bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Politics of American Broadcasting: Public Purposes and Private Interests
Authors: Williams Robert J.
Published: January 2009

Public regulation of broadcasting in the United States effectively began during the First World War. The history of such regulation, from its beginning to the present, is essentially a catalogue of governmental attempts to keep pace with extremely rapid technological and commercial developments. Thus the regulation of broadcasting should be viewed more as a series of empirical adjustments to changing circumstances and conditions than as expressing a coherent philosophy or theory of administration. But, in their attempts to deal pragmatically with abuses in the broadcasting industry, regulators found themselves evolving principles and standards which served to define and clarify the relationship between the government and the broadcasting interests. The purpose of this paper is to examine this relationship and to account for the gulf which has developed between the ‘ theory ’ and the practice of broadcast regulation.
Cooper and the American Revolution: The Non-Fiction
Authors: Ewart Mike
Published: January 2009

Revolution — both the American Revolution and the general idea of revolutionary change — is an important theme in Cooper's work. Several novels are set in, and deal with, the Revolutionary period; others approach the Revolution by indirection, offering redefinitions of the period and its significance as it were by analogy (I am thinking of novels such as The Waterwitch and The Red Rover which, while they are not set in the Revolutionary period, offer their subjects as images and judgments of the Revolution); still other novels treat the problem of revolution in Europe. The conditions for, and likely results of, revolutionary change in Europe are also discussed in the non-fiction; the American Revolution is continually redefined; and in the incomplete New York the desirability and possibility of a new Revolution are considered.
American Labour and European Immigrants in the Late Nineteenth Century
Authors: Lane A. T.
Published: January 2009

For American trade unions and labour organizations, immigration was a constant source of concern and anxiety during the second half of the nineteenth century. In their attempts to eliminate the more harmful consequences to their members of this flood of foreigners, they adopted and promoted a series of remedial measures, ranging from informal co-operation with the First International in the late 1860s, to attempts to strengthen the immigration law in the 1880s and early 1890s. None proved satisfactory. Pressure for further restriction built up and in 1897 the American Federation of Labor, to which most trade unions were affiliated, approved by a massive five-to-one majority a relatively new restrictive measure, the literacy test. This test was the central feature of an immigration bill sponsored by Senator Lodge, which had been approved by both houses of Congress in 1896 but vetoed by President Cleveland. The test was intended to discriminate against immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe where levels of literacy were low. For Lodge, who had opposed a general head tax because it was insufficiently discriminatory, the literacy test “ would tell exclusively on the most undesirable portions of immigration.”
Colour Symbolism in James Dickey's Deliverance
Authors: Monk Donald
Published: January 2009

Deliverance does not at first sight appear a poet's novel. The style is colloquial, low-key, middle-class Atlanta; there is no abundance of metaphor; the clearly indicated beginning, middle and end of the action appear in that order; and no one in it seems immediately to be overburdened in the way of sensibility. Images, when they occur, are sharply delineated but not apparently freighted with hidden significance, vide:
The Faded Dream: Inequality in Northern California in the 1860s and 1870s
Authors: Burchell Robert A.
Published: January 2009

Charles H. Randall arrived in San Francisco in the late summer of 1849. He came a convinced believer in the California Dream. His first letter home to his parents told them firmly that there appeared “no limits” to his “chances of making money”. In August 1850 William P. Dangerfield said much the same. “Proverbial ships” were about to dock. It did not matter that on arrival Dangerfield and his party had but two dollars each. Gold was everywhere, wealth for all close at hand.
“The plots of God are perfect”: Poe'sEurekaand American Creative Nihilism
Authors: Manning Susan
Published: January 2009

Your diddler is ingenious. He has constructiveness large. He understands plot. He invents and circumvents.

The attempt to bridge the chasm between multiplicity and unity is the oldest problem of philosophy, religion and science, but the flimsiest bridge of all is the human Concept, unless somewhere, within or beyond it, an energy not individual is hidden; and in that case the old question instantly reappears: – What is that Energy?
Utopianism, Scientific and Socialistic: Albert Chavannes and “Socioland”
Authors: Roper Jon
Published: January 2009

Albert Chavannes is not a name that is mentioned often in intellectual histories of the United States in the late nineteenth century. Few nowadays are familiar with the work of this émigré farmer and businessman who lived for most of his life in Knoxville, Tennessee. Yet his achievement was impressive. Between 1883 and 1885 he edited and published The Sociologist, which was possibly the first monthly journal of its kind in the U.S.A. Inspired by Edward Bellamy's utopian novel, Looking Backward (1888), and the nationalist movement which resulted from it, he also wrote utopian fiction in two books, The Future Commonwealth (1892) and its sequel In Brighter Climes (1895). In the first of these novels Chavannes synthesized Darwinian theories of evolution and secular notions of progress to suggest that scientific sociological inquiry could aid rational planning in the cause of perfecting society. In the sequel, he built a firmer bridge from this dynamic sociology to a form of naive Marxism. Chavannes's work thus colours with European ideas and influences that distinctive American utopian tradition which retains a nostalgic faith in the realization of Jefferson's millennial democratic vision.
A Note on Some Early Reviews of Tom Sawyer
Authors: Welland Dennis
Published: January 2009

It is well known that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in England in June 1876, almost six months before its appearance in the United States, and that the publication of the English edition was negotiated with Messrs Chatto and Windus by Moncure Daniel Conway. Clemens had given him a copy of the manuscript when Conway was returning to England after an American lecture tour at the beginning of 1876, and had authorized Conway to act on his behalf. Jacob Blanck records that the book was advertized in the Athenaeum of 10 June as ‘ready’, listed in the Publishers' Circular and Booksellers' Record on 16 June, and reviewed in the Athenaeum on 24 June.
Pound's Cantos: A Fascist Epic
Authors: Lauber John
Published: January 2009

It should no longer be necessary to speak with careful qualification of Ezra Pound's “ alleged ” fascism, or “ alleged ” anti-Semitism. The man who saw in Mussolini the greatest European leader since Napoleon (and believed that both were brought down by Jewish usurers), who in his wartime broadcasts praised Mein Kampf for its “ keen historical analysis ” and advised his hearers to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, who in those same broadcasts spoke of “ kikes, sheenies and oily people ” and referred to American “ Jewspapers,” who in his Cantos quotes approvingly a forged statement by Franklin warning Americans to keep out the Jews, who gave most of his energies during the last year and a half of the war to propagandizing for Mussolini's Salo Republic and was described by its officials as “ the collaborator Ezra Pound ” — that man can accurately be termed a fascist.
The Role of Eastern Europe in America's Containment Policy, 1945–1948
Authors: Garson Robert
Published: January 2009

Perhaps the greatest irony in the formative period of the Cold War is that the United States had to resign itself to the Soviets' domination of the very area in which it had at first chosen to challenge them, namely Eastern Europe. Yet America's ultimate acceptance of a Soviet hegemony in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary did not mean, as some histories of the Cold War imply in their omissions, that the status of these countries no longer concerned Washington. In the three years following World War II, American policy makers recognized that while they could not secure democracy or the “ open door ” in Eastern Europe, they could still develop policies for the area that could prove challenging to the Soviet hegemony. Their assumptions and expectations will be the subject of this article. It will show that the Truman administration believed that on developments in Eastern Europe depended the ultimate stability of the Soviet State itself. If the United States could arrest the growth of communism in the Soviet satellites, it could test the insistency of Moscow's power.
Idiomatic Language in Two Novels by Saul Bellow
Authors: Allen Michael
Published: January 2009

In The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King Bellow is, of course, using a fictional convention invented by Mark Twain. The language of Huckleberry Finn embodies every naïve, shrewd, awkward, or painfully honest attitude of a South-Western boy. Without forgetting this mimetic performance, however, we see that the words act directly on the sensibility of the reader in terms of his literary expectations. He is kept alert by fresh and vital rhythms and by idiomatic phrases which attract by their very incorrectness. His excitement is not primarily a response to the authenticity of the language he hears, although this is an important part of the effect. It is a response to a tension of style, involving the counter-pointing of the rhythms and incorrectnesses of a South-Western small town idiom against Victorian literary and subliterary language. Huck's relief on emerging from the Grangerford–Shepherdson feud is communicated by language which excludes, yet is aware of, fireside scenes in Dickens and the melting cadences of ‘Home, Sweet Home’: ‘I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.’
John Dos Passos and the Visual Arts
Authors: Spindler Michael
Published: January 2009

The remarkable originality of Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925) has been long recognized. From Sinclair Lewis's early appreciative essay onwards, the novel's significant advance over Dos Passos's three previous novels, its break with constricting convention, and its technical boldness have been repeatedly noted. Dos Passos's broad concern remains that of the traditional realist–the heavily itemized portraiture of urban social life–but in Manhattan Transfer that portraiture is energized and given fresh impact by new modes of description and new principles of narrative structure. These innovations have customarily been traced to the influence of modernist experimentation in the novel, and Dos Passos's debts to James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Marcel Proust have been established. Yet an explanation of Dos Passos's conception of form which confines itself to literary modernism alone must be regarded as incomplete. Dos Passos's heightened visual sense and the marked painterly and cinematic qualities of his work indicate that it is to the twentieth-century pioneers in the visual arts, as well as to the pioneers in fiction, that we must look for formative influences.

Dos Passos enjoyed a lifelong interest in the visual arts. After Harvard he went to Spain to study architecture, and at one time as a young man he was unsure whether to choose fine art or literature as his main avenue of creative expression.
The Inter-tribal Balance of Power on the Great Plains, 1760–1850
Authors: Calloway Colin G.
Published: January 2009

The culture of the equestrian nomads of the Great Plains was relatively short-lived. The more sedentary inhabitants of the plains — the Mandan, Arikara, Hidatsa, Pawnee, Wichita — had cultures stretching back hundreds of years. By contrast, that of the mounted hunting tribes — the Kiowa, Comanche, Crow, Blackfoot, Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux — developed rapidly with the acquisition of the horse, flourished for perhaps a century, then began its death throes under the pressure of white settlement and the catastrophic effects of European disease. The destruction of the buffalo herds removed the plains nomads' economic base, and their whole civilization finally collapsed in military defeat at the hands of the United States Army. Older, white-oriented studies of Indian history tended to concentrate on the years when this culture was in decline and to neglect earlier periods and developments. Such an approach is understandable, and to some extent inevitable, given the historical sources available, but it conveys an inaccurate impression of the situation on the Great Plains prior to white settlement. This paper considers the Plains Indians in their heyday and examines intertribal trade and warfare at a time when the spread of horses and guns was causing great upheavals in native power structures.

Non-Indian powers on the peripheries of the Great Plains tentatively penetrated the region and largely determined the flow of horses, trade, and guns, while their conflicts caused shifts in location, allegiance, and power among the tribes.
Avery Brundage and American Participation in the 1936 Olympic Games
Authors: Marvin Carolyn
Published: January 2009

Avery Brundage liked to say that revolutionaries were not bred on the playing field. That theme neatly expressed Brundage's distrust of any challenge to the established political and social order he cherished and garnished his speeches to countless audiences during the forty years in which he was the single most powerful figure in both the American and international Olympic movements, first as president of the American Olympic Committee (1929–1953), and then as president of the International Olympic Committee (1952–1972). Although the Iron Chancellor of amateur sport regarded himself as the last true defender of the strict separation of sport and politics, he also frequently insisted that more than the future of amateur sport was at stake in shielding sport from political manipulation. Upon sport for sport's sake depended the healthy psychological valuation of individual effort and excellence that was at the very heart of a democratic way of life. Moreover, fit bodies and competitive spirits were in Brundage's view essential for the continued success of American capitalism at home and abroad. Though he never acknowledged the political coloring of his vision of the Olympics, he regarded them as a kind of international mission for spreading democratic values in the continuing ideological battle between Communism and the American way of life.

Because it dramatizes victory, defeat, struggle against nature and other competitors, sport is a potent symbol constantly under pressure to lend its emotional power to other causes.
Winning Hearts and Minds: The 1st Casualty Press
Authors: Slocock Caroline
Published: January 2009

In the early 1970s, a number of Vietnam veterans sought publication for a collection of veterans' creative writing which they felt could make an important contribution to a political understanding of the war in Indochina. However, efforts to find a commercial publisher for their anthology met with no success. Their conviction that this literature both deserved and could find a substantial audience led these writers to establish their own independent publisher for the literature of Vietnam veterans, the 1st [sic] Casualty Press. In 1972, the Press published an anthology of veterans' poetry, Winning Hearts and Minds (or WHAM as it is often called), edited by Larry Rottmann, Jan Barry and Basil T. Paquet; it was followed a year later by Free Fire Zone, an anthology of short stories edited by Rottmann, Paquet and Wayne Karlin. As their epigraph, both volumes were given the quotation: “In war, truth is the first casualty.”
The American Research Library System in a Period of Constraint: Some Impressions
Authors: Willison I. R.
Published: January 2009

This article is the substance of a report, submitted to the Board of the British Library in 1974, on a short visit to research libraries in the United States made in October and November 1973. The author was at that time in charge of the United States Collection and Superintendent of the North Library in the British Library Reference Division (formerly the British Museum Library); the primary purpose of his visit was to see what implications for the British Library the American situation might seem to suggest. The opinions expressed are, of course, those of the author only, and not of the Board. The original report was prefaced by a detailed acknowledgement of the great hospitality, kindness and co-operation that the author received throughout his visit, and he is glad of this opportunity to express his gratitude publicly, though necessarily less specifically.
Wage Rates in Pittsburgh during the Depression of 1908
Authors: Shergold Peter R.
Published: January 2009

On 22 October 1907, the Knickerbocker Trust Company, the third largest trust company in New York City, closed its door and announced itself bankrupt. Panic rapidly spread. On the New York Stock Exchange chaos reigned as a loss of confidence, fed by insistent rumours of further imminent collapses, led to waves of selling, margin calls, and a rapid lowering of share prices. Heavy pressure developed upon the Trust Company of America and the Lincoln Trust Company: through the timely intervention of J. P. Morgan they survived, but lesser banking institutions throughout America, faced with long lines of depositors anxious to retrieve savings, were less fortunate. The supply of national bank notes proved insufficiently elastic to meet the massive, short-run increase in demand. Many banks, lacking adequate emergency reserves of notes and/or specie, were forced to ignore legal requirements and to suspend payments. It is true that the establishment of a New York trust company emergency fund prevented the chain of banking failures from spiralling disastrously onward, that the panic selling on the Stock Exchange was short-lived, and that the financial crises of late 1907 were confined largely to the cities – hence the manner in which the period has been written into American history as the ‘ rich man's panic ’. It is incorrect, however, to assert that its ‘ effects were not widespread ’.
Intelligibility inThe Pisan Cantos
Authors: Monk Donald
Published: January 2009

Commonly Ezra Pound'sCantoshave been attacked from two main directions. The first claims that the poem is interesting only at the level of technique, the second that the analysis of economics as the poem's thematic basis was either a mistaken choice of material or simply that Pound had inadequate mastery of this material. Both lines of attack agree in identifying a fatal imbalance between form and content which denies dieCantosan acceptable structure, but otherwise diverge: the first placing Pound as an aesthete-hedonist of his own rejected 1920 Mauberley model and the second presenting us with a mid-Western fascist yahoo. Neither proposition stands up to examination. Self-evidently dieCantosare a sensitive record and diagnosis of (and partial programme for) the civilization Pound felt was collapsing around him. The real difficulties confronting the reader lie in die arbitrary resorting to documentation, polyglot quotation and adaptation, the random shifts in time and place controlled by anecdotal maxims and categorizations operating as a formula for die healthy state. As a version of reality the poem does not initially seem to have significant correspondence with our own.
Whitehall, Washington and the Promotion of American Studies in Britain during World War Two
Authors: Reynolds David
Published: January 2009

On 18 March 1941 Duff Cooper, the British Minister of Information, sent a short but important letter to the President of the Board of Education. In it he discussed the lack of American studies in British schools and universities and called upon the Board urgently to consider ways of improving the situation. On the face of it, the moment was hardly propitious for minor educational reform. Britain was fighting on alone against Germany and Italy, the Battle of the Atlantic had worsened, and new setbacks were about to befall British armies in Libya, Greece and Crete. Yet Duff Cooper's suggestions were adopted with an alacrity that was remarkable by Whitehall standards. An ambitious programme to promote the study of America was quickly set in train for elementary and secondary schools, followed, though more slowly and less successfully, by action at the university level. Throughout, the Ministry of Information and the Board of Education enjoyed the enthusiastic support of other Government departments, particularly the Foreign Office, and of outside bodies including the BBC and Oxford University Press. Also closely involved were the American Ambassador, John Winant, several US Consuls around Britain and distinguished American historians such as Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager. These developments constitute an important and neglected episode in the story of American studies in Britain. They also offer an interesting sidelight on the place of cultural diplomacy in the foreign policies of the British and US Governments during World War Two.
Herbert Agar andFree America: A Jeffersonian Alternative to the New Deal
Authors: Leverette William E. , Shi David E.
Published: January 2009

In analyzing the thought of the 1930s, historians have usually concentrated on the reactions of various liberal and leftist critics of Roosevelt's New Deal reform programs. A few, however, have stressed that in opposition both to the New Deal's regulated welfare capitalism and to the left's many-faceted demands for a more openly radical program, the period also witnessed some significant theorizing that remained conservative and even reactionary. Considerable attention, for instance, has been given to the Nashville Agrarians who in November 1930 publishedI'll Take My Stand, their ardent manifesto of Southern cultural independence from the capitalistic, urban-industrial north. Yet it is not so well known that the Jeffersonian social theory they espoused was the basis for a broader, national effort to promote the decentralization of American government and industry and to foster greater economic self-sufficiency through a wider distribution of property. For ten years, 1937–1947, the journalFree Americaserved as an organ for this “decentralist” movement.
Malcolm Cowley's Path to William Faulkner
Authors: Schwartz Lawrence
Published: January 2009

In October 1938, Edmund Wilson advised Malcolm Cowley to get out of politics, both “revolutionary and literary alike… because what you're really practicing is not politics but literature…. ” Within two years, in the wake of the Hitler—Stalin pact and war, Cowley had withdrawn from radical politics. In early 1940, politically confused and dispirited, he wrote to Wilson:

I am left standing pretty much alone, in the air, unsupported, a situation that is much more uncomfortable for me than it would be for you. Since my normal instinct is toward cooperation. For the moment I want to get out of every God damned thing.

Cowley publicly announced his resignation from the League of American Writers in August 1940. He had helped to create the League in 1935 and had once been one of its officers. Deciding to avoid all further public political debates, he retreated to his Connecticut farmhouse. “Anyone who was as close to the radical movement as I was is going to be deeply shaken by breaking connection with it,” he explained to his close friend Kenneth Burke. “At that point the religious metaphor is absolutely accurate. You leave a church, and like a defrocked priest you can't think about anything else for a while.”
Republicans and Democrats as Social Types: Or, Notes toward an Ethnography of the Political Parties
Authors: Shafer Byron E.
Published: January 2009

When you shake his hand, do you already know? Before you ask whether she has done anything political, can you guess in which party she would have done it? The political parties, even American political parties, are different. They offer different issue positions, on economic policy, on foreign policy, on social policy. They represent different interests as well, different classes, different regions, different ethnic and racial groups. Yet there is something else about these parties, something quite apart from issues and interests, which makes the direct observer believe that he can tell the Republicans from the Democrats, even when he is at the country club, or at the corner bar.
‘ The Privilege of Making Laws ’; The Board of Trade, the Virginia Assembly and Legislative Review, 1748–1754
Authors: Morgan Gwenda
Published: January 2009

Far and away the most important activity of the Virginia assembly of 1748–9 was a wholesale revision of the colony's laws. The result of two years' hard labour by a special committee of leading members of the Council and House of Burgesses, this revision was the first in more than forty years and many laws were obsolete, inadequate or contradictory. Indeed, there had not been a printed edition of the laws for some sixteen years and the newer and more remote counties lacked copies of them. At the end of the session Lieutenant Governor Sir William Gooch congratulated the assembly on its accomplishment of a laborious but worthwhile task and submitted the revision to the Board of Trade in a routine fashion. The response of the home government was anything but routine, and the resulting series of events was to inaugurate the process by which, over the next quarter century, Virginia's confidence in the home government to deal sympathetically and responsibly with its problems was slowly eroded.
John Barth's Chimera and the Strictures of Reality
Authors: Mackenzie Ursula
Published: January 2009

Although many contemporary American novelists have rejected the straightforward representation of social reality in fiction, this rejection may occur for a number of reasons. In Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs it stems from a fear that the inanimate world is somehow superseding the animate, the sovereignty of the individual is being threatened. John Hawkes refers to the novelists ‘ who hope for more in the novel than trying to build brick walls of brick ’, and suggests that ‘ the true purpose of the novel is to assume a significant shape and to objectify the terrifying similarity between the unconscious desires of the solitary man and the disruptive needs of the visible world ’. Norman Mailer also remarks on this relationship in his essay ‘ The White Negro ’:

The second world war presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it. For if tens of millions were killed in concentration camps out of the inexorable agonies and contractions of superstates founded upon the always insoluble contradictions of injustice, one was then obliged also to see that no matter how crippled and perverted an image of man was the society he had created, it was nonetheless his creation, his collective creation (at least his collective creation from the past) and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?
Edith Wharton's American Beauty Rose
Authors: McIlvaine Robert
Published: January 2009

Edith Wharton frequently likens Lily Bart, the heroine of The House of Mirth (1905), to a flower. Her name is ‘Lily’; when she kisses Lawrence Selden ‘her face turned to him with the soft motion of a flower’ in her privileged station in life she is an ‘orchid basking in its artificially created atmosphere’; and, in sum, she is‘ the fine flower and complete expression ’ of the ideals of beauty and social grace held by the old New York aristocracy. Most significant, however, is Mrs Wharton's use of rose imagery when describing Lily. For example, when Lily came to her friend Gerty Farish after having narrowly escaped the unwelcome advances of Gus Trenor, Gerty reflected that everything about Lily was ‘warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose’. Indeed, the entire society of which Lily is ‘the fine flower’ diffuses a ‘rosy glow’. Those who stroll these ‘rosy shores of pleasure’, such as Judy Trenor, have complexions of ‘rosy blondness’. The fastest rising star in the economic and social firmament is Simon Rosedale, ‘a plump, rosy man of the blond Jewish type …’
The Ivory Tower : The Cessation of Concern
Authors: Bellringer Alan W.
Published: January 2009

Henry James's The Ivory Tower (1917) has suffered a similar fate to that of other incomplete last novels; most critical discussion has centred on the way it would have ended, taking into account resemblances with earlier works. This line of enquiry has not been very profitable; James's late style is too complex and rich to tempt anyone to continue The Ivory Tower in the way that ‘ Another Lady ’ has recently gone on with Sanditon. In any case one cannot legitimately say one wishes that James had lived to finish The Ivory Tower, since in fact he lived on without doing so; he had enough time to complete it if he had wanted. His general intentions were clear as we know from the ample notes he left. Why then did James give up? He stopped with the outbreak of the First World War, no doubt on the day war broke out. The really interesting critical question with regard to The Ivory Tower is: What is there in the novel, in its design as well as in its completed opening, which James found contradicted by war? James's imagination found the creative act of writing The Ivory Tower incompatible with war-time experience. He turned to other work, such as The Sense of the Past.
Time, Communications and Society: The English Atlantic, 1702
Authors: Steele I. K.
Published: January 2009

After the firm establishment of the English Atlantic colonies, and before the emergence of ‘the American identity’, these provinces participated with the metropolis in a political and economic ‘empire’. If ‘empire’ might be challenged as conveying too much political or economic meaning, it might also be challenged as conveying too little social meaning. Was the English Atlantic at the opening of the eighteenth century a civilization, a culture, a society, or a community? Though these terms are maddeningly ill-defined and somewhat interchangeable, they are suggested here as a scale of increasing social cohesiveness, from a relationship that is primarily inherited and parallel (civilization, culture) to a connexion that is primarily based upon the sharing of current ideas, institutions and interests (society, community). One essential pre-requisite for such sharing is a network of communications judged adequate by the people using it.
Emma Marshall and Longfellow: Some Additions to Hilen's Letters
Authors: Smith C. N.
Published: January 2009

In the Introduction to the first volume of The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press, 1966– ), Andrew Hilen recognizes that his edition can make no claim to completeness: there are still likely to come to light some of the early letters known to have been written but which he has been unable to trace. Though he considers it improbable that the rinding of lost correspondence will necessitate any fundamental reassessment of the poet's character or of his literary work, Hilen thinks it ‘nevertheless obvious that many of these unrecovered letters contained information that would interest both Longfellow's biographer and the critic of his poetry’ (pp. 4–5). These comments are perfectly applicable to the letters from Longfellow to Mrs Emma Marshall, nee Martin, which are to be found in Beatrice Marshall's memorial of her mother, Emma Marshall, a biographical sketch (London, Seeley & Co., 1900).
The Great Gatsby: Glamor on the Turn
Authors: Godden Richard
Published: January 2009

“I'll tell you God's truth.” His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. “I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West — all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.”

He looked at me sideways — and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn't something a little sinister about him, after all.

“What part of the Middle West? ” I inquired casually.

“San Francisco.”

“I see.”

“My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.”

His voice was solemn, as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a clan still haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg, but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.

Does Gatsby know where San Francisco is? If he does, his response is an odd gesture. “Epic theatre is gestural,” wrote Walter Benjamin of Brecht. Gatsby, too, is gestural: as Nick Carraway would have it, “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him” (p. 2). Except that Gatsby's gestures are broken, and by Gatsby himself. To “tell … God's truth” he raises his right hand — isn't that taking the truth a little too seriously? When speaking of loss he pauses in the right place; indeed, in a place so right that the addendum “all dead now” might just be bad acting, not lying. The creator of a criminal network operating Richard Godden is Lecturer in American Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of Keele, Keele, Staffs. ST5 5BG, England.
The Jerry McHenry Rescue and the Growth of Northern Antislavery Sentiment during the 1850s
Authors: Sokolow Jayme A.
Published: January 2009

In his second annual message to the Congress on 2 December 1851, President Millard Fillmore defended his administration's enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. Although “lawless and violent mobs” had resisted federal officers trying to enforce the statute, he happily noted that resistance was sporadic and ineffectual:

I congratulate you and the country upon the general acquiescence in these measures of peace which has been exhibited in all parts of the Republic … [T]he spirit of reconciliation which has been manifested in regard to them [the 1850 compromise measures] in all parts of the country has removed doubts and uncertainties in the minds of thousands of good men concerning the duration of our popular institutions and given renewed assurance that our liberty and our Union may subsist together for the benefit of this and succceding generations.

Fillmore also received support from both the Democrats and Whigs; at their national conventions in 1852 they pledged to honor the Compromise of 1850 and earnestly hoped that sectional differences would wane.
Fitzgerald: the Tissue of Style
Authors: Monk Donald
Published: January 2009

Printed as poetry this representative passage from Fitzgerald's first novel differs from the post-1915 debasement of Imagism (what Ezra Pound called ‘Amygism’) in only two significant aspects: it has a higher incidence of rhyme and is, if possible, even more devoid of content. Its voice defines the novel's protagonist, Amory Blaine, much more memorably than do his character and actions. Derived from the vaguely erotic style Pater developed in Marius the Epicurean (1885) and popularized by Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), this verbal swoon, made over into a Princeton accent, places Fitzgerald in the Romantic Decadence. Its derivative quality should not, however, blind us to the work it entailed for Fitzgerald, accumulating these inter-echoes during the re-writings of the novel.
An Old Philosopher in Rome: George Santayana and his Visitors
Authors: Armstrong T. D.
Published: January 2009

Rome after the Second World War presented something of an anomaly. Of all the traditional capitals of European civilization it was the least affected by the conflict. Because of the Pope's presence, it had not been bombed, and it had escaped the heavy fighting in the campaigns to the south. Indeed, so easily was it taken that one film was to show the Eternal City captured by a single jeep. Italy was also faster to recover than any of the other combatants. American money flooded into the country, and political life was quickly under way again. All this made it a good place for visitors, a relative bright spot amidst a shattered landscape. Harold Acton, the English historian who went there in 1948, remarked that “After the First World War American writers and artists had migrated to Paris: now they pitched upon Rome.” Among those who visited Rome or lived there for a period after the war were Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Frederic Prokosch, Daniel Cory, Alfred Kazin, Samuel Barber, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick (slightly later), as well as Acton himself and a host of less well-known figures. Many were entertained by Lawrence and Babel Roberts, under whose influence “the Roman Academy became an international rendezvous for artists and intellectuals.” While they were there, a large proportion of these writers made a pilgrimage to the Convent of the Blue Sisters, where since 1941 George Santayana had been living in a single room.
The Status of Politics 1909–1919: The New Republic, Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks
Authors: Bourke Paul F.
Published: January 2009

We have learned recently from the work of a number of historians that the process of national mobilisation and the erection of unprecedented controls over industry during World War I offered to important groups of American liberals models for permanent collectivist reform and institutional renewal. The ease with which such controls were dismantled ought not to obscure the remarkable attraction they appeared to have in 1917 and 1918. It is clear that agencies such as the War Industries Board, the Railroad Administration, the War Labor Board, the Inquiry, and the National Board for Historical Service attracted not only the wartime enthusiasm of intellectuals; these agencies were seen to contain potential for peacetime use.
That Ground Called Quiddism: John Randolph's War with the Jefferson Administration
Authors: Carson David A.
Published: January 2009

When Thomas Jefferson said in his 1801 Inaugural Address, “We are all republicans: we are all federalists,” he was attempting to reconcile the differences between the two political parties and make a bid for Federalist support. He could not have realized then that one of the greatest threats to political achievement in his second administration would not come from friction between the established parties, but from one individual who styled himself and his small circle of followers as a “third something” between Republicans and Federalists. During Jefferson's first term certain issues arose which caused a growing dissatisfaction with administration policies among a few party members. Chief among that small, disaffected faction (commonly called the “Tertium Quids” because they claimed to be “third something”) was John Randolph of Roanoke – one of the most capable and consistent representatives who ever took the oath of office. Although Randolph's announcement of his willingness to meet men on that ground called quiddism came in 1806 during debates on non-importation of goods from Great Britain, his personal war with Jefferson had already evolved through a series of issues which emphasized their emerging differences on how political theory, purity and principle should be put into practice. By early 1806 Randolph's break with the administration was inevitable and reconciliation impossible.
“I Trust You Will Detect My Intention”: The Strange Case of Watch and Ward
Authors: Traub Lindsey
Published: January 2009

At the opening of a magnificent career in fiction, Henry James's first novel, Watch and Ward, has appeared gauche, bizarre and unaccountable. With its overtones of incest and paedophilia, it is hard to imagine what James can have been thinking of. Yet he wrote to Charles Eliot Norton, whose opinion he respected, apparently assuming that Norton would understand what he was trying to do. Perhaps a text offered with such optimism is not quite the anomaly it seems at first sight: it may in fact have been conceived within a context and in response to circumstances clear to its author but long since obscured.
The Discipline of Fact/The Freedom of Fiction?
Authors: King Richard
Published: January 2009

At a recent conference of historians, one of the few participants with a literary background confessed that he was surprised to hear such frequent and confident reference to “facts.” His reaction reflects the fact that contemporary literary theorists have become as wary of speaking of facts, (without inverted commas) as avant-garde theologians are of adverting to “God.” Indeed to critical theorists, most historians seem theoretical dolts; unlike Molière's famous character, they don't even realize they are talking (bad) theory all the time. Moreover to a novelist such as Gore Vidal, historians seem pettifoggers and without an imaginative bone in their body. Whatever else they are confident of, novelists automatically assume that they can do justice to the past with more verve and authenticity than historians.
Limited Engagement: The Quiet American as History
Authors: Whitfield Stephen J.
Published: January 2009

Among the most intensely absorbed viewers of John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) was Adolf Hitler, who knew almost nothing of the United States but who observed how degenerate the “Okies” had become. He believed that immigration had already mongrelized the general populace and, since even farmers of Anglo-Saxon stock had succumbed to racial disintegration, the Americans would be pushovers for the Wehrmacht. This particular movie-goer failed to notice the resilience and endurance also flickering on the screen; and it would be foolish to claim that his decision to declare war on the United States was based only upon a misinterpretation of The Grapes of Wrath (which he watched several times). But since no treaty obligation compelled the Third Reich to make war, after Pearl Harbor, upon an industrial power of which the Führer was so ignorant, any analysis of his motives must remain speculative. It may have been a mad urge for apocalyptic destructiveness (and self-destructiveness), springing from subterranean depths that the psychobiographer can fathom more readily than the military or diplomatic historian. Perhaps Hitler's miscalculation was not utterly irrational: with Holland's surrender in 1940, its place as the world's nineteenth largest army was ceded to the Americans.
Manhattan Melodrama's “Art of the Weak”: Telling History from the Other Side in the 1930s Talking Gangster Film
Authors: Munby Jonathan
Published: January 2009

Ever since gangsters first appeared on the American screen (officially with D. W. Griffith's Musketeers of Pig Alley, in 1912) they have been involved in a prolonged battle with the forces of “legitimate” culture. Having fought their fights from the wrong side of the street gangsters have continually drawn attention to the line which separates legitimate from illegitimate Americans. This has raised problems in accounting for the gangster genre's significance. In stigmatizing the ethnic urban poor as criminal, the gangster genre betrays its origins in a nativist discourse which sought to cast “hyphenated” Americans as “un-American” and in need of “ Americanization. ” Yet, as perhaps the most powerful vehicle for the nationalization and popularization of ethnic urban American life, the gangster genre overturned many aspects of its iniquitous origin, playing an important part in the re-writing of American history from the perspective (and, as I shall demonstrate, quite literally in the voice) of the ethnic urban lower class.

This contradiction is characteristic of the dynamic and changing role American popular culture artifacts play in the mediation of the nation's history. Regardless of the poetic and ideological licence gangster fictions take with the very real socio-historical problems of the ethnic urban poor, the central conflict which informs these narratives remains the question of social, economic, and cultural exclusion.
Decadence and Disquiet: Recent American Fiction and the ComingFin de Siècle
Authors: Annesley James
Published: January 2009

Contemporary culture seems to be increasingly preoccupied with the millennium. “Endism,” the cult of the end, casts a familiar shadow. As memories of the cold war fade and the threat of nuclear apocalypse recedes, concerns about the environment and the disturbing activities of millenarian sects provide new sources of anxiety. Academic texts, like Robert Sinai'sThe Decadence of the Modern World(1978) and Francis Fukuyama'sThe End of History and the Last Man(1992), echo this apocalyptic atmosphere. One of the most striking versions of the endist thesis is offered by Alain Mine who, inLe Nouveau Moyen Âge(1993), suggests that modernity's dream of a “clean, well-lighted place” is being supplanted by a new medievalism, a period characterised by doubt, fear and superstition. This entropic zeigeist is sustained by a series of obvious comparisons between the anxieties of the contemporary period and those of the lastfin de siècle. Elaine Showalter'sSexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècledetails some of the points of comparison and produces an argument which identifies a strong image of the past in her vision of the present.
What Fame Is: Bukowski's Exploration of Self
Authors: Madigan Andrew J.
Published: January 2009

Although this quote reads like a description of Hollywood and its celluloid environs, the author is reviewing Run With the Hunted: A. Charles Bukowski Reader, a comprehensive anthology of the poet-novelist's work. From Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail (1960), his first full-length collection of poetry, to Pulp, published shortly after his death in 1994, Bukowski chronicled the humorous, lyric, impoverished lives of prostitutes, drinkers, bums, writers, and miscreants of every description. His tales of squalor which document the starving and passionate Angeleno writer are in large measure inspired by John Fante.

Los Angeles is Buk territory. He lived in and wrote about Central Los Angeles for most of his seventy-three years. L.A. is a place where, in the realm beyond fiction, people migrate in pursuit of dreams. One category of migrant dream-seeker is the writer. Whether he/she is a neophyte seeking fortune as a screenwriter or an aging, established author reviving an endangered career, the writer confronts an industry whose interests and intents are tangential to his/her own.