bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Predicting the onset of major depression in primary care: international validation of a risk prediction algorithm from Spain
Authors: Bellón J. Á. , de Dios Luna J. , King M. , Moreno-Küstner B. , Nazareth I. , Montón-Franco C. , GildeGómez-Barragán M. J. , Sánchez-Celaya M. , Díaz-Barreiros M. Á. , Vicens C. , Cervilla J. A. , Švab I. , Maaroos H.-I. , Xavier M. , Geerlings M. I. , Saldivia S. , Gutiérrez B. , Motrico E. , Martínez-Cañavate M. T. , Oliván-Blázquez B. , Sánchez-Artiaga M. S. , March S. , del Mar Muñoz-García M. , Vázquez-Medrano A. , Moreno-Peral P. , Torres-González F.
Published: April 2011

Background

The different incidence rates of, and risk factors for, depression in different countries argue for the need to have a specific risk algorithm for each country or a supranational risk algorithm. We aimed to develop and validate a predictD-Spain risk algorithm (PSRA) for the onset of major depression and to compare the performance of the PSRA with the predictD-Europe risk algorithm (PERA) in Spanish primary care.

Method

A prospective cohort study with evaluations at baseline, 6 and 12 months. We measured 39 known risk factors and used multi-level logistic regression and inverse probability weighting to build the PSRA. In Spain (4574), Chile (2133) and another five European countries (5184), 11 891 non-depressed adult primary care attendees formed our at-risk population. The main outcome was DSM-IV major depression (CIDI).

Results

Six variables were patient characteristics or past events (sex, age, sex×age interaction, education, physical child abuse, and lifetime depression) and six were current status [Short Form 12 (SF-12) physical score, SF-12 mental score, dissatisfaction with unpaid work, number of serious problems in very close persons, dissatisfaction with living together at home, and taking medication for stress, anxiety or depression]. The C-index of the PSRA was 0.82 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.79–0.84]. The Integrated Discrimination Improvement (IDI) was 0.0558 [standard error (s.e.)=0.0071,Zexp=7.88,p<0.0001] mainly due to the increase in sensitivity. Both the IDI and calibration plots showed that the PSRA functioned better than the PERA in Spain.

Conclusions

The PSRA included new variables and afforded an improved performance over the PERA for predicting the onset of major depression in Spain. However, the PERA is still the best option in other European countries.
Do cannabis and urbanicity co-participate in causing psychosis? Evidence from a 10-year follow-up cohort study
Authors: Kuepper R. , van Os J. , Lieb R. , Wittchen H.-U. , Henquet C.
Published: April 2011

Background

Cannabis use is considered a component cause of psychotic illness, interacting with genetic and other environmental risk factors. Little is known, however, about these putative interactions. The present study investigated whether an urban environment plays a role in moderating the effects of adolescent cannabis use on psychosis risk.

Method

Prospective data (n=1923, aged 14–24 years at baseline) from the longitudinal population-based German Early Developmental Stages of Psychopathology cohort study were analysed. Urbanicity was assessed at baseline and defined as living in the city of Munich (1562 persons per km2; 4061 individuals per square mile) or in the rural surroundings (213 persons per km2; 553 individuals per square mile). Cannabis use and psychotic symptoms were assessed three times over a 10-year follow-up period using the Munich version of the Composite International Diagnostic Interview.

Results

Analyses revealed a significant interaction between cannabis and urbanicity [10.9% adjusted difference in risk, 95% confidence interval (CI) 3.2–18.6, p=0.005]. The effect of cannabis use on follow-up incident psychotic symptoms was much stronger in individuals who grew up in an urban environment (adjusted risk difference 6.8%, 95% CI 1.0–12.5, p=0.021) compared with individuals from rural surroundings (adjusted risk difference −4.1%, 95% CI −9.8 to 1.6, p=0.159). The statistical interaction was compatible with substantial underlying biological synergism.

Conclusions

Exposure to environmental influences associated with urban upbringing may increase vulnerability to the psychotomimetic effects of cannabis use later in life.
La distance de réarrangement, duale de la fonctionnelle de Bowen
Authors: BOUSCH THIERRY
Published: April 2011

On the space of signed invariant measures of Aℕ, one constructs a norm (and hence a distance) that seems to have a particular significance in dynamics. I shall present some of its properties, in particular a duality theorem à la Kantorovich–Rubinshtein, which gives an expression of this distance using couplings.
Transitivity of Heisenberg group extensions of hyperbolic systems
Authors: MELBOURNE IAN , NIŢICĂ VIOREL , TÖRÖK ANDREI
Published: April 2011

We show that amongCrextensions (r>0) of a uniformly hyperbolic dynamical system with fiber the standard real Heisenberg group ℋnof dimension 2n+1, those that avoid an obvious obstruction to topological transitivity are generically topologically transitive. Moreover, if one considers extensions with fiber a connected nilpotent Lie group with a compact commutator subgroup (for example ℋn/ℤ), among those that avoid the obvious obstruction, topological transitivity is open and dense.
Computing the critical dimensions of Bratteli–Vershik systems with multiple edges
Authors: DOOLEY ANTHONY H. , HAGIHARA RIKA
Published: April 2011

The critical dimension is an invariant that measures the growth rate of the sums of Radon–Nikodym derivatives for non-singular dynamical systems. We show that for Bratteli–Vershik systems with multiple edges, the critical dimension can be computed by a formula analogous to the Shannon–McMillan–Breiman theorem. This extends earlier results of Dooley and Mortiss on computing the critical dimensions for product and Markov odometers on infinite product spaces.
F. O. Matthiessen and the Future of American Studies
Authors: Walhout M. D.
Published: April 2011

Now that the Soviet empire has collapsed, it is time for a fresh look at the victims of the oppositional “Cold War criticism” that came to dominate American Studies in the 1980s. Hoping to stem the tide of the Reagan Revolution, the “New Americanists,” as Frederick Crews dubbed the academic heirs of the New Left, instigated a sweeping critique of their own discipline, charging the founders of American Studies with complicity in imperialism abroad and McCarthyism at home. Of all the founders, none was interrogated more thoroughly than F. O. Matthiessen, long regarded as the very model of a critic for whom radical politics and academic criticism were not mutually exclusive commitments. As late as the early 1980s, critics were still hailing Matthiessen as a pioneer in the development of American Marxist criticism. Frederick Stern, for example, asserted that Matthiessen's “methodology as a critic, though not in any pure sense Marxist…, comes closer to some of the distinguished efforts of the Marxist critics of Europe than does the work of just about any other major American critic of Matthiessen's time” (44). Similarly, Leo Marx argued that “in his subtle treatment of the interplay between literature and society, Matthiessen in a sense anticipated the development of a more supple Marxist cultural and literary theory since its liberation from the rigid doctrinal cast of the Stalin era” (256). Yet it was also in the early 1980s that the first blow to Matthiessen's reputation was struck inThe American Renaissance Reconsidered, a collection of papers from the English Institute whose title, echoing that of Matthiessen's magnum opus, announced the beginning of an ambitious campaign to revise the history of American Studies – a campaign that proved to be quicker and easier than anyone could have expected.
Tom Sawyer's Capitalisms and the Destructuring of Huck Finn
Authors: Michaelsen Scott
Published: April 2011

Many have long inquired into the relationship between 19th-century U.S. literature and capitalism, and, recently, within the critical framework of “new historicism,” a complex debate has taken place as to whether it is possible to imagine any works of late-19th-century literature as anticapitalist. More particularly, the debate involves whether any of the characters who inhabit such works can be construed as resisting the particular formations of selfhood that exist in a capitalist society.
Economy of Exchange
Authors: Zheng Da
Published: April 2011

On December 28, 1875, Henry James wrote one of his Parisian sketches and submitted it to the New York Tribune. Over two-thirds of the article was devoted to the description of the painting 1807 — Friedland by French artist Ernest Meissonier and its purchase by A. T. Stewart, an American millionaire. The painting, which was entitled 1807 by the painter, represented that famous Napoleonic episode, with delicately and meticulously treated costumes, facial types, and other details. As James reported, it had “a special claim to distinction” since it was the largest picture — a yard and a half long and three quarters of a yard high — ever produced by Meissonier, the “prince of miniaturists.” James, like a connoisseur, commented in great detail on the ingeniously rendered content of the painting.
The Garden in the Machine: Two American Avant-Garde Films and the Nineteenth-Century Visual Arts
Authors: MacDonald Scott
Published: April 2011

One of the primary reasons I became interested in film studies was the seeming open-endedness of the field. Cinema wasnew, I reasoned, and would continue to be new, unlike other academic fields, and particularly those devoted to historical periods: as a scholar and a teacher, I would face the future, endlessly enthralled and energized by the transformation of the potential into the actual. That my development as a film scholar/teacher increasingly involved me in avant-garde film seemed quite natural — a logical extension of the attraction of film studies in general: Avant-garde film was the newest of the new, the sharpest edge of the present as it sliced into the promise of the future. Scholars in some fields may empathize with the attitude I describe, but scholars in all fields will smile at its self-defeating implications: of course, I can see now how typically American my assumptions were — as if one could maintain the excitement of youth merely by refusing to acknowledge the past! Obviously, film studies, like any other discipline, is only a field once its history takes, or is given, a recognizable shape.
Photorealist Nostalgia and the American Family
Authors: Hauser Katherine
Published: April 2011

Many critics of photorealism relied on the concept of nostalgia to dismiss the movement, finding in these apparently photographically accurate paintings representations of a simple past which seemed to disregard the complicated problems of the day. These critics, speaking within the constraints of a period when nostalgia experienced wider appeal than usual, offered what has become one of the accepted, and simplistic, interpretations of photorealism. Disenchanted by an apparently sentimental art popularized in mass-media photospreads and even business journals, critics of photorealism depended on a negative sense of nostalgia to dismiss these paintings as expressions of ineffective longings. However, Fredric Jameson's recent articulation of the utopian content in nostalgic yearnings affords the paradigm an affirmative element. Building on Jameson's model, I argue that Robert Bechtle's family paintings, taken as a group, display nostalgic desires for the secure families of the past even as they engage with contemporary popular and media-sustained perceptions of the breakdown of the family. In mediating conflicting or dissonant cultural pressures and desires, Bechtle's works at times display an ambivalent position toward the family as they echo fifties values for family unity while they capture seventies dissatisfactions with family tensions. Precisely because “the family” inspired controversy during the late 1960s and 1970s, it also became the site of nostalgic longings, as many Americans found images evocative of older domestic norms comforting. The family also serves as the hinge linking the present and past in Bechtle's works, displaying what I call thetemporal densityof nostalgia.
Norman Rockwell and American Mass Culture: The Crisis of Representation in the Great Depression
Authors: Graebner William
Published: April 2011

By the summer of 1929, Norman Rockwell was a full-fledged success. At age thirty-five, he had been creating covers for theSaturday Evening Postfor thirteen years. A generation of American youth had grown up beguiled by his illustrations forBoys' Life, St. Nicholas, and the Boy Scouts' calendar. For more than a decade, Rockwell's artistry had helped sell Adams Black Jack gum, American Mutual insurance, Sun Maid raisins, and Coca-Cola. As this commercial success modulated into social success, Rockwell, whose father had risen to middle-class respectability in the offices of a New York City textile firm, found himself living the good life in the artists' colony of suburban New Rochelle. The drab apartments and boardinghouses of his youth and adolescence had been left behind. He joined the Larchmont Yacht Club, golfed in clothes from Brooks Brothers, and hosted elaborate parties worthy of Jay Gatsby.
Two Dilemmas: Ralph Bunche and Hugo Black in 1940
Authors: Robinson Greg , Eisenstadt Peter
Published: April 2011

In february 1940, Howard University political scientist Ralph Bunche, acting in his capacity as chief research assistant to Gunnar Myrdal on the Carnegie Corporation's investigation of “the Negro problem” in America that resulted in the epochal studyAn American Dilemma(1944), interviewed U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Hugo Black on the subject of Southern race relations. Bunche included parts of the Black interview in “The Political Status of the Negro,” one of four lengthy manuscript memoranda he wrote for Myrdal's use. Although a few selections from the interview appeared in a condensation of the memorandum that was published posthumously, the full text remained in Bunche's papers and has never before been published. The full text is presented in the Appendix at the end of this essay. The dialogue between Bunche and Black, off the record and extremely candid, is extraordinary for the rare view it provides into the evolving attitudes on racial issues of two central figures in the debate over African-American civil rights during the 1940s and 1950s.
Brainwashing and Cold War Demonology
Authors: Seed David
Published: April 2011

In November 1949 the Hungarian government announced the trial for espionage of the American I.T.&T. executive Robert A. Vogeler. At the beginning of the following year Vogeler pleaded guilty and was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment. For a while his case became a cause célèbre to the extent that the U.S. government threatened to break of diplomatic relations with Hungary. Vogeler was released in 1951 after a deal between the two governments. With the case of Cardinal Mindszenty fresh in the public memory reports had been emerging that Vogeler had been subjected to a coercion tantamount to torture, which he himself confirmed in his memoir, I Was Stalin's Prisoner (1952), which was published the same year as Whittaker Chambers's Witness. This was no mere coincidence. Reviewing the latter work John Dos Passos threw out dark hints that the authenticity of both memoirs was being confirmed by a Communist-inspired smear campaign against the two writers. Vogeler had been subjected unwittingly to a process that was on the verge of being named. He recalled how he had been reduced to exhaustion and despair by sleep deprivation and by isolation from any American contacts. The result was a splintering of his consciousness into two entities: “A new personality was struggling to take command of my body, a personality that was prepared to do everything that No. 1 suggested. But my old personality — or perhaps it was merely the instinct of self-preservation — still held its ground”.
“One of the Most Gifted Women of the Age”: Zenobia, Margaret Fuller, and de Staël'sCorinneinThe Blithedale Romance
Authors: Cook Jonathan A.
Published: April 2011

Since its publication in 1852,The Blithedale Romancehas gained a measure of notoriety for its widely perceived use of Margaret Fuller as a model for the character of Zenobia. Contemporary admirers of the pioneering feminist, woman of letters, and social reformer were dismayed by Hawthorne's evident appropriation of Fuller's life in a romance obviously based on the Brook Farm community of the early 1840s in which Hawthorne participated and Fuller was a regular visitor. In his post-Civil War “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” for example, Emerson lodged a vigorous protest: “No friend who knew Margaret Fuller could recognize her rich and brilliant genius under the dismal mask which the public fancied was meant for her in that disagreeable story” (Lectures, 342). The potential insult to Fuller's memory inBlithedalewas compounded by overt injury when, three decades after the novel's publication, in an 1884 biography of his parents, Julian Hawthorne included a suppressed passage on Fuller from his father'sFrench and Italian Notebooks— an outspoken attack on Fuller as an intellectual humbug and fallen woman that conceivably threw a lurid light back on the portrait of Zenobia.
A Modern Dilemma: Changing Notions of Truth and Expertise in 20th-Century American Medical Science
Authors: Cravens Hamilton
Published: April 2011

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”: so wrote Duchess, Margaret Wolfe Hungerford. So, too, might we say today, at the 21st century's beginning, and not simply of beauty, or ugliness, or of justice or injustice, or of wisdom or folly, as Ralph Waldo Emerson might have had it a generation before her, but of truth, even scientific truth. The 20th century has not been kind to many 19th-century notions, ideals, and practices. Among those it has treated the most harshly is that of objective, scientific truth. In Hungerford's day, most educated people in the Western world spoke and acted as if truth was attainable. Positive truth was available to those trained in the special knowledge and methods of the professional expert. In Western Europe and North America, the educated classes regarded such special knowledge — expertise, that is — the natural and inevitable consequence of academic and scientific institutions there. And the professionalization of American science, thanks to the faculty of American private and public graduate universities in the half-century following 1870, set the intellectual and ideological horizons of science, scholarship, and the professions. The professional ideal crystallized, with its concomitant notions of the expert with special training and knowledge and a desire to serve the general public, not greedy commercial interests. Truth was not diluted. For the professionals and their client populations, it was absolute, unchanging, timeless. The professional scientist could verify it with his expert methods.
Come Fly with Me: Frank Sinatra, the Old Left, and thePax Americana
Authors: Breu Christopher
Published: April 2011

Frank Sinatra has always been a contradictory figure. Biographers have often commented on the paradoxical nature of Sinatra's personality, attempting in vain to reconcile the sensitivity, subtlety, and stark emotionality demonstrated by one of the 20th century's foremost interpreters of popular song with the image of the violent, boorish, and insensitive thug that denned his offstage persona. The more politically minded of his biographers have also commented on his radical political swing from fellow traveler of the Communist Party to right-wing ideologue over the course of his 50-plus-year career (though whether one wants to count the last twenty years or so of it as a defensible “career” rather than an extended exercise in ill-advised self-indulgence is another matter). They have attributed this shift either to Sinatra's fury at being first courted and then slighted by the Kennedy administration, which after the 1960 presidential election smartly distanced itself from Sinatra's mob ties, or to his visceral hatred of rock 'n' roll and, by extension, the counterculture for which it provided the sound track and of which it was a partial expression. While these explanations are convincing on the level of psychobiography, they miss the larger cultural scope of the political contradictions that shaped Sinatra's career — contradictions that lend his career an allegorical significance in charting the expressions and transformations of political community formation in the mid-20th-century United States. That this allegorical significance extends beyond the caprice of the cultural studies analysis that follows is suggested by Sinatra's enduring popularity as a national icon.
Ron Cobb: A Voice from the Underground
Authors: Colldeweih Jack H.
Published: April 2011

As one of the modern forms of the classic Fool, political cartoonists tend to bully us, irritate us, delight and enrage us, yet they always enlighten us. We need our Fools, and most social groupings have at least one, in one form or another.
Early Feminist Fiction: The Dilemma of Personal Life
Authors: Maglin Nan Bauer
Published: April 2011

It has been noted that the great first wave of feminist fiction and plays appeared in the final decade of the nineteenth century. But because the writers of this fiction were women and feminists, they were not, on the whole, well received. In 1914, for example, G. G. Wyant complained that “indeed novel after novel has appeared dealing with the feminist question, some purely emotional in their appeal, some written obviously as propaganda.” The popular and conservativeLadies Home Journalassociated feminist literature with communist propaganda:

The Red element, the Bolshevist party, as it may well be called, in the woman's movement, is sparring to-day as openly for the destruction of womanhood as the Soviet element in industry is shaking the pillars of organized economics.
Carl Schurz's 1865 Southern Tour: A Reassessment
Authors: Trefousse Hans L.
Published: April 2011

During the summer of 1865, the German-American leader, Carl Schurz, undertook a fact-finding tour through five Southern states. Although he entered upon the journey at President Andrew Johnson's request, Schurz was highly critical of the administration's Reconstruction policies. Rebuffed by the White House upon his return, he insisted upon incorporating his findings in a detailed report that was printed by Congress. It was widely circulated at the time; because of the persistent popularity of the pro-Southern views of William A. Dunning and his followers, however, only recently did it receive the attention it deserves. As Michael Burlingame has pointed out in his introduction to a modern edition, it is an important historical source. It ought to be reexamined in the light of recent scholarship.
Time and the Millennium: On the Religious Experience of the American Slave
Authors: Stannard David E.
Published: April 2011

Few scholarly debates have equaled, either in emotional intensity or in linguistic acrimony, the recent controversy surrounding the publication of Robert. W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman'sTime on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Although much of the energy of that particular dispute has been focused on the assumptions of Fogel and Engerman's quantitative methodology, the substance of many of the exchanges has been reminiscent of similar debates that have taken place among students of black American history throughout the past several decades. The issues in these debates have been large in number and diffuse in nature, but at their core has been a constantly recurring theme: the concern with the cultural source and the social viability of this or that black institution. The black family has been the institution receiving the most scholarly attention of late, but remaining unresolved are two nagging and closely related questions—that concerning the degree of African cultural survivals in the slave community and that concerning the docile or rebellious nature of slave religion.
Ezra Pound's John Adams: An American Odyssey
Authors: Surette Leon
Published: April 2011

In 1939, Pound wrote to a student of his in defense of the Cantos, and his own status as an American poet:

I don't have to try to be American. Merrymount, Braintree, Quincy, all I believe in or by. …

… Am I American? Yes, and buggar, the present state of the country, the utter betrayal of the American Constitution, the filth of the Universities, and the — system of publication whereby you can buy Lenin, Trotsky (the messiest mutt of the lot), Stalin for 10 cents and 25 cents, and it takes seven years to get a set of John Adams at about 30 dollars.

… And as to “am I American”: wait for Cantos 62/71 now here in rough typescript.
Meaningful Things and Appropriate Myths: The Artifact's Place in American Studies
Authors: Glassie Henry
Published: April 2011

We quiet the inner voices that mock our free will, comforting ourselves that clocks in their turning kill time. But the past is not dead. It lives in mind, as mind. Our thoughts arise, our words appear, our deeds emerge out of the past. Subtly or obviously, now is made of then. The past tests our uniquely human birthright, lending us the strength to act freely and cajoling us to deny innate potentials and create the future in its image.
The Politics of Art: The New Negro, 1920–1935
Authors: Lewis David Levering
Published: April 2011

From the early 1920s until the mid-1930s, artistic tremors rolled through Afro-America. Dramatic societies, literary clubs, and poetry groups sprang up in Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Indianapolis, Nashville, and Topeka, among other places. In Boston, the Quill Club launched theSaturday Evening Quillperiodical; in Washington, D. C., there was Howard University'sStylusmagazine and the freewheeling and remarkably productive soirées of Georgia Douglas Johnson's Saturday Nighters; Philadelphia's literati published the intriguingly promising review,Black Opals. But most of this ferment remained inchoate and, at best, decidedly amateurish. Only in Harlem was there sustained and professional artistic output—although much of its music was tested in and imported from Chicago.
The Fruits of Moderation: Greensboro and School Desegregation
Authors: Chafe William
Published: April 2011

Although barely two decades have passed since the modern “civil rights era” began, a folk wisdom about the history of desegregation and civil rights activism has already developed. In broad outline at least, the major themes of this new folk history are contained in the following assertions: (1) the white South greeted theBrowndecision with massive resistance; (2) this opposition was centered in violence-prone poor whites who would not tolerate the idea of blacks and whites “mixing” in the same schools; (3) more “enlightened” southerners, especially in the border or moderate states, did their best to counter such extremism; and (4) the plight of blacks improved only when John Kennedy became president, and in response to the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., initiated change in the South through federal intervention.
Richard Wright's Image of France
Authors: Fabre Michel J.
Published: April 2011

When richard wright died in November 1960, many of the Parisian obituaries quoted Wright's statement that “this [France] is the place where I could die.” Having lived in France for some sixteen years, Wright to some degree had become part of the Parisian intellectual setting and was mourned by the French as though he were a compatriot. Conversely, in the United States many saw in Wright's death-in-exile not only a comment on the racial situation in America but a reflection of the writer's personal attitudes. Some, white and black, resented his choice of living elsewhere. Some remembered the dedication of The Outsider—“To Rachel, my daughter who was born on alien soil”—and were offended by the dedication of Eight Men: “To my friends, Helene, Michel, and Thierry Maurice-Bokanowski whose kindness has made me feel at home in an alien land.”
New Towns-In Town and Future Urban Growth: Some Preliminary Assessments
Authors: Martin Judith
Published: April 2011

For over A half-century America has been an urban nation. However, a significant upsurge of concern for the cities has generally not accompanied the increasing acknowledgment of the country's urban status. In large measure, any serious governmental concern for American cities has been halfhearted. Attempts have been made to confront the problems of the nation's cities. Planners, enlightened city officials, and others have faced the intrinsic difficulty of bringing together thousands, and often millions, of individuals in a single municipal unit sometimes with limited success; but more often such attempts have been well-intentioned failures. Americans have yet to develop a consistent or coherent approach either to current urban dilemmas or to the future roles we envision for our cities. Though there are a multitude of regulations for almost every aspect of urban life, the phenomenon called “the city” continues to be as problematic for us today as it was for earlier generations of urban dwellers.
Sonata for American Studies: Perspectives on Charles Ives
Authors: Chmaj Betty E.
Published: April 2011

For nearly forty years, the world of American music has sustained a state of astonishment over its discovery of Charles Ives. That he is America's Greatest Composer and one of the three or four greats of twentieth-century music (along with Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and possibly Bartok or Webern) is generally conceded, yet a fervor still surfaces when his champions announce, as Harold Schonberg did in 1974: “Nobody has had that kind of vision, that personality. … Nobody, nobody ever, and least of all any American composer, has achieved his combination of unorthodoxy, passion, bigness, sweetness and nostalgia.” To characterize his importance, his Americanness, his style, or his place in world and national culture, he is offered to us as the Walt Whitman of American music, our Emerson, our Thoreau, Mark Twain, Melville, Frank Lloyd Wright, Norman Rockwell, James Joyce, our modern Beethoven, “our Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson” rolled into one. The enormous number of performances of Ives's music during the last ten years or so (there are more entries for Ives in recent Schwann and BMI orchestral catalogs than for any other American composer and almost any other modern one) has forced disbelievers to pay attention. When theNew York Times“Music” column reported in 1968, under the breathless headline “Suddenly a Flurry of Ives,” that his piano works were being performed at home and abroad, the flurry had scarcely begun. For the Ives Centennial in 1974 and the nation's Bicentennial in 1976 brought even more performances, many recordings, three major Ives festivals, a musical based on his life, conferences, exhibits, and a spate of books—three by scholars with American Studies credentials, one of which was a revisionist biography designed to refute an “Ives Legend.”
If They Can Build a Square Tomato: Notes Toward a Holistic Approach to Regional Studies
Authors: Mechling Jay
Published: April 2011

I suppose I can find in the details of my own biography all the contradictions of place and mobility in modern American civilization. I was raised for eighteen years in the same house in Miami Beach, one of the paradigmatically transient cities in America. I was an undergraduate in a small southern town, where people were as likely to stand up for “Dixie” as for “The Star Spangled Banner” and where a sense of place hung in the air like Spanish moss on the live oaks. I was a graduate student in Philadelphia and took my first job in Davis, California.
A Note on New Deal Iconography: Futurology and the Historical Myth
Authors: Marling Karal Ann
Published: April 2011

In 1939 Erwin Panofsky opened his seminal essay on the interpretation of expressive content in the visual arts with a bold definition of a new and socially relevant discipline. “Iconography,” he declared, “is that branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form.” According to his model, subject matter can be read in three stages, ranked in an ascending hierarchy of richness and complexity. The first and simplest step isolates the “factual meaning” of patterns and shapes under the guidance of the history of style, or knowledge of the ways in which, at a given moment in time, objects were expressed by forms. Hence, certain arrangements of line and color in an American painting of 1934, let us say, may be identified as a representation of a male figure grimly carrying a flat rectangular object on a pole. When this object can subsequently be recognized as a sign bearing the legend “On Strike,” the “secondary or conventional” subject matter is exposed: the hypothetical canvas depicts a strike. Subject to a knowledge of the history of types, or the ways in which, at a given moment in time, concepts were expressed by objects, the motifs of worker and placard form a coherent image, which conveys the concept or story of a strike. These “factual” and “conventional” revelations are the prelude to an exposition of “intrinsic meaning”; the history of culture and ideas is brought to bear on the work of art in this third and final stage through an intuitional process, which suggests how “the essential tendencies of the human mind” in a given epoch have been expressed via objects and concepts, style and type.
In Defense of Common Sense: Mental Hygiene as Ideology and Mentality in Twentieth-Century America
Authors: Matthews Fred
Published: April 2011

This essay on the middlebrow popularization of the role and influence of psychiatric ideas in the United States suggests that the world view variously described as the secular social gospel, progressivism, or (after about 1930) liberalism can best be understood in terms of the great influence that society's popularized medical models have had upon it. That is, liberal or progressive thinkers came to conceive of society as “a patient etherized upon a table,” an organism subject to illness but able to benefit from therapy as prescribed by trained experts. The popularization of psychiatric models also offered norms of health for the individual and (often by implication) for the group based upon the degree of adjustment to a reality external to the individual and subsuming smooth interpersonal relations and a variety of social norms. The most concrete institutional expression of this popular medical model of human nature and society was the network of local, state, and national societies for mental hygiene, and I have therefore used “mental hygiene” as a shorthand term for the concepts under discussion. However, it should be obvious that the fit between ideal-typical concepts and institutions is never perfect and that there is always a mix of ideas and motives among the individuals who constitute an institution at any one time. The concern here is with ideas and their diffusion, rather than with the close evolution of institutions or the development and effectiveness of therapeutic techniques. Furthermore, while this study is written from a viewpoint somewhat critical of the popular effects of a hygienic mentality, it should not be read as imputing either conscious self-interest or “bad faith” to the advocates of popular psychiatry, who appear to have been sincere, energetic individuals convinced that the diffusion of their own beliefs would have enormous social benefit. One of the regrettable tendencies of recent revisionist history has been a vulgar imputation of a conscious selfseeking or promotion of class interests to reformers and other actors who sought to change their environment—apparently from a Utopian view of what constitutes true sincerity and disinterestedness that finds only contamination in the mixed motives and unintended consequences of action in bourgeois society. A tragic or ironic view of history, obviously, avoids this naive faith and anger by assuming that consequences are rarely exact reflections of intentions, that action is as hazardous and morally ambiguous as it is necessary.
John Sloan's Images of Working-Class Women: A Case Study of the Roles and Interrelationships of Politics, Personality, and Patrons in the Development of Sloan's Art, 1905–16
Authors: Hills Patricia
Published: April 2011

John Sloan (1871–1951) was an early twentieth-century realist painter who embraced the principles of socialism and placed his artistic talents at the service of those beliefs. Hence, his graphic contributions to the radical, socialist monthly The Masses, and his work as art editor, made it one of the most extraordinary publications of the pre-World War I period. But as a painter Sloan shied from political or social comment. Instead, the paintings celebrate the leisure moments of the working classes, particularly women, in such paintings as his Picnic Grounds of 1906–7 (Whitney Museum of American Art) and Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair of 1912 (Addison Gallery of American Art). Sloan himself later insisted that these paintings were done with “sympathy but no social consciousness”: “I was never interested in putting propaganda into my paintings, so it annoys me when art historians try to interpret my city life pictures as ‘socially conscious.’ I saw the everyday life of the people, and on the whole I picked out bits-of joy in human life for my subject matter.”
Lindbergh in 1927: The Response of Poets to the Poem of Fact
Authors: Goldstein Laurence
Published: April 2011

More than half a century has passed since Charles A. Lindbergh's transatlantic flight to Paris, and we are less certain than ever how to judge its significance. The event remains so clouded by the aura of ballyhoo that even at this distance it seems to belong less to the history of aviation than to the triumph of that inflated rhetoric we have come to recognize and distrust as media hype. “Now is the most marvelous day that this old earth has ever known,” proclaimed the soon-to-be Chief Justice of the United States, Charles Evans Hughes, at a banquet for the young pilot, adding, “This is the happiest day, the happiest day of all days for America.” The official account of the flight prepared for the Boy Scouts of America called it “all things considered, the greatest feat undertaken by a single man.” A historian must back away from such eulogies, but not so far that he loses sight of their contribution to the essential character of the event.
The Way to Salvation: The Hollywood Blockbuster of the 1950s
Authors: Pauly Thomas H.
Published: April 2011

The religious epic, which consistently dominated the annual list of top-grossing films throughout the 1950s, was spawned by the trying conditions that developed in the United States, and Hollywood in particular, during the aftermath of World War II. V-J Day sent the country on a short-lived spree from which it awoke with a hangover that was to last for years. If most anticipated the difficulties of finding jobs and housing, few foresaw the soaring inflation and crippling strikes that followed. To make matters worse, Soviet belligerence and the frightening spread of Communism soon intruded the prospect of another war and a possible nuclear holocaust. Mounting disagreement over appropriate solutions eroded belief that any would work. For many people, the best years of their lives, of which the war was once thought to have robbed them, began to appear as though they may well have been the best.
Against the American Game: The “Strenuous Life” of Willard Huntington Wright
Authors: Lounsbury Myron O.
Published: April 2011

In 1926 Charles Scribner's Sons publishedThe Benson Murder Caseby “S S. Van Dine,” the first book in what would become one of the most successful series in the history of American detective fiction. The volume introduced the art connoisseur and amateur sleuth Philo Vance, whose adventures were to be the subject of a dozen novels and numerous motion pictures. The initial popularity of the Van Dine series is not difficult to decipher, forThe Benson Murder Casetapped many of the impulses of the 1920s: the status seeker, who had recently attended the high society comedies of Cecil B. De Mille, sought instruction from the aristocratic habits of Philo Vance; as a game, the book rivaled the mildly intellectual challenge of crossword puzzles and Mah-Jongg; the volume fascinated people of the “ballyhoo years” with its rough similarity to the murder of the famous bridge player Joseph Elwell. Also contributing to the novel's fame was the mystery of “S. S. Van Dine,” whose hidden identity allowed for considerable speculation that the author might be John Galsworthy, Vance Thompson, George Jean Nathan, H. L. Mencken, Pola Negri, or Carl Van Doren. Scribner's finally ended the suspense by admitting that Van Dine was in reality Willard Huntington Wright, who earlier in the century had distinguished himself as a critic of art and literature, only to fall from prominence after 1918 because of ill health and a mental breakdown.
Introduction to “Criticism, Biography, and Popular Culture”
Authors: Bercovitch Sacvan
Published: April 2011

The following three essays were read as papers at the biennial meeting of the American Studies Association held in Minneapolis in September 1979. The panel went under the conventional rubric of “Criticism, Biography, and Popular Culture,” but its main theme is probably best conveyed by V. P. Bynack's title, “Signs of the Times.” All three essays assault traditional methods in American Studies. Their tone is iconoclastic; their defiance, supported by a roll call of new authorities: not Lovejoy but Saussure, not Miller and Matthiessen but Geertz and Kuhns. Andere Zeiten, andere Lieder. Just what was being affirmed remains hazy, even in retrospect; but it made for an extraordinarily lively discussion, and signs are that the discussion will continue, in one form or another, for some time to come.
No Stone Unturned: Popular Versus Professional Evaluations of Willa Cather
Authors: Stineback David
Published: April 2011

InThe Song of the Lark(Willa Cather's third novel, published in 1915), Thea Kronberg goes to one of her father's regular prayer meetings in Moonstone, Colorado, and hears an old woman who “never missed a Wednesday night [and] came all the way up from the depot settlement.” Cather describes the woman this way:

She always wore a black crocheted “fascinator” over her thin white hair, and she made long, tremulous prayers, full of railroad terminology. She had six sons in the service of different railroads, and she always prayed “for the boys on the road, who know not at what moment they may be cut off. When, in Thy divine wisdom, their hour is upon them, may they, O our Heavenly Father, see only white lights along the road to Eternity.” She used to speak, too, of “the engines that race with death”; and though she looked so old and little when she was on her knees, and her voice was so shaky, her prayers had a thrill of speed and danger in them; they made one think of the deep black cañons, the slender trestles, the pounding trains. Thea liked to look at her sunken eyes that seemed full of wisdom, at her black thread gloves, much too long in the fingers and so meekly folded one over the other. Her face was brown, and worn away as rocks are worn by water. There are many ways of describing that colour of age, but in reality it is not like parchment, or like any of the things it is said to be like. That brownness and that texture of skin are found only in the faces of old human creatures, who have worked hard and who have always been poor.
Biography's Myth of Presence: Thomas Edison as Invention
Authors: Nye David E.
Published: April 2011

American Studies has traditionally been suspicious of biography. Early works of the myth-and-symbol school, such as John William Ward'sAndrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age, recognized the existence of a radical disjunction between public images and private realities, and focused almost exclusively on the images. Recent scholarship suggests that the myth-and-symbol school did not go far enough, and that its recent critics have erred in their attacks. Using biography as a focus, this essay will argue that in cultural studies there is no private reality and that documents are necessarily misused when regarded as clues to the existence of other lives. Rather, all documents are so separated from their reference points, or signifieds, that they are best studied as fields of relations and displacements.
Cotton Mather as Diarist
Authors: Rosenwald Lawrence Alan
Published: April 2011

Most scholars interested in Cotton Mather have read his diary; none has read Mather as diarist. The distinction is crucial. In the one case, the diary is a source of information. In the other, the diary is a work in a literary genre. In the one case, the diary is a record of events; in the other, a sequence of entries. In the one case, the diary is to be supplemented; in the other, it is a whole. To read Mather's diary is simply to hunt through it for something of interest. To read Mather as a diarist is to define his diaristic context, to describe his diary within that context, to establish its norms and exceptions, and to see how those norms and exceptions vary over time.
Henry James's Cultural Office
Authors: Anderson Quentin
Published: April 2011

Both for scholars and for the wider public Henry James began to come into his own after the centennial of his birth in 1943. If, as I believe, James has had a cultural function, we can tell approximately when he assumed it. The writer who is discussed in Frederick Dupee's collection of the critical essays written before 1945 had, generally speaking, been regarded as one interesting novelist among others. It was in the decade following the mid-1940s that he enjoyed a distinct position that set him apart and attracted a wider audience. He was often spoken of as the artist prized by other artists, although this did not, of course, explain the vogue that led to the reprinting of so many of his works, and the absorbed reading they frequently got from those who had no interest in the character of James's innovations in fictional technique. Did James answer a need felt by his readers at the time, and if so, what was it? Assuming that the novels, as Lionel Trilling once put it, read us—assuming, that is, that James supplied something we badly wanted—what clues about us does this offer?
Thermidor in America: The Aftermath of Independence in the South
Authors: Zuckerman Michael
Published: April 2011

In the first flush of independence, while most Americans celebrated their success at arms against the English, Benjamin Rush remained more guarded. “The American war is over,” he reminded his countrymen, “but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution.”

Rush's assertion was an arresting one at the time, and in an attenuated way its insight persists in the work that currently affords us our paradigmatic account of the Revolutionary movement. For Bernard Bailyn extends it to argue, in a succession of brilliant studies, that the ideas set loose in the struggle for independence had a logical momentum all their own. He has traced what he calls the “transforming radicalism of the American Revolution” to fruitions far beyond the conflict with England, and he affirms the fundamentality for all American history of the continuing “contagion of liberty” that originated in Revolutionary rhetoric.