bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Macaulay and America
Authors: Hook Andrew
Published: January 2009

The phenomenon of the precipitate decline in popular and critical favour of writers immensely successful in their own day is a familiar one. In due course, however, it often happens that decline is halted, and replaced by some degree of renewed interest. Nowhere has this pattern been more clearly revealed than in the case of the eminent Victorians: and Macaulay is an obvious example. In the present flourishing state of Victorian studies it is hardly surprising that the great liberal historian should be once again receiving at least some fraction of the attention he was accorded in his nineteenth-century heyday. Two book-length studies have recently appeared: Jane Millgate'sMacaulay(1973), in the Routledge Author Guides series, mainly concerned with Macaulay's status as a literary artist, and John Clive's highly praised biographical study,Thomas Babington Macaulay: the Shaping of the Historian(1973). Somewhat earlier, George Levine'sThe Boundaries of Fiction(1968) had included extended treatment of Macaulay along with Carlyle and Newman, and the early volumes of Thomas Pinney's collected edition of Macaulay's letters were published in 1974. It is perhaps surprising that more attention has not been paid to the evidence for Macaulay's widely-acknowledged, extraordinary American vogue and to the reasons for it.
Joel Chandler Harris and the Folklore of Slavery
Authors: Flusche Michael
Published: January 2009

Every historian addressing himself to the study of American slavery immediately confronts the paucity of sources. Significant documents written by slaves or former slaves are sufficiently scarce and difficult to work with that the slaves' view of slavery, in spite of recent publications, is still an underdeveloped area. In the almost fifteen years since Stanley Elkins stirred up swells of controversy by contending that slaves were characterized by a docile, childlike, ‘ Sambo ’ personality, historians have begun to employ concepts developed by psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists and to examine previously neglected sources such as slave autobiographies and recollections. But even these attempts stop far short of a radical departure from approaches traditionally employed by American historians. Although slave songs have been of interest for decades, with some recent exceptions, they have yielded few significant or surprising insights.
The Painted Sermon: the Self-Portrait of Thomas Smith
Authors: Allard Joseph
Published: January 2009

The character, modes, and forms of artistic expression in any epoch are in many ways governed by prevailing intellectual and philosophical points of view. What is considered ‘ good taste ’ by the patron of painting, poetry or music will often seem quite incredible to future generations because intellectual bases of perception and appreciation change so inexorably and often so quickly. If the final judgment about what is satisfying (not to mention ‘ beautiful ’) in a work of art must finally be left to each individual to decide for whatever reasons he feels important, this in no way alters the fact that a work of any period can be seen to exhibit aspects that are characteristic of its creator and audience. By studying a selection of works from a historical period, we are able better to understand not only the works themselves, but at least some particular characteristics of those who produced them, and those for whom they were intended. In a comparative study of the arts we will most quickly reach productive ends using what Erwin Panofsky terms an Iconological approach, a search for ‘ intrinsic meaning and content ’. This angle of vision looks to underlying principles to reveal important generalizations about attitudes of nations, periods, classes, or religions, or philosophical persuasions ‘ unconsciously qualified by one personality and condensed into one work ’. The scholar's work becomes synthetic, rather than just analytic. In the search, one must recover and ponder the ‘ intrinsic meaning ’ of every document of civilization available which relates to the work under consideration. Panofsky mentions specifically the areas of politics, poetry, religion, philosophy, and social tendencies of personality, period and country.
Divine Patterns: Louis Agassiz and American Men of Letters. Some Preliminary Explorations
Authors: Bell Ian F. A.
Published: January 2009

To arrive at Pound's Canto XXIII from Poe's ‘ Sonnet to Science ’ is a problematic task for more and less obvious reasons. Part of the way in which we may make the approach is through the resonances of certain figures prominent in the history of ideas; in particular to Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born geologist and natural historian who was a central personality in Cambridge circles from his arrival in America in 1846 until his death in 1873. Apart from Edward Lurie's excellent biography,Louis Agassiz, A Life in Science(Chicago, 1960), the twentieth century bears only scattered reference to him, whereas the latter half of the nineteenth century celebrated his work enthusiastically and prolifically. Part of the reason for his diminished presence after the turn of the century lies undoubtedly in his position outside the mainstream of contemporary biological thinking, particularly as a result of his quarrel with Asa Gray during the 1850s; Agassiz was the only scientist of influential standing to oppose himself to the doctrine of Evolution. Consequently, he occupies a far less prominent place in the history of biology than he did in his own era.
Samuel Eliot Morison: Historian
Authors: Taylor P. A. M.
Published: January 2009

Samuel Eliot Morison died in Boston in May 1976. He had been born there in 1887; he had spent much of his life in the Brimmer Street house his grandfather had built; and he could refer to Francis Parkman as “ my grandfather's friend.” I never met him; I have never discussed him with his colleagues and friends; and I do not propose writing a personal tribute. Rather, having re-read some four-fifths of the books he wrote, and perhaps nine-tenths of the words, I seek to describe his development, to explain why I judge him to be a great historian, and to show what manner of historian he chose to be.
Experience and Utopia: The Making of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward
Authors: Wilson R. Jackson
Published: January 2009

Shortly after Julian West awakened to Edward Bellamy's utopian Boston of the year 2000, he was given his first look at the city by his host, Dr. Leete. West nearly fainted at the “ prodigious thing which had befallen me.” Still in a daze, he was asked by Dr. Leete what surprised him most about the new Boston. “ I really think,” West responded, “ that the complete absence of chimneys and their smoke is the detail that first impressed me.” The city, as Bellamy went on to describe it, was an affair of fine buildings set in “ inclosures.” There were “ large open squares filled with trees, among which statues glistened and fountains flashed.” Julian West could see the Charles River, a “ blue ribbon winding away to the sunset,” and to the east was the harbor, “ not one of its green islets missing.” West's initial notice of the absence of smokestacks, coupled with Bellamy's first (and almost his only) physical description of the city, pointed up one of the most striking facts about Boston in the year 2000. The new city was park-like, even pastoral, in character. The entire apparatus of industrialism was kept sedulously out of sight, and the landscape, both physical and social, had come to look quite pre-industrial.
The Ideology of the Ante-bellum Northern Democrats
Authors: Collins Bruce
Published: January 2009

Why did large numbers of Northerners vote for the Democrats on the eve of the Civil War? This is a question which the most recent studies of Northern ante-bellum politics leave unanswered. Professor Formisano's pains-taking study of Michigan's party politics amply shows the eclectic character of the Republicans' appeal. Republicans combined a stern mixture of moral purpose and narrow puritanism with a powerful critique of the South. Republicanism emerges from Professor Foner's influential study as a species of stalwart, visionary parochialism quite irresistible to the northern electorate. It represented the self-satisfied affirmation that the proper maintenance of existing Protestant and entrepreneurial values in the socially harmonious North was essential to America's future growth. It also rested upon a belief in the need to resist Southern attempts to push slavery into the western territories. This belief stemmed from a defensive, slightly paranoid interpretation of the operation of federal politics. Congress and the federal administration in Democratic hands were, according to the Republicans, the merest tools of “ the Dominant Class in the Republic, ” the Southern slaveowners. Thus high faith in free society and deep fear of Southern expansion co-existed uneasily together. Republicans, in Eric Foner's view, articulated an ideology which merged together an over-arching notion of the good society (a basically non-class society, in which the ladder of status was short and its ascent easy, and in which the fundamental interests of labourers, farmers and small entrepreneurs were identical) with an immediate call to political action.
Henry Adams in England
Authors: Dusinberre William
Published: January 2009

Like other unusual “ New Englanders ” of the post-Civil-War era — Henry James, George Santayana, W. E. B. DuBois — Henry Adams needed to cross his native with an alien culture before he could flourish. The fusion was made possible by the stroke of fortune which in 1861 sent his father as American Minister, accompanied by Henry as his private secretary, to England.
Africa and the American West
Authors: McCarthy Michael
Published: January 2009

The American West has traditionally held a special appeal for the imagination of the citizens of the United States because it has come to represent so much for them. Not only has the vast expanse of land lying roughly to the west of the Mississippi River been the home of a number of America's most celebrated figures — Buffalo Bill and Billy the Kid, Sitting Bull and General Custer — and many of the country's national symbols — the six-gun and the Stetson hat, the homesteader and the pioneer, the cowboy and the Indian — but the “ western experience ” itself has also been looked upon as a basic theme in American life. From Frederick Jackson Turner's now-famous essay of 1893, which served to move discussions of Western America into academic circles, to Henry Nash Smith's analysis of 1950, which examined the mythical and symbolic dimensions of America's “ virgin land,” the story of the West has been viewed as one of the most enduring organizing concepts for understanding America's development and the characteristics of its people. While much of this matter is well-known today and common to the study of the United States, it is but little known that the cluster of ideas associated with the American West has also had implications for what might seem, at first mention, a somewhat unlikely place: Africa.
The Stamp Act Crisis in the British West Indies
Authors: Spindel Donna J.
Published: January 2009

Traditionally, colonial scholars have focussed their attention on the North American continent, where dramatic conflicts with Britain culminated in Revolution. No major article or book has yet dealt with British West Indians as active participants in the pre-Revolutionary struggle. This study attempts to correct that situation. Focussing on the Stamp Act crisis, it seeks to clarify the role of island colonists during the pre-war period and argues for a comprehensive appraisal of that role.
Connections with Toughness: the Novels of Eugene Burdick
Authors: Wilkinson Rupert
Published: January 2009

As the principal materials for a study of values, The Ugly American (1958) and Fail-Safe (1962) fit well together. Though each was written by two authors, they have one author in common, the late Eugene Burdick. Both were best-selling novels and made into movies. Both were political cautionary tales, seeking to present dire realities in fictional form. The Ugly American, making the case for a more adept social and economic war on communism in South-east Asia, prompted a Congressional investigation of foreign aid and formed part of the climate which later produced the “ low-technology ” Peace Corps and the Kennedy interest in sophisticated-seeming counter-insurgency. Fail-Safe, attacking the beautiful but dangerous, “ high-technology ” nuclear weapons systems of the Cold War, was written in part as a deliberate campaign for arms control and caused a secret Pentagon review of safeguards against accidental war. Both books attracted attention at the Kennedy White House, and in keeping with New Frontier images, both featured the tough but humane professional, socially sensitive but highly controlled. Self-reliant and resourceful individualists, the heroes of these books are, nevertheless, geared to draw on highly-tuned supporting organizations as well as intensive training or experience.
Ralph Adams Cram and the Americanization of the Middle Ages
Authors: Clark Michael D.
Published: January 2009

“The true democracy of St. Louis, Edward I and Washington is forgotten,” lamented the American architect Ralph Adams Cram in 1917, “and a false democracy has taken its place.…” The assertion was no aberration of wartime hysteria, and was less eccentric in the early twentieth century than it would have been before or since. It gave pointed expression to a set of attitudes which had strong appeal to a significant number of Cram's countrymen, and which casts light on the perennial efforts of Americans to define their place in history and to balance the competing claims of tradition and innovation.
Convict Runaways in Maryland, 1745–1775
Authors: Morgan Kenneth
Published: January 2009

That the newspaper press in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake colonies was chock-full of advertisements for runaway convicts is a clear indication of the significance of transportation to America in that period. The existence of convicts in Virginia and Maryland stemmed from the provisions of the Transportation Act passed by the British parliament in 1718. This stated that felons found guilty of non-capital crimes against property could be transported to America for seven years while the smaller number of criminals convicted on capital charges could have their death sentence commuted to banishment for either fourteen years or life. Between 1718 and 1775, when the traffic ended with the approach of war, more than 90 percent of the 50,000 convicts shipped across the Atlantic from the British Isles were sold by contractors to settlers in the Chesapeake, where there was a continuous demand for cheap, white, bonded labour. Though many convicts were people who had resorted to petty, theft in hard times rather than habitual criminals, they were often viewed with jaundiced eyes in the Chesapeake as purveyors of crime, disease and corruption. They also had to endure, along with slaves and indentured servants, the everyday reality of lower-class life in colonial America: the exploitation of unfree labour. It is therefore not surprising that many convicts, like other dependent labourers, tried to free themselves from bondage by escaping from their owners.
A High and Honorable Calling: Black Lawyers in South Carolina, 1868–1915
Authors: Oldfield J. R.
Published: January 2009

In recent years historians have begun to show considerable interest in the legal history of the South. But while much of this interest has touched on Southern lawyers and notions of professionalization, scant attention has been paid to the scores of black lawyers who were admitted to the bar in the post-Civil War period. Who were these men? Where did they acquire their legal training and at what cost? What sort of practices did they run? How successful were they? What follows is an attempt to answer some of these questions, taking as a case study the state of South Carolina, cradle of secession, and, by any measure, one of the most conservative (and recalcitrant) Southern states during the Reconstruction and Redemption periods.
British Humanitarians and American Cotton, 1840–1860
Authors: Billington Louis
Published: January 2009

Like other early nineteenth century religious and social reform movements the anti-slavery societies operated on a trans-Atlantic basis, with a regular exchange of ideas and personnel between Britain and the United States. The process was facilitated by the shared ideology and common background of many abolitionists on both sides of the ocean. This was especially true of the Quakers who had played such a prominent part in the early anti-slavery movement. British Quaker families were intermarried and maintained a network of religious and family contacts throughout the United Kingdom. They also maintained such close contacts with American Friends that historians have talked of a Quaker Atlantic community. That community shared many common social values and suffered similar religious tensions in its contacts with both Unitarianism and the more pervasive Evangelicalism.
America and Walter Bagehot
Authors: Brogan Hugh
Published: January 2009

Before he took over the management of the Economist in 1860, Walter Bagehot had not had much occasion to notice the United States, at any rate in his published writings. During the 1850s he had been too taken up with banking, and literary criticism, and expounding the value of stupidity in politics. To be sure, in 1859 he decided that the time had come to discredit the American example. The English were becoming disquietingly interested in democracy, a system as to which he had all the usual mid-Victorian doubts and a few extra. So he told the world, through the National Review (which struggling Unitarian quarterly he edited) that the vulgar American voters sent only vulgar men to Congress: “ men of refinement shrink from the House of Representatives as from a parish vestry ”; and that America was too unlike England to be a safe model. Then, just as he became editor of the Economist, the secession crisis and the Civil War erupted. It was incumbent on him to pronounce on these events, and it would have been most uncharacteristic of this sunny, self-confident man to shirk such a responsibility.
Connecticut Ministers and Slavery, 1790–1795
Authors: Essig James D.
Published: January 2009

No fanfare or stirring resolves marked the founding of Connecticut's first antislavery organization. Quietly instituted late in the summer of 1790, the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom and the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage soon betrayed a lack of direction and purpose. Upon reading the newly-drafted constitution of the Society, one Connecticut minister decided, “It does not appear that the Society is of much importance as it respects its influence in this State, as there is here scarcely a claim for its exertions.” And yet, during the five uneventful years of its existence, the organization attracted a large contingent of hyper-Calvinist ministers like Benjamin Trumbull, moderate Calvinists like Yale's Ezra Stiles, and unrepentant liberal clergymen like James Dana. All of the ministers involved were Congregationalists. The Society also included a number of prominent and pious laymen and even a sprinkling of prominent and openly irreverent ones. If the Society's work is compared to the ambitious programs of sister organizations in New York and Philadelphia, however, it appears that the Connecticut Society did not do much more than enlist the moral support of religious, political, and social leaders in the state.
Henry James, Veblen and Adorno: The Crisis of the Modern Self
Authors: Posnock Ross
Published: January 2009

I hope to redeem the banality of the second half of my title by immediately particularizing the modern self of which I speak. Forced into high heels, skirts, and corsets, women suffer what Veblen calls “mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work.” Writing eight years after Veblen, Henry James inThe Amerian Scene, his account of his 1904 travels in America, finds that the American woman “in her manner of embodying or representing her sex” has become “a new human convenience, not unlike the ingenious mechanical appliances.” In 1947 inDialectic of EnlightenmentAdorno and Horkheimer speak of the manner in which a teenage American girl keeps “the obligatory date, the inflection on the telephone or in the most intimate situation…” as bearing witness to “man's attempt to make himself a proficient apparatus…personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions.” One thread connecting these images is the commodity status of women under late capitalism. All three moments can be said to register the depleted subjectivity of those who, in Adorno's words, “have escaped the sphere of production only to be absorbed all the more entirely by the sphere of consumption.” But this convergence should not obscure significant differences among all three writers, especially between Veblen on the one hand and James and Adorno on the other.
Pudd'nhead Wilson: Mark Twain and the Limits of Detection
Authors: Whitley John S.
Published: January 2009

My starting point is two related critical judgments. In a recent essay on the detective fiction of Ross Macdonald, Eric Mottram suggests that an important point in the history of such fiction is reached in Mark Twain's play The Amateur Detective (1877) and his short story “A Double-Barrelled Detective Story” (1902), parodies of the literary process of detection where “Twain demolishes the man-hunt plot and the Sherlock Holmes plot of aristocratic ratiocinative powers derived from Poe's Chevalier Auguste Dupin”. A quarter of a century before this, Leslie A. Fiedler came to the conclusion that Twain's most extensive treatment of detective work, Pudd'nhead Wilson, was “an anti-detective story, more like The Brothers Karamazov than The Innocence of Father Brown, its function to expose communal guilt.” The purpose of this essay will be to show how the process of detection was cited in Twain's writings throughout his career, usually but by no means inevitably in a parodic manner, and that Pudd'nhead Wilson needs to be understood as a serious, indeed, tragic parody of the detective story, one which turned most of Twain's models on their heads in order to demonstrate that a supposedly successful detective dénouement (what Fiedler elsewhere describes as “Pudd'nhead's book – a success story”) is deliberately allowed to work against its normal function in a detective novel.
The Development of the United States Collection, Department of Printed Books, British Museum
Authors: Willison I. R.
Published: January 2009

The British Museum Library was established by statute in 1753, and since then the development of its collection of printed books has passed through three major phases corresponding to, and interacting with, three phases in the development of the aims and organization of scholarship in general.
The Culture of the Provincetown Players
Authors: Goldman Arnold
Published: January 2009

In the first decades of this century, American movements for social reform included a programme, somewhat belated perhaps, for cultural renewal. Disaffected from their society, lamenting a split between the nation's commercial-industrial genius, so visibly institutionalized, and its creative cultural talent, so individual and so isolated, analysts like Van Wyck Brooks undertook to search for what he entitled “ a usable past.” The phrase implied, however, that much or even most of that past, as commonly understood, wasunusable: a witness to the split, or, in relation to the literary culture itself, a congeries of intellectual and artistic activity passive in the presence of social change, oblivious to its realities, merely acquiescent in relation to the institutions of a developing modern industrial society. Culture in America, Brooks and his allies felt, had no institutions. Without them the seeds of genius would not germinate, for there was no nurturing process, no method of transmission.

When “ progressive ” literary intellectuals sifted the past for its neglected, potentially alternative, tradition, they rightly did not think to look back to any earlier American dramatist for inspiration, much less to a “ usable ” dramatic tradition. Yet when the whole Progressive attempt to reformulate the social and cultural basis of American life faltered and foundered in the years of the First World War, a modest theatrical venture undertaken just as the wider movements suffered their first setbacks preserved something of Progressive social vision — focussed it, prompted it, and passed it on as a legacy to later artists and to the intellectual community, and to the public.
History, Politics, and Health in Early American Thought: The Case of David Ramsay
Authors: Friedman Lawrence J. , Shaffer Arthur H.
Published: January 2009

In 1785 physician-politician David Ramsay of Charleston publishedThe History of the Revolution of South Carolina. Contemporaries praised it highly. Four years later Ramsay produced a more ambitious work,The History of the American Revolution. It established his reputation both in America and abroad as the new nation's leading historian. Thus in a few short years Ramsay went from a locally prominent physician and State legislator to an important national cultural and literary figure. The American reading public found his approach to history to its tastes. He expressed a set of ideas about American history in general and the Revolution in particular that were common currency in the United States. But he expressed them for the first time in well-reasoned and documented historical narrative: in volumes that were suitably pro-American, yet judicious in their treatment of Britain, that made a strong case for American uniqueness while maintaining the ideal of the United States as a model for the world.

Ramsay's histories alone would attract our interest as the first and most influential historical analysis of the American Revolution and the ratification of the Federal Constitution. But Ramsay's writings and his career as physician and politician are also significant because they launch us upon a journey into the mind of one of the new nation's most articulate spokesmen on historical, political, and medical issues. There is, to be sure, little in the general pattern of his life to distinguish him from a number of his contemporaries among the professions and political figures of second rank. Ramsay seldom formulated original ideas. His importance was not simply, or even primarily, that of a political or historical philosopher or medical innovator.
Andrew Carnegie and Herbert Spencer: A Special Relationship
Authors: White John
Published: January 2009

Andrew Carnegie, as he never tired of informing his readers and audiences, was an avowed and fervent admirer of the British railway engineer turned evolutionary cosmic philosopher, Herbert Spencer. Carnegie frequently addressed Spencer as “ My Dear Master,” entitled one chapter of hisAutobiography“ Herbert Spencer and His Disciple,” and liked to say that Spencer had had an even greater influence on him than either Burns or Shakespeare. Certainly in Carnegie, Spencer had one of his warmest American friends and a generous admirer, and the two men remained in close contact from the time of their first meeting sometime during the early 1880s until Spencer's death in 1903. An examination of their friendship yields some valuable insights into the reception of Spencer's ideas by the outstanding — if atypical — spokesman of the American business class during the Gilded Age. It reveals Carnegie's much-vaunted evolutionism to have been instinctive rather than intellectual, derived not from study and uncertainty but from innate optimism and heuristic observation. Again, despite Spencer's promotion by some historians as the patron saint of industrial capitalism, his writings and his relationship with Carnegie indicate that Spencer was highly critical of American competitive mores, monopolistic practices and pervasive materialism.
Harry S. Truman and the American Presidency
Authors: Williams Robert J.
Published: January 2009

This essay has two basic intentions: first, to sketch a biographical portrait of Truman in such a way as to throw light on the methods, values and attitudes that he brought to the Presidency, and, second, to evaluate Truman's enduring contribution, in terms of responsibilities, procedures and organization, to the institution or office of the Presidency. In short, it is concerned to explore both Truman's conception of, and his contribution to, the modern Presidency.
Public Interest Environmental Groups in the United States and Britain
Authors: O'Riordan Timothy
Published: January 2009

In a democratic political system policymaking takes place as a consequence of the clash of competing interests promoted in part by pressure groups. In the past many pressure groups operated in the shadows between the spotlight of intense publicity and the dark spaces where decision-takers and their advisers are to be found. More recently, especially in the case of the “ cause ” groups that form the subject of this analysis, pressure groups are working more consciously in the public arena both to arouse support and to widen the general understanding of the causes they espouse. Broadly speaking the political function of a pressure group is to recognize and publicize deficiencies in governmental activity; to try to influence in their favour governmental decisions; to provide information about events or problems that otherwise might not be available for decision-takers to consider; and, in some instances, to focus public attention on and increase public understanding of particular issues of wide social and moral significance.
The Millerite Adventists in Great Britain, 1840–1850
Authors: Billington Louis
Published: January 2009

Millenarianism was an important element in early nineteenth-century Evangelical Christianity. The majority of British and American Evangelicals favoured a post-millennial Advent, and looked forward to a thousand years of heaven on earth which were to precede Christ's Second Coming. The great religious and benevolent societies—tract and Bible societies, foreign and domestic missionary societies and the like, whose progress in Britain and America was closely linked—were sustained by the hope that their work and even their very existence were signs of the approaching Millennium. Within the major Evangelical denominations as well as the smaller sects, there were also ‘students of prophecy’, who took a closer interest in the allegorical and prophetic books of the Bible than the majority of their contemporaries, but this interest was by no means limited to the fanatical or eccentric. These ‘students’ read their Bibles with the extreme literalism common to Evangelicals at this time, and in their exegeses disputed the time and circumstances of the Second Advent. Many supported the idea of a post-millennial Advent, while others argued that Christ's return had already taken place at the destruction of Jerusalem. Some favoured a pre-millennial Advent; that is, that Christ would return before the thousand years of heaven on earth.
Party Responsibility in Britain and the United States
Authors: Rasmussen Jorgen S.
Published: January 2009

Political parties in representative democracies have, as two of their most significant functions, to facilitate popular participation in the decision-making process and to implement, through control of governmental organs, those policies which are popularly favoured. Judged by these criteria, American parties are dysfunctional—so one critical school argues. American parties, they charge, are responsible neither to their members nor voters and are so organized and operated that they fail to govern effectively. When, in the early 1950s, this case against American parties had its greatest acceptance in the discipline, a number of critics contrasted American parties unfavourably with British parties. As an earlier generation of political scientists had urged Americans to adopt British institutions of government, so the critics of American parties favoured reforms which they thought were characteristic of British parties. If American parties became more like British parties, they argued, those parties would be more responsible and effective. Defenders of American parties refuted the critics' diagnosis and prescription by emphasizing the many environmental and institutional differences between Britain and the United States. British experience simply was not applicable in the U.S., they maintained. As study of British parties progressed an even more devastating rejoinder to critics of American parties emerged. Various findings began to suggest that although British parties obviously were much more cohesive in the legislature than were American parties, they were not nearly as responsible as the critics had assumed.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee's Morality Play
Authors: Bigsby C. W. E.
Published: January 2009

Richard Schechner, the editor of the Tulane Drama Review, greeted Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a ‘persistent escape into morbid fantasy’. Like W. D. Maxwell, a member of the Pulitzer Prize advisory board, he found it a filthy play and indicted it for its ‘morbidity and sexual perversity which are there only to titillate an impotent and homosexual theatre and audience’. More perversely he saw in the play ‘an ineluctable urge to escape reality and its concomitant responsibilities by crawling back into the womb, or bathroom, or both’. His revulsion was shared by other critics who similarly misapprehended Albee's intention in a play which, far from endorsing illusion, remorselessly peels off protective fantasies in order to reach ‘the bone…the marrow’. Indeed, as Alan Schneider, the play's Broadway director, has asked, ‘is Albee not rather dedicated to smashing that rosy view, shocking us with the truth of our present-day behaviour and thought, striving to purge us into an actual confrontation with reality?’ (my italics).
This Stupendous Fabric: the Metaphysics of Order in Melville's Pierre and Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts
Authors: Bush C. W.
Published: January 2009

It has always been the unique desire of the American artist to attempt to order all experience in terms of the work of art and to make his life continuous and integral with the work. This poses certain problems for the artist for he thus becomes personally responsible not only for his imaginative redefinition of life but also its enactment in plural reality. In singing himself Whitman believed he was singing all America. His declaration that ‘The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,’ makes the point precisely. But not all have felt the Whitmanian synthesis an easily attainable one. Washington Allston, in his Lectures on Art and Poems, had already stated the problem which was to occupy the American artist throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:
The US Supreme Court and Affirmative Action: The Cases of Bakke, Weber and Fullilove
Authors: Maidment R. A.
Published: January 2009

If reports are to be believed, “waiting for Bakke” was the main preoccupation of the Washington press corps in the Spring of 1978. The case had been argued before the United States Supreme Court in a blaze of publicity, and, while the nine judges were considering the arguments, there was no shortage of commentators to “advise” the Court. As one of these “advisers,” Ronald Dworkin, noted “No lawsuit has ever been more widely watched or more thoroughly debated in the national and international press before the Court's decision.” Thus when Mr. Justice Powell began to read the opinion of the Court in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a “hush enveloped the courtroom.” The audience was hushed but expectant because it believed that it was about to witness a judgement of momentous historical importance. The pre-decision coverage suggested that the Court was either going to give or deny its constitutional imprimatur to the principle of affirmative action or preferential treatment. But unfortunately the judgement did not live up to its advance publicity. It did not definitively decide the issue, in fact it decided remarkably little. True, Allan Bakke did win and the University of California lost. However, the fate of affirmative action programmes was not resolved, and indeed despite the Supreme Court's pronouncements in two further cases, United Steelworkers of America v. Weber and Fullilove v. Klutznick, continues to hang in the constitutional balance.
The Character and Function of a Pioneer Elite: Rural California 1848–1880
Authors: Burchell R. A.
Published: January 2009

The history of the United States has been described again and again as the history of change, motion and instability. From Tocqueville to Turner, from Bancroft to Billington, from Berthoff to Thernstrom, the accent has been laid on the dynamic — whether it be democratisation, westward expansion, immigration, internal migration or “Americanisation.” It would appear almost incontrovertible that by 1900 the American people were unsettled, in search of order, pressured by the “M Factor,” responding unhappily to industrialism. Yet a number of questions may be asked: where, leaving aside the American Civil War as a very special case, is the evidence of large-scale dissatisfaction with and rebellion against the status quo; where is the evidence that, as the nation expanded west and its institutions extended over ever wider territories, they weakened and fell into disrepute; why did the United States succeed in reaching the Pacific in one piece rather than as several republics, as some of the Founding Fathers feared? One answer might be that the American people formed a consensus after all, but that is not the argument here. It is not necessary to involve the whole American people in an explanation of continuities, for the purpose here is to show how conservative, stabilising cultural control was in one case successfully provided by the few and not the many.
Moulding the Industrial Zone Aesthetic: 1880–1929
Authors: Stilgoe John R.
Published: January 2009

Zenith comprises three cities. At the outskirts is Floral Heights, a streetcar suburb of Dutch colonial houses three miles from downtown. Central Zenith, a commercial-retail focus of fireproof ten- to thirty-five-story office towers of Indiana limestone or yellow brick and stores selling everything from dictaphones to scarves, hums with speculative prosperity. On suburb and downtown Sinclair Lewis focuses almost all of the action of his 1922 novel Babbitt. But between Floral Heights and Babbitt's high-rise real estate office is a third city, an industrial zone Lewis calls South Zenith, although it encircles the city center. South Zenith is “a high-colored, banging, exciting region: new factories of hollow tile with gigantic wire-glass windows, surly old red-brick factories stained with tar, high-perched water tanks, big red trucks like locomotives, and, on a score of hectic side-tracks, far-wandering freight-cars from the New York Central and apple orchards, the Great Northern and wheat-plateaus, the Southern Pacific and orange groves.” It is a place of foundries, automobile factories, shops where five thousand men work under one roof, a place threaded with high-speed railroads.

However much reviewers argued about the character of Babbitt and his lifestyle, philosophy, and usefulness as a “type,” few questioned the setting of the novel. Indeed, newspapers in five cities, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Duluth, and Minneapolis, each proclaimed that its municipality was the prototype of Zenith, and Minneapolis actually celebrated a “Babbitt Week.”
The Paper War Between England and America: TheInchiquinEpisode, 1810–1815
Authors: Eldridge Herbert G.
Published: January 2009

In the LondonQuarterly Reviewfor January 1814 appeared a long and brilliantly written review of an anonymous American pamphlet entitledInchiquin the Jesuit's Letters, which had been published in New York some four years earlier. The pamphlet, indeed, was only of passing interest to theQuarterly. The real issue was the moral condition of the United States, an enemy which had to be dealt with during the coming year first militarily then diplomatically. The British reader was to be assured that the Americans should be handled no less severely than the French. To this end, the essayist revealed the distressing truth: through Gallic influence the Yankees had become imperialists, and the mania pervaded every aspect of life in the States. It followed that such a people should be chastised without scruple — whatever their English affinities. American magazines called the review a “collected mass of calumny and falsehood against a whole nation,” a “nefarious tissue of calumnies on the American character,” a copy of “all the effusions of malevolence, misrepresentation, and ignorance” which theQuarterlycould find against “American taste, customs, morality, and literature.” Even a few notable Britons were embarrassed: the venerated Wilberforce called on John Quincy Adams in London to explain that theQuarterly'sopinions of the United States were not those of the British people, and Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate and a major contributor to the magazine, told young George Ticknor in Paris after the war (a conflict that the Tory Southey had supported enthusiastically) that nothing in his literary career had caused him more mortification than “being thought” the author of the piece.
The Galaxy and American Democratic Culture, 1866–1878
Authors: Scholnick Robert J.
Published: January 2009

During the post-Civil War decades, the major Eastern literary magazines – the Atlantic, Scribner's, Harper's – came to serve, in Malcolm Cowley's phrase, as the “principal voices of the genteel era.” The business of the magazines – with Boston's Atlantic at the head – was delivering “culture” to the middle class. As Walt Whitman wrote in his essay “Personalism,” published in The Galaxy in May 1868, “The writers of a time hint the mottoes of its gods. The word of the modern, say these voices, is the word Culture.” But in pointing out that the culture everywhere advocated by American writers was based largely on European models, Whitman exposes a pathetic irony: “Never, in the Old World, was thoroughly upholster'd exterior appearance and show, mental and other, built entirely on the idea of caste, and on the sufficiency of mere outside acquisition – never were glibness, verbal intellect, more the test, the emulation – more loftily elevated as head and sample – than they are on the surface of our republican States this day.” In their slavish worship of European models and consequent devaluation of the native, American writers had become the high priests of a thin and bloodless “culture” that was distributed abroad through the magazines.

Whitman shrewdly recognized, as Alan Trachtenberg has written, that genteel culture had become an instrument of “social control.”
The Massachusetts Revolution of 1689: Three Early American Political Broadsides
Authors: Simmons Richard C.
Published: January 2009

The revolution of 1689 in Massachusetts was an event of some complexity in which various shades of political opinion were united, temporarily and for different reasons, in opposition to Governor Andros and the government of the Dominion of New England. The immediate result of the overthrow of Andros was the formation of an alternative government, a ‘Council for the Safety of the People and the Conservation of the Peace’, which was formally constituted on 20 April 1689, two days after the Boston uprising. It was then agreed that the fifteen signatories of the letter to Andros which had demanded his surrender should be members of this Council ‘together with such other of them of the old Magistrates or such other Gentlemen as they shall Judge meet to Associate to them…’ Twenty-two other men accepted the invitation of the original fifteen to join them.
British Views of American Policy in the Philippines Reflected in Journals of Opinion, 1898–1907
Authors: Seed Geoffrey
Published: January 2009

The acceptance by the United States of responsibilities in the Philippines was regarded with widespread approval in Britain. It was believed that American administration of the archipelago would not only bring benefits otherwise unattainable to the Filipinos, but that it would also be to Britain's advantage. An immediate consequence might be support for British policies in East Asia, reducing the relative power in that area of, especially, Russia and Germany; a longer-term consideration, reflecting a major obsession of the time, was the hope of Anglo-American association in the ‘moral’ enterprise of extending ‘Anglo-Saxon’ civilization and influence. Accordingly, American activities in the Philippines were regarded at the outset with sympathetic interest and given close attention. But during the next decade sympathy diminished and interest declined, and by about 1907 little trace of the initial response remained. The reactions to American policy towards the Philippines among informed and influential people are revealed by a study of journals of opinion.
Baronet on the Battlefield: Sir Bryan Leighton in Cuba
Authors: Ranson E.
Published: January 2009

The experiences and impressions of the officially accredited British military and naval observers in the war of 1898 between the United States and Spain have been recounted in an earlier number of this journal. However, in an era when it was still possible for the enthusiastic amateur to take a keen personal interest in such events, even to the point of direct participation, the activities of one such unofficial eye-witness of the campaign in Cuba are worthy of note.
Additional Unrecorded Reviews of Melville's Books
Authors: Pollin Burton R.
Published: January 2009

The editors of Moby-Dick as Doubloon sagely remark: ‘ Everything written about the book in 1851–1852, when reviews were affecting Melville's audiences and probably himself, is inherently more interesting than everything written in, say, 1951–1952 ’, This view is adequate reason for presenting the full text of over a dozen uncollected, unnoted reviews of Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Red-burn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence Man, appearing in ten journals of the period: in Philadelphia, the Dollar Newspaper and The Spirit of the Times; in New York, Fisher's National Magazine and Hunt's Merchant's Magazine, Holden's Dollar Magazine, The Golden Rule, The Home Journal, and Peterson's Ladies' National Magazine; in Syracuse, the Literary Union; and in Boston, the Boston Weekly Museum. Five of these titles appear in books and articles devoted to other Melville reviews. The most interesting review is that in the Literary Union, which is unusually ingenious in its presentation of very perceptive comments. In view of the number and diverse nature of the reviews and notices, it seems preferable to group them by journal titles, with brief introductory comments for each, rather than by date or the titles of Melville's novels.