bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Social Construction of Realityand American Studies: Notes toward Consensus
Authors: Mussell Kay
Published: April 2011

It is no secret that the American Studies movement finds itself methodologically fragmented and that definitions of its uniqueness and its relationship to other disciplines are a matter of debate within the profession. It is also no secret that attempts to move beyond the “nationalcharacter” and “myth-symbol-image” approaches have fallen short of consensus. Innovations and new directions in other disciplines include approaches and methods we have consideredourprovince and frequently seem to move us in new directions that further fragment our movement.
“Culture Morphology” and Cultural History in Berenice Abbott's Changing New York
Authors: Raeburn John
Published: April 2011

Berenice abbott's photographs of New York City in the 1930s, made under the aegis of the Federal Arts Project of the WPA, have never enjoyed the acclaim that the work of photographers for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) received from the 1930s onward, despite the fact that her work is at least the equal of theirs in both aesthetic and documentary interest. Her photographs have not exactly been neglected — she is dutifully mentioned in most histories of twentieth-century photography — but neither have they been seen as at least equally central to our understanding of the culture of 1930s America as the work of Rothstein, Mydans, Lee, and even Lange and Evans. Changing New York (1939), a collection of nearly 100 of her photographs taken between 1935 and 1938, is a major document of the Depression, one that has heretofore been slighted in evaluations of the decade's achievements.
Region, Ethnic Group, and American Writers: From “Non-Southern” and “Non-Ethnic” to Ludwig Lewisohn; or the Ethics of Wholesome Provincialism
Authors: Sollors Werner
Published: April 2011

In 1785 a writer who used the pen name “Celadon” (singer) tried to clarify the meaning of regions in America by making them one with ethnic groups. The author of the small pamphletThe Golden Age; or, Future Glory of North-America Discovered by an Angel to Celadon in Several Entertaining Visionscontemplated the future of America from a mountain overlooking the whole continent. He describes himself in a state of rapture when

the Angel recalled my attention by a gentle touch on my side, and pointing his finger a little to the south-west, Celadon, says he, do you see yonder long valley. … That whole region you may call Savagenia: It being designed for the future habitation of your now troublesome Indians. — And that other valley. … It lies toward the north-west … This you may call Nigrania: It being allotted for the Negroes to dwell there, when the term of their vassalage is come to a period. — And in all those vast spaces westward to the great ocean, there may be seats hereafter for sundry foreign nations. — There may be a French, a Spanish, a Dutch, an Irish, an English, &c. yea, a Jewish State here in process of time. — And all of them united in brotherly affection, will at last form the most potent empire on the face of the earth (pp. 11–12).
The Railroad-in-the-Landscape: An Iconological Reading of a Theme in American Art
Authors: Marx Leo
Published: April 2011

Of all the great modern innovations, the railroad probably is the one to which American artists have accorded the largest significance. The passenger railroad first appeared on the American scene in the 1830s, and it almost immediately caught the eye of several of the nation's most gifted landscape painters. By the time of the Civil War the new machine already had been incorporated into the work of Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty, Asher Durand, and John Kensett. The subject attracted their attention, for one thing, because of its newness — its radically innovative character-and, for another, because of its compelling visual properties. A steam-powered locomotive moving across the landscape is an arresting sight-so arresting, indeed, that its visual character alone might seem to account for the strong hold it so quickly took on the imagination of artists. Here, after all, was an imposing, mobile, man-made contrivance, a complicated mechanism wrought of dark metal in various shifting sharp-edged geometric forms; the engine's motive power was made visible by the train of cars it pulled, the surging puffs of smoke and steam (black or white or both) that trailed behind it, and the intermittent flashes of red when its fire box was open.
Passports to Change: The Resettlement Administration's Folk Song Sheet Program, 1936–1937
Authors: Warren-Findley Jannelle
Published: April 2011

In 1975, the folklorist archie green wrote a short, pioneering article about a folk song leaflet produced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration in 1936. Green suggested that the song sheet was “intrinsically interesting: a sharp pen-and-ink sketch, a traditional song both radical and humane in content, a singable musical transcription faithful to the folk idiom.” But, Green added, the fact that the song sheet had developed in a context of art and radical politics in the 1930s gave it additional meaning; “because something of the circumstances of its issue is known,” he said, “we can use the song sheet as a passport into New Deal cultural history.”
Manners, Morals, and Mince Pie: Howells's America Revisited
Authors: Porte Joel
Published: April 2011

When lionel trilling delivered an important lecture on William Dean Howells more than thirty years ago at Harvard, he began with an anecdote that helps to move us directly into Howells country. Offering a course on American literature at Columbia College, Trilling “imagined that it might be useful to [his] students to have a notion of the cultural and social situation which Howells described,” and he therefore “spent a considerable time talking about [Howells's] books”; whereupon, Trilling reports, “I received the first anonymous letter I have ever had from a student-it warned me that the lapse of taste shown by my excessive interest in a dull writer was causing a scandal in the cafeterias.”
Dreiser's Tragedy: The Distortion of American Values
Authors: Farrell James T.
Published: April 2011

Dreiser seems to have thought for years about the book that eventually became An American Tragedy. For years he had wanted to write about a crime. He kept clippings of various murder cases, and before the Chester Gillette-Grace Brown case in upstate New York in 1906 he had clippings about other murders, including one about a minister who committed a murder.
Sinclair Lewis Manuscripts in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division: A Preliminary Checklist
Authors: Cooney Charles
Published: April 2011

Subject File: Pulitzer Prizes, Award Winners, transcripts; of correspondence with. Lewis-Frank Fackenthall Correspondence (1926)
They Took Their Stand: The Emergence of the Southern Agrarians
Authors: Rock Virginia J.
Published: April 2011

It was no ordinary book, that collection of impassioned essays published on November 12, 1930. In the pitch and stress of the Great Depression,I'll Take My Stand: the South and the Agrarian Tradition, created by twelve Southerners, proved to be a prophetic confrontation, no mere “ineffectual lamentation of some impractical neo-Confederates over the passing of the golden age of slavery.” It represented, as Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Southern literary historian and critic, put it, “the first stages of a widespread revolt against computerized, depersonalized, machine-oriented society and its ruthless exploitation of the environment and its human inhabitants.”
Fifty American Books
Authors: Wilson Robert A.
Published: April 2011

A well-known biblical writer complained several millenia back that there was no end to the making of books. Lord knows what he would have said had he lived into the post-Gutenberg era. And there is also no doubt that there is no end in sight to the making of lists of books. Every few years a list is compiled of the “Best Books” of some period or subject. Some of these lists achieve distinction and permanence, such as the Grolier Club's list of “One Hundred Books Famous in English Literature,” published in 1903 and still a guide to the foundation of a gentleman's library. More recently, Cyril Connolly, the late critic of modern literature, published a list entitled “The Modern Movement,” which also contains 100 books he believed to be the touch-Stones of modern literature. This list, still in its infancy, has already become another classic guide.
“The American Scholar” as Cultural Event
Authors: Milder Robert
Published: April 2011

“The american scholar” descends to us as literature, but for the more than two hundred auditors who filled the First Parish Church in Cambridge on August 31, 1837, as for the speaker himself, the address was a singular dramatic occasion. “An event without any former parallel in our literary annals,” James Russell Lowell recalled years later: “What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!” In the provincial Boston world of 1837, Lowell's “event” — a picturesque memory exhumed from the literary scrapbook and fondly patronized — gave promise of being an “event” in Michel Foucault's sense as well: “not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it.” “The young men went out” from the church, remarked Oliver Wendell Holmes, “as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’”
The Light of Reflection: Hawthorne and the Luminist Sublime
Authors: Smith Gayle L.
Published: April 2011

Several months after Hawthorne's “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore” appeared in the January, 1838 Democratic Review, Elizabeth Peabody brought a copy to Emerson, who recorded in his journal the next day, “I complained that there was no inside to it.” Emerson's cool reaction notwithstanding, “Foot-prints,” along with a number of Hawthorne's other sketches and extended descriptions of nature, rewards much closer reading if we are interested in his complex aesthetic and philosophical responses to landscape. In fact, Hawthorne's depictions of nature reveal a particularly “inside” view, reflecting and inviting the meditative, contemplative response to nature articulated by Kant and embodied by the group of 19th-century American painters we now know as the luminists. His notebooks are filled with detailed descriptions of landscape, clouds, and light; some are almost specific enough to sound like painters' verbal sketches to be consulted later in the studio. While he frequently mentions Claude Lorrain and the picturesque tradition, his close attention to nature betrays a profound interest in elements that were to become the focus of the luminists in the 1850s and 1860s. Prolonged consideration of a landscape or seascape seems to lead Hawthorne significantly beyond the available, almost codified aesthetic of the picturesque to a way of representing nature and the individual's relationship to it that is more subjective, meditative, and open-ended. Hawthorne's later reactions to specific paintings, especially those of J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, also suggest strongly that he would have found a far closer match to his sensibilities in many of the canvases of the luminists, especially Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett, than those of his more immediate contemporaries, Thomas Cole and the other Hudson River School painters.
Late Nineteenth-Century Trompe L'Oeil and Other Performances of the Real
Authors: Maine Barry
Published: April 2011

“We live in an age of wonders!” exclaims a character in Henry James's The Bostonians (1886). And so it must have seemed to any American who could read the newspapers, which thrived, in the 1880s, on the business of proclaiming marvels. In The Bostonians one of the “wonders” is Miss Verena Tarrant, whose precocious and hypnotic speaking powers on the subject of women's rights — together with a pretty face and trim figure — succeeded in selling out the Boston Music Hall. Other wonders of the decade were less comely but more enduring: the lightbulb, the electric generator (which so awed Henry Adams), the telephone, the automobile, motion pictures, the linotype machine, the Kodak camera. The hawking of Verena Tarrant outside the Music Hall followed the American pattern of packaging, promoting, and generally celebrating (in a chauvinistic spirit) all manner of sensational feats, new technologies, and even writers and painters who caught the public's fancy. One of these was, of course, Mark Twain, who successfully promoted his own works through direct subscription sales. Also included among the sensational feats of the period were the trompe l'oeil (trick of the eye) still-life paintings by William Michael Harnett, who was heralded in a feature article that appeared in the New York News at the end of the decade. The headline ran as follows:

Painted Like Real Things. The Man Whose Pictures Are a Wonder and a Puzzle. How He Began and the Success He Has Met With — Poverty Forced Him to Earn a Living in the Line in Which He Excells.
A God Who Is Later a Terror: (En)countering the National Plot in Stein's The Making of Americans
Authors: Wald Priscilla
Published: April 2011

For laura riding, no one embodies “the new barbarism” more than Gertrude Stein: “No one but Miss Stein has been willing to be as ordinary as simple, as primitive, as stupid, as barbaric as successful barbarism demands.” The charge, which echoes T. S. Eliot's, attests to the efficacy with which Stein disturbs the boundaries of civilization to represent the process of acculturation during which Americans are made. Ironically, however, Riding's “barbarism” names precisely what Stein sought to depict, “gross dogmatic conventions resulting from the fear-inspired consolidation of humanity[,]. … a consolidation against the terror of numbers, each unknown, which would reign if humanity were not consolidated as humanity” (p. 135). Barbarism inheres in the civilizing process, in the very conventions that designate alterity, and it is in that sense that it is, unexpectedly, “ordinary.”
The Romance of the Dogfight: A Cautionary Tale for Historians
Authors: Cripps Thomas
Published: April 2011

By the end of 1991, the United States had not quite completed the restoration of the prestige of its armed forces. The occasion was the triumph of American arms as part of a United Nations exercise intended to restore the territorial integrity of the sheikdom of Kuwait, which had been violated by its truculent neighbor, Iraq. Curiously, photography was at the core of the adventure. For decades, World War II had been endlessly refought on American television screens, a stream of visual nostalgia for “the good war” (as Studs Terkel had named it) made possible by archival photographic images of a quite high order. But the image of victorious Americans against Axis heavies had been sullied by the Vietnam War, “the living room war” that had suffered a terribly bad press at least in part as a result of incessant, bloody, and finally fruitless combat that appeared as daily images on the nation's TV screens.
To “Personalize the Rainpipe”: The Critical Mythology of Edward Hopper
Authors: Hemingway Andrew
Published: April 2011

By the early 1930s Edward Hopper was a major figure in the American art scene. As is well known, Hopper made no significant sales of paintings until the exhibition of his watercolors at the Rehn Gallery in 1924, by which time he was forty-four years old. However, his career takeoff in the late 1920s and early 1930s was certainly dramatic, and in 1933 Forbes Watson could describe him as a “collector's favorite.” In 1924 the standard price of Hopper's watercolors was $150, by 1925 it had risen to $200, and in 1928–29, $300–400 was the norm. In 1929 alone he sold at least fourteen drawings. Between 1924 and 1930 he also sold sixteen oils at prices ranging between $400 and $2,500 dollars. In the 1930s he was getting between $1,500 and $3,000 for an oil painting, and from 1934 to 1939 he sold several watercolors at $750 each. If, asLifereported in 1937, his receipts from sales did not usually come near $10,000 per year, he was still doing a lot better than most other artists in the Depression years.
Whitman and the Humanitarian Possibilities of Lilacs
Authors: Eiselein Gregory
Published: April 2011

In 1865 while Whitman was preparingDrum-Tapsfor publication in New York, John Wilkes Booth fatally wounded Lincoln at Ford's Theater in Washington. As the nation expressed its grief in public mourning, poems, sermons, speeches, and funeral parades, Whitman paid close attention to the country's bewilderment and the “strange mixture of horror, fury, [and] tenderness” that followed the “black, black, black” of Lincoln's death. Although some volumes ofDrum-Tapswere bound and distributed, Whitman apparently realized that his new book needed a companion collection about Lincoln's death and the war's end. Postponing the release ofDrum-Taps, Whitman began work on “a little book” (p. 23), a collection of eighteen poems titledSequel to Drum-Taps (Since the Preceding Came from the Press). When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd. And Other Pieces. More than any other group of poems by Whitman,Lilacs and Other Piecesis a response to a moment in history; this immediacy of relation to historical discourses and events makes the volume an uncommonly suggestive example of Whitman's dialogue with his culture.
Darwin and “The Natural History of Doctresses”: The Sex War Between Howells, Phelps, Jewett, and James
Authors: Bender Bert
Published: April 2011

Two years after charles darwin'sThe Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex(1871) ignited a great debate about race, culture, and sexual difference, Dr. Edward H. Clarke drew the lines in what soon became a literary war in America over the supposed differences between the sexes. In his highly appreciative review of Clarke'sSex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls, William Dean Howells(?) wrote that “the subject is a very delicate one to handle,” not only because it involves certain embarrassing physiological details, such as “periodicity,” but because woman is the weaker vessel in many ways, and does not always care to be reminded of it. Yet the facts of anatomy and physiology are at the bottom of many differences in the capabilities and adaptations of the two sexes for the various offices of life. The female's muscles are weaker than the male's, and she must not be expected to do so much bodily work. The female's brain is five or six ounces lighter, on the average, than the male's, and she must not be expected to do so much “cerebration” as he can do. The special relation of the female to humanity that is to be, involves many disturbances, habitual and occasional, which handicap her, often very heavily, in the race of life.
Gateway to Empire: An Interpretation of Eero Saarinen's 1948 Design for the St. Louis Arch
Authors: Graebner William
Published: April 2011

In 1948, a unanimous jury awarded the $40,000 first prize in the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Competition to a design team headed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen. Competitors had been charged with memorializing Thomas Jefferson, his Louisiana Purchase, and the expansion of the American nation by creating a national park and monument on the West bank of the Mississippi River at St. Louis.
Foreword: The Strange Inscrutable Career of Uncle Tom's Cabin in China
Authors: Ch'maj Betty E. M.
Published: April 2011

The straightforward account by Tao Jie of the history of Uncle Tom's Cabin in China raises questions of great interest to contemporary American Studies scholarship. To the old question - how shall we represent America's “usable past?” - is added another: “Usable to whom?” This question, now being asked by a wide variety of multiculturalists reexamining our literature and history from revisionist perspectives, is the central issue raised by Tao's essay. Here we are given a specific case study for cross-cultural comparison that allows us to contrast the America we imagine we have been exporting to the America other cultures reinvent. Equally important, Tao provides us with the opportunity to examine one of the most compelling of our cultural documents from the perspective of 20th-century Chinese history and see how, stage by stage, the translators interpreted the story to respond to changing forces in Chinese cultural history.
How the Buttonwood Tree Grew: The Making of a New York Stock Exchange Legend
Authors: Eisenstadt Peter
Published: April 2011

On May 17, 1792, the story goes, twenty-four stockbrokers gathered beneath a buttonwood tree on Wall Street and signed an agreement that grew into the mighty New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). This traditional account of the founding of the NYSE is largely legendary; it distorts the reality behind the meeting of stockbrokers that long-ago day in May, and claims that the Buttonwood Agreement established the exchange are without any foundation. Yet for more than a century the Buttonwood legend has endured.
Personalities in the Crowd: The Idea of the “Masses” in American Popular Culture
Authors: Smith Steven
Published: April 2011

“There are no masses,” Raymond Williams wisely reminds us, “there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” This idea of the social crowd, usually organic and with a mind of its own, rarely is used self-referentially; “masses” always describes others. During and immediately following World War I, American intellectuals, especially social theorists, were preoccupied with this new model for society. Authoritarian regimes abroad, America's own wartime hysteria (fueled by new communications technologies), the insistent urban context, and a consumer-based economy all made discussion of crowd behavior and mass persuasion an obvious product of new circumstances. Newer fields of sociology, psychology, and behaviorism, promised the necessary tools for understanding these “phenomena.” Walter Lippmann'sPublic Opinion(1922) was but the most popular and enduring in a genre that drew upon earlier native and European theorists like Gustave Le Bon, E. A. Ross, Boris Sidis, and William Trotter. By 1925, the American library on the mass mind includedThe Behavior of Crowds(Everett Dean Martin),Social Psychology(Floyd Henry Allport), andIntroduction to the Science of Sociology(Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess). This new body of work distinguished “the concept of the mass, a dispersed and passive body of uprooted individuals, from the pre-World War I concept of the crowd, a physically united and active throng.” The bestremembered effect of these ideas, upon the likes of H. L. Mencken, Walter Lippman, and other leading critics, was a skepticism about democracy's survival in the face of such new knowledge. But the idea of the “masses” had another life, outside of more formal circles, among Americans who were not so quick to decry a “boobocracy,” or perhaps more important and long-lasting, in the rising industries of mass communication and popular culture.
“Little Plants in the Country”: Henry Ford's Village Industries and the Beginning of Decentralized Technology in Modern America
Authors: Segal Howard P.
Published: April 2011

“Technology Spurs Decentralization Across the Country.” So reads a 1984 New York Times article on real-estate trends in the United States. The contemporary revolution in information processing and transmittal now allows large businesses and other institutions to disperse their offices and other facilities across the country, even across the world, without loss of the policy- and decision-making abilities formerly requiring regular physical proximity. Thanks to computers, word processors, and the like, decentralization has become a fact of life in America and other highly technological societies.
Broadway Nights: John Reed and the City
Authors: Wilson Christopher P.
Published: April 2011

Not so very long after John Butler Yeats prophesied that “fiddles” would be “tuning up” throughout American intellectual life in the years before World War I, the private musings of John Reed strike another, less hopeful set of notes. The lament emerges in an unpublished tale Reed wrote in 1913 entitled “Success,” about a poet named Alan Meredith, age twenty-two, who, like Reed, has just come from the country to New York to answer his vocation. “The whirling star of Literature revolves in the Big City,” Reed explains. “By force of gravitation the minor bards sooner or later fall within its orbit, and nine out of ten emit no sparks from that time forth.” Alan's project is an epic poem tentatively entitled New York, A Poem in Twelve Cantos-but he gets nowhere beyond his title. “You see,” Reed writes, “he was making the same mistake as you and I, when we heard the voice [of the city] for the first time and tried to translate it without knowing the language.” Reed elaborates:

A poet writes about the things nearest to his heart-the things he does not actually know. As soon as he gains scientific knowledge of anything, the glamour is gone, and it is not mere stuff for the imagination. The bard of green fields and blossoms and running brooks is always a city man, and he who sings the Lobster Palaces and White Lights lives in Greenwich, Conn. Never do the stars seem so beautiful as to him who looks up between brownstone houses on a breathless night; all the magic of the city lies in the glow of lights on the sky seen thirty miles away.
Peter Sekaer: Slum Conditions in America
Authors: Sundell Michael G.
Published: April 2011

To most people, federally-sponsored photography during the New Deal means the splendid file of images created by the Resettlement Administration–later the Farm Security Administration of the Department of Agriculture. Understandable as it is, this equation simplifies truth. By the time of Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration in March 1933, the use of photography was commonplace in the federal bureaucracy, reflecting practices that had been developing for more than half a century. Since the Civil War, federal officials had profited from the precision of photography and from its deceptive appearance of objectivity to preserve information and sometimes to influence opinion. A few government projects had resulted in compelling educational documentations that were also recognized as compelling art. Most notably, photographers like John Hillers, William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'sullivan, and Carleton Watkins, tested by the opportunity to expand the possibilities of their medium while addressing a great national theme, had compiled in their records of the exploration of the West documentations that helped to change public policy by providing images with the power to crystallize the country's sense of its identity and potential growth.
The Family of Manat the Museum of Modern Art: The Power of the Image in 1950s America
Authors: Sandeen Eric J.
Published: April 2011

The family of man was an important cultural event of the 1950s. This great photographic exhibition, which drew record crowds at the Museum of Modern Art and attracted over 9,000,000 people on its sixyear, world-wide tour, was the work of Edward Steichen, who saw the opportunity for a retrospective on the history of photography as well as a comment on the perils of modern-day society. The exhibition took on a life of its own. It surpassed in popularity even the optimistic prediction of Steichen and defied the bland skepticism of other departments within the Museum. Museum workers received their first bonus because of its success. Popular magazines and newspapers from all over the world saw in the exhibition a penetratingly simple statement about the first decade of the nuclear age, and millions of people became acquainted with a photographic language to which they had not been exposed before.
The Pardoner's Tale: The Personal Theme of “Domestic Tranquility” in Gerald Ford's Pardon of Richard Nixon
Authors: Wood Peter H.
Published: April 2011

Few observers in the late summer of 1974 expected that Gerald Ford would pardon Richard Nixon, and none predicted that the action would occur as swiftly and enigmatically as it did. Yet on Sunday morning, September 8, the new Chief Executive issued “a full, free and absolute pardon” to the man he had succeeded in office less than one month before. No other act of the President's brief term would prove so singular or controversial. And few executive actions in modern times have remained more persistently elusive and unfathomable.
American Studies and the Radical Tradition: From the 1930s to the 1960s
Authors: Lenz Guenter H.
Published: April 2011

During the last years scholars in American Studies have become more conscious of the methodological problems of their work and have made wide-ranging use of the developments in various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. They have also discovered the importance of a critical perspective on the history of their “discipline.” But there clearly is the feeling of a loss of direction, an uneasiness about the purposes and objectives of American Studies. Often the appropriation of new methods and approaches was pursued under the old premises, and awareness of the history of the field reduced to a stereotypical periodization of “phases” characterized by dominant “key concepts” or “methods.” Whereas during the late 1960s and early 1970s the work of the so-called myth-symbol school (from H. N. Smith to Leo Marx) was criticized as methodologically unsound (by B. Kuklick) and politically conservative (or reactionary) (by Laschet al.), more recently some of its work, particularly by Leo Marx and Richard Slotkin, has been condemned (by Kenneth Lynn) as “regressive,” “reductionist,” or simply “anti-American Studies.” This confusion about the origin, the objectives, the political implications, and the “legacy” of the early period of American Studies, from the 1930s to the 1960s, and the development and changes in literary and cultural criticism and in historiography during these decades is, it seems to me, one reason for the precarious relationship between “history” and “theory” in American Studies today.
Making the American Way: Moderne Theatres, Audiences, and The Film Industry 1929–1945
Authors: May Lary
Published: April 2011

Three years after the start of the Great Depression, and shortly after A Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency, Terry Ramsaye, editor of the motion picture industry's major trade journal, wrote an editorial entitled “New Deal, Superman and Today.” No doubt many readers thought the world had turned upside down. For years civic reformers had attacked the movies for incarnating the dangers of city life: consumption, class mixing, and a sexual revolution. Now Ramsaye assumed the critic's stance, seeing hard times as divine retribution for the industry's folly. Atop the editorial pulpit, he condemned the Hollywood producers as equal to the monopolists whose speculation and grandiose illusions brought about the stock market crash in 1929. Even more dangerous, film producers spread lavish ideals through the powerful medium of sound films, which were displayed in sumptuous theatres that corrupted public life. After three years of bankruptcies and theatre closings, Ramsaye saw a New Deal pointing the way toward business and cultural reform. Like an old-fashioned revivalist, he then exhorted Hollywood to shed the foreignstyled theatre and create models more in touch with national traditions, “more a part of the town and less something that was imposed by outside Supermen.”
American Psychiatry: An Ambivalent Specialty
Authors: Grob Gerald N.
Published: April 2011

American psychiatry, perhaps more so than other medical specialties, has had a troubled and ambivalent past. For much of its history its members were employed in public mental hospitals and thus lacked the autonomy and independence of their colleagues in private practice. More significantly, psychiatry was indissolubly linked with the fate of public institutions, whose image and reputation often left much to be desired.

The ambivalent character of psychiatry has given rise to two distinct and polar interpretations of its past. On the one side is a Whiggish scholarship that indentifies the evolution of psychiatry with scientific progress. The barriers to the creation of a psychiatric utopia result from the actions of malevolent or narrow-minded individuals and groups unwilling to provide appropriate resources. Furthermore, there is a presumption that psychiatric scientific and objective knowledge provided the basis for policies capable of resolving many of the troublesome problems associated with mental illness. On the other side are those who maintain that psychiatrists were involved with the social control of deviant and troublesome individuals. Mental hospitals, therefore, were simply institutions that confined and brutalized individuals whose only crime was their inability to conform to traditional behavioral norms. Embedded in this approach is the assumption that mental disease is a social rather than a medical category.
The Garden in the Machine: The Construction of Nature in Olmsted's Central Park
Authors: Zetzel Susanna S.
Published: April 2011

Jasper Cropsey's 1865 Painting,Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania, shows a pastoral scene. In the foreground on a rock are two rustic figures, one of whom stands gazing into the distance. Between the figures and the autumnal mountains and sky in the background, behind a lake, is a viaduct across which a locomotive is passing, its white plume of smoke streaming behind it. The presence of the railroad does not disrupt the tranquillity of the scene; the machine seems rather to enhance the pastoral atmosphere. Cropsey's painting is one of the last representations of a type frequent in the middle third of the 19th Century, in which rural calm and the artifacts of the new industrial age are juxtaposed. In some, such as George Inness'sThe Lackawanna Valley, the juxtaposition is uneasy; in many more, however, the effects of industrialism are comfortably accommodated within the framework of the pastoral world.
The Sexual Politics of Memory: The Vietnam Women's Memorial Project and “The Wall”
Authors: Marling Karal Ann , Wetenhall John
Published: April 2011

During the 1988 season, there was nothing unusual about seeing the Vietnam War on television. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam had appeared during the dinner hour, for the most part, in ninety-second spots showing green foliage and red dust whipped into a vivid frenzy for the camera by the blades of helicopters. But in the waning 1980s, a generation after the fall of Saigon, Vietnam moved into prime time. With vintage rock blaring on the sound track, major stars began to “hump the boonies” in picturesque jungle fatigues. Magnum P.I., aiming for a more serious dramatic tone in its final seasons, afflicted the titular hero with flashbacks to his POW days. On a nearby Hawaiian set, CBS's Tour of Duty patrol (led by Terence Knox, late of St. Elsewhere, on another network) simulated the look of news footage, circa 1968.
The Discourse of Modernism in the Age of Jefferson
Authors: Shuffelton Frank
Published: April 2011

The 18th Century began with a debate between the ancients and the moderns in which the proponents of classicism seemed to enjoy a temporary advantage, but it ended with two revolutions whose victors loudly proclaimed a radical disjunction with the past. The age obviously contains more than one site on which we might locate a discourse of modernism, but the differences between a battle of the books and guillotining a king suggest that we should expect to find more than one kind of modernism. Or better, we might expect to find a discourse of modernism rich with an unrecognized and unresolved problematics that has become somewhat clearer, both to the original speakers and to us, only in the light of subsequent texts and events. In the summer of 1776, for example, many Americans thought that the Declaration of Independence had resolved an ambiguous situation by breaking with the political conventions of the past, but scarcely a decade later they required another text to clarify and constitute relationships among themselves. That Constitution immediately called into play discourse about the possible futures it made possible, and the advent of the French Revolution two years later called for a total reevaluation of the American revolutionary project. Some participants in the national discourse thought the events in France exposed the fallacy of any revolution that sought to go beyond the limits of replacing an unjust regime and aspired to transform human nature and human culture, while others thought the French experience made more explicit and extended the genuine meaning of the American Revolution as a radical transformation of history. The discourse of the Declaration, that of the Constitution, and that of the response to the French Revolution suggest that the origination and establishment of the young United States might be helpfully understood as an exemplary episode of the modernism that transformed the postmedieval world.
Artistic Ideals and Commercial Practices: The Problem of Status for American Illustrators
Authors: Bogart Michele H.
Published: April 2011

American illustration occupies an anomalous position in art history. Its proponents celebrate its brief but glorious history, a “Golden Age”, lasting roughly from 1880 to 1930. It is a history with a definite, limited chronology, determined by issues of quality and stylistic development and focused on the achievements of a few individuals. Others, however, regard American illustration as a minor episode in the history of art; many consider it to be beneath consideration as serious art. Yet there has been little analysis of why American illustration is considered so marginal or of why to this day the question of whether illustration is a fine art has not been resolved.
Haunted by History: Louise Erdrich'sTracks
Authors: Brogan Kathleen
Published: April 2011

Part German-American and part Chippewa, Louise Erdrich has described the “mixed blood's” quest as a search for parentage, an attempt to understand self by interrogating genealogy. In the opening paragraphs ofTracks, a novel set on a North Dakota Chippewa reservation in the early 20th century, Erdrich reveals that the investigation of background necessarily entails an entrance into the world of ghosts. When the narrator Nanapush addresses the young woman listening to his unfolding account of her familial and tribal past as a “child of the invisible, the ones who disappeared,” he simultaneously connects an awareness of the ghostly presence of the dead with the discovery of identity and the creation of history. The narrator's conjuring of “invisible ancestors and “ghosts” (2) who inhabit tribal woods introduces haunting as Erdrich's central metaphor for the way the past shapes and is shaped by the present.
“Propaganda Must Be Painless”: Radio Entertainment and Government Propaganda During World War II
Authors: Horten Gerd
Published: April 2011

For a jittery radio industry concerned about the future of American broadcasting in the early months after America's entry into World War II, William B. Lewis came as a godsend. As head of the Domestic Radio Division of the Office of Facts and Figures (OFF), and later the Office of War Information (OWI, June 1942), Lewis, a former vicepresident of CBS, reassured the industry that the commercial structure of American radio would remain unchanged. In his first meeting with network executives and radio sponsors and advertisers in January 1942, he outlined his pragmatic approach to radio's war effort. As he argued, “radio is valuable only because of the enormous audiences it has created.” During wartime, his government office planned to use radio's popularity without unnecessarily disrupting radio structure and schedule: “Let's not forget that radio is primarily an entertainment medium, and must continue to be if it is … to deliver the large audiences we want to reach.”
Meyer Schapiro's Jewish Unconscious
Authors: Kuspit Donald
Published: April 2011

In 1994, Margaret Olin, reviewing the fourth volume of Meyer Schapiro's Selected Papers, observed that Schapiro “only seldom addressed [his] Jewish heritage”. Surely, she suggests, it must have influenced his practice of art history and criticism. But she is at a loss to say how. Olin notes that Schapiro's neglect of the issue is all the more conspicuous in view of the fact that his contemporaries, the Jewish-American art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, openly viewed modern art from a Jewish perspective. While it was one among several heuristic gambits, they often privileged it as the most revelatory: the perspective that could disclose what is most at stake or immanent in modern art.
Closing the ecotourism-conservation loop in the Peruvian Amazon
Authors: KIRKBY CHRISTOPHER A. , GIUDICE RENZO , DAY BRETT , TURNER KERRY , SOARES-FILHO BRITALDO SILVEIRA , OLIVEIRA-RODRIGUES HERMANN , YU DOUGLAS W.
Published: April 2011

Annual revenue flow to developing countries for ecotourism could be as large as US$ 29 billion, providing an enormous financial incentive against habitat loss and exploitation. However, surprisingly little quantitative evidence exists on the profitability of the rainforest ecotourism sector, which determines the incentive and capacity of the sector to engage in conservation. A Peruvian rainforest ecotourism cluster generated US$ 11.6 million in 2005. The after-tax profit margin was at least 14% and has increased with tourist volume. High profitability, coupled with new legislation, has allowed operators to put 54 358 ha of rainforest near the new Interoceánica Sur highway under private management and to engage in conservation actions. A previously published microeconomic contract model of protected-areas management identifies two key features of rainforest tourism that link ecotourism to conservation: (1) tourists demand an immersive experience, which incentivizes the acquisition of large amounts of forest cover, and (2) institutional reforms have increased the expected effectiveness of conservation actions. In Peru, these conditions appear to be met, so that profits from ecotourism can combine with new land tenure rights to create a governance structure within which the industry can act as an independently financed partner to the conservation community.
Standardising bioresource acknowledgement in papers
Authors: Hewitt Dr Robert
Published: April 2011

This presentation describes the speakers experience of gathering performance indicator data, for biobank assessment. Problems encountered in collecting data on the number of publications resulting from supported studies are described. These include difficulty in obtaining a complete record of all the resulting publications and also frequent misnaming of the biobank in the acknowledgment section of papers. The presentation also includes a discussion of approaches to providing credit to all the contributors in the biobanking effort.
Evaluating Modelling Approaches for Medical Image Annotations
Authors: Opitz Jasmin , Parsia Bijan , Sattler Ulrike
Published: April 2011

Information system designers face many challenges with regards to selecting appropriate semantic technologies and deciding on a modeling approach for their system. However, there is no clear methodology yet to evaluate “semantically enriched” information systems. In this paper we present a case study on different modeling approaches for annotating medical images and introduce a conceptual framework that can be used to analyze the fitness of information systems and help designers to spot the strengths and weaknesses of various modeling approaches as well as managing trade-os between modeling eort and their potential benefits.
The BioGRID Interaction Database
Authors: Nixon Julie , Tyers Mike , Reguly Teresa , Rust Jennifer , Winter Andrew , Livstone Michael , Breitkreutz Bobby-Joe , Stark Chris , Boucher Lorrie , Chatr-Aryamontri Andrew , Dolinski Kara , Oughtred Rose
Published: April 2011

The goal of the Biological General Repository for Interaction Datasets (BioGRID) (http://www.thebiogrid.org) is to archive and freely disseminate collections of genetic and protein interactions from major model organisms. BioGRID currently houses over 335,000 interactions curated from high-throughput datasets and individual focused studies found in the primary literature, as derived from some 23,000 publications. Complete coverage of the entire literature for both the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe has been achieved, resulting in the curation of over 246,000 interactions, and efforts to expand curation across multiple species are underway. Through collaborations with the Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium and the Linking Animal Models to Human Disease Initiative (LAMHDI), we are focusing our curation efforts across model organisms on particular areas of biology to enable insights into conserved networks and pathways that are relevant to human health.The BioGRID 3.0 web interface contains new search and display features that enable rapid queries across multiple data types and sources. A dedicated Interaction Management System (IMS) is used to track all curation and to prioritize publications across multiple curation projects. BioGRID data are incorporated in several model organism databases and other biological databases. The entire BioGRID interaction collection may be downloaded in multiple file formats, including PSI MI XML, and source code for BioGRID is freely available without any restrictions. This work is supported by NIH NCRR grant R01 RR024031 to MT and KD, and by grants from the CIHR and BBSRC to MT.
Population development of beet cyst nematodes and their damage potential to sugar beets under different temperature regimes
Authors: Vandenbossche Bart , Niere Björn , Vidal Stefan
Published: April 2011

Heterodera schachtii, the white beet cyst nematode, is considered as one of the most important nematode pests on sugar beet and is present in most sugar-beet growing areas. The yellow beet cyst nematode, Heterodera betae, is less prevalent but has also been found damaging beet crops. However, knowledge about the damage potential and population dynamics of the yellow beet cyst nematode is limited. The amount of damage inflicted by nematodes is dependent on different factors. An important factor influencing the sugar beet yield decline by beet cyst nematodes is the soil temperature. Relationships between soil temperature, H. schachtii population densities and sugar beet yields have been reported previously. Until present, most studies have been conducted under constant temperatures. Since several studies have demonstrated that the population dynamics of many species are sensitive to small differences in temperature (1-4°C), we subjected in our pot experiment sugar beet plants (cultivar Monza) to 2 gradually increasing temperature regimes in separate climate chambers. Temperatures in the two climate chambers were increased from 8°C to 22°C and 12°C to 26°C, respectively. Results on the influence of soil temperature on the Heterodera schachtii and Heterodera betae population densities and sugar beet growth parameters are presented
Isolation of new racemic sugar (D/L galacturonic acid) from leaves of Paederia foetida Linn.
Authors: Kumar Vikas , Pankajkumar S Yadav , Pratap Singh Udaya , Raj Bhatt Hans , Zaman Kamaruz , Ali Md.
Published: April 2011

New racemic sugars (D/L galacturonic acid) were isolate from the leaves of Paederia foetida Linn by the column chromatography. Identification of these isolated compound achieved by TLC, 1H-NMR, 13C-NMR, FTIR and Mass spectral data.
Allelic Frequency of ABO And Rh D Blood Group Among The Banjara Caste Population of Akola District, Maharashtra , India
Authors: Chavhan Aravind
Published: April 2011

The distribution of ABO blood groups and Rh (D) factor has been studied among the Banjara Caste population of Akola District (Maharashtra). The O, A, B, and AB blood group percentage were recorded as 27.64%, 22.91%, 37.45% and 12% respectively. The Rh negative incidence was recorded as 02.55%. The allele frequencies of O, A, B and AB groups in the combined data were found to be 0.5196, 0.2880, and 0.1924 respectively and Rh (D) positive allelic frequency was 0.8405.