bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Literary Style as Political Metaphor in Modern Chivalry
Authors: Grant Barry K.
Published: March 2011

The first volumes of Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry, appear- ing only four years after the ratification of the Constitution, reveal from the start a remarkable panorama of life in the exuberant democracy of the early American frontier. Written over a time-span of twenty-three years,1 Modern Chivalry amasses such a wealth of contemporary detail that it has been regarded primarily as a period piece, an encyclopedia of antique Americana. And it is for this reason that few critics have given substantial attention to it. Although critics agree that the book's chief political themes concern a search for ways to control self-seeking human nature, which is exacerbated in a democracy, it is most often summarily described as a genial satire upon democratic excesses — Brackenridge, after all, had composed "The Rising Glory of America" with Philip Freneau, had pre- sented fiery patriotic sermons as chaplain in the Revolutionary Army under Washington, and had supported at first the French Revolution. For example, William L. Nance argues that Brackenridge is a staunch and unflinching defender of democracy who writes in Modern Chivalry "an intelligent treatise on practical democracy";2 Claude M. Newlin declares that Brackenridge "never swerved from his position as a sincere and ardent democrat,"3 and that "his satire was so good natured, so lacking in fundamental cynicism";4 for Mary Mattfield, Brackenridge "never loses his perspective or his ultimate faith in the democratic process";5 and Alexander Cowie similarly asserts that "humor gleams from almost every page of Modern Chivalry."6
Anthropologists, Novelists and Indian Sacred Material
Authors: Brumble III H. David
Published: March 2011

One of the threads that binds the bundle we are coming to call American Indian Literature is that of the Indian caught between two cultures; there are, to name but a few, Abel in Momaday's House Made of Dawn, Martiniano in Waters' The Man Who Killed the Deer, S. B. in Radin's Autobio- graphy of a Winnebago Indian, and, in a muted way, the unnamed protagonist of Welch's Winter in the Blood. Probably this preoccupation with personal identity and the impingements of culture is one of the major reasons for the rising popularity of American Indian books in a country which is stirring its melting pot ever more gingerly. But as the protagonists of such books writhe about in the nets cultures weave, they might be comforted to know that their creators share some of their problems—that the nets are there for authors as well as for heroes.
Religion and American Culture
Authors: Bumsted J. M.
Published: March 2011

Catherine L. Albanese. Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976. 274 + xiv pp. Clifford E. Clark, Jr. Henry Ward Beecher: Spokesman for a Middle-Class America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. 288 pp. Ann Douglas. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Avon Books, 1977. 504 + viii pp. Robert T. Handy. A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. 471 + ix pp. William G. McLoughlin. Revivals, Awakenings and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. 239 + xv pp. Once upon a time—and it was not so very long ago—religious history in America was in the hands of the denominational chroniclers and the filiopietistic biographers. These men and women told the story of the upward and onward march of American denominational religion as settlement expanded and population grew, and recorded the obstacles surmounted and problems faced by the clerical leaders of the various religious groups. Religious history, like most American history, was told largely in progressive terms, but it was in a distinctly separate compartment from secular history. As the tale of American religion became less clearly one of triumphant growth, and as historical study became more sophisticated, religious history was gradually integrated into the larger historical picture, usually as an aspect of American social and cultural development. The key innovators in this integration were the scholars of New England Puritanism —Kenneth Murdoch, Samuel Eliot Morison, and especially Perry Miller—who reacted against both the clerical monopoly of religious development and the secular hostility of historians like James Truslow Adams to the close relationship of church and state in early New England history. Over the past forty years, the history of religion has become a central feature of American social and cultural history, but until recently, only a part of the story.
New England Religion: Unitaranscendentalism and Presbygationalism
Authors: Ostrander Gilman M.
Published: March 2011

Catherine L. Albanese. Transcendental Religion and the New America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977. 210 + xxii pp. Marie Caskey. Chariot of Fire: Religion and the Beecher Family. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. Yale Historical Publications: Miscellany No. 117. 442 + xv pp. One way to render intelligible the religious history of nineteenth-century New England is to present it as literary Unitarians and Transcendentalists saw it, or wished to see it. This approach eliminates the Catholic Church from consideration, except to mention the errant conduct of Orestes Brown- son and Isaac Hecker. It eliminates the Methodists and Baptists, together with numerous other sects, except as they were noticed and described by Emerson and other literate observers. The Episcopal Church remains as a dignified Arminian haven from Calvinist onslaughts but divested of the sense of mission that the Anglican Church had possessed in colonial and even Federal times.
Two Faces of Loyalism
Authors: Tucker Bruce
Published: March 2011

John E. Ferling. The Loyalist Mind: Joseph Galloway and the American Revolution. Pennsylvania Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977. 157 pp. Anne Y. Zimmer. Jonathan Boucher: Loyalist in Exile. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978. 395 pp. "The principles and ways of thinking of Whigs and Tories, or of Republicans and Loyalists," Jonathan Boucher wrote in his Reminiscences of an American Loyalist, "are hardly more different than are their tempers."1 Despite the helpful simplicity of Boucher's assessment, historians have not generally succeeded in integrating the Loyalist experience with the history of the American Revolution. Loyalists, it seems, did not originate in one geographical area, class or religious denomination, nor did they share a cohesive political ideology. Many Americans, moreover, shifted their sym- pathies according to the success or failure of the British program of pacifi- cation in local communities. As many as a half million colonists preferred the British cause, John Shy estimates, and yet only a small fraction of these emigrated or expressed public dissent. Most of those who remained were able to relocate themselves in the political life of the Republic without difficulty.2 Historians have not been able to surmount these obstacles to explain precisely how Loyalists perceived and experienced the Revolution.
The American War of Interdependence: Foreign Policies for the 1980's
Authors: Wooley Wesley T.
Published: March 2011

Stanley Hoffman. Primacy or World Order: American Foreign Policy since the Cold War. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978. 333 + xv pp. Stanley Hoffmann, Professor of Government and Chairman of Harvard's Center for European Studies, has for many years been a harsh critic of American diplomacy, granting little mercy to statesmen who must constantly respond without benefit of hindsight to the confusing and often conflicting pressures of daily events. Now, in Primacy or World Order, Hoffmann supplements his criticisms of past policies with a sophisticated analysis of the contemporary nation-state system, and, based upon that analysis, he offers a set of broad guidelines for successful American statesmanship during the 1980's. Most of the essay is excellently argued, although the final section is seriously flawed by the author's failure to offer policymakers much practical advice. Hoffmann proves to be far better at description and analysis than at prescribing policies that meet his own demanding criteria of theo- retical purity.
The American Origins of the Temperance Movement in Ontario, 1828-1850
Authors: Barron F. L.
Published: March 2011

In 1828, the first temperance society in "Old Ontario" was organized in Bastard Township in the Johnstown District; soon after, societies were formed at Beverly, Ancaster and Stoney Creek. Then, with astonishing swiftness, temperance associations mushroomed into existence all across the province, so much so that by 1832 the corresponding secretary of the Montreal Temperance Society, R. D. Wadsworth, was able to report the existence of about 100 societies in Upper Canada.1 A decade later, it was estimated that the province had spawned upwards of 386 societies with a membership of perhaps 60,000.2
Rhetoric in the Wilderness
Authors: Morton Richard
Published: March 2011

Sacvan Bercovitch. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. 240 + xvi pp. Robert Daly. God's Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. 253 +ix pp. Cecilia Tichi. New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. 290 + xii pp. The dominance of seventeenth-century Massachusetts in the American mind is still unchallenged. It is true that modern scholarship—scholarship since Perry Miller, that is—has largely replaced the simplistic emotional attachment with serious debate over theology, politics and culture, so that Hawthorne and The Crucible (the old hard-line of interpretation) may seem quainter than Increase Mather or The Day of Doom. These three excellent and important books can, in their different ways, survey aspects of Puritan rhetoric and letters with an urbanity that would have been impossible thirty years ago. But even in these works something of the ambivalent passion, the love-hate relationship, remains. Longfellow placed the tale of John Alden and Priscilla in a rebirth of the "pastoral ages, Fresh with the youth of the world," but his New England Tragedies show the "errors of an age long passed away," which is happily buried "Beneath the fresher writing of today." In the popular tradition, there are still twin images coexisting: the grim zealot and the universal forefather moved by the same passions as his modern heirs. The first remains more potent, but evidences of the second are more eagerly sought after. So Robert Daly can speculate (p. 130) that the poet Michael Wigglesworth "leapt all to nimbly from the grief to the spiritual profit it afforded him," while allowing that "such a reaction.. .would be both uncharitable and beside the point." Cecelia Tichi observes that Edward Johnson has "personally human sympathies" and "parental compassion," ! "But Gortonist and other heresies inimical to a saintly New England provoke Johnson's most vituperative, illiberal language. 'Heale not lightly the wounds that Wolves make, 'warns his Christian herald, lest from their festering teeth a Gangrin make"' (pp. 40-41). Sacvan Bercovitch speaks of New England sermons: "Not that they minimised the threat of divine retribution; on the contrary, they asserted it with a ferocity unparalleled in the European pulpit, But they qualified it in a way that turned threat into celebration" (p. 8). Bercovitch's strong language, Tichi's irony, Daly's assumption that a literary critic needs charitably to judge the emotional reactions of a long-dead poet, all testify to the remarkable vitality of the Puritan image, ambiguous perhaps, but not to be taken lightly.
The Making of the Roosevelt Coalition: Some Reconsiderations
Authors: Braeman John
Published: March 2011

Kristi Andersen. The Creation of a Democratic Majority 1928-1936. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979. 160 + xv pp. Barbara Blumberg. The New Deal and the Unemployed: The View from New York City. Lewisburg, Pa., and London: Buckneii University Press and Associated University Presses, 1979. 332 pp. Sidney Fine. Frank Murphy: The Detroit Years. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975. 608 + ix pp. Sidney Fine. Frank Murphy: The New Deal Years. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979. 708 + xii pp. John W. Jeffries. Testing the Roosevelt Coalition: Connecticut Society and Politics in the Era of World War II. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979. 312 + xiv pp. Martha H. Swain. Pat Harrison: The New Deal Years. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978. 316 + ix pp. The New Deal remains not only a major topic for research among students of American history, but, even more than three decades after Roosevelt's death, a subject of continuing historiographical controversy. One focal point of this controversy involves its socio-economic aspect. The contemporary conservative indictment has found few exponents among later historians.1 Rather the historiographical controversy has largely pitted liberals against radicals—those who praise the New Deal for successfully relieving distress, disciplining business and humanizing the industrial order versus those who fault the Roosevelt administration for failing to transform the basic structure of socio-economic power in the United States.2
James Agee and the Furious Angel
Authors: Klug Michael A.
Published: March 2011

The modern American novelist is usually filled with democratic sympathy for ordinary humanity. At the same time he is caught in a fundamental conflict with it. This conflict often takes the form of a kind of philosophical allegory. Over and over in American fiction the artist is a symbol of the mind or imagination striving for spiritual being, while the ordinary man appears as the embodiment of chaos, entropy, death—all those destructive aspects of reality that the artist must fight against or rise above if he is to achieve his special fate. This tendency of American novelists to draw a sharp opposition between the artist as romantic idealist and the ordinary man as the incarnation of chaos has, of course, deep moral consequences. For one thing it involves a perversion of the traditional idea of the soul. The spirit is debased and becomes "identity." It is no longer the given or inherent meaning which all men possess, but must be achieved as the object of a quest which only the artist or visionary can hope to complete. As the personification of chaos, the ordinary man of modern American fiction is a dead soul. He cannot order his life through dreams or ideals; he does not even have a being separate from his environment with which to resist or despise it. Paradoxically, while he is a product of his world, he has no real connection with it but simply floats around in the arbitrary soup of finite things. With the best of intentions, the American novelists of our century have set out to know the ordinary man, stripped of any idealization or mystification. The results have not been altogether in the service of truth. The ordinary man is still "unknown," but his mystery has been killed. What remains is chaos, the corpse of mystery.
Beating Plows into Bond Shares
Authors: Ingham John N.
Published: March 2011

Gabor S. Boritt. Lincoln and the Economics of the .American Dream. Memphis, Term.: Memphis State University Press, 1978.420 + xxi pp. John A. James. Money and Capital Markets in Postbellum America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978.293 + xv pp. Jay R. Mandle. The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern Plantation after the Civil War. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978.144 + xvi pp. Claude F. Oubre. Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedman's Bureau and Black Land Ownership. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1978,212 + xvii pp. These four books cover a very broad spectrum of American life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, within that expanse there is a strong thread of continuity—the economic and social transformation of America in the second half of the nineteenth century and its subsequent impact upon people and institutions. These books investigate the economic thoughts and actions of Abraham Lincoln and his visions for a modernizing and industrializing America which he hoped would bring equality and economic success to all. They search for the roots of contemporary black poverty in the Southern plantation system after the Civil War and examine in detail the reasons for and consequences of the failure of the federal government to provide land for ex-slaves during Reconstruction. Finally, they analyze the development of a national banking system and capital markets in the late nineteenth century. Because Abraham Lincoln's first recorded speech in 1837 and his first political pamphlet in 1840 dealt with the banking issue, and further, because his later career was identified with the cause of the slave and ex-slave, the thematic circle is completed.
Law in Early America
Authors: Crowley John E.
Published: March 2011

Gerard W. Gawalt. The Promise of Power: The Emergence of the Legal Profession in Massachusetts, 1760-1840. West port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. 254 + x pp. Leo Herskowitz and Milton M. Klein, eds. Courts and Law in Early New York: Selected Essays. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennicat Press, 1978. 155 pp. Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau. Federal Courts in the Early Republic: Kentucky 1789-1816. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 234+ ix pp. Until a generation ago most American legal history had preoccupations appropriate to its close association with the curriculum of law schools. Pro- fessional legal history was the chronicling of substantive changes in the law, the discovery of arcane legal precedent, the criticism on historicist grounds of presumed analogies, the institutional history of judicial procedures and responsibilities, and the analysis of constitutional doctrine. Legal historians usually discouraged other historians from taking an interest in these studies, but fell into two camps in doing so. Some advised that legal history was too anachronistically whiggish and too professionally antiquarian to be of much importance to "real" historians; others warned historians, as laymen, to have decent and prudent modesty and not to venture onto professional turf.
Varieties of International History
Authors: McDermott John
Published: March 2011

Hans W. Gatzke. Germany and the United States: "A Special Relationship "? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980,314 + xii pp. Phyllis Keller. States of Belonging: German-American Intellectuals and the First World War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. 324 pp. Melvyn E Leffler. The Elusive Quest: America's Pursuit of European Stability and French Security 1919-1933. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. 409 + xvi pp. David Strauss. Menace in the West: The Rise of French Anti-Americanism in Modern Times. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 197B. 317 + xxii pp. Europeans have viewed the United States from its inception with profound ambivalence. Some, like Goethe, saw it as a model embodying the best hope for the future of mankind; others, like Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm II, saw it as the future seat of world power against which Europe would have to combine in one way or another. Yet others, like de Tocqueville, while con- vinced that the United States held the key to the future, were distressed by the materalistic, conformist democracy they found and consequently exhi- bited a sense of cultural superiority toward the new world. Meantime, the Monroe Doctrine notwithstanding, America made no real diplomatic or political impact upon Europe until the end of the ninteenth century, when the Republic emerged as the worlds' leading industrial power and, as a result of its war with Spain, an imperial and naval power to be reckoned with. At a time European tensions were leading toward war, Great Britain was the first power to seek accommodation with the United States,1 a course of action which contributed to America's disposition in Britain's favor in 1914.
Lowell's "Heartbreaking" Verse Autobiography
Authors: Willis Garry
Published: March 2011

Rolando Anzilotti, ed. Robert Lowell: A Tribute. Pisa: Nistri-Lischi Editori, 1979. 184 pp. Steven Gould Axelrod. Robert Lowell: Life and Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 286 + xiv pp. During my interview with him in June 1974, Lowell said, among other things, that he had had "lots of good critics." Of course, even prior to writing publishable poems, he was acquainted with some of America's most notable poet- critics, among them John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and the young Randall Jarrell. Probably for this reason, Lowell, unlike the other great American poets of this century, received widespread poetic recognition from the very beginning of his career. Two of his friends, Tate and Jarrell, not only praised him in print but privately guided his development in its germinal phase. At each stage of his career his work elicited fine critical articles: thus the antho- logies of critical pieces edited by Thomas Parkinson, London and Boyers, and Jonathan Price remain among the most useful books on Lowell. In book- length studies by a single critic, Lowell has not been consistently fortunate: the first book on Lowell (1962), by Hugh B. Staples, is brief but lucid and helpful; but Mazzaro's 1965 study, evidently Catholic in perspective, mis- understands and undervalues Lowell's post-Catholic poetry; Cosgrave's 1970 book has a perverse and autocratic moralism that "judges" only a few Lowell poems to be worthy of serious attention; and Cooper's 1970 book is inter- mittently fatuous. The books by Fein (1970), Perloff (1973), and Crick (1974) are solid, substantial treatments; but only Williamson's Pity the Monsters (1974) and Yenser's Circle to Circle (1975) do justice to the intricate subtleties of the poems. All these works were published prior to the poet's death in 1977 now that his zigzag progress has been stilled, critics can begin to assess his achievement without concern that he will again catch us by surprise. Anzilotti's book was compiled "to do homage to his memory" (p. 7); Axelrod's work was begun before the poet's death, but completed afterward.
Clio in Celluloid
Authors: Skinner J. M.
Published: March 2011

John E. O'Connor and Martin A. Johnson, eds. American History/American Film. New York: Frederick Ungar," 1979.320 + xxix pp. If, as Marshall McLuhan long since opined, we are living in a post-Gutenbergian age of revolution in the field of human communication, the cinema stakes a fair claim to our attention as an integral part of that revolution. Our appreciation of the social history of the present century will benefit from the study of the commercial motion picture as a reflection of its time, its makers and its country of origin. Not only is the film exceptional among all the inventions of modern technology in that it reached a mass, working-class audience before slowly spreading up the social scale to those who long affected an intellectual contempt for it, but it is no less important because it retained a powerful and special appeal for its working-class devotees. It remained, in Arthur Knight's phrase, "the popular art," while poetry, painting and classical music have increasingly become the exclusive preserve of a cultural elite. Artists seem to create for fellow artists and critics whereas the vast majority of filmmakers still try to speak to millions. Before the advent of television, the prime characteristic of this relationship of mass audience to the cinema was habitual attendance. Tens of millions of North Americans went to the movies at least once a week. They spent thousands of hours before the screen during their most impressionable years. Any study of the history of popular culture is lacking if it ignores this phenomenon.
The Study of American History in Canadian Universities, 1919-1979: A Bibliography of Canadian Theses and Dissertations on American History
Authors: Lee Linda
Published: March 2011

The study of American history in Canada has increased steadily over the course of the twentieth century and dramatically in the last two decades. This growth of interest in the American past is reflected in a burgeoning literature of masters theses and doctoral dissertations written on American topics and completed at Canadian universities. This bibliography attempts to provide a comprehensive listing of that literature in order to acquaint scholars of American history with works which they might otherwise overlook.
Theodore Roosevelt avant la présidence: analyse d'une pensée politique
Authors: Ricard Serge
Published: March 2011

La personnalité et l'oeuvre du président Theodore Roosevelt ont fait couler beaucoup d'encre depuis trois quarts de siècle. Le vingt-sixième président des Etats-Unis a eu ses hagiographes, puis ses censeurs.1 Roosevelt s'est trouvé tantôt absous par une sympathie excessive, tantôt accablé par un parti pris systématique. Depuis les années cinquante un certain nombre de livres remarquables d'érudition et d'impartialité ont été publiés.2 Ces livres m'ont été infiniment précieux et m'ont aidé à mieux saisir la complexité d'une personnalité et d'une oeuvre qui ont marqué plus d'un quart de ciècle de vie politique américaine. Toutefois, il m'est apparu qu'à vouloir présenter l'homme d'Etat dans sa totalité, à travers sa personnalité, sa vie, son oeuvre, avec un luxe de détails biographiques, on risquait de perdre de vue quelque chose d'essentiel: sa pensée politique telle que l'exposent ses écrits et ses discours. Il m'a semblé, par ailleurs, que les analyses globales de la pensée de Theodore Roosevelt accordaient une large place aux années de sa maturité politique, à la période présidentielle et post-présidentielle, et négligeaient un peu l'époque précédente, les années de maturation politique.
"Knit of Identity": Defining the American Self
Authors: Cederstrom Lorelei
Published: March 2011

Martha Banta. Failure and Success in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. pp. Sam B. Girgus. The Law of the Heart: Individualism and the Modern Self in American Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. 180 pp. James E. Miller, Jr. The American Quest for the Supreme Fiction: Whitmans Legacy in the Personal Epic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. 360 + xvi pp. While strikingly different from one another in terms of theme, critical approach and style, these three recent works of literary criticism are surprisingly similar, for each questions the nature of the American self, and each turns to the American Transcendentalists for the most convincing of its answers. This is not without precedent for, within the last ten years, students of American literature have become preoccupied with the nature of the self. While many recent critical analyses have focused upon the inturned, unhealthy self, the critics under review here represent a movement in the other direction, a movement toward an optimistic view of the self derived mainly from Whitman and Emerson. In this connection, there has been a reasessment of the works of William James, for his unique approach to psychology, philosophy and religion allows for a synthesis between reason and intuition not found else- where. Thus, after domination for more than fifty years by the Eliot/Pound "culture" poets, who protect the self from disintegration by surrounding it with tradition, literary critics are returning to Whitman and the "barbarian" poets who sing of the intuited wholenes of the healthy self.
Autour de F. Scott Fitzgerald
Authors: Tavernier-Courbin J.
Published: March 2011

Joan M. Allen. Candles and Carnival Lights : The Catholic Sensibility of F Scott Fitzgerald. New York : New York University Press, 1978. 163 + xvi pp. Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed. The Notebooks of F Scott Fitzgerald. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1978. 366 + xvi pp. Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed. The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F Scott Fitzgerald. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1979.788 + xx pp. Linda C. Stanley. The Foreign Critical Reputation of F Scott Fitzgerald. Westport, Conn, and London: Greenwood Press, 1980. 276 + xiii pp. La fascination qu'exerce F. Scott Fitzgerald sur les lecteurs contemporains est certaine et parfaitement justifiée, car il reste, tout compte fait, l'un des plus grands écrivains américains du vingtième siècle. Sa réputation qui avait peut-être sombré à son niveau le plus bas lors de sa mort en 1940—et encore n'était-elle pas réellement basse si l'on tient compte des très nombreux articles nécrologiques qui parurent de New York à Los Angeles—n'a cessé de remonter depuis lors pour atteindre son apogée en 1960 avec la parution de la biographie de Scott écrite par Andrew Turnbull. Il est en effet fort rare que la biographie d'un écrivain soi-disant oublié, ou même celle d'un écrivain en vogue, devienne un "best seller." Il est encore plus étonnant que la biographie de la femme de cet écrivain tienne la tête de liste des best sellers pendant plus de six mois.1 Mais la réputation de Scott ne semble pas avoir décliné depuis 1960, bien au contraire. De nouvelles études critiques sur son oeuvre ne cessent de paraître, de nouveaux films sont produits qui prennent son oeuvre comme point de départ ( The Great Gats by, The Way We Were, Hearts of the West) et qui, dans certains cas, lui restent extrême- ment fidèles—trop peut-être pour la réussite du film—comme ce fut le cas pour Gatsby. La mode enfin des robes et des décors en revient aux lignes et aux attitudes des Années Vingt. Pourquoi cette nostalgie d'un monde dont Fitzgerald par sa vie et par son oeuvre était devenu le symbole? Peut-être parce que nous partageons avec lui la conscience et la peur d'une catastrophe imminente; peut-être parce que par son anticipation de la désintégration physique et psychologique Fitzgerald appartient plus que tout autre écrivain de sa génération au monde moderne.
Violence et relations raciales à la Nouvelle-Orléans pendant la guerre civile: un prélude à l'émeute du 30 juillet 1866
Authors: Vandal Gilles
Published: March 2011

La Nouvelle-Orléans était en 1860 unique parmi les villes du sud. La cité était avec sa large population cosmopolitaine la ville la plus sophistiquée du sud en plus d'en être le centre économique par l'importance de son com- merce. Un nombre substantiel de sa population noire, 10,000 sur 24,000, était libre1 et jouissait par l'excellence de leur éducation et l'importance de leur richesse d'une place enviable parmi les 168,000 habitants de la ville.2 Aussi, c'est à la Nouvelle-Orléans, plus que dans toute autre ville du sud, que la population noire était capable d'exercer un rôle politique. La chute subite de la ville entre les mains de l'armée fédérale en mai 1862, la décision du président Lincoln de choisir la Louisiane comme territoire d'implantation de sa politique de reconstruction et l'immigration en masse des noirs des plantations vers la ville, allaient transformer fortement les relations entre les différents groupes raciaux de la ville. Les premières années de la période de reconstruction, 1862-66, furent donc une période où la montée des aspira- tions de la population noire pour une véritable émancipation juridique, économique et politique se voyait contrariée par une opposition grandissante de la population blanche de la Nouvelle-Orléans et de la Louisiane. La plupart des historiens ont reconnu que l'émeute du 30 juillet 1866 à la Nouvelle-Orléans trouve son origine immédiate dans la tension sociale générée par la tentative d'un groupe d'unionistes alliés à l'ancien gouverneur Michael Hahn de reprendre le pouvoir par un remaniement de la constitution de leur Etat3. Lémeute exprime ainsi à la fois le refus des démocrates au pouvoir de se laisser déplacer par un petit groupe d'unionistes et le refus de la grande majorité des blancs d'accorder le droit de vote aux noirs. Les historiens diffèrent cependant sur l'interprétation des causes de l'émeute. Les membres de l'école "Dunning" affirment qu'une clique radicale à Wash- ington était responsable de l'émeute,4 alors que le célèbre historien noir, W. E. B. DuBois, est convaincu que les autorités municipales complotèrent et exécutèrent froidement l'émeute (pp. 464-66). Ces dernières années, une nouvelle interprétation de l'émeute a été présenté par Donald E. Reynolds qui affirme que l'émeute résulta d'une "spontaneous explosion of racial anti- pathy on the part of the white mob," point de vue qui a été repris dans un livre récent de Joe Gray Taylor.5 Toutefois, ces différentes interprétations ont la faiblesse majeure de trop se limiter à une analyse des causes immédiates de l'émeute.
Studying Women
Authors: Fellman Anita Clair
Published: March 2011

Ellen Carol DuBois. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America. Ithaca: Cornell ' University Press, 1978. 220 pp. Tamara K. Hareven and Maris A. Vinovskis, eds. Family and Population in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 250 + xiv pp. Helen Deiss Irvin. Women in Kentucky. Lexington : The University Press of Kentucky, 1979. 134 pp. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann. A Generation of Women: Education in the Lives of Progressive Reformers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. 207 + viii pp. How best to study the history of women? Do women need to be a segregated and explicit focus of research, or should they be considered in the context of the institutions with which they were associated? What is gained by studying women as women rather than as reformers, teachers or pioneers who happened also to be female? What are the key aspects of women's pasts on which to focus scholarly inquiry? How do historians' reasons for studying women affect the kind of history they write? These are the sorts of questions stimulated by read- ing four disparate books which in various ways might be expected to illumi- nate something of American women's past. An analysis of what each of the four brings to the study of women should enable us to understand more clearly what can be learned from each type of historical inquiry, although by no means do these books illustrate the entire range of the contemporary study of women's history.
American Art in Broad Spectrum
Authors: Davis Ann
Published: March 2011

Richard J. Boyle. John Twachtman. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1979. 88 pp. William H. Gerdts and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. A Man of Genius: The Art of Washington Allston. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1979. 255 pp. William H. Gerdts. American Impressionism. Seattle: The Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, 1980. 180 pp. Laurie Lisle. Portrait of an Artist: .4 Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe. New York: Seaview Books, 1980.384 + x pp. Barbara Novak. Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.323 + xi pp. Christopher Tunnard. A World with a View: An Inquiry into the Nature of Scenic Values. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978. 196 + xii pp. The six volumes under review cover a broad spectrum of American art. They are unified by a general concern with the way creators have used nature. The specific characteristics of this concern vary greatly. For instance Washington Allston (1779-1843), the earliest painter examined, used nature as a general guideline in the creation of his romantic works and not as a specific, precise theme to be depicted. The Luminists, discussed by Barbara Novak, on the other hand, were much more interested in scientific rendering and saw nature itself as containing full and divine powers. American Impression- ists also used nature scientifically, but with a heavy emphasis on the depiction of light through color rather than pantheistic themes. O'Keeffe's interest in nature is much more individual and psychological, once again a more romantic vision. And, finally, Tunnard pleads for a broad sensitivity to landscape and a specific appreciation of its historic, social and esthetic values.
Early American Intellectual History After Perry Miller
Authors: Tucker Bruce
Published: March 2011

It is one of the pecular ironies of current American historiography that intellectual historians have turned increasingly from writing the history of ideas to writing about the history of ideas.1 During the 1940s and 1950s intel- lectual historians such as Merle Curti, Ralph Gabriel, Richard Hofstadter and Perry Miller led the profession away from the economic determinism of the Progressive historians toward a new synthesis which emphasized political consensus and the unity and uniqueness of the American past.2 The preemi- nence of the history of ideas, however, was short lived. A near revolution in methodology during the 1960s elevated social history to the cutting edge of the profession and precipitated the demise of intellectual history as a coherent field. Intellectual historians have now begun to join their colleagues in turn- ing to the social sciences—psychology, sociology and anthropology—to rejuvenate the field, and they are writing more frequently about the history of ideas in order to evaluate the work which has relied on methodologies from other disciplines.3 Whereas earlier intellectual historians aspired to a literary mastery of their sources, their successors have become obsessed with method and technique.
Resentment and Revolution in Jack London's Sociofantasy
Authors: Beauchamp Gorman
Published: March 2011

"The greatest story Jack London ever wrote," Alfred Kazin once observed, "was the story he lived."1 London was one of those writers whose lives fascinate readers as much as, or perhaps more than, their art. Indeed, his career consists of the stuff of old Hollywood biodramas, a sort of Horatio Alger saga of the poor boy's rise to world fame and great fortune—but with the tragic twist that makes his life a cathartic lesson in the price exacted for pursuing the Bitch Goddess SUCCESS, as William James called our national obsession. London was the prototypic success-as-failure. Even more than with most writers, the now old New Criticism that eschews biography as a legitimate source of literary interpretation proves inadequate for evaluating London, whose life and work seem unusually inextricable. A psychological approach to his art thus appears unavoidable.
Many More Thoreaus
Authors: Lane, Jr. Lauriat
Published: March 2011

Walter Harding and Michael Meyer. The New Thoreau Handbook. New York: New York University Press, 1980,238 + xviii pp. Mary Elkins Moller. Thoreau in the Human Community. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980,202 + xvi pp. Fritz Oehlschlaeger and George Hendrick, eds. Toward the Making of Thoreau's Modern Reputation: Selected Correspondence of S.A.Jones, A. W. Hosmer, H. S. Salt, H. G. O. Blake, and D. Ricketson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979,413 + xx pp. Edward Wagenknecht. Henry David Thoreau: What Manner of Man? Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. 212 pp. Walter Harding's A Thoreau Handbook1 gave valuable aid to Thoreauvians of many stripes and vintages. At a time when no cumulative bibliographies or bibliographical essays were at hand, with the partial exception of LHUS and the earliest edition of Eight American Authors,2 Harding's handbook was able to list and describe nearly all material up through 1957. It is clear from the large amount of work on Thoreau from 1958 to now, however, and the complex thought and genuine new knowledge it contains, that Harding's and Michael Meyer's The New Thoreau Handbook could not include as much of the total material, could not comment on it as fully, might find more difficulty conveying the full range of our interest in Thoreau, and for these and other reasons might not be of use to as many Thoreauvians. Both handbooks also have a bibliography at the end of each section; these listings continue to be undoubtedly helpful, whatever questions we may raise about the discussions that precede them.
Woodrow Wilson and the Presidency
Authors: Hohner Robert A.
Published: March 2011

Arthur S. Link, et al., eds. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Volume 25,1912 (1978), 672 + xxiv pp. Volume 27,1913 (1978), 599 + xxxii pp. Volume 28,1913 ( 1978), 629 + xx pp. Volume 29, December 2, 1913-May 5,1914 (1979), 592 + xx pp. Volume 30, May 6-September 5, 1914 (1979),526 + xx pp. Volume 31, September 6-December 31, 1914 (1979), 592 + xxii pp. Political figures often stand in fear of the judgment of history. Reflecting upon his academic career, Woodrow Wilson in 1912 recalled that when he had been an historian, he had been able to "sit on the side lines and look on with a certain degree of complacency upon the men who were performing in the arena of politics." He had taken satisfaction in the fact that "after the game is over some quiet fellow like myself will sit down in a remote room somewhere and tell the next generation what to think" about the politicians. That knowledge, however, took on new meaning once he entered public life. "Now that I am myself exposed," he observed, "I think of that quiet jury sitting in those rooms surrounded by nothing but shelves and books and documents. I think of the anticipated verdict of another generation" (25: 197). The verdict which Wilson pondered is of course never final, and the evidence now available to "that quiet jury" of which he spoke has grown to enormous proportions. The task of arriving at a fresh assessment of Woodrow Wilson will be facilitated immensely, however, by the availability of the documentary collection now being produced at Princeton University by Arthur S. Link and his associates.
The Faces of Robert Frost
Authors: Tefs Wayne
Published: March 2011

William R. Evans. Robert Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship. Hanover, N. H. : University Press of New England, 1981.297 +xv pp. John C. Kemp. Robert Frost and New England: The Poet as Regionalist. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.273 + xiii pp. James L. Potter. Robert Frost Handbook. University Park and London : Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980. 205 + xvi pp. Conventional wisdom describes Robert Frost and the poetic canon that he developed over fifty years as radiating Yankee wisdom and sagacity, solid with apple trees and ax-helves which infused a bucolic landscape of wintry evenings and sleepy Vermont mountains. Only occasionally, according to this view, is Frost's pastoral New England solidity overshadowed by clouds of what Radcliffe Squires called "the obscure mechanics of the universe,"1 and these quickly dissipated in the poet's essentially Christian and Humanist perception of the cosmic scheme.
Biopsy: Biography
Authors: Fogel Stanley
Published: March 2011

Helen S. Garson. Truman Capote. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980.210 pp. Mark Harris. Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. 184 pp. Sheldon J. Hershinow. Bernard Malamud. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980.165 pp. Jerome Klinkowitz. The American 1960s: Imaginative Acts in a Decade of Change. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980. 119 + x pp. Suzanne Henning Uphaus. John Updike. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980.149 pp. Ronald Weber. The Literature of Fact: Literary Nonfiction in American Writing. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980. 181 pp. The Sixties. The phrase, not to mention the period, has already acquired talismanic properties. It is enough to say "the Sixties" as one says "the Twenties'" or "the Nineties'1 for a certain set of attitudes and events to be conjured up. With all the reverence of Shreve McCannon begging Quentin Compson to tell him about the South, a good many students demand of apparent Sixties' survivors an account of those halcyon days when, rumor has it, students were a force to be reckoned with. What with the installation of the "new conservatism" regarded as a "fait accompli," thankfully by the Moral Majority and many academics who yoke such profundities as "the Sixties are over" and "back to basics [sic]" the allure of defining the Sixties' sensibility has increased for would-be cultural sages. How tempting it is to try to bring into focus that "whole new sense of priorities and values," those "new cultural styles," the "new cultural model," the "sixties aesthetic." Jerome Klinkowitz has obviously succumbed to such aspirations, the phrases in the preceding sentence being his—readers who confront The American 1960s will wish he hadn't. This book will probably stand for some time to come as one of the most portentous, least incisive and least insightful attempts to articulate the Sixties' Zeitgeist.
Whitman's Tangled Roots: The Problem of Sources
Authors: Cederstrom Lorelei
Published: March 2011

Harold Aspiz. Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980, 290 pp. Roger Asselineau. The Transcendentalist Constant in American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1980.189 pp. Martin Bickman. The Unsounded Centre: Jungian Studies in American Romanticism. Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 1980. 182 pp. Betsy Erkkila. Walt Whitman Among the French. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 296 pp. In the fourth section of "Song of Myself" Walt Whitman envisions both the questions that the future would ask of him as well as his ability to transcend those queries. He depicts himself as standing firm though surrounded by "trippers and askers" who are inquiring about "people I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,/The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new." In the face of all this "pulling and hauling" Whitman asserts the consistent core of himself, a dynamic center which is unaffected by the ephemeral events which others call history or reality. "These come to me days and nights," he writes, "and go from me again,/But they are not the me myself."
Lonesome in Eden: Dickinson, Thoreau and the Problem of Community in Nineteenth-Century New England
Authors: Gross Robert A.
Published: March 2011

Emily Dickinson was so deeply private a poet, so unique, so idiosyncratic a sensibility, so dedicated to exploring a self-constructed house of the imagination that an historian who wishes to use her art and life to talk about nineteenth- century culture and society —as I propose to do —ought to begin with a good defense.
Four Fathers
Authors: Bilson Geoffrey
Published: March 2011

James H. Hutson. John Adams and the Diplomacy of the American Revolution. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1980. 200 + vii pp. Richard M. Rollins. The Long Journey of Noah Webster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980.195 + xi pp. Robert E. Shalhope. John Taylor of Caroline: Pastoral Republican. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1980. 304 + ix pp. Charles Cecil Wall. George Washington: Citizen-Soldier. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980. 217 + xiv pp. Some of the most interesting and provocative recent work on the Revolution has attempted to recover the experience of common people in that crisis. These four books belong to an older tradition, that of the weighty life-and- times volumes which used to mark the passing of statesmen or at least the death of politicians. Modern economics have reduced the two or three volumes to one slim book, but modern scholarship shows that there is still vitality in this approach to a great historical event. It is not an easy mode to work in, especially under the pressure of limited space, and some of the authors are more successful than others in bringing together characters and circumstances.