bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Discussing Terms: Professions, Professionals, Professionalism
Authors: Bledstein Burton J.
Published: April 2011

“Who's a Professional? Who Cares?” asked a prominent historian nearly a decade ago. In the essay that followed the answer was shrewdly crafted. Because so many Americans have cared to call their occupational activity professional, few have succeeded in bringing to the concept a consistent and coherent interpretation. When nearly everyone “cares,” from gamblers and killers to jet fighters and physicians, the question “who's a professional?” loses its seriousness of meaning. The criticism cut to the bone. It served to question the integrity of the historical field of inquiry. Ironically, if students of the professions can not find a coherent body of knowledge in the subject, a similarity of pattern, then they are using the concept falsely – that is, unprofessionally.
Panoramas of New York, 1845–1860
Authors: Bergmann Hans
Published: April 2011

New york city went through a period of dramatic change between 1845 and 1860. During those fifteen years New York became a complex and multiform modern city-the center of American commerce and culture, and the center as well of the new social problems that large-scale immigration and economic centralization brought. I am interested in the contemporary discourse used to describe the rapidly changing city, and I concentrate here on the convention of the panorama as used in that discourse. I will try to show that the New York panorama — as developed in popular illustration and popular fiction, in journalism and nonfiction — functioned to acknowledge a new immensity of urban scale at the same time as it created an image of the city as a single, comprehensible whole.
Hollywood's Washington: Film Images of National Politics During the Great Depression
Authors: Levine Lawrence W.
Published: April 2011

In her recollections of the 1930s, Louise Tanner helped to create an image that has stayed with us despite a number of studies that should have dissolved it by now. Thirties movies were, she insisted,

a flop as a source of Communist propaganda. Some studios – notably Warner brothers – tried to bring Father to grips with social reality. But most of the cinemoguls agreed with Louis B. Mayer that Dad got all the social significance he needed at home. The script writers of Hollywood might take the Spanish Civil War to heart but they were more concerned with a public that preferred Carole Lombard doing secretarial work in a penthouse with a white telephone. Father sitting there in the dark forgot his own plight as he watched the gods and goddesses of the screen sweeping down staircases into dining rooms with a footman behind every chair. Depression movies portrayed an America devoid of economic conflict.
Jefferson's Prospect
Authors: Breitwieser Mitchell Robert
Published: April 2011

Thomas Jefferson's right to membership in the pantheon of Enlightenment thinkers is repeatedly argued, in his own writings as well as in writings about him by others, by trope, by the use of vision as a figure for understanding: if we can only clear our thinking of those interferences that are the accumulated clutter of history, the enlightened Jefferson seems to say, our apprehension of the natural and human worlds will be as clean, plain, and immediate as the act of looking at a physical object.
The Journey and the Mirror: Emerson and the American Arts
Authors: Chmaj Betty E.
Published: April 2011

In 1924 van wyck brooks suffered a nervous breakdown while trying to finish a book about Emerson. For four terrifying years Brooks moved in and out of mental hospitals in Europe and America while the Emerson manuscript lay unfinished in his study, “a kind of symbol of his failure to resolve … the dialectical crisis of his own personality — so much like that of Emerson himself.” There were “manic” moments when he thought his depression had left him. In May 1925 he wrote to his good friend Lewis Mumford, “You may know I had a breakdown last spring — it really lasted about two years; and when it came to a head and burst — on May 20th, when I woke up — I felt as if I had expelled from my system the gathering poisons of years. … Everything I have done so far has been a kind of exploration of thedarkside of our moon, and this blessed Emerson has led me right out into the midst of the sunny side.” Emerson had become for him a healing agent, a subject that, he told his wife Eleanor, would make him “sane again,” serving as an example of a successful American writer to contrast to his books about failures.
Objectivity and Low Seriousness in American Naturalism
Authors: Budd Louis J.
Published: April 2011

Resistance toward accepting realism and naturalism as major literary terms is lively and will undoubtedly stay so. Though nobody seriously denies that a naturalistic mind or intellectual system had matured by 1900, some insist that realism and naturalism, grounded in the literal and leaning toward the positivistic, are antithetical, to artistic creation or else irrelevant to its unique qualities. Such a view has helped to refine the debate over theory, which recently elicited the brilliant opening chapter of Edwin H. Cady'sThe Light of Common Day(1971). Of course, this debate is ultimately worthwhile so far as it helps us appreciate specific novels. Only the zealot needs to decide what is the most honorific mode of fiction or to deny that experience radiates inward and outward into both private and social realms—between which different readers and different sides of the same reader will make varying degrees of choice. The private realm may express itself best in symbols, impressionism, or fantasy, but the world that we fitfully share and that is partly the product, as well as a determinant, of our inwardness attracts some novelists toward mimesis. I unabashedly believe that mimesis serves humanistic ends in trying to cope with the outward world and bring it into perspective against the inward and that it fights through to becoming an invaluable mode of discourse.
The Browning of Buchwald
Authors: Mintz Lawrence E.
Published: April 2011

Twenty-five years ago an adventurous young expatriate, Art Buchwald, began writing a humor-gossip column for the European edition of theNew York Herald Tribune. Today the Washington based columnist is a successful, sometimes brilliant, social and political satirist. Indeed, the thrice weekly column is an important indicator that American humor has emerged from the doldrums of the post-World War II period and has reached a new and respectable, if sometimes bitter and unpleasant, maturity.
The Saintly Child in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
Authors: Trensky Anne Tropp
Published: April 2011

In 1820, Hawthorne wrote “The Gentle Boy,” the story of Ilbrahim, who, too pure and fragile to survive the cruelties of the world, dies young. “His gentle spirit … from Heaven” chastens his “fierce and vindictive” mother, teaching her true religion. Here, in one of the earliest stories of the saintly child, we see the basic pattern for hundreds of stories that were the favorite reading of nineteenth-century America—the confrontation between an innocent child and. a corrupt society, and the demonstration of the ultimate power of innocence. For the modern reader, the saintly child stories offer a valuable insight into the tastes of our recent ancestors: they enjoyed the most heavy-handed sentimentality, the crudest pathos, a sickly religiosity, and a trumped-up mysticism. And sex, though banished from these works, frequently sneaks back into the stories—albeit unconsciously—often in incestuous forms.
Holy Wars, Civil Wars: Religion and Economics in Nineteenth-Century America
Authors: Zuckerman Michael
Published: April 2011

Maybe it was merely the Zeitgeist. Maybe in the years of reactionary resurgence, under a government scant on social sympathy and ethical integrity, amid pitiless profiteering and a proliferation of economic theories to justify it, historians also lost the capacity and concern to connect business behavior and moral standards. Or maybe it was something more than the momentary temper of the time. Maybe it had its origin in developments far deeper and its source in dynamics far more fundamental than the souring of the American spirit in the age of Ronald Reagan.
Ethiopian Skits and Sketches: Contents and Contexts of Blackface Minstrelsy, 1840–1890
Authors: Mahar William J.
Published: April 2011

Blackface minstrelsy is a troublesome topic in popular culture studies. Because burn-cork comedy originated and thrived in a racist society, many scholars and most nonscholars believe that minstrelsy's primary purpose was the creation and perpetuation of demeaning caricatures or untruthful portraits of African-Americans. Most studies published since the early 1960s emphasize the negative effects of blackface comedy or focus on the development of the principal stereotypes (the urban dandy and the shiftless plantation hand) rather than on the interpretive significance of blackface comedy within the broader context of American ethnic humor. While it is essential that minstrelsy's negative characteristics be explored and explained as overt manifestations of the racist attitudes many Americans shared, the narrow focus on race and/or racism as the primary feature of blackface entertainment limits the application of the interdisciplinary methods and interpretive strategies needed to understand the content and context of one of the most popular forms of American comedy. The limitations imposed by restrictive methodologies can be removed, however, if historians reconsider a few of the issues that have been bypassed in most recent studies of American minstrelsy, namely, (1) the nonracial contents of blackface comedy; (2) the treatment of nonblack ethnic groups; (3) the socializing and class-defining functions of minstrel show humor; (4) the importance of minstrel shows as evidence of American ideas about politics, work, gender differences, domestic life, courtship, and marriage; (5) the use of the burnt-cork “mask” as a vehicle for reflexive, self-deprecating humor among various social, ethnic, and economic groups; and (6) the relationships between minstrel shows and other forms of American and English theater.
Tea Wars: Advertising Photography and Ideology in theLadies' Home Journalin the 1890s
Authors: Bogardus Ralph F.
Published: April 2011

“If a magazine should be published at ten cents and made light, bright, and lively,” thought publisher Frank Munsey, it would surely attain a “wide circulation.” What he meant in part, by “light, bright, and lively,” was lots of pictures. Happily for publishing entrepreneurs like Munsey, who courted “the millions” as readers during the 1890s, two innovative communications technologies came together to help make the cheap “picture” magazine possible — photography and the halftone reproduction process. With the birthing of the modern mass magazine — combining low price, increased use of halftone illustrations, an abundance of advertisements, and contents shrewdly designed to satisfy, as Hamlin Garland put it, “the appetites of the millions” by appealing “to shopgirls, tired businessmen, and others who demanded easy and exciting reading” — two revolutions were set in motion, one in perception and the other in values.
The American Spectator Symposium Controversy: Was Dreiser Anti-Semitic?
Authors: Tuerk Richard
Published: April 2011

The Nation for April 17, 1935, contained an exchange of letters between Hutchins Hapgood and Theodore Dreiser entitled “Is Dreiser Anti-Semitic?” In a brief introductory note, Hapgood, who put the exchange in the Nation, explained that the question arose when he read a symposium entitled “Editorial Conference (With Wine)” in the American Spectator for September, 1933. It consisted of the record of a conversation among members of the magazine's distinguished editorial staff: drama critic George Jean Nathan, literary critic Ernest Boyd, novelist James Branch Cabell, playwright Eugene O'Neill, and Dreiser. The symposium and the controversy following it form a minor but nonetheless important chapter in American literary and cultural history.
The Dynamics of Erasure: Anti-Semitism and the Example of Ludwig Lewisohn
Authors: Hutner Gordon
Published: April 2011

“A recent experience has shown me how terribly hard it is for a man of Jewish birth to get a good position. I had always suspected that it was a matter worth considering, but I had not known how widespread and strong it was. While we shall be glad to do anything we can for you, therefore, I cannot help feeling that the chances are going to be greatly against you.” These words, in 1903, imputed to the chairman of the English Department at Columbia University effectively put an end to Ludwig Lewisohn's dream of becoming a professor of English. The humiliation was so severe that Lewisohn spent most of the next fifty years examining the role of the alien in a gentile country, the Jew in America. He transformed the hatred and shame he suffered into a writing career, of some forty-three volumes, remarkable for its productivity, variety, frankness, and occasional distinction. A critic, journalist, cultural analyst, scholar, translater, polemicist, drama reviewer, editor, and memorist, he perhaps delighted most in being a novelist. A few of his ten novels were celebrated, most especially The Case of Mr. Crump (1926), for which Thomas Mann provided an introduction and which Sigmund Freud hailed as a masterpiece depicting the “tyranny of sex” (as the novel was retitled after being banned in the United States for twenty years), and Island Within; (1928), for some readers as fine a novel of Jewish immigration as has been written. As a literary critic, however, Lewisohn's most significant achievement was surely Expression in America; (1932), the first fullscale psychoanalytic history of American literature, a monumental study of artistic personality and the effect of milieu, later reprinted as The Story of American Literature (1939).
Peter Hill, the First African American Clockmaker
Authors: Bedini Silvio A.
Published: April 2011

The annals of clockmaking appear to identify but a single instance of an African American clockmaker, although there may be others who escaped the attention of historians. The number of African Americans, either as slaves or freemen, who were enabled to work in the skilled crafts was limited, and of this small number even fewer succeeded in achieving a degree of independence that enabled them to establish their own shops and clienteles.
“Picture Maker of the Old West”: W. H. Jackson and the Birth of Photographic Archives in the United States
Authors: Brunet François
Published: April 2011

Inventor of the hand-held stereoscope and “autocrat of the breakfast table,” the editor of the Atlantic Monthly proved himself, in an important series of articles on photography, a master of rhetoric. Behind the Epicurean touches with which he colored the “mirror with a memory” – the most “audacious, remote, improbable” discovery of human ingenuity – and through the irony of his thundering philosophical conclusions – “form is henceforth divorced from matter,” which “as a visible object is of no great use any longer” – the modern reader perceives O. W. Holmes's keen awareness of the documentary possibilities born of photography. In this essay, it is one of the first sketches of such a “Bank of Nature” that I shall examine.
Children, Literature, and the Bomb
Authors: Stone Albert E.
Published: April 2011

If hiroshima as fact and metaphor marks a turning point of modern secular and spiritual history, what has this fact meant to American children and youth? The thinkable event with the unthinkable implications has, for four decades and more, offered unique challenges and opportunities to all sorts of writers working in popular and esoteric forms with adult audiences. One of the least esoteric but most neglected of these literary forms is children's books, written and illustrated, for the very young and for adolescents. As with works for adults, writings for children are rich sources of cultural information on and attitudes about the nuclear age. They create, vicariously but affectively, informative and imaginative encounters with earthshaking events and their aftershocks long antedating young consciousnesses but present in children's lives as adult conversations, media messsages, and significant silences. Such books often build early imaginal memories on which adult thought and feeling about the Bomb are deeply based.
Emerson, Paris, and the Opening of the Scientific Eye
Authors: Brown Lee Rust
Published: April 2011

We start with a crystallizing moment in Emerson's career: the famous moment, ecstatically recorded in his 1833 journal, when Emerson recognized the future shape of his work in the vast natural history displays at the Muséum d'histoire naturelle (Jardin des Plantes) in Paris. Brooding over “this bewildering series of organized forms,” Emerson found himself driven into making a vow: “I am moved by strange sympathies, I say continually, ‘I will be a naturalist’” (JMN, vol. 4, p. 200). The vow would soon be heard again in his first lyceum lecture, “The Uses of Natural History,” and many times throughout his career Emerson would remind audiences of his central calling as a “natural historian” of life, the intellect, and the soul. Emerson's vision of natural history in Paris gave definitive focus to ambitions that had found no proper outlet in his earlier life in America. The results were almost immediate: by the time he began his return trip to America, he was settled on the subject of his early lectures and was already contemplating the larger project ofNature. Emerson came back to America to found himself as an institution of private research and public presentation not unlike the Museum itself, methodically gathering specimens from the exotic frontiers of experience and setting them out, in their multiple dark affinities, on common ground.
What More Can Carrie Want? Naturalistic Ways of Consuming Women
Authors: Gelfant Blanche H.
Published: April 2011

A recent magazine article evokes the perennial mystery of human desire by asking why a movie star who “has it all” — “a perfect body, happy marriage, wealth,” and “success” — is “not yet satisfied.” Beginning with a play of words, “Why Demi Moore Wants More,” the article ends by finding the wordmore“elusive.” This elusivemoreis the subject of my essay, which links a desire formoreto determinism as a doctrine of causation common to literary naturalism, behavioral psychology, modern advertising, and consumerism. Once consumption figures in a discussion of literary naturalism, at issue in this essay, the lines of argument move centrifugally in various directions to include such seemingly far-flung and unrelated matters as the Vietnam War, kleptomania, the “packaging” of American politics, women's fashion, material culture studies, fitness diets, images of burning bodies, the commodification of books, Jane Fonda's self-transformations, and indecent proposals to Demi Moore. All these matters converge at a single point of origin where a woman character, an American literary heroine, stands and looks. The consequences of this simple, ordinary act — which leads the woman to consume and be consumed — seem to me laden with literary and cultural meanings I must necessarily condense. To do so, my first tactical move will be to leap over an entire century in order to compare Theodore Dreiser's famous novelSister Carrie, published in 1900, with a contemporary story that leaves one shaken by its brilliance and horror. I ask the reader to imagine the gap between the two texts as an ellipsis - adot, dot, dot- filled in by decades of turbulent historical change that have redefined what an American heroine wants but not why she wants more.
A Home Away from Home: Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis, and the Rural Cemetery Movement
Authors: Bohan Ruth L.
Published: April 2011

Much has been written in recent years about 19th-century rural cemeteries. Beginning with the establishment of Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery in 1831, these rural retreats rapidly replaced existing church burial grounds and by the 1850s had led to the development of urban parks and garden suburbs as well. Like urban parks and garden suburbs, rural cemeteries were meant to provide relief from the crowding, grid-iron regularity, and grittiness of the country's rapidly expanding industrial centers by embracing the openness, spontaneity, and verdant freshness of nature. Trees, shrubs, and flowering plants punctuated and enhanced the gentle contours of the land; lakes and roadways reflected and extended nature's beauties; manmade structures, too, nestled into the undulating rhythms of the land, exhibiting a oneness with the varied and carefully orchestrated richness of the natural setting. The garden suburb and the rural cemetery shared a further distinction of being located on the periphery of existing cities and were frequently entered through imposing gates that effectively announced their separateness from the surrounding terrain. Even more fundamental, however, but not fully understood, is the fact that at the core of the creation of both the rural cemetery and the garden suburb was a desire to emphasize and consolidate the American family by providing it with a new physical setting and a new set of symbols. By the Civil War, virtually every large American city had a rural cemetery, where its dead were buried in ample family lots that were adorned with imposing family monuments, and set off from other family lots by elaborate iron fences or stone copings similar to those that edged the family home.
American Heroes and Invading Barbarians: The Regionalist Response to Fascism
Authors: Whiting Cécile
Published: April 2011

The characteristics that contributed in the 1930s to the fame of A Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry, the three leaders of the Regionalist art movement, were the same that led to their being condemned as Fascists in the art criticism of the 1940s. Despite differences in their artistic styles, all three artists based their paintings in the 1930s on the life and land of specific locales in the Middle West. Each artist became associated with a particular region: Wood with Iowa, Benton with Missouri, and Curry with Kansas and later with Wisconsin. In their effort to celebrate the folk and tradition of these American regions, these artists relied heavily upon figurative styles and anecdotal narratives. They eradicated from their paintings the modernist styles such as Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism with which they had experimented in the 1910s and 1920s. Modernism, they now believed, was a difficult language, inaccessible to the ordinary public. Instead, these artists embraced a plain-speaking, folksy pictorial rhetoric.
Apocalypticism in America: The Argot of Premillennialism in Popular Culture
Authors: Balmer Randall
Published: April 2011

On the evening of good friday, 1878, Charles Taze Russell and a handful of followers, all clad in white robes, gathered at the Sixth Street Bridge in Pittsburgh to await the Millennial Dawn, which would provide their translation into heaven. His study of the Scriptures had convinced Russell, a haberdasher from Allegheny, Pennsylvania, that Christ had returned invisibly in 1874 and that now, three-and-a-half years later, the kingdom of God would begin, and the faithful would be summoned to heaven. Russell later denied the incident—Pittsburgh newspapers insisted otherwise-and revised his theology to accommodate this disappointment. The Kingdom of Jehovah, he said, would begin in 1914, whereupon God and Satan would rule the world jointly until the Battle of Armageddon vanquished the forces of evil and inaugurated a theocratic millennium.
Gold's Fool and God's Country: The Coronado Craze of 1940–1941
Authors: Kendall M. Sue
Published: April 2011

In 1540, a spanish expedition led by Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado ventured out of Mexico into what is now the American Southwest in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola and the mythical Kingdom of Quivira. The Coronado expedition wandered for two years through present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and perhaps as far as Oklahoma and Kansas in search of the elusive cities of gold before returning to Mexico, bitter and disappointed. The Spanish conquistadores had set out to find the fabled treasures of Cibola, where, it was rumored, the houses were studded with jewels and the streets were paved with gold. They found instead the source of the inflated legend-the terraced mud pueblos of the Zuñi Indians. The earlier scout, Fray Marcos, had seen them from a distant hillside glittering in the sun, and his vision had been embellished by tales of riches told by the Indians he encountered en route. Finding mud instead of gold, Coronado and his expedition became seduced by tales of yet another land to the east called Quivira, whose riches were beyond imagination and where gold and silver were as common as prairie dust. The quest for the phantom gold of Quivira led Coronado east across the Rio Grande valley and perhaps as far north as present-day Kansas. He had imagined treasures to surpass even those of the Incas in Peru. What he found was another patch of dusty Indian villages, this time made of straw instead of mud. In 1542, the Coronado venture was considered by its Spanish promoters to have been a costly and somewhat embarrassing failure.
Building America: Henry Thoreau and the American Home
Authors: Fink Steven
Published: April 2011

When henry thoreau publishedWaldenin 1854, the title page was illustrated with an engraving of the modest dwelling he had built by the pond. (See Figure 1.) While the cabin seems unexceptional, it was an appropriate focal point for the book, a visible emblem of the independent, self-determined life he had made for himself and which he advocated for every American. Recognizing that the built environment expresses fundamental personal, social, and economic values, Thoreau saw that Americans in particular needed to build with a deliberation commensurate to the larger endeavor of defining their personal and national identities. Thoreau was not alone in his interest in developing a national architectural ideal; he wrote at the height of a period during which, as Gwendolyn Wright has put it, “The task of defining the American home was a national mission.” For Thoreau, the cardinal principle of housing-the first demand he made of America in its domestic architecture — was that living space must create or preserve the freedom and independence of the individual. This is the principle upon which all of his comments on housing and architecture are based and the criterion by which any particular architectural model is judged.
“Intervals of Tranquillity”: The Language of Health in Antebellum America
Authors: Burbick Joan
Published: April 2011

Hurled into the vortex of a whirlpool, Edgar Allan Poe's protagonist in “A Descent into the Maelström” hangs suspended on a wall of water. A deafening roar like that of Niagara Falls and a haunting moan like a “vast herd of buffaloes” resound as the fisherman and his brother watch pieces of society and nature float by: “Both above and below us were visible fragments of vessels, large masses of building timber and trunks of trees, with many smaller articles, such as pieces of house furniture, broken boxes, barrels and staves.” In the midst of this swirling rubble, Poe's hero survives on luck; clutching at a water cask, he hangs on the rim of the maelstrom until the cask's buoyancy lifts him from the water's depths. Punctuated by mere “intervals of tranquillity,” this chaotic landscape emanates violence and danger.
ACrisis of Identity:The Sketch Bookand Nineteenth-Century American Culture
Authors: Rubin-Dorsky Jeffrey
Published: April 2011

It is one of the commonplaces of our literary history that Washington Irving'sSketch Bookput America firmly and finally on the cultural map by pleasing the British reviewers. These arbiters of taste and upholders of cultural standards had long been savaging American publications, and even when they found one to praise, they were reluctant to consider it anything but an anomaly.The Sketch Book“is the first American work,” wrote Francis Jeffrey in theEdinburgh Review, “of any description, but certainly the first purely literary production,” which rose to the level of the great English prose stylists. According to Jeffrey, it was quite “remarkable” that a book produced by an American, “entirely bred and trained in that country,” “should be written throughout with the greatest care and accuracy, and worked up to a great purity and beauty of diction, on the model of the most elegant and polished of our native writers.” Nevertheless,The Sketch Bookwas deserving of the praise, and the acknowledgment of the British literary establishment was one reason for its continued success. But as Jeffrey noted, even before Irving's sketches had charmed the British they had been “extensively circulated, and very much admired” among his own countrymen, so much so that two of our literary historians have claimed a place forThe Sketch Bookon the alltime American “best-seller” list. A close and careful scrutiny of the reasons for this success will reveal that Irving's famous book touched his American readers on a deep, subconscious level because Irving himself was an acute register of the anxieties of his age.
Fine Fitnesses: Dickinson, Higginson, and Literary Luminism
Authors: Armand Barton Levi St.
Published: April 2011

As American Studies extends its interdisciplinary mandate to the pictorial arts, a manifest destiny that might be seen by some as but a new form of cultural imperialism, it behooves us to stop this juggernaut for a moment and consider the increasingly important question of historicism. An historicism strictly applied can provide us with a rubric rooted in fact rather than in speculation, chastening a self-reflexive presentism with documentary and contextual integrity. Nowhere is this discipline of the interdisciplinary more needed than in considering the application of a problematical term like “Luminism,” itself an ex-post-facto construct of American art history that, like a typical Baby Boomer, was born in the mid-fifties, came of age in the seventies, and now is an establishment figure of the late eighties. First conceived by John I.H. Baur, Luminism was nurtured by Barbara Novak in her magisterial American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, and all but beatified in the post-Bicentennial extravaganza of John Wilmerding's American Light exhibit at the National Gallery. With the acceptance of Luminism as a viable aesthetic category, American Romantic painting itself, so long international Modernism's stepchild and poor relation, came of age and was invested with the Toga Virilis of academic respectability. In looking backwards, Americanists once anxious about vindicating their attraction to a supposedly secondhand and second-rate pictorial tradition could proudly point out that the nation had always possessed a legitimate school of artists who responded in a unified yet creative way to the idiomatic qualities of the American scene.
Home on the Range: Turner, Slavery, and the Landscape Illustrations inHarper's New Monthly Magazine,1861–1876
Authors: Diffley Kathleen
Published: April 2011

So wrote scholar and clergyman Samuel Osgood in “Our Lessons in Statesmanship,” one of the few essays on the Civil War published inHarper's New Monthly Magazinebefore Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. Osgood's subject was the peaceful election of 1864, which led him to marvel at the orderliness of America's voting men even at a time of national crisis. Surprisingly, in his apostrophe to the “character” and “manifest destiny” of Americans in the North, it was not Southern intransigence that threatened the ties binding sections together, even in 1865. He was confident that traditional affinities between free men would prevail. “But the negro,” Osgood wrote, “what shall we do with him, and how can the nation be one again, with such a barrier as those millions of blacks between the two sections, with the apparent antagonism of emancipation on one side and perpetual slavery on the other?” Only tentatively in the future he predicted for “independent, steadfast, cosmopolitan” Americans could Osgood find a role for the freed slaves whom “our people” were otherwise likely to dismiss.
At Odds/In League: Brutality and Betterment in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford
Authors: Banta Martha
Published: April 2011

In 1929, F. A. Silcox, union leader and future New Deal official, made the following observation in theBulletin of the Taylor Society, sounding board for the principles of scientific management formulated a quarter of a century earlier by Frederick Winslow Taylor:

The acquisition of power is the primary thing that counts.… [W]ith a favorable balance of power there is only one workable course of action and that is to take all the traffic will bear when the taking is good.… [T]he ethical moralizing with oughts, shouldn'ts and don'ts is an effort to mitigate in some manner the brutality of the conflict and is a method used mostly by those who do not possess sufficient power to enforce their own will.
Veblen's Social Satire and Amos Alonzo Stagg: Football and the American Way of Life
Authors: Dawson Hugh J.
Published: April 2011

Since the appearance of The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen's unhappy experience at the University of Chicago has been recognized as the precipitant of its criticism of American academic life. The endeavors of John D. Rockefeller, the University's founder; William Rainey Harper, its first president; and benefactors like Charles Tyson Yerkes exemplified what Veblen denounced as “the conduct of universities by business men.” Almost two decades intervened between The Leisure Class and the fuller indictment of The Higher Learning in America, which drew also upon Veblen's disappointments at Stanford, where he taught after his dismissal from Chicago. The later book developed a manuscript critique of higher education that Veblen had written in 1904. Although he professed to feel bound “under the rule of Nihil nisi bonum” to observe a “large reticence” in speaking of the University's president, his 1916 preface mocked Harper as the “Great Pioneer in reshaping American academic policy.” The book's criticisms “necessarily drew largely on first-hand observation of the conduct of affairs at Chicago” and were largely directed at the zeal for moral regeneration that Harper would have had suffuse his campus.
Dean Acheson and the Potato Head Blues; or, Some British Academic Attitudes to America and Its Literature
Authors: Lawson-Peebles Robert
Published: April 2011

I Will Begin with two dates. The first is August 3, 1958. It has – as far as I know – no significance whatsoever, except to me. It was my sixteenth birthday, and a friend gave me a record of Louis Armstrong's Hot Seven. I can still vividly remember, more than thirty years later, the shock of first hearing “Potato Head Blues,” particularly Satchmo's second trumpet solo, which leaps like a golden gazelle away from the stalking stop chords of the band. The British jazzman Humphrey Lyttelton remarked that jazz would never be the same again after that solo. Neither would I. Until then, I had looked with a typically British mixture of amusement and amazement at the American consumer products like Coke, bubblegum, and Westerns which had lightened the rationed gloom of a postwar childhood. After “Potato Head Blues,” not just jazz but America generally became exciting and exotic. I determined to find out more about it.
The Drama of Farming: The Federal Theatre Living Newspapers on Agriculture
Authors: O'Connor John
Published: April 2011

The term “Living Newspaper” has been used to describe various topical theatrical productions adapting a considerable diversity of performance styles and relationships to an audience. For the Works Projects Administration (WPA) Federal Theatre Project (FTP) (1935–39), the Living Newspaper was a documentary drama that examined the nature, size, and origin of a current problem or issue. In theory, the action and dialogue would be completely objective by simply reenacting actual events. In practice, however, the authors of the Living Newspaper selected what they thought typical or representative to highlight or explain the “facts.” The play generally concluded by exhorting the audience to support a particular position or a specific piece of legislation.
Practical Philanthropy: The Phelps-Stokes Fund and Housing
Authors: Gardner Deborah S.
Published: April 2011

Improving low-income housing in New York City was one of two objectives for the Phelps-Stokes Fund when it was incorporated in 1911. Enhancing educational opportunities for African-Americans, Native Americans, Africans, and needy white students was the other. Both represented lifelong concerns of Caroline Phelps Stokes (1854–1909), whose bequest financed the fund.
Middletown Again
Authors: Hoover Dwight
Published: April 2011

Middletown, or Muncie, is one of the most studied communities in the United States. Since the initial research was begun in 1924, the community has learned to endure the probing of many investigators, and the many reports have reflected the tensions and concerns of scholars searching for clues to the American urban experience. One might well trace the course of 20th-century American studies through the Middletown experience. In a limited way, that is what this effort purports to do.

Ironically the community was chosen largely by accident, studied by a person unqualified to do so, and the results were not what the sponsoring organization had wanted. When published, however, the report titledMiddletownwas an immediate success; it has remained in print since first issued, and has inspired many successors.
Hawthorne's Mister Hooper: The Veil of Ham?
Authors: Birk John F.
Published: April 2011

Scholars now generally acknowledge that Nathaniel Hawthorne was no deeply secluded artist, but a man and citizen keenly aware of contemporary social and political issues. Over three decades ago, Arlin Turner maintained that Hawthorne wrote in response not only to his extensive reading in American history but to the burgeoning nationalism of the 1820s and 1830s. We cannot fail to note the growing ascendancy during this period of that one moral issue which would soon come to eclipse all others and draw the nation into its bloodiest conflict — that of slavery. Moreover, the very seedbed of the antislavery movement in these 1830s, the home and headquarters of its fiery central leader, lay but a few miles from Hawthorne's doorstep.
Prairie Prospects: The Aesthetics of Plainness
Authors: Kinsey Joni L. , Roberts Rebecca , Sayre Robert F.
Published: April 2011

The ways American prairie landscapes have been used and understood, since the first Euro-American encounters with them in the early 19th century, are inseparable from how they have beenseenanddescribed. The converse is no less true for pictorial depictions and verbal accounts. Far from being disassociated, the differing actions of perception and utilization are in fact interdependent, and as such have had far-reaching consequences for human interaction with the prairie landscape itself and for the subject of prairies as it is presented in literature and art. Although it is not often acknowledged, aesthetics lie at the heart of any discussion of the landform, even in policy debates over agricultural practices or proposals to restore a tract to native grasses. And just as critical, the land's use (or disuse) directly informs its representation in written or visual portrayals, whether these concern virgin territory or cultivated terrain.
The Writing on the Wall: Treasury Section Murals in New Deal Louisiana
Authors: Megraw Richard B.
Published: April 2011

Up in Bienville Parish, through piney hills rolling toward the Ozarks, the road winds down a sweeping curve, rises abruptly, and enters Arcadia, Louisiana. Main Street parallels an abandoned railroad spur and runs along eighty yards of brick-faced storefronts. The usual concerns flourish: a flower shop, an insurance agency, the pharmacy, and a secondhand furniture store. There is also a Baptist revival hall, but people point it out for another reason. Years before it was a house of the Lord, the building was a home for the dead, a funeral parlor, and as such, briefly, the focal point of national attention. That was in 1934 when, shortly after the sheriff sprang his trap, the corpses of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were fetched back to town and propped on slabs leaning in the undertaker's window. Tellers of the tale usually smile at the irony, but it is not the only one Arcadians can claim. Across the street and down the block from the morguecumrevival hall stands a United States post office built during the Great Depression. It conforms to the standard floor plan then in vogue, and at one end of the main hall, over the postman's door, hangs a mural whose warm pastels depict an abundant cotton harvest. Black pickers dot the field, sacks filled to bursting. A white driver crests the hill in a wagon brimming over with the yield and descends a road leading toward the mill. Surrounding hills stretch beyond (Figure 1).
Reversing the Romance: Class and Gender in the Supermarket Tabloids
Authors: Britt Theron
Published: April 2011

America's ubiquitous supermarket tabloids are a relatively recent invention. Sensational and hyperbolic, they nonetheless offer through their distinctive style and content a unique narrative that is focused quite specifically on the lived experience of many working-class American women. Indeed, because of this focus, the working-class feminine-gender role found in America's supermarket tabloids offers a unique vantage point in contemporary culture for understanding the ideological intersection of categories of class and gender. Perhaps because they are predominantly read by women, the tabloids are often ignored as part of American mass culture, but they deserve attention because they offer both a voice for some women who are rarely heard, and a unique perspective on the mass-culture debate that centers on the question of whether within Western capitalist societies mass-culture forms contain any possibility of resistance to commodification and exploitation.
Scientific Racism in Modern America, 1870s–1990s
Authors: Cravens Hamilton
Published: April 2011

In post-Darwinian times, Americans have usually thought of the national population as divided into many distinct races and ethnic groups. The notions and definitions they have used for a race and an ethnic group have varied from one age to another. Although Americans have not needed the resources of science to believe that some races and ethnic groups are superior to others, in these times science has become a powerful symbol of cultural authority. For the racist, the assistance of science has often been useful. In this essay, it is important to distinguish between the scientific discourse on race and ethnicity whose participants do not necessarily assume that groups differ in value, and that of scientific racism, whose participants might or might not be scientists, but who have consistently assumed that science proves the existence of permanent group differences and legitimates the assertion that some groups are inherently superior to others. Here we shall discuss the latter.
Examining the Interplay Among Negative Emotionality, Cognitive Functioning, and Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Symptom Severity
Authors: Healey Dione M. , Marks David J. , Halperin Jeffrey M.
Published: April 2011

Cognition and emotion, traditionally thought of as largely distinct, have recently begun to be conceptualized as dynamically linked processes that interact to influence functioning. This study investigated the moderating effects of cognitive functioning on the relationship between negative emotionality and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptom severity. A total of 216 (140 hyperactive/inattentive; 76 typically developing) preschoolers aged 3–4 years were administered a neuropsychological test battery (i.e., NEPSY). To avoid method bias, child negative emotionality was rated by teachers (Temperament Assessment Battery for Children-Revised), and parents rated symptom severity on the ADHD Rating Scale (ADHD-RS-IV). Hierarchical Linear Regression analyses revealed that both negative emotionality and Perceptual-Motor & Executive Functions accounted for significant unique variance in ADHD symptom severity. Significant interactions indicated that when negative emotionality is low, but not high, neuropsychological functioning accounts for significant variability in ADHD symptoms, with lower functioning predicting more symptoms. Emotional and neuropsychological functioning, both individually and in combination, play a significant role in the expression of ADHD symptom severity. (JINS, 2011, 17, 502–510)
No association between coffee, tea or caffeine consumption and breast cancer risk in a prospective cohort study
Authors: Fagherazzi Guy , Touillaud Marina S , Boutron-Ruault Marie-Christine , Clavel-Chapelon Françoise , Romieu Isabelle
Published: April 2011

Objective

Numerous mechanisms for the effects of coffee, tea and caffeine on the risk of breast cancer have been suggested. Caffeine intake has already been associated with high plasma levels of female hormones, but associations have not been clearly demonstrated in epidemiological studies.

Design

We examined prospectively the association of coffee, tea and caffeine consumption with breast cancer risk in a French cohort study.

Setting

Dietary information was obtained from a 208-item diet history questionnaire self-administered in 1993–1995. Multivariable Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to estimate hazards ratios and 95 % confidence intervals.

Subjects

The study was conducted on 67 703 women with available dietary information. During a median follow-up of 11 years, 2868 breast cancer cases were diagnosed.

Results

Median intake was 280 ml/d (2·2 cups/d) for coffee and 214 ml/d (1·7 cups/d) for tea. Median caffeine intake was 164 mg/d. No association was found between consumption of coffee, tea or caffeine and breast cancer risk. Sub-analyses by tumour receptor status, menopausal status, type of coffee (regular or decaffeinated) and meals at which beverages were drunk led to the same conclusion.

Conclusions

Results from this prospective study showed no relationship between coffee, tea or caffeine intake and breast cancer risk overall or by hormone receptor status.
In Principle Method for Noninvasive Determination of the Fetal Genome
Authors: Fan Christina , Quake Stephen
Published: April 2011

We illustrate the concept of noninvasive determination of the fetal genome by shotgun sequencing maternal plasma. The approach is based on molecular counting of alleles in maternal cell-free DNA: the inheritance of paternal haplotypes can be determined by counting paternal specific alleles present on each of the paternal haplotypes; the inheritance of maternal haplotypes can be revealed by counting the alleles on each maternal haplotype and determining the relative representation of the two maternal haplotypes. The concept was experimentally proven by sequencing a synthetic mixture of genomic DNA samples from a child and her mother, whose whole-genome haplotypes (defined by ~800,000 SNPs), together with those of the father, were previously determined. Light sequencing (0.25x) of such sample containing ~16% child’s DNA enabled the inheritance of parental haplotypes to be correctly resolved over most part of the genome, and partially resolved when prior knowledge of paternal whole-genome haplotypes is absent. Translating this approach to maternal plasma DNA samples, together with increased sequencing depth and phase knowledge of additional numbers of parental SNPs, should enable clinically practical sequencing of the fetal genome.