bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Bellow's “Indian Givers”: Humboldt's Gift
Authors: Newman Judie
Published: January 2009

Emerson's essay on “Gifts” perceptively highlights the ambivalence felt in gift-giving or receiving, an ambivalence which lies at the heart of Saul Bellow's most recent novel, Humboldt's Gift. The importance of literal gift-giving has been insufficiently recognised as a factor which governs the action of the novel, our understanding of which is enhanced by an examination and application of the sociological analysis of gift-exchange.

Gift-exchange has been most extensively studied in relation to the North-West Coast American Indians, notably the Kwakiutl, in whose culture the “potlatch” is a central activity. The term “potlatch” is applied to a variety of gift-giving ceremonies, involving both the giving away of quantities of possessions and their wilful destruction. The whole of a man's worldly goods may be dispersed or destroyed in this fashion, in an attempt to maintain status. To eclipse a rival chief, for example, a man may destroy all his own accumulated wealth. While in theory the “gift” is spontaneous and disinterested, in practice it is based on political or economic self-interest.The gift of property implies an obligation in the recipient which, if not fulfilled, results in his loss of face.
Ethnicity in Contemporary America
Authors: Dormon James H.
Published: January 2009

It is just under a decade since the historian Theodore Hershberg, a close student of American minority groups and a founder of the then new Journal of Ethnic Studies, announced the demise of the “Age of Aquarius,” pronouncing at the same time its displacement by the “Age of Ethnicity.” In so proclaiming he also, figuratively at least, announced the passing of one of the oldest of American ideals: the notion of the “Melting Pot,” that social process by which the ethnic elements of American society would all be boiled down into a national cultural amalgam by way of their “Americanization.” In announcing the advent of the Age of Ethnicity, Hershberg gave tacit recognition to the fact that the melting pot model of ethnic group accommodation to American culture had now been pre-empted, officially and normatively, by the notion of “cultural pluralism.” There was no further need for amalgamation at all: each group was now to proceed to celebrate its origins, its distinct culture, and its fellowship in any way it pleased, as one of its fundamental American “rights.”

On reflection, it may seem that in some respects the timing of the Hershberg prophesy is odd, even perverse. Many specialists were even then about the business of eliminating ethnicity altogether as a major factor in American culture, pronouncing the vestigial ethnic elements in US society virtually “assimilated.”
Tocqueville and the American Presidency
Authors: Brogan Hugh
Published: January 2009

In nothing is the difference between the Presidency today and in the nineteenth century more clearly symbolised than in the matter of accessibility. Today the President is closely guarded both for reasons of security and to save him from unreasonable calls on his time, and what is unreasonable is defined pretty strictly. For example, Mr. Walter Hickel, when he was Secretary of the Interior, found it impossible to get an interview with President Nixon on a matter he thought important. He took the desperate step of leaking his views to the press, and was dismissed for his pains.

Such an episode was inconceivable in the nineteenth century. Everyone knows the story of the reception at the White House on New Year's Day, 1863. So many people called to shake hands with Abraham Lincoln on that day, as was their right, that when he went upstairs to sign the Emancipation Proclamation he could hardly hold the pen steady. And everyone also knows the story of the riotous installation of Andrew Jackson in 1829.

It was then considered highly un-republican, indeed dangerously aristocratic, for a President to seclude himself; and Jackson, whose predecessor, John Quincy Adams, and successor, Martin Van Buren, were both ferociously criticised for their airs and graces (Adams's crime was that he had installed a billiards table in the White House) was particularly careful to give no cause for offence.
The Anti-Slavery Mission of George Thompson to the United States, 1834–1835
Authors: Rice C. Duncan
Published: January 2009

During the fifteen months from August 1834 to November 1835 nothing caused so much excitement in the American press, both pro-slavery and abolitionist, as the anti-slavery mission of the British reformer George Thompson. In the event, Thompson's visit ended in his escaping from a mob-ridden Boston on the New Brunswick packet. William Lloyd Garrison, no doubt secretly satisfied with the discredit reflected on his opponents by the mobs supporting them in this way, also consoled himself and the readers of theLiberatorwith the reflection that Thompson, ‘By his presence, and the power of his victorious eloquence, and the resistless energy of his movement…has shaken the land from side to side… At the mention of his name, republican tyrants stand aghast, and their knees smite violently against each other.’ In retrospect he appears wildly optimistic: it took another thirty years to free the Negro from ‘republican tyrants’, and even then the success was incomplete. It was achieved by methods Garrison abhorred, which certainly owed little directly to the efforts of Thompson. If his mission was of any importance it was so in the sense that it polarized opinion on slavery more sharply. He came to provide a useful focal point for the preconceived likes and dislikes of American citizens who could work themselves up to a new enthusiasm over the slavery issue by hating him as a ‘foreign incendiary’, or adulating him as the slaves' Lafayette. On the other hand, Thompson was only one of several possible focal points, and it is likely that even in 1834 it would have been easy to find some other individual to centre controversy around and produce exactly the same polarization effect if he had never set foot on American soil.
American Naval Preparations for War with Spain, 1896–1898
Authors: Grenville John A. S.
Published: January 2009

The historical debate over the Spanish-American War of 1898 is being reopened on both sides of the Atlantic. Until comparatively recently historians gave confident answers to the questions of the causes and consequences of the war. Moral assumptions about America's true mission were never very far from the surface of the interpretations which had won general acceptance in the United States. America's involvement in world affairs and more especially the acquisition of an empire was viewed as a perversion of her mission. There existed a consensus of opinion among historians that President McKinley and his administration were not in control of policy; that they were swept forward by a tide of public feeling, by political considerations, and by Congressional pressures they found impossible to resist. It was believed that war had been foisted on the American people by those who manipulated public opinion, by mass hysteria cleverly fomented by sectional interests, by the newspapers, by business pressure groups, and by jingo senators. Responsibility for the acquisition of the Philippines was uncritically ascribed to a junior member of the administration, Theodore Roosevelt, who when Assistant Secretary of the Navy, it was alleged, had plotted the whole thing with his friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Rigorous research is challenging every one of these assumptions. The strategic aspects of American foreign policy, and more particularly the influence of naval officers on national policy, have been seriously studied by only a few historians, whose work has as yet little affected the ‘classical’ textbook versions of American policy before the war with Spain.
The Vernacular History of A. M. Simons
Authors: Kreuter Kent , Kreuter Gretchen
Published: January 2009

No recent student of American historiography has failed to acquire a passing acquaintance with some of the historical writing of the American Socialist A. M. Simons. No treatment of economic determinism in American thought omits at least a footnote of credit toSocial Forces in American History, published in 1911, in which the irascible radical touched upon ideas and interpretations that Charles Beard and others were to develop with less heat and less haste. Simons's treatment of the American Revolution and the Constitutional Convention, of the Jacksonian era, and of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, sounded themes that became staples of debate within the historical profession. In fact, however, Simons's history has a distinction that goes beyond its role as the first Marxist interpretation of the American past, or as an expression of ‘progressive history’. It is part of a much older, larger and many-sided body of thought that made up an attack upon the genteel tradition in American intellectual and cultural experience. In literature, that attack developed a set of responses that recent scholars have termed the ‘vernacular tradition’. By examining Simons's historical writing in the context of the vernacular tradition, one can see that his history is much more than a Marxist curiosity. His history was shaped both by experience and ideology, and it was intended to be a cultural critique as well as an economic one.
Notes for a Comparison between American and European Romanticism
Authors: Tanner Tony
Published: January 2009

This is a version of a paper read to the conference of the European Association for American Studies at Rome in September 1967. The subject, which was prescribed by the organizers, is clearly too vast to admit of definitive treatment in this space, and the essay should accordingly be regarded as no more than a tentative exploration of the topic in order to stimulate discussion. As my method relies extensively on allusions and short quotations it seemed undesirable to over-burden this printed version with footnotes locating precisely the source of every such reference. I have instead indicated in the text wherever possible the title of the work cited, and it may be helpful to add here that the essays of Emerson on which I have mainly drawn are these: ‘Nature’ (1836), ‘The Transcendentalist’ (1843), and ‘The Poet’ (1844).
‘You Can't Steal Credit’: the Economic Motif in Paterson
Authors: Conarroe Joel O.
Published: January 2009

In a strong attack on the second, third and fourth books of William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Randall Jarrell expressed chagrin that Book II introduces the themes of credit and usury, ‘those enemies of man, God, and contemporary long poems’. It is true that the economic theories worked into parts of Williams's major work often sound very much like Ezra Pound at his most dispensable. As Vivienne Koch put it: ‘One serious weakness in Book IV, got like a contagion from Pound's Cantos, is the introduction of an explicit pseudo-scientific diagnosis of our present economic ills, relying on the Poundian demonstration of Usura and the Poundian salvation of Social Credit.’ The least impressive passages in Paterson are those (particularly the final six pages of IV. ii) in which the excited promulgation of money theories comes perilously close to being mere harangue. Jarrell was mistaken, however, in going on to assert that the economic anecdotes and political remarks are where they are only ‘because Dr Williams chose—happened to choose—for them to be there’. Williams's ideas on money and credit, as digressive and presumptuous as they often seem to be, are actually tied in with the other major themes in the poem. Furthermore, they represent the culmination of a long and passionate protest against a system that sanctions private use of public money.
Large Town Officeholding in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut: The Growth of Oligarchy
Authors: Daniels Bruce C.
Published: January 2009

The Colonial New England town has always intrigued American historians but, paradoxically, few historians until recently have placed the colonial town under a microscope and studied it in detail. Most, instead, like George Bancroft and Herbert Baxter Adams, simply heaped accolades upon it. Even the Progressive historians, writing in an age of scientific history and seeking to debunk the myth of town meeting democracy, still did not apply a close scrutiny to the actual sources but instead also talked in generalities. The only real exceptions to this pattern and the only persons to delve deeply into local sources were Charles Andrews in his River Towns of Connecticut and G. E. Howard in his Introduction to the Local Constitutional History of the United States, both published in 1889. The next serious professional local study did not appear until 1961. In the intervening seventy-two years hundreds of local histories were written, but by antiquarians who frequently wrote with intelligence and felicity but seldom asked the significant questions that a professional historian would. Indeed, to be involved in local history implied, to people living in this time period, that a person was an antiquarian and not a true historian. However, since 1961 a number of historians have attempted to put the New England town under a microscope and ascertain some specifics to replace the generalities.
Gary, Indiana: Steeltown Extraordinary
Authors: Brook Anthony
Published: January 2009

Gary, Indiana, was the great symbol of urban-industrial America in the Progressive Era, the largest attempt at urban genesis and town planning ever undertaken by American industry. It was an enormous undertaking – nothing less than the creation of the largest integrated iron and steel complex in the U.S.A., complete with its supporting city. Unfortunately, the greatest of America's company towns never lived up to the hopes of its founders, U.S. Steel. Hailed as the New Industrial Utopia, it rapidly degenerated into a dreary industrial conurbation; Gary represented the failure of large-scale industrial city planning.
The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives
Authors: Zavarzadeh Mas'ud
Published: January 2009

Recent American experimental fiction, in response to the fictive behaviour of the emerging realities of a technetronic culture, moves beyond the interpretive modernist novel in which the fictionist interpreted the ‘ human condition ’ within the framework of a comprehensive private metaphysics, towards a metamodern narrative with zero degree of interpretation. The mistrust of the epistemological authority of the fictive novelist is mainly caused by the pressures of the overwhelming actualities of contemporary America which render all interpretations of ‘ reality ’ arbitrary and therefore simultaneously accurate and absurd.
A Reading of Bernard Malamud's The Tenants
Authors: Lindberg-Seyersted Brita
Published: January 2009

A reader familiar with Bernard Malamud's works is likely to turn to a new novel by this well-established writer with certain expectations. He will probably count on meeting again Malamud's variant of the Yiddish shlemiel: the fool-victim, who is the butt of fate and men, bungling his way through life, but who somehow manages to endure it all, helped by his foolhardy persistence and his wry grimaces and shrugs. Among other strands that enter into the fabric of a Malamud novel or story there is the all-too-human female character – one hesitates to dub her ‘ heroine ’ – whose gift of love tends to be a dubious blessing. The male protagonist's personality and destiny are often given depth and scope through the motif of the double; this is not exactly the Romantic Doppelgänger, but rather two characters whose destinies are linked in various ways, sometimes in a (spiritual) father-son pattern. The heroic-unheroic action will very likely take place in an atmosphere of isolation and imprisonment, the ghetto being a prototypical setting. The past will most certainly play a small but important role as a means of creating depth and resonance; it may appear as history, legend or myth. Touches of a pastoral world – trees, flowers, birds – will hint at possibilities of freedom, purity and innocence. The shlemiel will never really be attuned to these happier strains; nevertheless there will most probably be a movement in his development toward a qualifies rebirth, a limited redemption, which will have to be bought with suffering and commitment. This might be the commitment of the artist, and the satisfaction of wholehearted dedication will be balanced and often outweighed by anguish and doubts of purpose and ability. Malamud always lightens the sombre picture with humour and wit; this is achieved by colourful ‘ Jewish ’ echoes: self-deprecating jokes and home-made sayings and proverbs which tend to reduce tragedy to something trivial and commonplace.
Cast a Cold ‘ I ’: Mary McCarthy on Vietnam
Authors: Taylor Gordon O.
Published: January 2009

‘ There is always one theme in Mary McCarthy's fictions ’, writes Alfred Kazin in Bright Book of Life: ‘ none of these awful people is going to catch me. The heroine is always distinctly right, and gives herself all possible marks for taste, integrity and indomitability. Other people are somehow material to be written up. ’ Whether or not one accepts this as fair, one is inclined to agree that a pattern of identification exists between the novelist and her fictional heroines. A reader of McCarthy's non-fiction is also often struck, particularly of late, by the extent to which self-portrayal can become central to her treatment of a subject. The inward play of her imaginative response is frequently as much the substance as the servant of her outwardly avowed literary purpose, or the onward momentum of her narrative line. The intellectual, aesthetic or moral assurance of her self-characterization exerts defining pressure on her materials, be they those of the critic or the polemicist, the autobiographer or the reporter. This pressure of personality indeed relates more than it distinguishes, sometimes even fuses, these various literary roles, along with a number of their respective techniques.
Howells's Obscure Hurt
Authors: Crowley John W.
Published: January 2009

‘ Every loyal American who went abroad during the first years of our great war felt bound to make himself some excuse for turning his back on his country in the hour of her trouble ’, wrote W. D. Howells in 1881. It is a striking coincidence in American literary history that four major writers of the late nineteenth century – Howells, Henry James, S. L. Clemens, and Henry Adams – all failed to serve in the Civil War. Whether or not they believed that they had turned their backs on their country, each made some excuse in his published work. The most notorious is Henry James's statement inNotes of a Son and Brotherthat ‘ a horrid even if an obscure hurt ’ had prevented him from volunteering to fight.
MelioristversusInsurgent Planners and the Problems of New York, 1921–1941
Authors: Simpson Michael
Published: January 2009

American planning in the twentieth century has been dominated by a meliorist approach to environmental problems. This dominance has been challenged, more or less ineffectively, by a more radical tradition. The sharpest exchange between the two took place in the interwar years in the city and state of New York, respectively the nation's largest metropolis and then its most populous state. The problems of city and state were the problems of the new industrial-urban nation in microcosm. They attracted the attention of the leading figures in each camp and led to an abortive proposal for a state plan on the part of the radicals or insurgents and, in terms of its implementation, a much more successful Regional Plan of New York and its Environs (1921–30), the work of meliorist planners. This essay explores the problems of the metropolitan region in the interwar years, the alternative strategies put forward, the controversies between the opposing schools of thought and their relative successes and failures.
Humanitarianism in the Early Republic: The Moral Reformers of New York, 1776–1825
Authors: Heale M. J.
Published: January 2009

During the eighteenth century humanitarian sentiment grew in both Britain and Europe and by the end of the century, as Michael Kraus has shown, this benevolent spirit was crossing the Atlantic and was touching many Americans. Humanitarian activities of many kinds were undertaken in the early republic, presaging the great reforming crusades of the mid-nineteenth century, and the centres of these experiments were the large commercial cities of New York, Philadelphia and Boston, which possessed the necessary conditions of a conscientious middle-class, an adequate supply of funds, and social evils in need of attention.
Henry Adams and 1905: Prolegomena toThe Education
Authors: Vandersee Charles
Published: January 2009

We know precisely what Secretary of State John Hay was doing on 7 January 1905, and it had nothing to do with government affairs. Sixtyseven years old, and not in the best of health, Hay had an engagement that took him away from his comfortable Washington mansion on Lafayette Square, across from the White House. His destination was New York—the Italian Renaissance building at 7 West 43rd Street occupied by the Century Club. The New YorkTribuneduly noted his checking-in at the Wolcott Hotel, but it carried no notice of his mission, which for the moment was secret. Hay had once lived in New York, thirty years before, as an editor of theTribune, after serving as Lincoln's secretary during the Civil War. While there he had also published his celebrated little book of western dialect poems calledPike County Ballads(1871). He had then gone on, with John Nicolay, to write a scholarly ten-volumeHistoryof Abraham Lincoln, and in 1897 had been appointed American minister to England. Now, with neither fanfare nor ambition behind him, he was in his seventh year as Secretary of State and at the apex of his career, having arranged the Open Door to Chinese trade and having negotiated several important Latin American treaties.
The Hero in France and in America
Authors: Poli Bernard
Published: January 2009

Renart the fox, D'Artagnan the musketeer, ambitious young men like Rastignac or Julien Sorel are usually described in France as universal types and yet they strike the foreign observer as typically French. Conversely, who could say that Huck Finn, Sister Carrie, Joe Christmas or Frederick Henry are anything but American, though their stories have been read and made emblematic of the human fate in numerous foreign countries? There seem to exist subliminal signals which give readers at home the shock of recognition, and also denote the foreignness of a character when seen from distant shores.
Formal Experiment and Social Discontent: Joseph Heller's Catch-22
Authors: Way Brian
Published: January 2009

Joseph Heller's brilliant first novel, Catch-22, has the power to transform American literature, to re-invigorate a fiction which, since 1955, has tended to work over, with declining vitality, the formulae of earlier years. He combines an experimental attitude towards formal problems with a fully contemporary sense of what it means for a writer to be a radical in the current phase of American culture.
Kennedy, Congress and Civil Rights
Authors: Hart John
Published: January 2009

President Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 was quickly followed by a wave of instant history, mainly produced by those who worked closely with him in the White House. Sorensen, Schlesinger and Salinger all published their memoirs in the mid-sixties, while O'Donnell and O'Brien followed suit in the early seventies. It was inevitable that their assessment of the Kennedy Presidency would be a favourable one and it was equally inevitable that it would generate a reaction from those who believed that the Kennedy myth needed to be destroyed. The instant history of the sixties has now given way to the instant revisionism of the seventies and John F. Kennedy is getting a distinctly unfavourable press. Leaving aside foreign affairs, it is Kennedy's handling of civil rights to which the revisionists are most antagonistic. Here the relationship between the President and Congress is brought sharply into focus. It is argued that Kennedy did not put before the legislature the wide-ranging and bold commitments on civil rights made during the election campaign; that his approach to the problem was tailored to suit the sensibilities of the southern Democrats in the House and Senate, and that he studiously avoided offering moral and political leadership to the country at large. Thus Henry Fairlie blames Kennedy for “ procrastination and tokenism”; Lewis Paper argues that Kennedy's handling of civil rights “ did not speak well of his success as a public educator ” and Bruce Miroff, perhaps the most outspoken of all the critics, places Kennedy's performance in the context of “ pragmatic liberalism rooted in elite politics ” — an approach which he unhesitatingly condemns.
Proletarian Literature and the John Reed Clubs 1929–1935
Authors: Homberger Eric
Published: January 2009

In February 1921 Irwin Granich, not yet transformed into “ Michael Gold,” published “ Towards Proletarian Art” in The Liberator. This essay has been described as “ the first significant call in this country [the United States] for the creation of a distinctly and militantly working-class culture.” What Gold meant by “ proletarian art” remains unclear. He uses “ proletarian” interchangeably with “ masses,” and suggests that Walt Whitman was the discoverer, without quite realizing it, of proletarian art in America. The proletariat for Gold were nothing less than heroic possessors of Life — “ The masses know what Life is, and they live on in gusto and joy ” — who have been thwarted by society from the full realization of their artistic and cultural heritage. Gold's thought was dominated by a lyrical and mystical celebration of the modern industrial worker, tinged by frustration at the bitter waste of human potential under capitalism.
Profit Over Class: A Study in American Industrial Espionage
Authors: Jeffreys-Jones R.
Published: January 2009

My students at the University of Edinburgh often ask me, why have Americans been so anti-socialist? Some of them perplexedly refer to the rarity of class conflicts, as, say, Clydesiders would define them, in United States history. They remain unconvinced by ‘class’ or ‘economic’ interpretations of the American past. They underline the paradox by recalling the comparative weakness, in the long term, of organized American socialism. Still, they point out, there has been a good deal of anti-socialist, anti-communist rhetoric across the Atlantic. Is mere any explanation for what, on the face of it, seems to be a ranting in the void?
Charles Francis Adams (1807–1886): A Forgotten Family Man of Letters
Authors: Harbert Earl N.
Published: January 2009

In any catalogue of famous American families, the Adams name takes second place to none. John and John Quincy Adams were first and second generation Presidents, and in the fourth generation Charles Francis Jr., Brooks, and Henry Adams all gained renown as historians and writers. Upon closer study, however, the story of the Adamses presents us with something more significant than an example of sequential biography; rather, it suggests a fascinating historical and literary problem. For what began as a political dynasty endured three generations later as a family literary society, effectively divorced from the exercise of those powers which had once appeared to be a birthright. A dramatic transition from political leadership to literary notoriety had been completed; and this change symbolized the alteration in Adams family fortunes between 1828 and 1920. Even as it was taking place, moreover, this shift in the nature and character of family activities and attainments puzzled and sometimes tortured those members of the third and fourth generations who felt themselves being made the victims of the change. Brooks Adams, for example, shows his anguished response in ‘The Heritage of Henry Adams’ and Law of Civilization and Decay; and Henry Adams registers his own surprise and cool horror when he contemplates the fate of the Adamses in The Education of Henry Adams.
Living Mythically: The Thirties
Authors: Mottram Eric
Published: January 2009

In May 1932 the Museum of Modern Art opened on 53rd Street in New York in an old mansion. A number of artists associated widi New Masses, the leftist magazine founded in 1925, showed a collection of political murals sharply commenting on die economic imbalance and social cruelty of the times. Hugo Gellert's mural was entided ‘Us fellas gotta stick together’, a phrase drawn from an already notorious conversation between a young member of die wealthy Vanderbilt family, who had obtained a reporting job on a Hearst newspaper, and his equally rich interviewee, Al Capone, then in gaol. Capone, as usual, knew die score and told die young capitalist inheritor: ‘Us fellas gotta stick togedier.‘ Gellert's mural neatly encapsulated the Hearst-gangsterdom axis, since the centre of corruption, then as now, in America was die interlocking of business and crime. Naturally, President Hoover, Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan and J. D. Rockefeller found die exhibition offensive since diey were die ‘fellas’ in die mural with Capone. Another picture, by the great political artist, Ben Shahn, showed figures in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and one by William Gropper, another fine political artist, showed J. P. Morgan and Andrew Mellon, a couple of notorious millionaires, eating tickertape with two pigs, and protected by militiamen. The Gropper was entitled, with little subdety, but quite accurately, ‘The Writing on the Wall’.
The Soldier and the Scholar: Emerson's Warring Heroes
Authors: Stessel Edward
Published: January 2009

He is tempted to cease battling; his blood begins to chill; he hears the frost-king's lullaby. But as he is about to yield to sleep, he is startled back into militance by the cry of a titmouse, a small “scrap of valor” that “just for play/Fronts the north-wind.” The courage of the bird returns to him his own and he adopts its Emersonian doctrine that “the soul, if stout within/Can arm impregnably the skin.”

The freshness that Emerson's contemporaries found in his writings derived largely from this brisk militant quality. In an age that Emerson thought lacking in a “literature of Heroism,” his own writings were a constant call to bravery (CWE, 2, 247–48). And his most consistent image for that bravery was the soldier. Men, he said, “should calmly front the morrow” as if it were a battle-formation; they should not be “cowards fleeing before a revolution,” but instead should be “advancing on Chaos and the dark” (CWE, 2, 47, 297). One's life should be “a battle, a conquest”; one should state his convictions as boldly as if he wereopening hostilities: “Every principle is a war-note” (CWE, 9, 353). Even those in sedentary occupations should display the bravery of warriors.
The Transmogrification of Faerie Land Into Prairie Land
Authors: Krieg Joann Peck
Published: January 2009

In the spring of 1827 the splendidly appointed steamshipAlbanyslid for the first time into the waters of the Hudson River to begin what proved to be an eighteen-year career of commercial travel on that busy waterway. Two years earlier the opening of New York's Erie Canal linking Albany to its western sister city, Buffalo, had enhanced the already flourishing steamboat commerce on the Hudson, for that mighty river then became the principal access to the great westward water route that terminated with the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.
The New Class in Massachusetts: Politics in a Technocratic Society
Authors: Davies Philip , White John Kenneth
Published: January 2009

With the gradual disintegration of the Democratic Party's New Deal coalition there has been regular speculation on the nature of party dealignment and realignment in the USA. Realignment affects the various levels of government and regions of the country differentially as the political landscape responds to underlying demographic and economic patterns. Groups of voters may reassess their traditional loyalties as they find their own, or their party's, policy priorities changing. Recent gubernatorial elections in Massachusetts serve to illustrate some of the internal pressures on the Democratic Party as the country enters the post-industrial era. In spite of the Democratic Party's dominance of the state's politics these elections have served as a battleground between groups of voters whose interests and concerns coalesce in a way that no longer can be explained solely in terms of traditional class position or economic interest, but also represent a clash between competing lifestyles.

An emergent post-industrial social setting, such as can be observed in Massachusetts, may be identified as possessing a number of interrelated components.
The 1972 Elections
Authors: Nicholas H. G.
Published: January 2009

Elections satisfy both the practical and the theoretical requirements of classical democratic theory if they answer one question only: Who shall rule? Judged by this test the American elections of 7 November 1972 returned as clear and unequivocal an answer as the United States Constitution permits – crystal-clear as to individuals, equivocal as to parties and political forces. But the student of politics and society cannot resist treating elections as data-gathering devices on a wide range of other questions, on the state of the public mind, on the relative potency of pressure groups, on the internal health of the political parties, and, of course, on the shape of things to come. In this ancillary role American elections, despite the generous wealth of statistical material which they throw up – so much more detailed and categorized (though often less precise) than our own – Suffer in most years from one severe limitation, a limitation which in 1972 was particularly conspicuous; they do not engage the interest of more than a moderate percentage of the American citizenry. In 1972 that percentage was as low as 55 per cent, i.e. out of an estimated eligible population of 139,642,000 only 77,000,000 went to the polls. Since this circumscribes the conclusions which can be drawn from the results themselves, as well as constituting a phenomenon of considerable intrinsic interest, it seems worthwhile to begin any examination of the 1972 elections by an analysis not of the votes counted but of those which were never cast.
The Cambridge Lectureship of 1866: A False Start in American Studies
Authors: Martin Ged
Published: January 2009

In October 1865 Cambridge University was offered an endowment for a lectureship in the History and Institutions of the United States. In February 1866, after full and open discussion, the Senate of the University, which was composed of all Masters of Arts, voted to reject the offer. This false start to American Studies in Cambridge was no mere donnish eccentricity, but an indication of the attitudes of conservative Englishmen to the United States at the close of the Civil War.
Joseph Hergesheimer's Germany: A Radical Art of Surfaces
Authors: Justus James H.
Published: January 2009

In the summer of 1931 Joseph Hergesheimer, author of more than a dozen books of fiction, returned to Germany for a visit, his first since 1907. This very American trip is recounted in his Berlin (1932) forgotten book by a well-nigh forgotten writer. It is surely one of the most curious volumes of a literary type which, for all its vigorous and perceptive judgements, is itself something of a curiosity. By now, I suppose, it is a commonplace mat the travel book, the elegant bastard of genres, invariably reveals more about the traveller than about the geography he supposedly describes. This is true certainly for modern examples which come to mind – James's The American Scene (1907) Hemingway's The Green Hills of Africa (1935) or Steinbeck's Travels with Charley (1961). And whatever other defects mar, say, Truman Capote's Local Color (1950) or John Knowles's Double Vision (1964), the failure to impose personality on the scene –to let voice and stance, even with their inadequacies, shape and experience – is in large measure the source of our disappointment in those books. Hergesheimer's Berlin does not fail for this reason. Like Local Color, it is mannered, and like Double Vision, it is thin; but it is not merely mannered and thin.
The Problem of the Early American Crowd
Authors: Countryman Edward
Published: January 2009

Some six years ago Gordon Wood closed a brief discussion of mobs in the American Revolution by asking whether, if the mob was no less a mob than its European counterpart, the revolution was any less a revolution. Three recent full-length studies, Pauline Maier'sFrom Resistance to Revolution, Richard D. Brown'sRevolutionary Politics in Massachusettsand Patricia U. Bonomi'sA Factious People, deal in significant part with mob, or, as I will call it, crowd activity in early America, although in none of them does it form the main subject. The approach to it of all three is fresh and sophisticated but, as the cliché goes, they raise as many questions as they answer. This essay will look first at the questions they answer and then go on to the ones they raise.
The American Revolution as a Social Movement Revisited
Authors: Bonwick Colin
Published: January 2009

Discussion of the American Revolution began at the beginning. Contemporaries identified two interactive, though not interlocked, major elements by boasting of the attainment of independence and the founding of a new republic; as Enos Hitchcock insisted in 1788, “A revolution can never be considered as complete till government is firmly established — and without this independency would be a curse instead of a blessing. — These jointly were the great object of the American Revolution.” A third component of the Revolutionary experience was a network of social changes that affected many aspects of American life. Some processes — demographic growth, economic expansion, and western settlement, all of which contributed materially to the context of Revolutionary change — were essentially secular and developmental in effect. Others, such as the emancipation of blacks and women, had barely begun during the Revolutionary era; a few, for example, the disestablishment of religion, were largely complete by the end of the century. Among these many social processes was one that interacted with both other components of the Revolution, was central in function, and had both immediate and long-term effects. Elites were forced to share their power.

By 1800 a critical change had taken place in the fabric of American society. The Revolution had transformed ideological expectations, behaviour patterns and social relationships as well as institutions, and had drastically altered the basis on which social and political authority could be exercised in a manner that transcended the departure of British officials and Loyalist exiles.
The Democratic-Republicans before the Civil War: Political Ideology and Economic Change
Authors: Ashworth John
Published: January 2009

When James K. Polk entered the White House in March 1845 all but a small minority of politicians acted and voted in accordance with the stated principles of one of two major parties. These parties were emphatically national in scope; each won support from all sections of the Union. Sixteen years later when it was the turn of Abraham Lincoln to enter the White House the situation was dramatically altered. Seven states from the Deep South had left the Union, four of the Upper South states were soon to follow. As the firing began at Fort Sumter, northerners of all parties rallied to the defence of the Union. A party system genuinely national in scope had been supplanted by sectional conflict that was about to erupt into Civil War.

A key stage in this process occurred when northern Democrats challenged what seemed to be the increasingly evident southern dominance of their party. For many Democrats disillusionment did not come until close to the end of the decade. These Democrats remained within their party and supported Douglas in 1860. They were nevertheless by this time bitter in their denunciations of the South and the resolute defenders of the Union in the aftermath of secession.
The Lincoln–Douglas Contest of 1858 and Illinois' Electorate
Authors: Collins Bruce
Published: January 2009

Who won the Lincoln–Douglas election of 1858? is a question that has frequently been pondered by historians. This is not surprising, since the campaign of 1858 in Illinois was, in David Potter's words, “perhaps the most famous local political contest in American history.” It made Abraham Lincoln'snationalreputation, though Lincoln had enjoyed strong support in his run for the Senate in 1855, and had been a respectable midwestern candidate for the Republicans' vice-presidential nomination in 1856. It also confirmed Senator Stephen A. Douglas's differences with the national Democratic Party under President James Buchanan's leadership. The acrimonious division among Illinois' Democrats between Douglasites and Buchanan's followers in 1858 prefigured a wider struggle throughout the northern Democratic Party during the two following years, a struggle which, to some of his party rivals' surprise, Douglas won by a huge margin. Because both men achieved their parties' presidential candidacy in 1860, it is easy to accept the force of Don E. Fehrenbacher's conclusion: “The Lincoln–Douglas campaign of 1858 proved to be a contest without a real loser…. The momentum gathered in their contest for a Senate seat carried both Lincoln and Douglas to the threshold of the White House, but only one could enter.” What is less obvious is how Illinois' electorate responded to the rhetoric so plentifully presented to them and how far the debate over sectional issues subsumed all other political questions in 1858.
Sinclair Lewis and the Diagnostic Novel: Main Street and Babbitt
Authors: Fisher Joel
Published: January 2009

Sinclair Lewis's critical reputation could not easily be lower than it is at present. In the discussion that follows I want to suggest that a radical re-evaluation of this reputation, and of Lewis's achievement as a novelist, is necessary; not just because he ought to be read and studied seriously in his own right, but also because in his best fiction he addresses very important issues of narrative technique and of historical and structural analysis. And I believe that without a proper understanding of Lewis's engagement with his material in these areas, most notably in Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), the two texts I want to concentrate on here, any account of the re-shaping of American fiction in the years after the First World War must be seriously incomplete.

Lewis has proved to be an extremely easy writer to dismiss from any literary or intellectual canon, and not without good reason. His fictions are direct, accessible, and for the most part actively simple. Like Wells and Bennett in England he is a provincial writer of materialist romances, apparently left behind by Modernism; like Upton Sinclair he is a clumsy and over-productive fictionaliser of obvious social problems; in the 1920s he is a man of middle age writing stories about middle-aged characters for a middle-aged readership in a literary and intellectual climate obsessed and characterized by youth; he is a “wildly inconsistent writer, who in his weakest work unquestionably justifies Schorer's description of him as “one of the worst writers in modern American Literature.” And probably more than any other twentieth-century writer of comparable stature, Lewis has been a victim of literary history-writing. With only the very weak platform of spectacular popular success to support him, he stands as the clearest (and unfortunately also the most vociferous) representative of the American fiction that Hemingway and Fitzgerald and their apologists were careful to be seen to be superseding in the 1920s and 1930s.
Henry George the Prophet
Authors: Lawson-Peebles Bob
Published: January 2009

The Gilded Age saw the emergence of a number of figures who produced alternative theories to the dominant doctrine of laissez-faire. One such alternative theorist was Henry George (1839–97), a man of pronounced individualist proclivities who invoked the Jeffersonian tradition of sturdy agrarian independence as a corrective to an unbalanced economy which, he believed, was driving a destructive wedge between rich and poor. Today, George is regarded primarily as an economic reformer and his best-selling book with its jingling title,Progress and Poverty(1879), is read for its analysis of post-bellum America and for the panacea that it propounds: a levy on the value of land which, because it was designed to replace all other taxes, came to be called the Single Tax. In contrast, George's religious beliefs have received scant attention from his biographers and historians of the period, who have done little more than note that he was a devout Christian. This oversight has been rectified in a recent article by Fred Nicklason, ‘ Henry George: Social Gospeller ’, which draws attention to the religious orientation of George's writings and discusses his relations with churchmen. Yet although Nicklason stresses the importance of George's religious activity, he asserts that ‘ George himself moved from an initial concern for the single tax as a social reform to a deep-seated regard for its divine sanction ’. I believe that this is a misconception of George, and I shall try to show that his visionary experience led him to regard himself as a religious leader and prompted him to formulate his social theory. I also hope to demonstrate that his messianic pretensions grew with his following and that it was his religious role, rather than the Single Tax, which during his lifetime not only made disciples but also influenced theorists who were otherwise unsympathetic to his economic bolus.
‘ The Persuasive Lips ’: Men and Guns in America, the West
Authors: Mottram Eric
Published: January 2009

In June 1974, Tim Findley reported the shoot-out between Los Angeles police and the Symbionese Liberation Army for Rolling Stone. Fully covered by TV, police fanaticism and the fantasies of Cinque entered every home:

People sat in their living rooms, watching an epic battle of American insanity, commenting to each other about the cases of ammunition being unloaded from the FBI car, about the small grin on the cop's face as he threw the bolt home on his rifle before firing another round into the blazing little bungalow in south Los Angeles. His base-ball cap and clumsy flak jacket along with his bolt-action rifle made him appear as a boy playing at a game in which all the battles are heroic spectacles – where just the imaginary bad guys fall dead.

The camera pans closer …
An Early Colonial Historian: John Oldmixon andThe British Empire in America
Authors: Rogers Pat
Published: January 2009

For many years, Arthur M. Schlesinger observed, the American colonists were too occupied with living the present to explore their own past. Such historical works as were written generally confined themselves to a single province. Perhaps the most important intercolonial work of the early eighteenth century was compiled by an Englishman: Daniel Neal'sHistory of New-England(1720). In theNew Cambridge Bibliography of English Literaturethe entry for Neal is immediately preceded by that for John Oldmixon (1673–1742), miscellaneous Whig compiler and butt of the Tory wits. This may serve as a reminder that Oldmixon, too, wrote a pioneering work of colonial history – a flawed, prolix but deeply interesting book which merits more scrupulous attention than it generally gets.