bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Makers and Finders
Authors: Rubin Joan Shelley
Published: March 2011

Paul E Boiler, Jr. Freedom and Fate in American Thought from Edwards to Dewey. Dallas: SMU Press, 1978. 300 + xiv pp. Harry V Jaffa. How to Think About the American Revolution. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1978. 183 +xii pp. Peter Karsten. Patriot-Heroes in England and America: Political Symbolism and Changing Values over Three Centuries. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. 257 pp. John E Wilson. Public Religion in American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979, 198 + ix pp. Americans, Van Wyck Brooks complained in Letters and Leadership (1918), have "no national fabric of spiritual experience." In the years since Brooks made that pronouncement, intellectual historians, political scientists, liter- ary critics (among them Brooks himself), and other cultural explorers have furnished abundant evidence for a revision of his appraisal; such scholars have been, to use Brooks's phrase, the "makers and finders" of American traditions. Four of the latest contributors to that effort—Peter Karsten, John E Wilson, Harry V Jaffa, and Paul E Boiler, Jr. —have "made and found," and in some instances "made up," national traditions of political hero- worship, collective devotion to broadly defined religious ideals, dedication to equality on the part of the country's greatest leaders, and preoccupation with ideas of freedom. Each provides a different model for the examination of American thought.
Dark Laughter and Light Comedy: Humor and the American Character
Authors: Collins R. G.
Published: March 2011

James C. Austin. American Humor in France. Two Centuries of French Criticism of the Comic Spirit in American Literature. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1978. 177 pp. Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill. America's Humor. From Poor Richard to Doonesbury. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. 559 pp. Ronald Wallace. The Last Laugh: Form and Affirmation in the Contemporary American Comic Novel. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979. 159 pp. In the Tom Stoppard play Night and Day, two English colonials in an African country are briefing a newly arrived journalist. The black strong man who runs the country as president—a mixture of Idi Amin and George Washington — is expected to arrive at their house at any moment, and the journalist is warned of his unpredictable temper in something like the following words: "Don't worry, unless he laughs. If he laughs, look out!" Buried in the general discussion, the comment is apt soon to be forgotten by the audience. A few minutes later the dictator arrives, and slouches amiably in a deck chair as the group engages in conversation. Then, a casual comment by the journalist evokes a booming laugh; a second later, the massive fist of the black ruler lashes out and strikes the journalist to the floor.
The Realist Restoration: Histories of American and Soviet Diplomacy in the Near East, Latin America and Eastern Europe
Authors: Wooley Wesley T.
Published: March 2011

Bruce R. Kuniholm. The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980. 485 + xxiii pp. Lester D. Langley. The United States and the Caribbean, 1900-1970. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1980. 324 + i pp. Walter Ullmann. The United States in Prague, 1945-1948. Boulder, Co.: East European Quarterly and Columbia University Press, 1978. 205 + x pp. Few topics in American history have been as extensively and emotionally debated during the last two decades as American Cold War diplomacy. The debate has been energized by disillusionment with the policies of the United States in Southeast Asia, by the intensely ideological political controversies of the 1960s, by the government's release of many new historical sources for the 1940s, and, more simply, by the mere passage of time. A new generation of writers emerged who could recall only dimly the panicky early postwar fears of Soviet expansion.
A Forgotten Prophet: Henry McCulloh and Reform of the British Empire
Authors: Bumsted J. M.
Published: March 2011

History has not been kind to the memory of Henry McCulloh. After a century and a half of almost total obscurity, he emerged for a time in historical accounts as an important colonial expert, an advisor to ministries, and an eminence grise on such important colonial matters as the Stamp Act and Sugar Act.1 More recently, he has been exposed as a self-serving land speculator and placeseeker whose influence on government was far less significant than once was argued.2 Throughout most accounts has run a thread of misinformation, which, as one scholar has pointed out, resulted from his being confused with another man of similar name.-1 Unfortunately, in all the claims and countercharges, a large part of Henry McCulloh's rightful place in the history of the first British Empire has become obscured. For while McCulloh may have been a land-grabber and placeseeker (and who involved in imperial affairs in the eighteenth century was neither?), while he may not have been singlehandedly responsible for either the idea or the execution of the Stamp and Sugar Acts, in the decade of the 1750s his was an articulate voice in Britain on the subject of the American colonies and the themes of imperial regulation and colonial reform. In memorials to ministers and through the publication of a series of lengthy pamphlets on American affairs, McCulloh put forward a far-reaching and coherent series of proposals for reform. While attributing influence to such ideas may well be fraught with danger, McCulloh and his writings nevertheless provide an important illustration of how the American Empire could be viewed by knowledgeable men in the 1750s, as well as indicate the sorts of motivations which prompted such scrutiny and perhaps even some of the ultimate reasons for the failure to pay proper attention to the advice proffered.
Varieties, Verities and Paradoxes in the History of Education
Authors: Abbott John
Published: March 2011

Ronald D. Cohen and Raymond A. Mohl. The Paradox of Progressive Education: The Gary Plan and Urban Schooling. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979. 216 + viii pp. Barbara Finkelstein, ed. Regulated Children/ Liberated Children: Education in Psychohistorical Perspective. New York: Psychohistory Press, 1979. 225 pp. Vincent P. Franklin. The Education of Black Phila- delphia: The Social and Educational History of a Minority Community, 1900-1950. Philadelphia- University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979. 298 + xxi pp. In a variety of ways, the three books under review certify that paradox in human history is a truth to be explained, not an illusion to be explained away. Few libertarian philosophies are free of regulative elements; not many libera- tion movements are without their regulating agents. If progressivism in American education was a force for social redemption, as Lawrence A. Cremin suggests in The Transformation of the School one has to explain why the school board in Philadelphia was so reluctant to employ democratic values in the education of its black minority. If Raymond E. Callahan, the author of Education and the Cult of Efficiency, perceived Gary's William Wirt as an administrative progressive whose platoon system replicated the factory rather than the fulness of life, why was Wirt able to command the admiration and respect of a social reconstructionist like Alice Barrows for full twenty years?1
More on Pound
Authors: Adams Stephen J.
Published: March 2011

Wendy Stallard Flory. Ezra Pound and The Cantos: A Record of Struggle. New Haven : Yale University Press, 1980. 321 pp. Forrest Read. 76: One World and The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1981. 476 pp. Carroll F. Terrell. A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Volume I (Cantos 1-71). 362 pp. Anthony Woodward. Ezra Pound and the Pisan Cantos. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.128 pp. These four books on Pound's Cantos are an ill-assorted lot. One, Carroll F. Terrell's Companion, is the single most important aid toward an under- standing of this daunting text yet published, and it should be in the hands of every serious reader. I shall save it for last. The three critical books all have their limitations, though the most successful—Anthony Woodward on The Pisan Cantos— is a pleasure to read. The most curious thing about these three books is the way in which their value varies in inverse proportion to their authors' reputation, pretension and garrulity.
Paradigms, Progress and the Interpretation of History
Authors: Noble David W.
Published: March 2011

June Goodfield. An Imagined World: A Story of Scientific Discovery. New York: Harper and Row, 1981. 240+ x pp. Michael Kammen, ed. The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.524 pp. Richard Reinitz. Irony and Conscience: American Historiography and Reinhold Niebuhr's Vision. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980.230 pp. Cushing Strout. The Veracious Imagination. Essays on American History, Literature, and Biography. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1981. 301 4- xiv pp. Daniel J. Wilson. Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Quest for Intelligibility. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1980. 248 + xvii pp. There are important interrelationships between Richard Reinitz' book, Irony and Consciousness, and Gene Wise's American Historical Explanations (1973). Wise borrowed from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to argue that something like a paradigm revolution took place in the writing of American history between 1940 and 1960. According to Wise, a Progressive paradigm or explanation-form dominated the writing of American history from the 1890s into the 1940s. By the latter date, it was challenged by a counter-Progressive or Consensus explanation-form. For Progressives, history was to be written as a movement from a dark and undemocratic past toward an enlightened and democratic future. For counter- Progressives, however, history did not have such a teleological nature and was not characterized by clear-cut confrontations between the forces of democratic enlightenment and those of undemocratic darkness. The counter-Progressives, Wise declared, wrote narratives that expressed ambiguity and irony.
Science and the World View
Authors: Waiser W. A.
Published: March 2011

Robert C. Bannister. Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979.292 + ix pp. Herbert Hovenkamp. Science and Religion in America 1800-1860. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978. 273 + xii pp. As evidenced by the recent Sacramento court case pitting creationists against evolutionists, the debate over the history of the earth and the origins of humanity is far from settled. In what has become known as the "second monkey trial" (the first being the famous Scopes trial of 1925), the director of the Creation Science Research Center sued the California Education Board, charging that his children were denied the right to learn the biblical version of creation in addition to the theory of evolution. Quite wisely, the presiding judge ruled that neither evolution nor creation was on trial but that the case revolved around the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment—the right to hold and exercise religious beliefs.
Autour de Jack London
Authors: Tavernier-Courbin Jacqueline
Published: March 2011

Ray Wilson Ownbey, ed. Jack London: Essays in Criticism. Santa Barbara and Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, Inc., 1978,126 pp. Andrew Sinclair. Jack: A Biography of Jack London. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. 297 + xv pp. Dale L. Walker, ed. Curious Fragments: Jack London's Tales of Fantasy Fiction. Port Washington, N.Y. : Kennikat Press, 1975. 223 + x pp. Dale L. Walker, ed. Jack London: No Mentor But Myself. Port Washington, N.Y. : Kennikat Press, 1978.197 + xv pp. L'oeuvre de Jack London qui, depuis ses premières traductions, fut haute- ment estimée à l'étranger aussi bien par le grand public que par les intel- lectuels, les philosophes et les hommes d'état, ne reçoit toujours pas le respect qui lui est dû en Amérique du Nord. Plus d'un académique américain serait très surpris d'apprendre que Jack London est l'écrivain américain le plus lu dans le monde, que son oeuvre a été traduite en plus de soixante-huit langues étrangères, et que les ventes d'un roman tel que The Call of the Wild ont atteint plus de sept millions de copies à l'étranger depuis 1903, sans compter, bien entendu, les innombrables éditions pirates.
Reflections on the Revolution in America
Authors: Tucker Bruce
Published: March 2011

Wallace Coyle and William M. Fowler, eds. The American Revolution : Changing Perspectives. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1979. 231 + xiv pp. W. Robert Higgins, ed. The Revolutionary War in the South: Power, Conflict, and Leadership: Essays in Honor of John Richard Alden. Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1979. 291 + xxii pp. Linda K. Kerber. Women of the Republic: Intellect andIdeologv in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (For the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia), 1980.304 +xiv pp. Leopold S. Launitz-Schurer, Jr. Loyal Whigs and Revolutionaries: The Making of the Revolution in New York, 1765-1776. New York: New York University Press, 1980. 225 + xiv pp. Seven years after the flood of studies which accompanied the American Bicentennial in 1976, the American Revolution continues to command the intellects and energies of historians. An array of monographs and interpre- tive studies has poured from the presses, chipping away at the neo-Whig analysis of the origins of the Revolution established by Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood in the 1960s. While some scholars have tried to offer alter- native interpretations, others have studied neglected topics, intending to fill in gaps in information. Of the four books under review, Higgins' The Revolu- tionary War in the South and Kerber's Women of the Republic address issues which have long awaited imaginative treatment. Coyle and Fowler's The American Revolution: Changing Perspectives, a collection of essays, summarizes recent scholarship on the Revolutionary era, and Launitz-Schiirer's Loyal Whigs and Revolutionaries looks afresh at the relationship between provincial factional struggles and the forging of revolutionary loyalties in New York. All four volumes make solid contributions to the study of the American Revolution, but Women of the Republic stands out as a book which could substantially alter the questions asked by both historians of the Revolution and of women.
Amerindiana
Authors: Maud Ralph
Published: March 2011

H. David Brumble, III. An Annotated Bibliography of American Indian and Eskimo Autobiographies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981.178 + ix pp. Hugh A. Dempsey. Red Crow, Warrior Chief. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. 248 + viii pp. Dell Hymes. "In vain I tried to tell you ": Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.402 + ix pp. Karl Kroeber, ed. Traditional Literatures of the American Indian : Texts and Interpretations. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1981. 162 + ix pp. Hymes and Kroeber are convincing in their prediction that, when North American Indian myth receives the same kind of care and attention that has been given to other oral traditions—ancient Greek, for instance—the mass of ethnographic texts will yield a corpus of rich and rewarding literature. Three of the six contributors to Traditional Literatures of the American Indian are professors of English, ready to apply the tools of their trade to this interdisciplinary study. They recognize that English departments have always stood for what the distinguished folklorist Alan Dundes has called "the exploration of the interrelation between... textures, text, and context." This, asserts Karl Kroeber in fellowship, "is, in fact, what literary criticism is all about" (p. 4). Thus, in the spirit of "New Criticism," he has invited co-workers to present texts and interpretations which indicate the advances recently made in this interesting field of scholarly endeavor.
Freedmen, Schools and "Middle-Class" Racism
Authors: Reid Richard
Published: March 2011

Ronald E. Butchart. Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction: Freedom's Education, 1862-1875. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. 309 + xiv pp. Robert Francis Engs. Freedom's First Generation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979. 236 + xx pp. Jacqueline Jones. Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865-1873. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.273 + xiii pp. Northern abolitionists, particularly those missionaries and teachers who maintained their concern for the newly freed black throughout Reconstruction, became accustomed to bitter invectives from their white countrymen both North and South. They might have been angry or merely bemused had they been able to foresee arguments a century later that they were merely responding to a loss of social status. Recently a more damning accusation has been leveled at the teachers and missionaries involved in the black education movement, an accusation which would presumably bewilder and outrage them. Implicitly and explicitly, historians such as Robert Francis Engs, Jacqueline Jones and Ronald Butchart accuse the Northerners of being middle-class racists who wished to create a pliant, obedient black, molded according to Northern expectations. Their goals, at best, were to solve the "Negro problem" by transforming the rural Southern freedmen, chiefly through education, into people who were culturally no different from the majority of Americans. At worst, the Northerners deliberately selected education as the means of subverting black liberation. In reaching these general conclusions, these three historians have looked at very different aspects of the experiences forced upon Southern blacks during Reconstruction.
Order and Its Discontents
Authors: Cassidy Keith
Published: March 2011

John M. Allswang. Bosses, Machines and Urban Voters: An American Symbiosis. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977.157 + ix pp. Paul Boyer. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978.387 + xvi pp. William A. BuIIough. The Blind Boss and His City Christopher Augustine Buckley and Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. 347 + xvi pp. Lyle W. Dorsett. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the City Bosses. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977.134 + x pp. The city has attracted attention from a variety of new perspectives, but two older themes continue to manifest considerable vitality: bossism and reform. Both of these phenomena deal, in their very different ways, with the same problem: organization, control and order in a new, bewildering and rapidly changing urban environment. There is, of course, more to both topics than just this, but the need to bring order to what has often appeared a danger- ously undisciplined society has been a recurring theme in American history, one which acquired a new urgency in the city. The contradictions and tensions which, since the nation's earliest days, have characterized the American approach to the question of authority, have rendered quite taxing the task of those who would order and control those about them, and have shaped the way they approached it. The same tensions may be seen in the works of recent historians dealing with the reformer and the boss, predis- posing them to a negative view of the former and a more positive one of the latter.
Urban Linkages: America's Cities
Authors: Ingham John N.
Published: March 2011

James Borchert. Alley Life in Washington: Family. Community. Religion and Folklife in the City. 1850-1970. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1980. 326 + xiv pp. David R. Goldfield. Urban Growth in the Age of Sectionalism: Virginia. 1846-1861. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1977.336 + xxx pp. Judd Kahn. Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning in an American City, 1897-1906. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1979. 263 + xii pp. Roberta Balstad Miller. City and Hinterland: A Case Study of Urban Growth and Regional Development. Westport. Conn.: Greenwood Press. 1979. 179 + xiv pp. Allan Pred. Urban Growth and City Sytems in the United States. 1840-1860. Cambridge. Mass: Harvard University Press. 1980. 282 + xvii pp. John C. Schneider. Detroit and the Problem of Order. 1830-1880: A Geography of Crime. Riot and Policing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1980. 170 4- xv pp. Three of these books deal with various aspects of urban growth in America in the period prior to the Civil War. A fourth uses the growth theme as a mechanism to examine politics and planning at the turn of the twentieth century, and the final two deal with what might be termed the social consequences of that growth, i.e. the interrelated problems of crime, order and community building. Looked at in a slightly different way, the first trio of books deals largely with the external relations of a city or group of cities, while the final three focus upon the internal relationship, or urban ecology, of their respective cities.
American Poetry Now : Making Room for the Weather
Authors: Kroetsch Robert
Published: March 2011

Charles Altieri. Enlarging the Temple: Sew Directions in American Poetry during the 1960s. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. 1979. 258 pp. Paul A. Bové. Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press. 1975.1980. 304 + xx pp. Robert K. Martin. The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1979.259 + xx pp. Jerome Mazzaro. Postmodern American Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1980. 203 + xi pp. Charles Molesworth. The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 1979. 214 + xpp. We are now in the process of retelling the story of Modern. It is a necessary revision of history and canon and poetics that allows, that will allow, other poets to come after. The magnificent telling of Modern by Pound, the success of the early twentieth-century poets like Pound himself and Eliot and Yeats, the supporting cast of critics like Hugh Kenner and Northrop Frye—all these forces conspired to shape and then to close Modern, to complete the period, even to complete literature.
Poetry by Women in America : Esthetics in Evolution
Authors: Alkalay-Gut Karen
Published: March 2011

Unborn sisters, look back on us in mercy where we failed ourselves, see us not one-dimensional but with the past as your steadying and corrective lens. —Adrienne Rich, "Turning the Wheel"' In the past sixty years women in America have come to enjoy a general recognition for their poetry that their ancestors could not have imagined. Although women have written poetry throughout history, and a great deal from earlier periods is now being rediscovered, the quantity of published work was small, the audience select or non-existent, and the general attitude negative. Muriel Rukeyser sums up the problem of women poets in courses and anthologies: "One undergraduate said to me There are no women until after Easter.'"2 Historical editions of literature present an extremely low per- centage of women, but contemporary anthologies are becoming better balanced.3 Women are simply writing more today, are writing as women to a universal audience, and are being taken seriously as poets. Yet this deve- lopment has come about gradually, and the form and character of poetry by women in the twentieth century is still in a state of evolution. Although this phenomenon seems to be true of many western countries, the radical development of poetry by women is so pronounced, so extreme and self-aware in the United States, as to constitute a unique experience. Three specific stages may be distinguished: the period beginning with the enfranchisement of women following World War I and concluding with the reintroduction of the "feminine mystique" in American culture following World War II; the period between World War II and the politicization of women's lives through the war protest, the civil rights movements, and other national concerns; and the present period of the psychological, political and social revolution in the form of the feminist movement. The three parts of this essay trace these stages.
Wife-Beating : The Darker Side of Victorian Domesticity
Authors: Glenn Myra C.
Published: March 2011

Recent scholarship on domestic violence has stressed that the problem of wife-beating did not receive widespread public discussion in nineteenth- century America.1 Public protests against the beating of other groups, however, were a common occurrence in the antebellum United States. The use, especially frequent abusive use, of corporal punishment began to provoke widespread public controversy in the northern United States in the late 1820s. Public criticism of corporal punishment gained momentum in the 1830s and 1840s. It waned during the mid 1850s as the nation increasingly focused its attention on another form of violence—slavery.
Tocqueville and American Slavery
Authors: Bonetto Gerald M.
Published: March 2011

A century and a half has not diminished the fame of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. It is still widely regarded as one of the most penetrating analyses of modern, democratic society; for Tocqueville stripped away the ephemeral, and superficial, and isolated the basic democratic features underlying American social and political institutions. He believed that man in the modern world was entering into an entirely new situation, a condition of social equality between man and man, in which all occupations, all privileges and all political rights would be opened to everyone. In his view the movement toward the equalization of conditions (democracy) was irresistible and, on the whole, desirable. But it was not without peril. Man was now confronted with a choice of the greatest magnitude: equality could be equal servitude or equal freedom. France, and seemingly much of Europe, was in jeopardy of drifting into the first; America, in her political and social structure, stood as a lesson of how liberty could be safeguarded in egalitarian (democratic) society.
Tribalism and the American Indian
Authors: Smith Burton M.
Published: March 2011

Brian W. Dippie. The Vanishing American : White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. Middletown. Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. 1982. 432 + xvii pp. Charles Hudson, ed. Black Drink: A Native American Tea. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979.175 + vii pp. Daniel F. Littlefield. Jr. Africans and Creeks: From the Colonial Period to the Civil War. Westport. Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. 286 + xiii pp. William K. Powers. Oglala Religion. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1977. 233 + xxi pp. Graham D. Taylor. The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. 203 + xii pp. Walter D. Williams, ed. Southeastern Indians: Since Removal. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979. 253 + xvi pp. For the past two hundred years, American society has recognized the existence of Indian tribes as a political fact of life, while ignoring for the most part the cultural aspects of Indian tribalism. At the center of this paradox and outweighing all other considerations, has been the issue of Indian lands. From earliest settlements, Indians were forced off desired land, either physically or by attrition, but the effect was the same. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, public attitudes were fixed and few believed that Indian tribes had any right or title to the land. President Andrew Jackson in his Annual Message to Congress reflected popular opinion when he asked rhetorically: "What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns and prosperous farms...and filled with the blessings of liberty, civilization and religion?'1 (1830).
Champs et Contrechamps sur des Images Reçues
Authors: Desbiens Albert
Published: March 2011

Howard W. Allen. Poindexter of Washington: A Study in Progressive Politics. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 1981. 334 +xv pp. Ballard C. Campbell. Representative Democracy: Public Policy and Midwestern Legislatures in the Late Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1980.260 pp. Justus D. Doenecke. The Presidencies of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur. Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1981.229 pp. James A. Kehl. Boss Rule in the Gilded Age: Matt Quay of Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.295 + xx pp. A l'origine ce compte rendu critique avait voulu être centré sur un examen de quelques productions récentes dans le domaine des biographies d'hommes politiques de la fin du XIXe et du début du XXe siècle. Ces messieurs des P.C. (Postes canadiennes) en auront décidé autrement en égarant un des volumes qui m'étaient destinés. Heureuse erreur devrais-je avouer car le volume de remplacement aura permis l'addition à ma liste de lectures d'un ouvrage important qui apportera en même temps diversité à ma tâche. Le volume de Ballard Campbell éclaire en effet une zone d'ombre de la vie politique de la fin du XIXe siècle, soit le fonctionnement des législatures du mid-west américain. De plus l'auteur y procède selon les normes de la new political history et en renouvelle certaines données. Nous reviendrons plus lois à cette contribution importante après avoir examiné trois ouvrages plus traditionnels.
The Transformation of Sexual Morality in "Puritan" New England : Evidence from New Haven Court Records, 1639-1698
Authors: Roetger R. W.
Published: March 2011

By all accounts the itinerant sawyer William Harding who practiced his trade in early New Haven was a "lewd and disorderly person." Although his origins are unknown, Harding made an indelible impression on residents of this puritan settlement and officials entered his illegal activities into court documents for posterity. Those records suggest that one of his principal "trades" was corrupting those around him. He was responsible on at least one occasion for causing servants to steal. On another, his "pernicious counsel" prompted a young couple to violate the law and be cast out of the plantation. Finally, in 1643, when Harding's misdeeds caught up with him, he was convicted of "a great deal of base carriage and filthy dalliances with divers young girls." For yielding to Harding, Ruth Acie, Jane Andrews and Martha Malbon, whom he entertained at a venison feast, were whipped for their unrighteous behavior. The licentious sawyer's penalties included a severe whipping, monetary damages to the girls' parents, and banishment from the community.1
The "Things" of History
Authors: Russo David J.
Published: March 2011

Barbara Allen and Lynwood Montell. From Memory to History: Using Oral Sources in Local History Research. Nashville: American Association of State and Local History, 1981.172 + xii pp. Brad Jolly. Videotaping Local History. Nashville : American Association for State and Local History, 1982.160 pp. David E. Kyvig and Myron A. Marty. Nearby History: Exploring the Past Around You. Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1982.300 + xiii pp. Thomas Schlereth. Artifacts and the American Past. Nashville : American Association for State and Local History, 1980. 294 pp. Thomas Schlereth, ed. Material Culture Studies in America. Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1982.419 + xvi pp. From the perspective of historians of the modern world, there has been a notable enlargement in the subject matter or content of historical scholarship over the past several decades, a development frequently commented on but rarely explained in a substantial or satisfying way. References to the "new social history" serve to indicate that professional historians now deal with ordinary people, and not just elites, with the social, cultural, intellectual, religious and economic dimensions of life, and not just the political. The quotation marks reveal something else, however: that such commentators are not at all certain how much is truly new in the great outpouring of articles and monographs that have created an ever widening ambit of res- pectable historical subjects: food, health, popular culture, technology, science, education, women, the family, local communities—the list grows regularly.
Former American Businessmen in Canada, 1850-1981
Authors: Harvey David D.
Published: March 2011

Former Americans have always played a significant part in Canadian business life and have at times seemed conspicuous among the Canadian business elite. There are indications, though, that their profile is lowering as native Canadians assume more and more managerial and proprietary roles, roles involving the innovative and entrepreneurial skills once thought to be un-Canadian. "Branch plant" operations are also less likely to be managed by Americans resident in Canada—a trend parallel to but not usually contiguous with a decline in the movement of independent entrepreneurs from the United States, potential founders of firms or dynasties. These trends probably reflect a general coming of age more than the impact of particular nationalist policies or activities.
James Gatz's Mentor: Traces of Warren G. Harding in The Great Gatsby
Authors: Hall Petry Alice
Published: March 2011

One of the more intriguing minor characters of The Great Gatsby is the man responsible for James Gatz's transformation from dreamy small-town boy to wealthy, powerful bootlegger: Dan Cody, the metals magnate whose photograph is enshrined in Gatsby's bedroom.1 When one considers the enormous impact which Cody had upon the creation of Gatsby—man and myth— it is surprising (and a bit frustrating) that Fitzgerald supplies us with tantalizingly little information about him; but the information that he does provide is remarkably suggestive. Dan Cody's very name conjures images of an American hero. According to Robert Emmet Long, the name "suggests the American frontier": Cody is an adventurer "of a former age who has made his fortune from slender beginnings, and he poses for Gatsby the same possibility";2 in fine, he embodies the rags-to-riches motif so ingrained in the American psyche and so visible in the tales of Horatio Alger. Ernest Lockridge takes this one step further and sees in the Christian name "Dan" a reference to Daniel Boone, that quasi-mythical hero of the American past, and the surname "Cody" to be a reference to Buffalo Bill Cody, whose later career was something of a Western carnival, a lamentable Barnumesque rendering of the American Dream of the West which Boone had embodied.3 I agree with Lockridge as far as he goes, but would argue further that Cody represents the ultimate American hero: the President of the United States. Specifically, I believe that what little information Fitzgerald provides about Cody points to his having been directly inspired by the twenty-ninth President, Warren Gamaliel Harding (1865-1923), the small-town newspaperman turned world leader whose mysterious death in office was the sensation of the 1920s, and whose brief administration—striated with graft, corruption, infidelity, murder and suicide—destroyed forever the mystique of the Presidency.
Language and Literature in an Integrated Culture
Authors: Morton Richard
Published: March 2011

James C. Gaston. London Poets and the American Revolution. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1979. 285 + x pp. Michael T. Gilmore. Early American Literature: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980. 184 + vii pp. Mason I. Lowance, Jr. The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 335 + xiv pp. Richard C. Vitzthum. Land and Sea: The Lyric Poetry of Philip Freneau. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978.197 + vi pp. Donald Yanella and John H. Roch. American Prose to 1820: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit: Gale, 1979. 653 + xxii pp. National cultures in the early years of their perceived independence tend to generate what might be called classical periods; classical not in terms of the culture's overt imitation of Greek and Roman models, but classical in terms of the unified sensibility and purpose of verbal and artistic expression. This unity is perhaps what distinguishes the great ages of Pericles and Augustus. Yeats's definition of the ideal culture of Byzantium is the paradigm— that in such a classical age, the artisans of all sorts work out of a common, single impulse. History, political theory, verse, architecture and theology all interrelate, and each forms a necessary commentary on the other. Naturally, then, the student of classical literature reads philosophy, scientists and the general rubric of "civilization," while, on the contrary, the student of, say, nineteenth-century British literature confines himself to belles-lettres, with only the occasional footnote-directed smattering of Thomas Huxley, Mayhew, Bentham and the Chartists.
Sam Blowsnake's Confessions: Crashing Thunder and the History of American Indian Autobiography
Authors: Brumble III H. David
Published: March 2011

I have elsewhere suggested that the history of American Indian autobiography will be found to recapitulate the history of Euro-American autobiography.1 The earliest autobiographical writings in the European tradition, for example, are the res gestae, the stories the Greeks and Romans wrote about their great deeds;2 this kind of writing corresponds quite closely to the coup tales and the hunting tales among the Indians.3 Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, unassimilated Indians were quite capable of telling stories about their victories and their daring and their pain. But where the Indian's sense of identity is still tribal, where the ancient's sense of identity was still tied to the gens or the polis, we do not find what Karl Weintraub has called "genuine autobiography," that "form of autobiography wherein a self-reflective person asks 'who am I?' and 'how did I become what I am?'" (p. 1). Some of the ancients wrote memoirs, narratives about great events which they had witnessed, and here again we find American Indian equivalents. Sometimes the Indians themselves wrote memoirs; more often their memoirs were taken down by historians and anthropologists.4 But in these memoirs of ancients and Indians, again, we do not find the inwardness of "genuine autobiography."
The Colonial Town
Authors: Sosin J. M.
Published: March 2011

Bruce C. Daniels. Dissent and Conformity on Narragansett Bay: The Colonial Rhode Island Town. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983. Jessica Kross. The Evolution of an American Town: Newton, New York, 1642-1775. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983. Lynne Withey. Urban Growth in Colonial Rhode Island: Newport and Providence in the Eighteenth Century. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984. In a sharp comment on the parochial view which had long prevailed in writings on early American history, W.T. Root, in reviewing the second volume of Charles McLean Andrews' Guide to Materials for American History, to 1783 in the Public Record Office, observed in 1915 that the work of Andrews and others in foreign archives was a "sure sign that we are coming to a study of the past with a new vision."1 Too frequently American historians had been studying their country as if it were somehow unaffected by and unconnected to the main currents of world history. Undoubtedly a reaction had set in, and Root predicted that the work of Andrews would weaken the old isolation. Indeed, the imperial historians did go on to break down the parochial view of early America and to portray its institutions and development as part of a larger British community.
Beyond Patriot Politics: Causes, Context and Consequences of the Collapse of the First British Empire
Authors: Cress Lawrence Delbert
Published: March 2011

Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt. The Dutch Republic and American Independence. Translated by Herbert H. Rowen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.351 + xii pp. Janice Potter. The Liberty We Seek: Loyalist Ideology in Colonial New York and Massachusetts. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. 238 + x pp. Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson. The Fall of the First British Empire: Origins of the War of American Independence. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. 450 + viii pp. These books, though fundamentally different in focus, share a common perspective. They look at the American Revolution from the outside. Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson analyze the coming of the war between England and her colonies within the political, institutional and constitutional structure of the First British Empire. Janice Potter probes the positions espoused by Loyalists in the key colonies of New York and Massachusetts as Patriots gained control of the political apparatus that sustained the drive for independence. Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt examines the American Revolution's impact on Dutch domestic and foreign affairs during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Each book examines important if not new questions about the implications and significance of the American Revolution.
The Self and the Social Community: Another Look at American Realism
Authors: Pitz Barbara
Published: March 2011

Alfred Habegger. Gender, Fantasy and Realism in American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.378 + xiii pp. Elizabeth Hampsten. Read This Only to Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern Women, 1880-1910. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. 242 + xiii pp. William Dean Howells. Selected Letters. Vol. I (1852-1872). Edited by George Arms et al. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979.498 + xxv pp. William Dean Howells. Selected Letters. Vol. II (1873-1881). Edited by George Arms and Christoph K. Lohmann. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979. 371 + xiv pp. Elizabeth Stevens Prioleau. The Circle of Eros: Sexuality in the Work of William Dean Howells. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1983. 226 + xvii pp. Eric J. Sundquist, ed. American Realism: New Essays. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. 298 + ix pp. In The Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defined realism as "the art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads."1 Like Bierce, literary critics traditionally have been uncomfortable with realism's seemingly unsophisticated ideas and objective view of human experience, its documentary and detailed forms of expression, its quaint structures, and literary mediocrity. Further, naturalism, often seen as an extension of realism, has seemed a decadent embarrassment. Realism and naturalism, therefore, generally have been consigned to the realm of the literary historian, who focuses on the philo- sophical alienation of the idealistic imagination responding to cultural changes produced by rapid industrialization, the rationalizations of social Darwinism, and the worship of wealth. For the literary critic, realism serves as a bridge spanning the complex vision of romanticism and the cultural and esthetic dislocation of the moderns. For the literary historian, realism expresses the social and intellectual effects of industrial capitalism.
Robert Frost: Faith and Art
Authors: Heath William G.
Published: March 2011

Philip L. Gerber, ed. Critical Essays on Robert Frost. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1982. 247 + x pp. Doroth Judd Hall. Robert Frost: Contours of Belief. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984. 148 + xxi pp. Edward Connery Lathem and Hyde Cox, eds. Prose Jottings of Robert Frost: Selections from His Notebooks and Miscellaneous Manuscripts. Lunenburg, Vermont: Northeast-Kingdom Publishers, 1982.145 + xviii pp. In an age of disbelief, it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief, in his measure and in his style. (Wallace Stevens) In his 1935 "Letter to The Amherst Student," Robert Frost spoke reassuringly about mankind's place in a world that sometimes seems mad or out of control. "There is something we can always be doing," Frost wrote, "without reference to how good or how bad the age is." He reminded his readers that man is a maker. Man not only delights in self-expression; he craves it. At any given moment in history, there is a background of chaos and confusion. Against this background, however, man can show form: "When in doubt there is always form for us to go on with. Anyone who has achieved the least form to be sure of it, is lost to the larger excruciations. I think it must stroke faith the right way." The best forms of all, he added, are those the individual makes by himself, "all our individual enterprise and needing nobody's co-operation; a basket, a letter, a garden, a room, an idea, a picture, a poem. For these we haven't to get a team together before we can play."1
The Media in Politics: "The Fourth Branch of Government"?1
Authors: Braeman John
Published: March 2011

Edwin R. Bayley. Joe McCarthy and the Press. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981. 270 + x pp. Robert C. Hilderbrand. Power and the People: Executive Management of Public Opinion in Foreign Affairs, 1897-1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. 262 + viii pp. Paul S. Holbo. Tarnished Expansion: The Alaska Scandal, the Press, and Congress, 1867-1871. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. 145 + xix pp. George Juergens. News from the White House: The Presidential-Press Relationship in the Progressive Era. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2981. 338 + x pp. Montague Kern, Patricia W. Levering, and Ralph B. Levering. The Kennedy Crises: The Press, the Presidency, and Foreign Policy. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. 290 + xiii pp. Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang. The Battle for Public Opinion: The President, the Press, and the Polls during Watergate. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. 353 + xiv pp. Graham J. White. FDR and the Press. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979,186 + viii pp. The founding text of modern-day analyses of the role of the media in American politics is Walter Lippmann's 1922 classic, Public Opinion.2 Traditional democratic theory, he pointed out, assumed "that a reasoned righteousness welled up spontaneously out of the mass of men." But men's opinions were not the product of pure rational calculus; their comprehension of the world was shaped by unconscious drives and hidden assumptions. And as that world has become increasingly complicated, the average citizen has increasingly to make judgments about matters outside his first-hand personal experience. The locus of political decision-making has shifted from the local community to the national and even international levels; the individual voter has accordingly become more and more dependent for information upon outside sources, "...the real environment," Lippmann wrote, "is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance....what each man does is not based on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given him." The mass media exert a crucial influence in this process via "the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo- environment. To that pseudo-environment his behavior is a response."3