Published: March 2011

George M. Fredrickson. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Char- acter and Destiny, 1817-1914. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 343 pp. H. Shelton Smith. In His Image, But.... ; Racism in Southern Religion, 1780-1910. Durham: Duke Uni- versity Press, 1972. 318 pp. Brace Clayton. The Savage Ideal; Intolerance and Intellectual Leadership in the South, 1890-1914. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972. 231 pp. The intellectual props of American racism have never received the same attention as the edifice itself. The role of the churches, schools and science in supporting the racist ideology has more often been assumed than ex- haustively researched and analysed. While individual intellectual leaders in the fight for or against segregation have attracted their students, com- prehensive surveys of racism in the church and in schools or of the American racial debate have strangely been few and far between.
Incidence patterns for primary malignant spinal cord gliomas: a Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results study
Authors: Hsu Steven , Quattrone Marisa , Ostrom Quinn , Ryken Timothy C. , Sloan Andrew E. , Barnholtz-Sloan Jill S.
Published: March 2011

Object

Primary malignant spinal glioma represents a significant clinical challenge due to the devastating effect on clinical outcomes in the majority of cases. As they are infrequently encountered in any one center, there has been limited population-based data analysis on the incidence patterns of these aggressive tumors. The objective of this study was to use publically available Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) program data to examine the overall incidence and incidence patterns over time with regard to age at diagnosis, sex, race, primary site of tumor, and histological subtype in patients in whom primary malignant spinal cord gliomas were diagnosed between 1973 and 2006.

Methods

The study population of interest was limited to primary, malignant, pathologically confirmed spinal cord gliomas based on data drawn from the SEER 9 standard registries for patients diagnosed between 1973 and 2006. Variables of interest included age at diagnosis, sex, race, primary site of tumor, and histological subtype of tumor. The SEER*Stat 6.5.2 program was used to calculate frequencies, age-adjusted incidence rates with 95% CIs, and annual percentage change (APC) statistics with a 2-sided p value. In addition, linear correlation coefficients (R2) were calculated for the time association stratified by variables of interest.

Results

The overall age-adjusted incidence rate for primary malignant spinal gliomas was 0.12 per 100,000, which increased significantly over the study period (APC = 1.74; p = 0.0004; R2 = 0.36). The incidence was highest in patients diagnosed at ages 35–49 (0.17 per 100,000), males (0.14 per 100,000), whites (0.13 per 100,000), and those with ependymomas (0.07 per 100,000). Over the study period, the incidence of ependymomas increased significantly (APC = 3.17; p < 0.0001; R2 = 0.58) as did the incidence of these tumors in whites (APC = 2.13; p = 0.0001) and for both males (APC = 1.90, p value < 0.0001) and females (APC = 1.60, p < 0.0001). The authors found no significant changes in the incidence over time by age of diagnosis.

Conclusions

This study demonstrates an increasing overall incidence of primary, malignant spinal cord glioma over the past 3 decades. Notably, for ependymoma the incidence has increased, whereas the incidence of most other glioma subtypes remained stable. This may be due to improved diagnostic and surgical techniques, changes in histological classification criteria, and changes in neuropathology diagnostic criteria. Although primary, malignant spinal cord gliomas are rare, an improved understanding of the incidence will assist investigators and clinicians in planning potential studies and preparing for allocation of resources to care for these challenging patients.
Clinical features of the extension teardrop fracture of the axis: review of 13 cases
Authors: Watanabe Masahiko , Sakai Daisuke , Yamamoto Yukihiro , Sato Masato , Mochida Joji
Published: March 2011

Object

Extension teardrop fracture of the axis is an extremely rare cervical spinal injury. The classic clinical features, which have mainly been described by radiologists rather than spine surgeons, include its occurrence in elderly patients with osteoporosis, an association with minimal or no prevertebral soft-tissue swelling, and an absence of associated neurological deficit. However, recent case studies indicate notable exceptions to these clinical features, although few studies have investigated osteoporosis in these patients. The purpose of the present study was to clarify the clinical features of extension teardrop fracture of the axis.

Methods

The authors retrospectively reviewed data obtained in 13 patients with regard to their injury etiology, neurological deficit, treatment and outcome (residual neck pain), and imaging findings (size and displacement of the fragment, C2–3 subluxation, disc injury, and osteoporosis of the axis).

Results

Extension teardrop fracture of the axis constituted 11.6% of upper cervical spinal injuries at the authors' institute. The mean age of the patients was 49.5 years and distinct osteoporosis was identified in only 1 patient. A C2–3 subluxation was observed in 2 patients, in whom the displacement of the fragment was significant, although its size did not appear to have an effect. Magnetic resonance imaging, undertaken in 7 patients within 48 hours of injury, showed no disc injuries. Instability of the cervical spine was absent in all patient at follow-up. Only one patient underwent surgery for the presenting symptoms of dysphagia. The other patients were treated conservatively. The authors examined 9 patients directly; these patients had bony fusion and did not complain of neck pain, except for a patient with traumatic spondylolisthesis.

Conclusions

Extension teardrop fracture of the axis is generally caused by hyperextension of the cervical spine caused by a direct high-energy blow to the forehead or mandible. Based on the present case study, the authors believe that osteopenia and older age should not be considered risk factors. Most patients with an extension teardrop fracture of the axis can be treated conservatively, and surgical intervention may only be indicated for specific cases, such as those in which a patient presents with dysphagia or with other complicated fractures.
Reinvestigation of the ambient cistern and its related arachnoid membranes: an anatomical study
Authors: Qi Song-tao , Fan Jun , Zhang Xi-an , Pan Jun
Published: March 2011

Object

A precise understanding of the ambient cistern and its associated arachnoid membranes is helpful for accessing perimesencephalic lesions. However, few studies of the arachnoid membranes related to the ambient cistern have been published, and, additionally, some aspects of the ambient cistern also require further examination. The goal of this study was to reinvestigate and expound on the anatomical features of the cistern and membranes.

Methods

The ambient cisterns and its associated arachnoid membranes were examined in 20 adult cadaveric brains using an operative microscope.

Results

The perimesencephalic membrane is a set of inner arachnoid membranes surrounding the midbrain at the level of the tentorial incisura. It arises from the outer arachnoidal membranes covering the tentorial edge and the dorsum sellae and can be subdivided into anterior and posterior portions. The anterior membrane is actually the mesencephalic leaf of Liliequist membrane, which is divided into medial and lateral parts by the oculomotor nerve. The posterior membrane can be divided into horizontal and ascending parts. The ambient cistern is located above the perimesencephalic membrane and contains the anterior choroidal arteries, the posterior cerebral arteries, the basal vein, and sometimes the segments of the superior cerebellar arteries. It communicates with the carotid cistern, the interpeduncular cistern, the oculomotor cistern, the cerebellopontine and cerebellomesencephalic cistern, and the quadrigeminal cistern.

Conclusions

This study updates some information about the ambient cistern and its arachnoid membranes. The perimesencephalic membrane was identified and described in detail. The ambient cistern was verified to be a supratentorial cistern above the perimesencephalic membrane. The borders and contents of this cistern, as well as its relationship with adjacent cisterns, were also redefined.