bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Disruption and Decline of the Oklahoma Socialist Party
Authors: Burbank Garin
Published: January 2009

Students of the Socialist Party of America are well-acquainted with the extensive and persistent support it received from poor farmers, many of them tenants, in Oklahoma and Texas. David Shannon and, more recently, James Weinstein have both noted that the Socialist Party of Oklahoma had a more active and widespread membership than any other state branch of the Party. Both writers have also given proper emphasis to the shattering impact of repression upon the widely scattered and vulnerable Socialist locals in the rural areas of the Southwest after the United States entered World War I. Weinstein especially has suggested that the Socialist Party was a broadly-based and effective political organization, not only ‘in’ but ‘of’ the world of American workers and small farmers. Pointing to the vigour of the Socialist Party's support in the North and Eastafterit opposed American participation in the war, Weinstein argues that an American Socialism attuned to American conditions and needs had much potential vitality and could have been a significant political force in the country. For this assertion Weinstein was sharply criticized by a reviewer who argued that he exaggerated the depth of the Party's support after 1912 and that he specifically failed to perceive the German ethnic origin of much of the Party's ‘new’ support for its anti-war position.
Notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Passing of the Great Race
Authors: Gidley M.
Published: January 2009

Nick Carraway, the narrator of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), is slightly taken aback by some of his host's remarks in the course of an otherwise bantering conversation during his first visit to the Buchanans' East Egg residence:

‘Civilization's going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? … Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved … This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or those other races will have control of things … The idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are, and … And we've produced all the things that go to make civilization – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?
What Really Happened to Warren Winslow?
Authors: Fender Stephen
Published: January 2009

Robert Lowell's The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket is dedicated to ‘Warren Winslow, Dead at Sea’. Academic treatments of the poem point out that Winslow, Lowell's cousin, was killed in action at sea in World War II, though as to the more specific details of his death there is little agreement among the scholarly commentators. Here are four versions, in the order of their appearance in print:

During World War II, the naval vessel on which Lowell's cousin, Warren Winslow, was serving disappeared and no Ishmael survived to explain her fate.
Santayana on Athletics
Authors: Shaughnessy Edward L.
Published: January 2009

The good things about America, Santayana wrote to Van Wyck Brooks, ‘ are football, kindness, and jazz bands ’. To many this remark would typify the philosopher's lifelong disdain of American life. But Santayana meant his description as a compliment. For he saw football and jazz as manifestations of a healthy spontaneity and goodwill. Of course, there is no question about his ambivalence towards the United States; he loathed what he took to be a lethal presence in the American psyche – a prosaic utilitarianism and moral poverty. Yet he could not write off those qualities that in part redeemed the brave new world: ‘ There is much forgetfulness, much callow disrespect for what is past or alien; but there is a fund of vigour, goodness, and hope such as no nation ever possessed before.’
The Black Culture Movement and the Black Community
Authors: Runcie John
Published: January 2009

The problem of defining a coherent cultural identity is one that has confronted generations of Afro-Americans. As part of the justification and defence of slavery and the slave trade many whites rationalized their actions by arguing that all Africans were cultureless savages. The same combination of guilt and arrogance induced them to attempt to suppress and denigrate surviving elements of a culture whose very existence they had already denied. Most black Americans responded to these pressures by rejecting Africa and their African heritage as a source of shame and by trying to deny and to erase their blackness. Malcom X clearly understood this when he proclaimed in 1965: ‘ We have been a people who hated our African characteristics. We hated our black heads, we hated the shape of our noses …, we hated the color of our skin.’ Identification with the dominant white culture took many forms. For some Blacks it involved the use of hair straightening and skin bleaching; for others it meant the elimination of any ethnic quality in their speech, dress, cuisine and religion; for many more it meant a life of morality and hard work lived according to the dictates of the Puritan ethic. The loss of any distinctive cultural identity involved in this process was made worse by the unwillingness of white society to recognize and accept the Afro-American as part of the dominant culture. In these circumstances many blacks found themselves in a cultural limbo without an adequate self-image. White domination of the media meant that they sometimes felt literally invisible. James Baldwin drew attention to this dilemma in a speech delivered in June 1963, when he noted that:

A black child born in this country … discovers two terrifying things. First of all he discovers that he does not exits in it, no matter where he looks – by which I mean books, magazines, movies – there is no reflection of himself anywhere … [if] he finds anything which looks like him, he is authoritatively assured that this is a savage, or a comedian who has never contributed anything to civilization.
The Workload of the Supreme Court: A Comment on the Freund Report
Authors: Hodder-Williams Richard
Published: January 2009

Belief that the Supreme Court is overburdened is not new. In the years after the Civil War, the expansion of the United States, both territorially and economically, enlarged the work of the Justices enormously, for not only did the number of cases on which they were required to pass judgement increase but the miles they had to travel within their own circuits also multiplied hugely. In 1891 the Circuit Courts of Appeal Act was passed, establishing intermediate courts between the District Courts, product of the original 1789 Judiciary Act, and the Supreme Court itself. Whereas in 1890 before the Act was passed 623 new cases were filed, in the 1892 Term only 275 were, and the Court was soon able to reduce its backlog. Nevertheless the number began once again to drift upwards so that by 1923 nearly 750 appeals and petitions for certiorari, on most of which the Justices were obliged to pronounce, reached the Supreme Court. Following intense lobbying by Howard Taft, at that time Chief Justice, a major reform took place in 1925 which allowed the Court discretionary power over virtually all its docket.
The Black Ghetto 1890—1940
Authors: Renshaw Patrick
Published: January 2009

The ‘long hot summers’ of the 1960s undoubtedly helped stimulate the growth of black studies in the United States and led to an urgent re-examination of the black ghettoes which have become a feature of every major Northern city. Much of this work, however, has tended to concentrate on the economic, political and sociological problems posed by the ghetto. Historians, for their part, have become increasingly aware of how much research still needs to be done to explain the origins and development of the ghetto, especially in the crucial period between 1890 and 1940. Fortunately the rebirth of black studies has coincided with the emergence of the ‘new urban history’, and when the work of several scholars now in progress reaches fruition we may have a clearer picture of the historical problems posed by the growth of the ghetto. In particular, we should be able to evaluate the speed with which blacks were able to exercize effective political and economic power by comparison with other white ethnic groups.
Swedenborgian Spirit and Thoreauvian Sense: Another Look at Correspondence
Authors: Harding Brian R.
Published: January 2009

Since Thoreau's reputation today rests largely on his grasp of concrete reality – on his ability to suggest what he called the ‘hard bottom and rocks’ of that reality in his prose – the connexion between his works and the theories of the mystic Swedenborg does not receive much attention. In recent studies of Thoreau, when the Swedish mystic appears in die text, the mention is commonly brief and dismissive: Thoreau's imagination is often defined in contra-distinction to that of the ‘saint’ of the Transcendentalists. Answering a friend's enquiry in 1856, Thoreau himself admitted that he had not read Swedenborg, ‘except to a slight degree’, but he also stated that he had the highest regard for the mystic's ‘wonderful knowledge of our interior and spiritual life’. The ‘wonderful knowledge’ to which Thoreau here refers was revealed to Thoreau, and to his age, in the theory of ‘correspondence’ between the ‘interior and spiritual’ and the exterior, natural – or material – world. To be aware of that wisdom, Thoreau did not need to read much in Swedenborg's own works, since die theory of correspondence was ' thanks to a number of interpreters ' in the air of New England when Thoreau was developing as a writer.
The Education of Ernest Hemingway
Authors: Monteiro George
Published: January 2009

To native writers emerging in the 1920s The Education of Henry Adams (1918) spoke with an immediacy and an authority now difficult to reconstruct. Sherwood Anderson, whose own Winesburg, Ohio (1919) would soon become another model for young writers, was puzzled by Adams's book. But he was intrigued enough by it to grapple with its ideas in the pages of his own autobiography. Scott Fitzgerald, who as a child had known Adams, not only studied the Education but paid its author a writer's compliment by putting him into This Side of Paradise. At one point, in fact, Fitzgerald had even decided to call his first novel The Education of a Personage. On the basis of the Education T. S. Eliot branded Adams a ‘sceptical patrician’, damning him as an ineffectual product of his New England heritage, but not disdaining, all the while, to snap up from die Education images and phrases for his own poetry. Ernest Hemingway, who consciously sided with Eliot on absolutely nothing, would have found himself, had the occasion forced itself, hard put to disagree with Eliot's radier summary judgement of Adams. Nevertheless, all things considered, it remains my conviction that one important way in which Hemingway's work resembles Eliot's, and both resemble Fitzgerald's, is that in certain basic characteristics it is what it is because of The Education of Henry Adams.
Breakfast of Champions: The Direction of Kurt Vonnegut's Fiction
Authors: Messent Peter B.
Published: January 2009

In his autobiographical introduction to Slaughterhouse Five, looking back on the novel as completed process, Kurt Vonnegut writes, ‘I've finished my war book now. The next I write is going to be fun.’ This ‘war book’ marked, in many ways, though, the culmination of Vonnegut's fiction up to that point of time.
The British Foreign Office and American Foreign Policy, 1947–48
Authors: Boyle Peter G.
Published: January 2009

On 21 February 1947, the US Government was informed of Britain's decision to terminate aid to Greece as from 31 March 1947. This produced a flurry of activity culminating in President Harry Truman's address to Congress on 12 March 1947 in which he requested $400m. aid for Greece and Turkey and pronounced the Truman Doctrine, thereby commiting the United States to the worldwide containment of Communism by means of American aid to nations threatened either by Communist insurgency from within or by Communist aggression from abroad. Debate on the Greek-Turkish Aid Bill and on the implications of the Truman Doctrine was one of the important sources of Secretary of State George C. Marshall's speech at Havard University on 5 June 1947 which initiated the idea of the Marshall Plan, the four year programme (1948–52) of American Aid to sixteen European nations designed to build up the economics of these countries and to lessen the prospect of Communism gaining strength within them. Was Britain's sudden withdrawal of aid from Greece determined simply by financial weakness, or did British policy have a more positive and subtle aim, namely to induce the United States to commit itself decisively to a policy of containment in both its political and economic form? The British Foreign Office papers for the late 1940s, as well as the papers of other government departments such as the Treasury, which are now open as a consequence of the thirty year rule, facilitate a better understanding of British policy in 1947–48 and of the British view of American policy in those years, in particular with regard to the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.
“A new battle on evolution”: The Anti-Chain Store Trade-at-Home Agitation of 1929–1930
Authors: Harper F. J.
Published: January 2009

Five years after William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow bitterly debated the descent of man before the world's press at the Dayton, Tennessee, “monkey trial,” the New York liberal weeklyThe Nationbrought news to its metropolitan readers that “A new battle on evolution is raging in the South. This time, however,” wrote Harry Schacter, “the issue is not religious but economic… The battle is between the small retailer, taking the fundamentalist position, against the chain store, an exponent of modernism in distribution.” The “chain-store menace” was, Schacter judged, “the question most talked of below the Ohio.” Not just in the South, but from the Rockies to the Appalachians and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, hundreds of organizations sprang up in the winter of 1929–1930 to urge all good citizens to “trade-at-home” by boycotting the “foreign-owned, community-wrecking” chain stores. Dozens of anti-chain newspapers were rushed into circulation, while broadcasters emulated the example set by the undisputed leader of the enemies of the chains, Shreveport radio station owner W. K. Henderson. In all, the agitation was carried on “with a virulence which has not been matched in business since those early days in the Pennsylvania oil regions when the ‘independents’ rose up in their wrath against John D. Rockefeller's ‘Anaconda,’” and although the full passion of revivalist fervour lasted but a few months, the agitation proved to be the prelude to a decade of bitter legislative struggle between chains and independents.
American Progressives and the European Left
Authors: Stokes Melvyn
Published: January 2009

Until comparatively recently, historians treated progressivism of the early twentieth century variety as if it were a purely American affair. In 1952, Eric F. Goldman argued that progressivism was ‘as exclusively national a movement as the United States ever knew’. But in the years that followed, a number of works appeared which challenged the validity of this narrowly national interpretation. Arthur Mann, in 1956, suggested that American reformers were much influenced by British social thought. Gertrude Almy Slichter drew attention to the European background of American reform in a 1960 dissertation. A number of essays then showed that progressivism itself could be regarded as part of an international movement. Peter F. Clarke pointed out that there had been a progressive movement in England which, in fact, predated the American equivalent. Kenneth O. Morgan, reviewing the nature of the links between British and American reformers, thought it meaningful to write in terms of ‘ Anglo-American Progressivism’. Other historians, looking at the matter in a more general, European context, were struck by the apparent similarities between American progressives, British Liberals or Labourites, and French and German socialists. George E. Mowry argued that American progressives should be regarded as part of western ‘social democracy’. Arthur A. Ekirch came to much the same conclusion.
The Voice of the Fiction Factory in Dime and Pulp Westerns
Authors: Bold Christine
Published: January 2009

Dime and pulp writers were always hacks, in Walter Benjamin's terms, because, from the beginning of the dime novel in 1860 to the end of the pulp magazine around 1950, they consistently subscribed to the conditions of labour in the ‘fiction factories’. These writers came into being when mass literature began in the United States. Their main product was Western fiction, since enthusiasm for the West coincided with the technological innovations which made these forms of commercial publishing possible. Hacks were hired by dime novel and, later, pulp magazine firms to churn out formulaic Westerns to their employers' stipulations. This they did without protest: in interviews and biographies, hack writers talk of the advantages of regimented production and they emphasize the financial rewards. One Beadle and Adams author says, ‘The only men, as a class, in America today, who are able to live by pure literary labor, are the writers of what you call ‘dime novels’, that is to say, of books written for the largest possible market in this country.’ In their fiction, they invariably complied with publishers' directives, writing popular imitations of James Fenimore Cooperand Robert Montgomery Bird.
Evangelicals, Whigs and the Election of William Henry Harrison
Authors: Carwardine Richard
Published: January 2009

Few American presidential elections have engaged the passions of contemporaries or exercised the imaginations of later generations more than the ‘log cabin’ campaign of 1840. By their parades, slogans, symbols and songs party managers deliberately played down questions of public policy likely to divide their ranks, reasoned discussion was overwhelmed by an organized torrent of feeling, and the carefully cultivated images of candidates obscured the reality of their outlooks. Unscrupulous propagandists, especially of the Whig party, undoubtedly manipulated the emotions of the electorate. The excitement carried a massive 80·2 per cent of voters to the polls, a huge increase in turnout over previous presidential elections and a level of participation exceeded in no subsequent campaign. William Henry Harrison was indeed, as Philip Hone put it, ‘sung into the Presidency’

Yet style alone did not create the passion. The economic distress consequent upon the Panic of 1837 allowed the Whigs to act as a focus for those who blamed the Democrats for the hard times and who looked for a more vigorous stimulus to capitalist development than Martin Van Buren was likely to provide.
Robert Frosts
Authors: Crawford Robert
Published: January 2009

Chicken-farmer, shoe-worker, bobbin-boy, messenger, teacher, journalist, leather-worker, poet, student, cultural ambassador, berry-picker, lecturer. Such a list does not even exhaust Robert Frost's occupations, let alone his ambitions. In fact, when he writes in “Two Tramps in Mud Time” that

My object in living is to unite

My avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one in sight

it is tempting to see here a sly joke at his own expense. For Frost had so many vocations and avocations that they are well-nigh impossible to combine in any clear-sighted unity. “No poet in this century has written more poems involving more different kinds of work than Frost,” writes William H. Pritchard, before going on to list some of the jobs which Frost found and abandoned between 1885 and 1892. Even the many jobs he did do were insufficient to content him. “I should have been an archaeologist,” he wrote to A. J. Armstrong in 1943 and though Frost as an extremely successful poet might allow himself that ironic wistfulness, he was not being merely whimsical. If some of his family were drawn into the darker sides of his poetry, then they also enacted a few of his brighter dreams. Welcoming Willard E. Fraser as a new son-in-law in 1932, Frost proposes not one but four desired careers.
Woodrow Wilson and World War I: A Reappraisal
Authors: Thompson J. A.
Published: January 2009

Woodrow Wilson was the first American President to leave the Western Hemisphere during his period of office, and, as befitted him, the circumstances in which he did so were neither casual nor frivolous. He went to Europe in late 1918 to take part in the peace conference following a war that the United States had played a crucial part in bringing to a decisive end. His aim was to secure a peace that accorded with the proposals he had set out in his Fourteen Points address of January 1918 and in other speeches — a peace that would be based upon justice and thus secure consent, that would embody liberal principles(the self-determination of peoples as far as practicable, the prohibition of discriminatory trade barriers), and that would be maintained by a new international organization in which the United States, breaking its tradition of isolation, would take part — a league of nations that would provide a general guarantee of “political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

The symbolism of this dramatic moment, with the American prophet coming to bring redemption to the Old World, imprinted on the minds of contemporaries an image of Wilson which has affected most subsequent historiography. Viewing events from Vienna, that special victim of the First World War, Sigmund Freud found “the figure of the American President, as it rose above the horizon of Europeans, from the first unsympathetic, and… this aversion increased in the course of years the more I learned about him and the more severely we suffered from the consequences of his intrusion into our destiny.”
“Female Laborers in the Church”: Women Preachers in the Northeastern United States, 1790–1840
Authors: Billington Louis
Published: January 2009

In recent years historians have emphasized the centrality of women to religious life, especially among the older Protestant denominations in the northeastern section of the United States. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women and girls were usually the majority of attenders at prayer meetings and Sunday services, made up the bulk of converts at revivals and provided the greatest number of candidates for church membership. They were also great fund raisers not only for their own congregations, but for a network of inter-denominational missionary agencies which sprang up during the first two decades of the nineteenth century and helped to impress a more evangelical character upon American society. As Nancy Cott has argued, ministers may have seen this work as part of woman's appropriate and subordinate “sphere,” but for the women themselves “evangelical religion nourished the formation of a female community that served…as both a resource and a resort outside the family.”
The Afro-American Contribution to African Studies
Authors: Shepperson George
Published: January 2009

The study of Africa began long before African studies in America. In the United States today the words ‘African studies’ imply a formalized, academic structure of centres, programmes, institutes, postgraduate theses, publications, professional associations, conferences, finances from the foundations, grants from the government, etc., etc. Three and a half centuries ago, when the first blacks came to the New World, the study of Africa in America was outrageously informal: the cherishing of the memories of the ancestral continent from which the slaves had been forced.
The Problem of Klan Violence: the South Carolina Up-Country, 1868–1871
Authors: Stagg J. C. A.
Published: January 2009

The period of Reconstruction in the South was marred by frequent outbreaks of racial violence and South Carolina undoubtedly achieved a certain notoriety in this respect. Yet this phenomenon of recurring violence – even in its best known manifestation, the Ku Klux Klan – has not really received much intensive study from either the ‘revisionist’ school of Reconstruction historians or any local historians of the South. There is still a great deal of uncertainty about the questions of why the Ku Klux Klan came into existence in the Southern states, and who organized and participated in its vigilante activities. These questions can be easily posed but, largely because of the lack of source materials which bear directly upon them, they have proved to be extremely difficult to answer satisfactorily.
Black Women in the ‘White City’
Authors: Massa Ann
Published: January 2009

The scope of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, which celebrated, albeit a year late, the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America, ranged over many centuries, numerous nations and almost every type of human achievement. The 27 million people who came to the five months long Fair were able to see Grace Darling's boat or Spanish galleons of Columbus's time; they could follow the history of transport from coracles to cars; they could see the latest in Krupp's cannon and Bell's telephone in a classically styled Machinery Hall six times the size of the Coliseum. With the exception of Louis Sullivan's golden Transportation Pavilion, the buildings which housed the Fair, covered uniformly with staff, composed a classical ‘White City’, grouped round a complex of lagoons and fountains on Chicago's Lake Front.
Run, Nigger, Run: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a Fugitive Slave Narrative
Authors: Beaver Harold
Published: January 2009

At the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Nigger Jim is a free man. ‘Nothing More to Write’ Huck calls that final chapter. But for Jim, surely, it could only have been a beginning. Jim was now free to purchase his wife from off that neighbouring plantation, as he had planned all along ‘saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free state he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent…’ Now even Miss Watson's Jim could claim ‘a new name’, in token courtesy to that wayward spinster; and as Mr Watson maybe, if he could not buy his own two children, he might even yet have to ‘get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them’. Was not that a more likely outcome for Jim than more ‘howling adventures amongst the Injuns’ as planned by those youngsters, Huck and Tom?
Forgotten Pages: Black Literary Magazines in the 1920s
Authors: Johnson Abby Ann Arthur , Johnson Ronald M.
Published: January 2009

Towards the end of his life, Langston Hughes wrote an article about Harlem during the 1920s. In his narration, he paused fondly over memories of Sugar Hill. At 409 Edgecombe, the address of the ‘tallest apartment house’ on the hill, lived Walter and Gladys White, who gave frequent parties for their friends; Aaron and Alta Douglas, who ‘ always had a bottle of ginger ale in the ice box for those who brought along refreshments’ Elmer Anderson Carter, who succeeded Charles S. Johnson to the editorship ofOpportunity; and actor Ivan Sharpe and his wife Evie. Just below the hill, in the Dunbar Apartments, lived W. E. B. Du Bois as well as E. Simms Campbell, the cartoonist. Nearby was Dan Burley, a black journalist and a boogie-woogie piano player. Hughes recalled the excitement of those days: ‘Artists and writers were always running into each other on Sugar Hill and talking over their problems and wondering how they could get’ fellowships and grants from benevolent organizations. One evening, Hughes and six of his compatriots gathered in the Aaron Douglas apartment and decided to start a literary magazine,‘the better to express ourselves freely and independently – without interference from old heads, white or Negro.’ From that initial discussion at 409 Edgecombe cameFirein its one and only issue of November 1926. Two years later, some of the same persons began another literary magazine, this time calledHarlem.
The Great Wolf Hunt: The Popular Response in Vermont to thePatrioteUprising of 1837
Authors: Duffy John , Muller H. Nicholas
Published: January 2009

During the 1830s Vermonters had largely come to accept the sobering fact that their golden age had ended, that no longer would an investment be almost certain to be rewarded nor would rapid growth take up slack and obscure economic problems. After having been the fastest growing state in the Union at the turn of the century, in the 1830s Vermont's population increased by only 11,000 souls, a meagre four per-cent. Without the old boom psychology for support during this turbulent decade, Vermonters coped with chronic cholera epidemics and severe economic dislocations and at the same time experienced a virtual exodus that caused one-third of their towns to lose population. The social fabric clearly reflected the strain as the society desperately sought outlets, and flocked to a variety of movements. Many readily responded to revivalism and, forgetting the teaching of their orthodox divines, easily adopted the word of prophets and millennialists. They turned to egalitarian reforms, anti-slavery agitation, and abolitionism. In politics they rejected the tradional parties of J. Q. Adams and Henry Clay or Jackson and Van Buren for the social nostrums of Anti-Mason candidates.
Art Criticism in America 1865–1880: The Early Voices of Dissent
Authors: Earl  , Harbert Ellen
Published: January 2009

In his influential study, Art and Life in America, Oliver W. Larkin describes the famous Armory Show of 1913 as an ‘explosion’ in the history of American art. Few would quarrel with this view; indeed, the author's choice of the noun does no more than proper justice to the sudden and powerful impact of the Armory event upon the American public. Certainly, at least with regard to a popular audience for art ‘explosion’ is an appropriate description. Unlike the public, on the other hand, the select group of artists represented by works in the Show itself proved that they were ready for that historic moment. They had practised and created, and over the years the biographical accounts of how they prepared themselves and their art have gradually filled an important place in the larger explanation of why the ‘explosion’ went off at all.
Robert Penn Warren: An Interview
Authors: Walker Marshall
Published: January 2009

M. W. – I'd like to begin with a question about the Fugitive group. Would you say that there was any special critical emphasis in these early Fugitive discussions of poetry? You have said before that there's a fallacy in assuming there was a systematic programme behind the Fugitive group.
“The Columbian Ode” and Poetry, A Magazine of Verse: Harriet Monroe's Entrepreneurial Triumphs
Authors: Massa Ann
Published: January 2009

In 1911, at the age of fifty-one, Harriet Monroe of Chicago decided to seek in that city sponsorship for a magazine devoted solely to the publication and criticism of poetry. It was a bold project, if not an unlikely one. America had never had such a journal. Chicago had a reputation as the graveyard of little magazines. There appeared to be scant supply of good new poetry and less demand. Moreover, it was doubtful that Chicago's intermittent patronage of the arts could be diverted from the publicly prestigious forums of the Art Institute and the Chicago Symphony.
Modernism on Trial: C. Brancusi v. United States (1928)
Authors: Hartshorne Thomas L.
Published: January 2009

We all know that the revolution in art – or the revolutions in the arts – that resulted in the emergence of what we loosely call “modernism” created a great deal of excitement and controversy. Noise and shouting filled the air. Critics opposed to the new currents saw in them the possibility of the destruction of everything noble in the Western tradition of the arts and perhaps even Western civilization itself. Defenders of the new ways were only slightly less acrimonious, if at all, and between the two there were continuing tumultuous and occasionally bitter arguments.
Transcendentalism and Urbanism: Concord, Boston, and the Wider World
Authors: Gross Robert A.
Published: January 2009

The town of Concord, Massachusetts, is widely celebrated in American culture as a pastoral place. It was the home of the Minutemen, the “embattled farmers” who fought the Redcoats at the Old North Bridge and launched the War for Independence. More than a half-century later, it became the bucolic center of the American Renaissance, where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau waged their own revolutions of the spirit. In these terms, Concord readily plays its part within the longstanding American opposition between country and city, serving as the timeless small town, the symbolic guardian of that rural simplicity and love of liberty so regularly invoked in times of crisis to recall a complex urban-industrial nation to its roots. Even today, when the town numbers some 16,000 people, Concordians like to picture their community as a “climate for freedom.”
American Character Revisited
Authors: Wilkinson Rupert
Published: January 2009

One of the intellectual industries that has flourished as the economic barometer has fallen is the study of American social character: the enterprise of generalizing about American culture in a way that focuses on psychological tendencies: on character, attitude, and personal values. Ten years ago, most readers, I believe, would have accepted this topic as a distinctive part of American intellectual history, but as something which more or less went out after the concerns of the 1950s that made such a market for David Riesman'sThe Lonely Crowdand William Whyte'sThe Organization Man. We now know that it did not go out; it merely receded in the centrifugal sixties and resumed in the seventies. Yet despite the industry's resurgence and its long antecedents, it has never been fully analysed and explained.
Sir Walter Scott, the Angel of Hadley, and American Historical Fiction
Authors: Dekker George
Published: January 2009

From 1815 until about 1840 Sir Walter Scott was America's favorite novelist and much the most important model for her own budding fictionalists – Irving, Cooper, Paulding, Simms, Kennedy, Hawthorne, and others. Yet although fairly accurate estimates of Scott's American sales and circulation have been available for several decades, our understanding of his impact on American fiction has made only modest advances since the 1930s. While echoes of the Waverley novels can be discovered everywhere in American Romantic fiction, usually the louder they sound the more they signal merely the borrower's failure of inspiration or nerve. Scott's example was most fruitful where it was comparatively unobtrusive – partly because the best writers were best able thoroughly to adapt Scott's European scenes, characters, and conflicts to American experience, but also because at its best Scott's influence was of the self-effacing kind that helped Cooper, Hawthorne, and their contemporaries find their own true bent as American writers.

On one occasion, however, Scott provoked a more revealing response by invading American home territory.
Walter Abish's Fictions: Perfect Unfamiliarity, Familiar Imperfection
Authors: Martin Richard
Published: January 2009

Writing somewhat sceptically of “recent experimental fiction” in 1975, Morris Dickstein saw a great deal of it as “ebulliently parricidal and cannibalistic,” but detected at the same time “the celebrated ‘cool’ tone…, a cleanness of manner that partly redeems the pervasive irony and emotional distance.” In the case of Walter Abish, the “hot” is the high-spirited inventiveness which grows out of the self-set limitations of a predetermined system; it is part of his own response to the craft of writing: “I was crossing the parade ground in Ramle during my second year in the Tank Corps when quite suddenly the idea of becoming a writer flashed through my mind. A moment of pure exhilaration.”

Abish, who was born in Vienna in 1931, spent the formative years of childhood and adolescence in Shanghai, then eight years in Israel, and finally settled in New York City, where in 1960 he became an American citizen. In his writing (a collection of poems, two novels, and two books of short fiction) he has retained an affinity for things European and for the literature of the German-speaking world.
Reflections of American Science and Technology at the New York Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1853
Authors: Post Robert C.
Published: January 2009

The New York Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations was the first attempt to pursue the aims and imitate the success of the great London exhibition of 1851. The most remarkable thing about that event had been its setting, dubbed by Punch the “Crystal Palace.” Though a number of visitors from the United States had aired the notion of staging an American Crystal Palace exhibition, the first tangible plans were devised by Edward Riddle, who has served as U.S. Commissioner to the London Crystal Palace. Riddle was a Bostonian, but New York was clearly the place for such a venture, and early in 1852 the New York Board of Aldermen granted a concession on a tract just west of the Croton Reservoir (at Sixth Avenue between 40th and 42nd). Soon afterward, however, Riddle had to relinquish control of the enterprise to a new group of backers, all New Yorkers with close ties to Wall Street, Washington, and London. Included among them were August Belmont, Alexander Hamilton, Jr., William Cullen Bryant, Edward K. Collins, and members of such families as the Schuylers and the Livingstons. Their leader was Theodore Sedgwick, a well-connected lawyer with a reputation as an eminent student of judicial and political reform, and with ties to the world of letters through his friend Bryant and his aunt, the novelist Catherine Maria Sedgwick.
Between the Lines of Billy Budd
Authors: Redfern W. D.
Published: January 2009

Melville thinks he does, though he cannot speak quite so confidently of the rest of us. The Navy of Billy Budd is a heterocosm, a separate, self-contained and self-regulating world. The tale of the doomed, angelic foretopman begins with a swaggering parade. Billy enjoys his local triumph, to be followed in due course by his tragedy and his partly victorious aftermath. Neither he nor his black counterpart in the opening pages belongs to the nautical tradition of “Billy-be-Damn” (no doubt a more decorous avatar of Bollicky Bill). Their twin asexual cocksureness receives apparently sexless worship from their fellows, for whom they are first among equals. Perhaps because we see no battle action in this story, a curious passivity seems to reign. Billy is a “cynosure”: a static magnet for admiration, and later a hapless target for malevolence. Although “to deal in double-meanings and insinuations of any sort was quite foreign to his nature” and though he is hardly conscious of the pun involved when he bids farewell to his first ship, the “Rights of Man,” his creator Melville stands in for him in this function. “Indirection” is Melville's preferred mode, He exploits his impeccable hero as the locus of double dealing, innuendo, lies, ambiguity, treachery, perverted history, and finally popular legend. Simple goodness, and complex evil, may be freaks of human nature, ultimately unfathomable alike, but Melville refuses the passivity of his sailors, and intervenes to make some sense of mystery. As Polonius said to Reynaldo: “With assays of bias, By indirections find directions out.” Like God in the Portuguese proverb dear to Claudel, Melville seeks to write straight in crooked lines. Since the pun, like irony and oxymoron, is an oblique mode, he appeals to its devious resources in his search.

The naval world provides a firm basis for this weaving approach, since it is governed by clear lines of demarcation: hierarchical vetoes, territorial imperatives, disciplinary codes. “Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head; no intricate game of chess where few moves are made in straight-forwardness, and ends are attained by indirection.”
Racial and Ethnic Definition as Reflections of Public Policy
Authors: Novit-Evans Bette , Welch Ashton Wesley
Published: January 2009

Official definitions of race and ethnicity in American law reveal a great deal about public policy in an environment of ethnic pluralism. Despite some ambiguity over who is black, or Hispanic, or an Aleut, relatively few people fall between the wide cracks in the American patchwork of identity classifications. However, those cracks tell us a great deal about the ambivalence of the American polity toward ethnicity.

Laws, regulations, guidelines, and judicial opinions are social artifacts which provide evidence about how a society deals with certain perceived problems. Laws are designed to serve social purposes and change as the purposes change; the specific form they may take reflects a need for congruence between laws as instruments of policy, and the purposes of policy. A survey of laws on race and ethnicity suggests three different policy aims: (1) laws mandating separation and disparate treatment, (2) laws prohibiting disparate treatment, and (3) laws encouraging aggregate changes in ethnic representation. Each purpose had a corresponding form of definition. If the purpose of a law is to mandate diverse treatment of individuals based on race or ethnicity, the law must be quite precise about who falls into which category, because an administrator is expected to make clear distinctions in individual cases.
The Popular Concept of “Home” in Nineteenth-Century America
Authors: Van De Wetering Maxine
Published: January 2009

Professor Erik Erikson was more than justified in 1950 when he asserted that the work he produced on childhood and society was one concerning historicprocesses. He began by documenting certain childhood experiences which he took to be universal, and he continued by urging upon his readers speculative extrapolations that might be seen to apply to society as a whole. Erikson suggested that human beings progressed normally through a chronology of eight ages, the first of which, experienced by infants, involved a psychological dichotomy reflecting the infant's feelings of what he called “basic trust vs. basic mistrust” of the exterior world. Essentially, this early experience, as described by Erikson, was one of tension between a sense of cogency, continuity, and sustenance in the outside world, and an opposite sense that the outer world was unfaithful in its appearances and liable to aberrations in the expected order of things. This antithetical reality, he supposed, was replayed in the wider social institutions of adult life. Experiences of a positive cast, such as basic trust, were so elemental and psychologically crucial that they “bore a special relation to one of the basic elements of society,” and were, thus, re-lived by individuals through the vehicle of some contemporary institution. The past essential crisis, consequently, was eternally present, and historical developments in institutions, to a certain extent, were replays of elemental childhood experiences.
Out of the Light: An Analysis of Narrative inOut of the Past
Authors: Harvey John
Published: January 2009

When Jacques Tourneur'sOut of the Pastwas released in November 1947 it was seen by the trade press as an efficient example of an RLO medium-budget thriller. TheHollywood Reportercalled it “action-packed and suspenseful” and “solidly entertaining,” suggesting “a profitable box office pay-off.”Film Dailyheadlined the film's “strong box office possibilities”. Yet, even allowing for this moderate enthusiasm,Varietywas surprised to findOut of the Pastplaced as high as seventh in the listing of the top ten money-making films in the United States for the month of December. This set it just below such films as Hope and Crosby'sRoad to Rioand the John Garfield boxing movie directed by Robert Rossen,Body and Soul.
The Comedian as the Letter “N”: Sight and Sound in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams
Authors: Baker Tony
Published: January 2009

The fifth section of William Carlos Williams's Collected Earlier Poems (1951) bears the title “Della Primavera Transportata Al Morale”; this is also the title of the first poem within that section. A close look, however, reveals a slight discrepancy: “Transportata” at the head of the section is spelt “Trasportata” in the poem title on the page following. A mistake perhaps. And yet, if it is a mistake, it is certainly persistent. On the Contents page at the beginning of the volume the word is also shown as “Trasportata”. Thus of three appearances in the book, the word occurs first without an “n”, becomes “Transportata” in the sectional heading, only to contract again in the poem title to “Trasportata”: the “n” seems to ghost through the text as a flickering shape poised between presence and absence. There is insufficient evidence to decide whether this is deliberate or accidental, or even – if it is accidental – whether the anomaly began with Williams or with his printer, but the history of the poem holds so many parallel variations that it is difficult to doubt that Williams enjoyed the anomaly and wanted to preserve it.
The Blithedale Romance– Translation and Transformation: Mime and Mimesis
Authors: Swann Charles
Published: January 2009

There is no need to compile a list of past criticism to make the case thatThe Blithedale Romanceis a fiction which has given rise to a remarkable number of interpretations and evaluations (even if judged by the strikingly high standards set by over a century of Hawthorne criticism). The text's concern with fluidity and its questionings of authoritative explanation have not made it any easier for a critical consensus to emerge.

The Blithedale Romance, I am going to suggest, may usefully be approached by looking at the ways it foregrounds the question of the difficulties of description and the (inevitably) related problems of interpretation — by beginning from the juxtaposition of two names (Coverdale and Fauntleroy) and a recognition of what those names so contrastingly and problematically signify: translation and forgery. Among the dictionary definitions given for “to translate” are: to interpret, to explain, to change, to transform. Among those for “ to forge ” are: to pretend something to have happened, to make something in fraudulent imitation of something else, to make or devise something spurious.
The Odyssey of Ebenezer Smith Platt
Authors: Cohen Sheldon S.
Published: January 2009

On 17 February 1777 John Wilkes, the controversial politician, pamphleteer, and propagandist, rose to address the House of Commons. Wilkes, renowned for his opposition to King George III and his followers, was equally regarded by Americans as a long-standing champion of their colonial rights. And it was in both of these contexts that he marshaled his oratorical skills on this occasion. The specific target of his speech was the third reading of a bill, proposed by Lord North's government, which would suspend the habeas corpus act through the remainder of the year for persons accused of high treason for actions within the American colonies, or on the high seas, or for alleged acts of piracy. Wilkes began by declaring emphatically: “I cannot continue silent while so important a Bill is pending before this house.” He then attacked the proposed act as “tyrannical, arbitrary, ambiguous, unconstitutional,” and forecast that it would lead to expansion of the American war that had been raging for almost two years. Wilkes illustrated the oppressive, unwarrantable and alienating effects of the proposed act on Americans by citing the case of a young colonial named Ebenezer Smith Platt, then confined in London's infamous Newgate prison.