bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Reassessing the Slave Legacy on the North American South Atlantic Coast
Authors: Konrad H. W.
Published: March 2011

Lelund Ferguson. Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650-1800. Washington and London. Smithsonian Institution Press. 1992. Pp. 186. The timely appearance of Uncommon Ground in 1992, the quincentennial year of European impact in the Americans, places it squarely into a context of heightened historical assessment of trans-Atlantic processes and impact. Ferguson's contribution adds an important archaeological perspective to the historical debate, in this case about underrepresented African peoples whose slave status denied them a voice to express their views. This ground-level view, based on surviving material artifacts, has an important story to tell. Keeping in mind that between 1500 and 1800, six of every seven trans- Atlantic arrivals in the Americas were Africans (Nash 1984,141), our knowl- edge of their experience in no way matches their role. The 1650 to 1800 period covered by this book encompasses the time during which most of the slaves entered the thirteen English mainland colonies. Compared to the Caribbean and Latin America areas, this labour component, or, as put by a contemporary, "the strength and the sinews of this western world" (Williams 1966, 30), arrived late. As late as 1680, there were barely 7,000 slaves in the English colonies, while one hundred years later their numbers had swelled to 350,000 (Nash 1984, 152). These numbers pale when contrasted with the estimated ten million Africans brought to the New World. Within the Virginia, Florida, and Carolina plantation colonies focused upon in Ferguson's study, they came to be the overwhelming majority of the population. His intentions are twofold, to demonstrate how archaeological research "helps us see the contrast between the world the slaves built and the ones they rejected" (120), and to reinterpret evidence showing African rather than native America origins of plantation pottery.
Effective Constitutionalism
Authors: McKenna Marian
Published: March 2011

Harvey Flaumenhaft. The Effective Republic: Administration and Constitution in the Thought of Alexander Hamilton. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. Pp. 309. Robert W. Gordon, ed. The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Pp. x + 313. A. E. Dick Howard, ed. The United States Constitution: Roots, Rights and Responsibilities. Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. Pp. xxix + 402. The voluminous (and still growing) literature on Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. ranges from the reverence of votaries like Charles E. Wyzanski to adverse critics like Harold McKinnon, whose analysis of the distinguished Massachu- setts jurist emphasizes his celebration of force as an ultimate factor in law and government ("Right was on the side that could lick the other side"). One adverse critic went so far as to group Holmes with Hobbes and Hitler! Until now, many writers have been preoccupied with trying to establish whe- ther Holmes was a liberal, only a liberal, or a closet conservative. But, as Daniel Boorstin (1941) has made clear, the use of labels like liberal and conservative are not at all helpful in trying to come to grips with the real Holmes. Of all the great legal minds the United States has produced, Oli- ver Wendell Holmes was undoubtedly the most cerebral, and arguably the most influential in recent times. "I should like to be admitted to be the greatest jurist in the world . . he is reported to have once said. If not quite having achieved that vaunted goal, he did succeed in making a singu- lar contribution to the life of the law. More sophisticated recent scholarship on Holmes asks why this is so and explores the wellsprings of his greatness.
Myth Building and Cultural Politics in W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe
Authors: Garman Bryan K.
Published: March 2011

The mythic vision of America and its national pastime which W. P. Kinsella constructed in Shoeless Joe ([1982] 1991) has extended into millions of American imaginations, both in the form of the novel and its film adap- tation, Field of Dreams (1989).1 Kinsella built the myth, and people came to live it. Perhaps literary critic Neil Randall best articulates the popular response to Shoeless Joe when he calls it a "moral book" which "makes us come away in the end feeling 'pretty damn good about being alive for the rest of the day"' (1987, 181). But when we read beyond what Randall calls "fantasy and the humor of fellow-feeling," and explore the context of the novel's morality, an unsettling portrait of America emerges (1987, 173). In this essay, I will argue that Kinsella engenders a culturally conservative world, which reflects the historical circumstances of the 1980s and repro- duces the ideology of Ronald Reagan's presidency. By discussing the text within the framework of Reagan's America and the social history of base- ball, this paper shows that Kinsella's nostalgic world is characterized by a mythic history of consensus, a fraternal and patriarchal order, and dis- crimination based on race and gender.
Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn: Leading Advocate of Liberal Immigration Policy, 1945-52
Authors: Lemelin Bernard
Published: March 2011

Immigration was a prominent issue during the Truman era. Indeed, several significant laws were enacted at this time. These included the War Brides Act of 1945, the Displaced Persons Acts of 1948 and 1950, the Internal Security Act of 1950, the Immigration and Nationality (McCarran-Walter) Act of 1952, and some momentous measures relating to Mexican agricul- tural labour and the so-called wetback problem. Particularly noteworthy were the Displaced Persons Acts, which constituted the "first significant refugee legislation in American history" (Higham 1975, 61) and the Mc- Carran-Walter Act, which marked the end of the "long postwar debate over the nature of American immigration policy" (Divine 1957, 185-86).
Bartleby is Dead
Authors: Zeitlin Michael
Published: March 2011

J. Hillis Miller. Versions of Pygmalion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Pp. iii + 256. The origins of this book are traceable to A. Bartlett Giamatti's "vigorous attack on literary theory written while he was still president of Yale Uni- versity. He was of course implicitly criticizing some influential colleagues at Yale" (14). In response to Giamatti's charge that deconstruction is radically incapable of situating the literary text within the social domain of ethics, Miller undertakes close readings of James's What Maisie Knew, Kleist's "Der Findling," Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," Blanchot's L'arret de mort, and James's "The Last of the Valerii," in order "to exemplify... the claim that the rhetorical study of literature is indispensable to exploration of the so-called extrinsic relations of literature: the relations of literature to his- tory, politics, and society, to personal and institutional relations" (13). In exploring "the extrinsic relations of literature," Miller's project, a continua- tion of that explicitly begun in his Ethics of Reading (1987), is theoretically relevant to the discipline of American Studies and the cultural studies movement in general, for which literary texts participate in, represent, and mediate—often in extraordinarily complex ways—the material conditions and social contradictions of a surrounding culture. In practical terms, how- ever, Miller's readings tend to reinscribe a gap or aporia between narrative and ethics, between literature and that social space one might designate, in the broadest sense, as history; accordingly, Versions of Pygmalion will do little to appease either the "liberal" or the "materialist" critics of decon- struction.
Four Colonels, Two of Them Small, With Six Arms Among Them: The Ideal, American World of Annie Fellows Johnston's "Little Colonel" Series
Authors: Duffy Dennis
Published: March 2011

Annie Fellows Johnston's (1868-1931) juvenile fiction series, the "Little Colonel" stories (1895-1912), sold some two million copies during the author's lifetime (Kaye 1985, 251).1 Yet even research libraries that hold more than a few of the thirteen titles of the series are now hard to find. This preliminary inquiry into the material indicates why this neglect is easy to understand; it will also indicate that this series for adolescent girls in fact conveys a set of attitudes and themes familiar to us from better-known works produced during this time.
Henry Adams and the History of Postmodernism
Authors: Neal Aubrey
Published: March 2011

Henry Adams (1838-1918)1 complained in his famous autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, that "in the want of positive instincts, he had drifted into the mental indolence of history" (1918, 36). Adams's self-deprecating irony is hard to take in the right proportions. Underneath the wit, reticence, and good manners, Adams was enormously vain. When, with patrician arrogance, he turned his cynical wit against himself in The Education of Henry Adams, he portrayed his own life as a simulacrum of modern civilization. Fascinated by politics, but unwilling to seek office, he subsumed the course of American history under the subtext of his cultural autobiography. He admitted to his friend, Francis Walker, that, "he rather liked having his head in the clouds" because he was able "to see over the crowd" (Samuels 1958, 19). There is an elite tone in Adams's language, but it cannot be reduced to class advantage exacerbated by artistic sensitivity. Adams's style was also a moral criticism of his modern role, the political and economic status which he and the other members of his distinguished family could never escape.
"The Surest Augery For Ultimate Success:" The Release of Proprietary Technical Knowledge By U. S. Firms In The Early Twentieth Century
Authors: Hull James P.
Published: March 2011

Introduction In 1914, M. C. Whitaker, editor of the journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry and president of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, criticized "the reluctance of many in the chemical industry to share technical knowledge with each other," thus impeding "the Progress of chemical engineering by preventing the free interchange of technical knowledge" (cited in Rhees 1987, 95). His views were shared by people in a variety of industries, many of whom made calls for such a freer exchange. Some looked to trade or technical associations to mediate such exchanges of knowledge, others also to the universities, perhaps through the continued use of industry sponsored research fellows. James McGibbon of the North American Rayon Corporation, writing a technical piece on crepe fabrics for a technical journal, hoped for similar or complementary work "on the part of dyers and finishers and on the part of machine manufacturers" (1937, 36-37). Two employees of a ceramic pot manufacturing firm observed "the need of sincere cooperation, mutual criticism and common counsel of the pot manufacturer and the glass maker" (Brownlee and Gorton 1921, 98). A Rochester, New York, boat manufacturer writing on the problems of inland water transportation felt that "shippers, barge builders, engine builders and their associated industries should work out the problem of water transportation" (Lacy 1921, 61). In a paper touting the virtues of gas versus electricity in types of enamelling furnaces, George M. Parker of the Mississippi River Fuel Corporation stressed the need for the gas industry to maintain its competitive position: "Let us continue our experiments, carry on extensive research, and make full use of all facilities at hand for the exchange of research" (1937, 8-9). In fact, many facilities were at hand and such free exchange of information had long been a characteristic of U.S. industry (Usselman 1985, 184-89). The effects of the second industrial revolution only enhanced the situation and thus made the exceptions more conspicuous. Many would have agreed with W. K. Hatt when he stated, "against the background of research and a common effort to determine the facts, acrimonious disputes are quieted, mere opinions are held in abeyance under the benign influence of research for the truth" (1922, 29).
Changing Paradigms in Migration History: From "To America" to World-wide Systems
Authors: Hoerder Dirk
Published: March 2011

Introduction Into the 1970s, migration history in Europe and North America concentrated on the westward flow from Europe. Neither the high incidence of return migration (Hoerder 1982; Wyman 1993) nor the increasing cross-Pacific flow were taken into consideration. In fact, the mythology was, and is, so pervasive that few people realize that Alfred Stieglitz's famous photo "The Steerage" was taken on an eastbound trip and shows returning migrants; that the arch-critic of U. S. society, Emma Goldman, recounts in her autobio- graphy her awe as an immigrant child when passing the Statue of Liberty. But when she arrived in 1885, the Statue had yet to be built. In this review essay, I will first summarize research on migration and ethnicity to the late 1970s, then in section two, I will outline the develop- ment of the concept of two intercontinental migration systems in the north- ern hemisphere, an Atlantic and a Russo-Siberian one. Next, revisions of the paradigm remaining within its geographical scope will be discussed in section three, followed by a summary of the extension of research into the Pacific Basin and into colonial areas in section four. The recent world migration systems' approach receives attention in section five; and, finally, method- ological questions will be raised and suggestions for new interpretive frame- works are made in the conclusion.
Interlocutors, Interpellants, Interpreters, Interpretants
Authors: White Robert
Published: March 2011

William Styron. The Confessions of Nat Turner. Vintage International Edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Albert E. Stone. The Return of Nat Turner: History, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Sixties America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Even though Vintage has recently brought out a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Confessions of Nat Turner, and even though Samuel Coale's 1991 William Styron Revisited argues that, even if Styron failed to overcome certain problems posed by his choice of a first-person narrative, "the Con- fessions of Nat Turner remains a powerful novel in its own right" (102), it seems that the angry attacks launched by those Ten Black Writers who pub- lished, in 1968, under the editorship of John Henrick Clarke, William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond were opening salvos in a campaign that has by now pretty much driven the Virginia-born novelist from the field where the prize was the right, the 'privilege,' to define and characterize the leader of the violent 1831 slave rebellion. What is more, it now seems that the controversy over Styron's fourth novel, The Confessions, presaged a dimming of his once-glimmering literary reputation, fostered a critical climate in which many readers, if they could be bothered to consider the matter, would be likely to smile condescendingly at the assertion with which Coale concludes his book: "Sophie's Choice is a masterful, passionate vision, one filled with all the ambiguities and uncertainties that such dark visions can conjure up. The promises of Lie Down in Darkness are here realized, and the confessions of William Styron have reached their present fulfillment" (134).
Too Much Empathy? The Dilemma of Toleration in a Plural Society
Authors: Matthews Fred
Published: March 2011

Quentin Anderson. Making Americans; An Essay on Individualism and Money. New York: Harcourt, 1992. Pp. 264. John C. Burnham. Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History. New York: Univer- sity Press, 1993. Pp. xviii + 385. George Kateb. The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Pp. x + 275. These three stimulating books elucidate many of the issues which cluster together in the disputes between 'liberals' and 'communitarians both Right and Left'—though this last distinction may no longer apply very clearly in the contemporary conflicts over the permissible variety of lifestyles in a cul- turally plural but not pluralistic society. There are many questions involved: What constitutes a culture? Are some cultures (or lifestyles) intrinsically destructive, and, therefore, legitimately stigmatized? The example of the Thuggee forces an affirmative response, leaving many more questions about where and on what grounds to draw what kinds of lines. In the 1990s, the central question seems to be whether there are universally necessary social structures, which must be supported by stigmatizing, perhaps legally san- ctioning, alternative structures. There are now widespread calls for the re- stigmatization of illegitimacy and single-parent families, for the restoration of older sanctions, like zoning laws, which maintained the moral and legal primacy of intact nuclear families as the necessary social norm and base.
Oral History: An Interview with Bruce Daniels
Authors: Tucker Bruce
Published: March 2011

Introduction As part of the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the Canadian Review of American Studies, the editors are pleased to present the second in a series of interviews of former editors and presidents of the Canadian Association of American Studies (CAAS). In the following interview, past president ot the Canadian Association For American Studies, Bruce Daniels, reflects on his experience as a Canadian professor teaching and writing American history. A former editor of the Canadian Review of American Studies, Professor Daniels has taught at the University of Winnipeg since 1970. He has pub- lished six books and dozens of articles, and he has received numerous awards for his work. The interview was conducted by Bruce Tucker at the annual CAAS meeting in Halifax on 16 October 1993.
Alcohol and Wife Abuse in Antebellum Male Temperance Literature
Authors: Nadelbaft Jerome
Published: March 2011

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the male-dominated temperance movement, through its association of alcoholism and unrestrained violence, first focused the attention of Americans on wife beating and murder. Temperance societies, in printed speeches and tracts, stimulated government concern and generated official reports, which in turn created both a need and a market for temperance fiction. All drove home the same terrifying points. Although Samuel Cary, Cincinnati's major temperance figure, might have been perceptive in suggesting that "scenes of drunkenness, debauchery, crime, poverty and destitution become familiar and we come to regard them as a matter of course," at least the literature left few people able to plead ignorance of the dangers faced in the home (quoted in Dannenbaum 1984, 173). Alcohol destroyed man's self control, weakened moral influences, and unleashed antisocial passions. "Intemperance brings into operation the worst passions of human nature. Anger, malice, envy, revenge, jealousy, violence, madness and outrage" were only a partial list Manual on Temperance 1852, 13). "The amusements of drinkers are remarkable for their cruelty," Robert Hartley (1851) wrote in an early, lengthy study of the impact of in- temperance in cities and large towns. "Drink, while it deadens the moral sensibilities, lashes the destructive propensities into a morbid excitement . . ."
"'Such Insulting Trash and Triviality'" Franklin D. Roosevelt's Fala Speech Reconsidered
Authors: Troy Gil
Published: March 2011

Franklin D. Roosevelt's Fala speech of 23 September 1944 marks a cele- brated moment in American electoral history. Running for his fourth term, President Roosevelt faced a surprisingly vigorous challenge from his Republican opponents. With World War II still raging and his health failing, the president had decided to limit his public appearances. After a disastrous speech in Seattle during the summer, Democrats began to worry that Roosevelt might lose the election. But in his rollicking address to the Teamsters Union convention that autumn night, the old master revived his campaign. The centrepiece of his comeback speech was a sarcastic defense of his Scottish terrier, Fala, from Republican attacks.
The Best Defence is . . . Smuggling? Vermonters During the War of 1812
Authors: Alcock Donald G.
Published: March 2011

When historians research and write about the War of 1812, they do so with either a causation or military history theme, of which there is no shortage of good examples. To date, no one has looked at the war from a diplomatic viewpoint, other than on the international level. While relations deteriorated between London and Washington, they did not between the peoples of Alburg, St. Albans, and Burlington in Vermont and those in St. Jean, Philipsburg, and St. Paul-de-L'Isle-aux-Noix in Lower Canada. The War of 1812 intruded upon their decades-old, peaceful coexistence. The choice between peace and war was the ultimate crisis for the people of Vermont. How Vermonters reacted politically, economically, and militarily in their relations with Lower Canadians adds a new dimension to the diplomatic history of the War of 1812.1
Too Much Empathy? The Dilemma of Toleration in a Plural Society"
Authors: Matthews Fred
Published: March 2011

Quentin Anderson. Making Americans: An Essay on Individualism and Money. New York: Harcourt, 1992. Pp. 264. John C. Burnham. Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, arui Swearing in American History. New York: Univer- sity Press, 1993. Pp. xviii + 385. George Kateb. The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Pp. x + 275. These three stimulating books elucidate many of the issues which cluster together in the disputes between 'liberals' and 'communitarians' both Right and Left—though this last distinction may no longer apply very clearly in the contemporary conflicts over the permissible variety of lifestyles in a cul- turally plural but not pluralistic society. There are many questions involved: What constitutes a culture? Are some cultures (or lifestyles) intrinsically destructive, and, therefore, legitimately stigmatized? The example of the Thuggee forces an affirmative response, leaving many more questions about where and on what grounds to draw what kinds of lines. In the 1990s, the central question seems to be whether there are universally necessary social structures, which must be supported by stigmatizing, perhaps legally san- ctioning, alternative structures. There are now widespread calls for the stigmatization of illegitimacy and single-parent families, for the restoration of older sanctions, like zoning laws, which maintained the moral and legal primacy of intact nuclear families as the necessary social norm and base.
Borders that Divide and Connect: Capital and Labour Movements in the Great Lakes Region
Authors: Smith David R.
Published: March 2011

The Canadian imperialist is ever on guard . . . discovering even in the harmless agent of commerce the disguised spy of political union with the American Republic. Yet if anything could make annexation a living force it will be the prevention of closer trade and social relations between Canada and the United States. (Albert J. Beveridge, American Review of Reviews, 1911) The recent passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the introduction of other free-trade initiatives have prompted a host of debates about the impending results of economic integration on international borders (Herzog 1992; Randall 1992; and Widdis, forthcoming). For instance, will economic integration necessarily lead to political integration? Despite the seemingly recent rise of free trade to the forefront of public policy debates, a study of the economic development of the Great Lakes region since the mid-1860s reveals that the current debates reflect long established concerns— that Senator Beveridge and others before him had—about economic inte- gration in such transnational regions as the Great Lakes basin.
Charles Chesnutt: Crossing the Colour Line
Authors: Carmean Karen
Published: March 2011

Richard H. Brodhead, ed. The journals of Charles Chesnutt. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993. Pp. 181 + illustrations. Richard H. Brodhead, ed. The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales: Charles W. Chesnutt. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993. Pp. 207. Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) is one of those small miracles of late-nineteenth-century American literature. Born into a free black family that returned to North Carolina from Ohio where they remained during the Civil War (Chesnutt's father fought for the Union Army), Chesnutt grew up in Fayetteville and came to adulthood as something of an intellectual anom- aly. Ambitious, articulate, disciplined, gifted, and diligent, Chesnutt achieved the highest social and professional levels available to him in the South, becoming the principal of the State Colored Normal School in his early twenties. Rather than being satisfied, however, his very achievement seemed to spur ambition, and he eventually abandoned southern racial constraints to become a successful businessman and author in Ohio. Indeed, he was the first African-American writer to cross the colour line in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly.
Abraham Lincoln and American Values
Authors: Lightner David L.
Published: March 2011

J. David Greenstone. The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pp. xxxiii + 312. Mark E. Neely, Jr. The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Pp. ix + 214. Merrill D. Peterson. Lincoln in American Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. viii + 482. Established scholars have produced these three major new works concerning Abraham Lincoln: an encyclopedic survey of Lincoln's place in American culture over the thirteen decades that have elapsed since his death, a brief but informative biography aimed at a general audience, and an ambitious attempt to situate Lincoln within an overarching reinterpretation of the American liberal tradition.
Toward the Third Millennium: The Role of the United States in the New North America
Authors: Duffey Joseph
Published: March 2011

This is a particularly good time to consider the question of the role of the United States in the new North American community. Much of the world today is being compelled to reassess how international relations are to be handled with the advent of a new age. For forty-five years the Cold War provided a certain clarity to international relations. It is both exhilarating and terribly confusing to live in this "time between the times," this puzzling, unnamed and inchoate period when Manichean dualities seem irrelevant as we try to understand and responsibly confront the opportunities of a new time.
Low Barriers Make Good Neighbours
Authors: Weintraub Sidney
Published: March 2011

Introduction When I come to Canada—which I have been doing frequently since my first visit more than thirty years ago as part of a U. S. team engaged in wheat negotiations—the press articles I read tend to deal with problems in the Canada-U. S. relationship. Fair enough. The Garden of Eden was less news- worthy than eating an apple. My main theme, however, will be that the two countries are fortunate in the neighbour they have. Their problems these days deal mostly with trade. I don't wish to make light of these, but compare them with disagreements in this century between other neighbours, such as France and Germany, or the Soviet Union, and now Russia and its neighbours, or over territory in Latin America. What is now the European Union was started in order to make war between France and Germany unthinkable by thoroughly enmeshing their economies with each other. There was no war fright that stimulated the Canada-U. S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA). The motive was to lock in the extensive economic linkages that already existed.
Thomas Pynchon and Postmodern Liberalism
Authors: Varsava Jerry A.
Published: March 2011

Introduction Thomas Pynchon has written some of America's most imaginative and intellectually suggestive fiction of the postwar period. And, responsive to his work's richness, critical attention has in due course been paid to a myriad of topics he has examined. One important subject, however, has not been ade- quately addressed in Pynchonian scholarship. No sustained effort has been made to see Pynchon's work as embracing a determinate political stance or political philosophy.1 It is the latter that will provide the focus of this essay. It should be said from the outset that important features of postmodern American fiction have discouraged readers from looking for philosophical coherence of any sort. As reflected in various works by, for example, Walter Abish, Paul Auster, Frederick Barth, Robert Coover, Raymond Federman, William Gass, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Ronald Sukenick, unrelieved epistem- ological doubt and antic involution of form do not provide the method- ological foundations for a coherent political philosophy. Scepticism typically yields local and often ambiguous insights, not comprehensive understanding. And for its part, formal experimentation—and certainly postmodern fiction's recurrent obsession with parody—inevitably invites readings that, advertently or otherwise, emphasize aesthetic autonomy.2 In the case of Pynchon, readers have quite astutely identified the general lines of his critique of modern America and Western civilization as a whole, but, with rare exception, Pynchon's political philosophy has typically been either overlooked or reduced to an amorphous postmodern disillusionment or some sort of dark pessimism or even disappointed humanism.3
Roughing It Under the Shadow of the Corporation
Authors: Michaelsen Scott
Published: March 2011

Introduction Mark Twain's Roughing It (1872) is, by most accounts, a sprawling, patched- together, decentered thing. But many commentators have unified the book by suggesting that it coheres around the difference between U. S. East and West—and therefore between genteel values and their attendant social limitations and demands, and the comparative openness and possibility of the frontier. The most influential reading of the text in this regard is Henry Nash Smith's (1957), which argues that the book is framed by the double- consciousness of the character "Mark Twain"—both a western "tenderfoot" and "old-timer." The latter, according to Smith, is a representative of "ver- nacular values" and the conditions of the wild West, including picturesque "color," "brotherhood," and "freedom." This figure exhibits traits of "laziness, irresponsibility, irreverence," and Smith concludes that the "western" Twain rejects such values by the end of the book, and substitutes American values of self-making which are inherently "urban," "industrial," and "capitalist" (226, 218, 225).1
Lives of Edith Wharton
Authors: Nowlin Michael E.
Published: March 2011

Shari Benstock. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribners, 1994. Pp. xi + 546 and illustrations. Susan Goodman. Edith Wharton's Inner Circle. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 165 and illustrations. Eleanor Dwight. Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life. New York: Harry Abrams, 1994. Pp. 296 and illustrations. "As my work reaches its close, I feel so sure that it is either nothing, or far more than they know. . . . And I wonder, a little desolately, which?" So wrote Edith Wharton to her lifelong friend Daisy Chanler in 1925 (cited in Benstock 1994, 384), after surveying reviews of her most recent novel, one of which deemed her "now equal to Scott Fitzgerald," a rising star less than half her age who had just published The Great Gatsby. Wharton's work was certainly not "nothing" to Fitzgerald, who was as flattered by her expressed admiration for his novel as he was by the praise of T. S. Eliot. The terms of Wharton's desolate musing here are telling: displacement by a new genera- tion of writers bothered her less than the question of whether or not her work would ultimately find its place in literary history, of whether, in effect, her work really was "literature," worthy of canonization alongside work of writers she admired: Johann Goethe, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, George Eliot, and Henry James. The fact that she made an enormous amount of money from her writing and that her novels and stories were as critically acclaimed as they were popular meant ultimately "nothing," it seems, compared to the possibility that her work would command the interpretive energies of posterity.
Spinning Our Wheels On Foundational Tenets
Authors: Zwicker Heather
Published: March 2011

Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex. ' New York/London: Routledge, 1993. Pp. xii + 284. Elspeth Probyn. Sexing the Self: Gendered Positiotis in Cultural Studies. London/New York: Routledge, 1993. Pp. x + 173 and bibliography. The world of gender used to be simple: boys were boys and women were girls, and everyone knew their place. Then feminism happened, and before feminists had altogether convinced everyone that women were women, thank you very much, poststructuralism intervened with a crisis of representation that has resulted in a basic uncertainty about any such analytic categories.
Prelude to War: The Interventionist Propaganda of Archibald MacLeish, Robert E. Sherwood, and John Steinbeck
Authors: Buitenhuis Peter
Published: March 2011

The American sleep of isolation in the 1930s—the separation from the tumultuous events in Europe and Asia—was deep and prolonged. Franklin D. Roosevelt was aware of the problems in this wider world and deeply concerned about the implications for the future of his country. For some time, however, he felt he could do little to aid the internationalists who wanted the United States to take a stand against fascist aggression. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how three prominent writers of the time, Archibald MacLeish, Robert E. Sherwood and, to a lesser extent, John Steinbeck became involved in the fight against fascism and, subsequently, became agents of propaganda for the U. S. government.
Managing Madness
Authors: Lightner David L.
Published: March 2011

Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes. Madness in America: Cultural and Medical Perceptions of Mental Illness before 1914. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. 182. David Gollaher. Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix. New York: The Free Press, 1995. Pp. xi + 538. Gerald N. Grob. The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America's Mentally III. New York: The Free Press, 1994. Pp. xiii + 386. That American mental health policy is a shambles seems apparent to anyone who walks the mean streets of the nation's cities. The last time I was in Washington, I repeatedly skirted gingerly by a deranged man seated on the sidewalk outside the Library of Congress. The stench of his body wastes was overpowering. His face crawled with vermin and was contorted in rage, as he shouted an endless torrent of obscenities. I have not encountered the like here in Canada, but perhaps it is only a matter of time. The province of Alberta, where I live, is eliminating almost half of its acute-care psychiatric beds, and already horror stories are surfacing in the media. A professor at my university suffered from depression. Refused admission at a hospital, he shot and killed himself. More recently, a young woman tried to jump off a bridge near the university campus. Pulled to safety by passers-by, she was taken to hospital, examined, and released. She promptly returned to the same bridge and had to be rescued a second time.
Oral History: An Interview with Robert Martin
Authors: Tucker Bruce
Published: March 2011

Introduction As part of the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the Canadian Review of American Studies, the editors are pleased to present the third in a series of interviews of former editors and presidents of the Canadian Association of American Studies (CAAS). In the following interview, president of the Canadian Association for American Studies, Robert Martin, reflects on his professional and personal experience teaching and writing about American literature. He discusses his focus on gay issues, and shares his views on the topic of studying American Studies in Québec. Robert Martin is pro- fessor of literature at the Université de Montréal.
Was Bloom PC?
Authors: Ryan Phil
Published: March 2011

If I were called upon to write a book which was to be vested with the highest authority, I should preter to write it in such a way that a reader could find re-echoed in my words whatever truths he was able to apprehend. (Augustine, Confessions, 12.31) Allan Bloom? The man whose Closing of the American Mind "best articu- lates the critique" of political correctness and "represents the key text" (Piatt 1992, 123), who demonstrates "an excessively ossified, hierarchical, and im- mutable view of the cultural tradition" (Kurzweil et al. 1991, 226), who has been "subjected to an unremitting barrage of criticism and abuse from the academic Left" (Kimball 1990, 3), whose "name has become virtually synony- mous with traditionalist views of higher education" (DePalma 1992), who began a speech with the salutation "Fellow elitists" (Bloom 1990, 13)?
Beyond Synthesis: The Problem of Coherence in American History
Authors: Tucker Bruce
Published: March 2011

During the past several years, cultural commentators, critics, and scholars, both black and white, have sought to link the teaching and interpretation of American history with arguments about what it means to be an American in the present. Lamenting the emergence of multicultural forms and ideologies in the United States and the perceived lack of a common culture, literary scholar E. D. Hirsch (1987) proposed a list of facts that every American should know about American history and literature. Similarly, philosopher Alan Bloom (1987) has promoted the study of the "great books" of Western civilization as the way to bring ethnic groups that have resisted the "melting pot" more fully into the national American fold. Educator Molefi Kete Asante has taken an Afrocentrist position, favouring an educational strategy that "centers African-American students inside history, culture, [and] science" to stimulate a "new sense of purpose and vision in their own lives" (1991, 72, 77). Philosopher Cornel West calls for a history of the United States that stresses racial inequality, declaring the central proposition that "black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather con- stituent elements of that life" (1994, 6, original emphasis). And, writer Toni Morrison (1992) has interrogated the very concept of "American-ness," in the forging of a national identity, arguing that the term has been synonymous with "white." Although these writers are pursuing quite different arguments about citizenship, each refers to the need for a particular understanding of the American past.
Sartre, White America, and the Black Problem
Authors: Peters Renate
Published: March 2011

At various times, Jean-Paul Sartre addressed issues of racism and prejudice: anti-Semitism in Anti-Semite and Jew ([1946] 1948), colonialism in his pre- faces to Black Orpheus ([1948] 1963) and Fanon's Wretched of the Earth ([1963] 1968). His views on American racism were, similarly, a transient pre- occupation. Although his writings on anti-Semitism were contemporaneous with his writings on American racism, he barely connected one form of prejudice with the other. In Orwell's critique, Sartre "[made] no attempt to relate antisemitism to such obviously allied phenomena as, for instance, colour prejudice" (Orwell [1948] 1968, 452).1 Beyond this failure, his writings on racism in America—the subject of this essay—also reveal his failure to grasp the complexities of race prejudice.
The Making of the "Rust Belt" in the Minds of North Americans, 1969-1984
Authors: High Steven
Published: March 2011

Roger & Me, Michael Moore's irreverent 1989 film documentary about cor- porate greed and the hollowness of the American Dream, propelled Flint, Michigan into the North American limelight. The fall of Moore's home town was a decidedly sharp one. To the upbeat music of the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice," Moore showed his audience what Flint had become— a town of abandoned homes, vacant lots, boarded businesses, and empty streets. Interspersed between these scenes of urban decay were newspaper headlines announcing the closure of one automotive plant after another. Moore's technique of juxtaposing contrasting images led to a devastating indictment of General Motors. The most damning example occurred at the end of the film when Moore overlaid G. M. Chairman Roger Smith's Christmas message of human fellowship with visual images of a family being evicted on Christmas eve. While a choir sang "You Better Watch Out, You Better Not Cry," the family's meagre possessions were piled onto the curb- side; even the Christmas tree was added to the pile. The film's impact owed not only to the creativity of Michael Moore, but also to the fact that North Americans were already primed to interpret, in terms of decline, the history of Flint, and other industrial cities in the Great Lakes region. Had Moore made such a negative film about a city—in what was then known as the "industrial heartland"—-at the outset of the 1969 recession, he would have been dismissed as an alarmist. By the 1980s, however, North Americans had become used to thinking pessimistically about the Great Lakes region. As the industrial heartland transmuted into the "Rust Belt" in the minds of Canadians and Americans, the fate of its cities became the ideal targets for black humour.1
The End of America: Geology and Cartography in Herman Melville's Pierre and Victor-Lévy Beaulieu's Voyageries
Authors: Leroux Jean-François
Published: March 2011

What would it mean were someone to proclaim, in a certain apocalyptic tone, "the Time is near, the End of America is at hand?" In "Hawthorne and His Mosses," Herman Melville announces "the coming of the literary Shiloh of America," whose advent is further to herald and to prepare for that "political supremacy among the nations, which prophetically awaits [America] at the close of the present century" (Melville [1850] 1967, 550, 546). Ac- cording to this version of the End, the ark of Truth would find its final sanc- tuary in the democratic republic with the American Shiloh. In spite of this nationalist, fin de siècle rendering, such apocalypticism is not endemic solely to nineteenth-century America. In his Monsieur Melville (1978) and Les Voyageries (1973-83; published separately), Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, a con- temporary québécois author and polemicist, appropriates the American rhetoric of the New Frontier and the New Man for his own purposes. With Melville as literary co-conspirator, Beaulieu undertakes the accomplishment of La Grande Tribu, a Homeric reconstruction of Québec's origins. Para- doxically, however, Monsieur Melville discerns the roots of Québec's future grandeur not in the earthbound past, but in the starlit firmament of the coming New World (Beaulieu 1978, vol. 3, 129).
Pauvreté et Assistance Publique à Barre, Vermont, 1910-1920
Authors: Douville Eric
Published: March 2011

Abstract: This article delves into the issue of public assistance and its role in the small community of Barre, Vermont, as it existed at the beginning of the century. The study looks specifically at the granite industry, which was a mainstay of the small town, and the different groups, American, Canadian as well as several ethnic minorities, which participated in this industry and their need and reliance on public assistance. The study focuses on the reasons why families and inviduals came to be on the public assistances rolls, including unsafe working conditions, ill health, and irregular work cycles. The study demonstrates, on a very small scale, a demographic history of poverty.
Some Comparisons of Canadian and U.S. Attitudes/Behaviour Concerning Sustainable Development
Authors: Webster Henry H.
Published: March 2011

Introduction The view has been expressed elsewhere that forestry in the United States is in a very curious state (Webster and Chappelle 1997). This is a time of general improvement of many domestic resources, most definitely forests (Easterbrook 1995, Frederick and Sedjo 1991, Sampson and Hair 1990). The effect is further to make these resource sectors an area of potential national comparative advantage.
Deceitful Traces of Power: An Analysis of the Decadence of Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby
Authors: Lena Alberto
Published: March 2011

When Ernest Hemingway first published The Snows of Kilimanjaro in Esquire (1936), the story contained an explicit reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald's relationship with the rich: The rich were dull and they drank too much . . . they were dull and they were repetitious. . . . He remembered poor [Scott Fitzgerald] and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, 'The rich are different from you and me.1 And how someone had said to [Scott], Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to [Scott]. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him. ([1939] 1967, 72)
The Moral of Glenway Wescott: The Closet and The Second Act
Authors: Doyle Kegan
Published: March 2011

"Since I can't think when, I have wanted to give some account of myself as a lover and a loved one, of the plot of my life replete with coin- cidences and influences, Monroe's influence especially, but not solely, and now of that triumvirate in which I figure in the third place, perhaps more governed than governing; who knows? Surely it constitutes a theme or set of themes less hackneyed and possibly more significant than any other thing experienced or observed by me. But how, how, can it be dealt with clearly and interestingly and enjoyably except in an auto- biography, painfully encroaching upon the others1 lives?" (Glenway Wescott 1990, 9) "There are no second acts in American lives." (F. Scott Fitzgerald 1941, 189)
The Black and White of Race
Authors: Eddy Charmaine
Published: March 2011

There may ... be something accurate about this repeated dramatization of woman as simulacrum, erasure, or silence. For it would not be easy to assert that the existence and knowledge of the female subject could simply be produced, without difficulty or epistemological damage, within the existing patterns of culture and language. The Critical Difference may here be unwittingly pointing to "woman" as one of the things "we do not know we do not know." ... It is not enough to be a woman writing in order to resist the naturalness of female effacement in the subtly male pseudogenderlessness of language. (Barbara Johnson 1987, 40-41)