bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Film Noir: The Politics of the Maladjusted Text
Authors: Maltby Richard
Published: January 2009

How are we to situate a movie in history? By now there must be few practitioners of American Studies who would not acknowledge that the products of Hollywood provide a rich seam waiting to be mined by social and cultural historians. As in most mining projects, the difficulty lies in developing the equipment needed to extract the ore. To treat film as a source of cultural history is by no means as simple as that old-fashioned literary approach by which an author's biography could be interwoven with a summary political or social history. The cinema has no author whose individuality can be used to gloss over the absence of method in such a procedure. Or rather, any movie has such a plethora of authors that the attempt to establish evidence of authorial intent is bound to fail, as auteurist criticism has repeatedly demonstrated. The “authors” of an entertainment commodity are not simply its director, writer, producer and studio head of production. They include front office personnel, New York executives and the advertising staff, distributors and theatre managers who “author” the product at the point of its sale to the public. In any case, the historian concerned with popular rather than elite culture is at least as interested in reception as in production, and his or her sphere of interest must extend beyond the limits of the text and its intended meaning to a concern with context and with how the movie was received and understood by its primary audience.
Terminal Flight: The Air Traffic Controllers' Strike of 1981
Authors: Morgan David
Published: January 2009

A conservative Republican presidential candidate committed to the “free market,” a “landslide” victory, the election of many “conservative” Democrats who had strong reservations about organized labour and a willingness to increase defence at the expense of all other federal spending: all suggested that confrontation with unions in both public and private sectors was a real possibility in 1981. A strike in the public sector there certainly was, and it was full of ironies. The union concerned was the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization [PATCO] which, under the abrasive leadership of Robert Poli, had endorsed the Reagan candidacy, offended the AFL–CIO leadership, waged its strike with little union help, and was crushed, to judge by the opinion polls, amidst considerable popular acclaim. Ronald Reagan capped a very successful seven months, spent pushing Congress into rewriting U.S. taxing and spending priorities, by sacking thousands of federal employees all over the U.S.A.
Unlonesome Highways: The Quest for Fact and Fellowship in Depression America
Authors: Peeler David P.
Published: January 2009

Woody Guthrie managed to capture much of Depression America in his songs. In “This Land Is Your Land” of 1940, he reflected the leftist sentiments of many thirties Americans. Singing that it was the blank side of a “Private Property” sign that “was wrote for you and me,” Guthrie echoed the conclusion that others had reached in the preceding decade — America belongs to the working masses rather than to a few wealthy owners. For all his insight, however, Guthrie missed part of the Depression experience when he set his “Private Property” sign beside a “lonesome highway.” Rather than deserted places, the nation's roadways were virtually teeming with dispossessed people. Millions of foreclosed farmers, evicted renters and unemployed workers crowded the thoroughfares, desperately searching for new lives. Despite what Woody Guthrie had to say, America's Depression highways were far from lonesome.

A certain number of those folks jamming the nation's highways were not homeless drifters. They were instead more like author Erskine Caldwell. Soon after the 1932 publication of his novel, Tobacco Road, Caldwell had taken to travelling. He continued on the road until one day in 1940 when he pulled his car into a Missouri gas station. As had been his habit for the past years, he asked the attendant not for gas or oil, but for an analysis of the state of the nation. The attendant knew Caldwell's type. For years writers had been stopping and asking him “all sorts of fool questions” without purchasing anything. Well prepared, he silently handed Caldwell a neatly printed card describing his life and thoughts, ridiculing with its detail the questions writers asked him.
Continuity and Radicalism in American Black Nationalist Thought, 1914–1929
Authors: Lively Adam
Published: January 2009

Interest in the historical phenomenon of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American black nationalism has been inspired by the revival of nationalist modes of thought among blacks since the 1950s. Because the placing of post-Second World War Pan-Africanism or the American Black Power movement within a historical context has been seen as an urgent task, the search for a coherent tradition has carried with it the danger of distortions in the historical treatment of the earlier movements. “Traditional” nineteenth-century black nationalism was essentially a conservative movement advocating racial self-improvement through the “civilizing” influence of Anglo-Saxon values, particularly Christianity. Taking black nationalism to mean the assertion of group identity for political purposes (which need not be separatist), its nature clearly changed during the period 1914–1929 as the nature of the American black community changed. For the first time in American history there existed a sizeable number of black intellectuals and a literate audience for them; the rapid growth in the number of black newspapers and magazines reflected these facts. These intellectuals were responsive to new ideas like socialism, yet the transformation of black nationalist thought during this period did not constitute a complete break with the past. This essay attempts to illustrate continuities with the nineteenth century along with those elements of radicalism that presaged modern black nationalism.

Two discontinuities between modern and “traditional” black nationalism constitute essential reference points for the analysis of black nationalist thought during this period. The first relates to who is perceived as being the principal agent or vanguard of the nationalist movement.
Attitudes Towards Homosexuality in the Seventeenth-Century New England Colonies
Authors: Thompson Roger
Published: January 2009

The first play I attended at my all-boys secondary school was Marlowe's Dr Faustus. The lower boys crammed in the gallery were not wholly engaged by grandiloquent Elizabethan cadences, nor by the laboriously unfolding plot. What stopped the whispering and fidgeting and then brought the house down was the scene in which Faustus, as reward for selling his soul, is allowed to kiss the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy. In this production the hell-bent Doctor had to make do with the prettiest boy in the school. Wild whoops, mating calls, indecent suggestions for further action rained down from the gallery. At the curtain call Helen again stole the show. Next morning, the Headmaster, a Scottish Presbyterian whose zeal for the Lord was second only to his zeal for rugby football, rebuked the school for the shameful scenes and prescribed a three-mile run to cool our ardour.
Margaret Bourke-White and the Communist Witch Hunt
Authors: Snyder Robert E.
Published: January 2009

Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971) has been called “the most famous woman photographer” and “the finest woman photographer of our times.” Indeed, in a photographic career that spanned nearly five decades, Bourke-White demonstrated great professional versatility, registered many photographic firsts, and in a male-dominated field set standards by which others were measured. During the 1920s, Bourke-White carved out her first reputation in architectural and industrial photography. Her pictures of steel mills, shipyards, packing houses, logging camps, quarries, auto plants, skyscrapers, banks, and terminals captured the atmosphere of the industry and the dynamics of the capitalist system. Her industrial photography was of such outstanding quality that, as one critic observed, it “transformed the American factory into a Gothic cathedral.”

Henry Luce was so impressed by her early work that he hired her as the first photographer for his business magazine Fortune. Under a unique arrangement she was allowed six months out of the year to pursue her own private studio practice for advertising agencies and corporations. When Henry Luce added the pictorial magazine Life to his growing publishing empire in the 1930s, he selected Margaret Bourke-White to become one of the four original staff photographers. At Life she established the tradition of negatives printed full frame and proved by black borders, and pioneered the synchronized multiple flash picture. Bourke-White revealed the range of her photographic talents in photo essays, murals, and documentary travelogues. “As a result of her twelve- and fourteen-page essays,” Carl Mydans noted, “her monumental work became known throughout the world — beyond that of any other photographer.”
The Manassa Mauler and the Fighting Marine: An Interpretation of the Dempsey–Tunney Fights
Authors: Gorn Elliott J.
Published: January 2009

I often have heard boxing fans remark that the prize ring reveals life the way it really is. The elemental combat between two individuals, the primal physical struggle, the quest for glory and fear of humiliation, all contribute to the belief that men in the ring are in touch with life's underlying realities. Significantly, depicting “life the way it really is” is precisely the role anthropologist Clifford Geertz ascribes to religious worldviews. Religions, Geertz tells us, do not just buttress social systems or justify conditions as men and women find them. They also explain the way the world works, cut behind surface appearances, and offer visions of underlying order which give meaning to daily life. Through drama and ritual, religion depicts the “really real” with idealized clarity. Religious symbols unmask the way the universe is in sheer actuality and demonstrate the moving forces behind mundane affairs. The truism that America's popular religion is sports takes on new significance in light of Geertz' observation. And in the pantheon of the 1920s, no gods shone more brightly than the heroes of the ring.
Cooper, Nationalism and Imperialism
Authors: Green Martin
Published: January 2009

In his poem to the hesitating purchaser of Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson names Cooper among the great romancers he has emulated, describing him as “ Cooper of the wood and wave.” That phrase names both the aspect of Cooper's work which interests me, the adventure novels, and the major subdivision of that aspect. I am not, that is, going to discuss the non-fiction, and among the fiction I am not going to discuss the Effingham or the Littlepage novels, nor even the historical novels as such. I'm going to concentrate upon the Leatherstocking saga, seen as forest books, and upon sea fiction like Afloat and Ashore, The Pilot, and The Sea Lions. I want to point out differences between the two sub-genres in fictional art and fictional success, and to try to explain those differences in terms of social and political forces. But I also want to stress the unity of the two, which is to say Cooper's identity as an adventure novelist. Because we lack a critical vocabulary for that genre, critics have, it seems to me, failed to take proper account of one of the major forms and forces of our literature. And this is particularly unfortunate in American Studies, because adventure has been so large a part of American culture.
The Practice and Theory of Storytelling: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walter Benjamin
Authors: Swann C. S. B.
Published: January 2009

“ What is he? ” murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. “ A writer of story-books ! What kind of business in life, what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation, may that be? ” (Hawthorne, “ The Custom-House”
The Political Culture of Emancipation: Morality, Politics, and the State in Garrisonian Abolitionism, 1854–1863
Authors: Voss-Hubbard Mark
Published: January 2009

Historians have long recognized the unprecedented expansion of federal power during the Civil War. Moreover most scholars agree that the expansion of federal power manifested itself most immediately and profoundly in the abolition of slavery. In a sense, through the Emancipation Proclamation, the Republican administration injected the national government into the domain of civil rights, and by doing so imbued federal power with a distinct moral purpose. The passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments codified this expression of federal authority, rejecting the bedrock tenet in American republican thought that centralized power constituted the primary threat to individual liberty.
Why Shouldn't a Union Man Be a Union Man? The ILGWU and FOUR
Authors: Renshaw Patrick
Published: January 2009

Historians generally agree that in the 1950s and 1960s organized labour in the United States had become thoroughly bureaucratized. This is often explained as part of a general process of growth and maturity. In their lean, radical youth in the 1930s, those American unions which had launched the Congress of Industrial Organizations had aimed at two targets: to organize and bargain collectively, as promised by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act; and then to use this power to press for wider industrial democracy and social reform. By the time the CIO was reunited with the American Federation of Labor in 1955, this picture had been substantially changed. Increasingly labour cooperated with management and had become part of the white, male, liberal corporate power structure which ran the American capitalist industrial and political system. This military-industrial complex was the indispensable basis, not just for American prosperity but the whole Cold War strategy of containment of communism through the Pax Americana.
Dating Hemingway's Early Style/Parsing Gertrude Stein's Modernism
Authors: Ryan Dennis
Published: January 2009

In the relatively short history of Hemingway studies, a significant controversy has erupted as to how early and to what degree Gertrude Stein influenced Ernest Hemingway's early style. The earlier commentators (whose works date roughly from 1952 to 1973) agree that Gertrude Stein significantly influenced Hemingway's early style from 1921 to 1924. For instance, Philip Young writes that “similarities between his prose and hers suggest indeed that he learned a lot. What she had tried to do in the days when Hemingway was a boy was remarkably like what the young man was going one day to try to do, too.” Charles Fenton concurs, writing that Hemingway responded to Stein's method “between 1922 and 1924, the period of Miss Stein's greatest personal importance to him.” Carlos Baker reports that Stein provided sound advice and that “nearly any 23-year-old author could profit by it,” which is “what Hemingway did whenever he sat down at the typewriter.” Finally, Sheldon Grebstein concludes that “Hemingway brought [Stein's] experiments to fruition and made it [her style] a major resource of his style.”
The 1968 Presidential Elections
Authors: Nicholas H. G.
Published: January 2009

The electoral events of 1968 constitute a classical case of the vanity of political prediction. In 1964, in the wake of Mr Johnson's crowning mercy of November, political scientists were affirming the end of the Republican Party; the most that was to be looked for in the future was a one-and-a-half party system. In 1962 it was universally agreed amongst the politically sophisticated that Mr Nixon, by losing the California governor's race and, worse still, by publicly displaying his wounds and his chagrin, had wrecked all chances of a presidential nomination. In 1968, even after the New Hampshire primary, it was the conventional wisdom that Senator McCarthy's was, for all its gallantry, a children's crusade, of no serious significance for the course of American politics. Dis aliter visum. The two-party system fully reasserted itself, even in a three-party year; Mr Nixon easily won the nomination and, by a hair's breadth, the presidency; finally, Senator McCarthy, despite his failure to win either, decisively affected the course of American policy in Vietnam, was probably responsible in large degree for Mr Johnson's abdication and may, by his own autumnal aloofness, have tipped the electoral balance from Humphrey to Nixon.
British Military and Naval Observers in the Spanish-American War
Authors: Ranson E.
Published: January 2009

The American expeditionary force against Santiago, which sailed from Tampa, Florida, on 14 June 1898, comprised some 800 officers and 16,000 men, plus a number of civilian clerks and stenographers, teamsters, packers and stevedores. The troops were honoured by the presence of eighty-nine newspaper correspondents, and eleven foreign military observers. The colourful exploits of the correspondents are well known, but the activities and opinions of the foreign attachés were by their very nature strictly confidential. Happily, the reports of the British military and naval representatives who accompanied the Santiago expedition have survived the intervening years, and when viewed in conjunction with the observations of the British military attaché with the Spanish forces in Cuba they shed interesting light on the conduct of the war.
The Social Critics and the End of American Innocence: 1907–1921
Authors: Bourke Paul F.
Published: January 2009

Shortly before America's involvement in the First World War there appeared a series of works of social and cultural criticism remarkable for their range and sophistication. The familiar list includes Herbert Croly'sThe Promise of American Life(1909) andProgressive Democracy(1914), Walter Weyl'sThe New Democracy(1912), Walter Lippmann'sPreface to Politics(1913) andDrift and Mastery(1914), Van Wyck Brooks'sThe Wine of the Puritans(1909),America's Coming of Age(1915), andH. G. Wells(1915), and Randolph Bourne'sYouth and Life(1913),The Gary Schools(1916) andEducation and Living(1917). The authors of these books were involved as well in the development of vehicles for social criticism such asThe New RepublicandThe Seven Artswhich continued and institutionalized the preoccupations of their books.
Ossian, Scott and Cooper's Indians
Authors: Hayne Barrie
Published: January 2009

Though Mark Twain's phrase ‘the showiest kind of book-talk’ undoubtedly represents the apogee of the attacks on Cooper's diction in general, the grandiloquent speeches of Cooper's Indians had drawn the fire of the proponents of verisimilitude from the earliest. The North American Review, with The Last of the Mohicans before it, criticized the author's idealization of Indian speech and character (‘We should be glad to know, for example, in what tribe, or in what age of Indian history, such a civilized warrior as Uncas ever flourished?’). Nor, two years later, did the reviewing of one of Cooper's sea novels seem an inappropriate occasion for a fresh onslaught upon his Indians: ‘This bronze noble of nature, is then made to talk like Ossian for whole pages, and measure out hexameters, as though he had been practising for a poetic prize’. Adding weightily to the chorus, as the years succeeded, would be the Indian fighter Cass, who expressed ‘regret that [Cooper] did not cross the Allegany, instead of the Atlantic, and survey the red man in the forests and prairies’, as well as the author of The Oregon Trail and historian of the eighteenth century's struggle against the Five Nations: ‘We do not allude to his Indian characters, which it must be granted, are for the most part either superficially or falsely drawn; while the long conversations which he puts into their mouths, are as truthless as they are tiresome’.
Chance, Time and Silence: the New American Verse
Authors: Raban Jonathan
Published: January 2009

The post-Pound, post-Carlos Williams movement in American verse, represented by such poets as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Ed Dorn, has for the most part been received with a deadly critical hush, particularly in England. Apart from the timely special issue of Ian Hamilton's Review in 1964 on Black Mountain Poetry, together with some discreet championing by Eric Mottram and Donald Davie, attention to the New Verse has been largely confined to the off-campus underground scene. The Black Mountaineers are generally thought to be the exclusive province of the Fulcrum Press, Calder and Boyars, the International Times and a tiny circulating broadsheet published from Cambridge called The English Intelligencer. But this critical neglect is, I think, a symptom of a genuine distress in literature departments of universities about the nature of contemporary verse. On the one hand, we have acquired a sophisticated terminology for discussing most of the verbal objects we have learned to call poems: this terminology entails certain assumptions about the working of language itself–that, for instance, the semantic value of an utterance is housed entirely in the words that compose that utterance, that language is a collection of multiply-suggestive symbols, that the operation of language is rational, logical and continuous. On the other hand, we have been recently confronted with a body of verse which either defies, or comes off very badly from, our conventional terminology. Its most striking features have been a metrical, syntactical and logical discontinuity; an insistence that language works, not symbologically, but phenomenologically, as a happening in time and space; that the silence in which a poem occurs has as great a semantic value as the words which are imposed on that silence. Given this battery of opposed assumptions, it is hardly surprising that the case of the New American Poetry offers the unengaging spectacle of criticism and poetics confronting one another with at best a dubious silence, at worst, bared teeth.
The Critical Recognition of Sister Carrie 1900–1907
Authors: Salzman Jack
Published: January 2009

In his introductory essay to The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, Alfred Kazin has noted that the legend that Sister Carrie had been suppressed by the publisher's wife became so dear to the hearts of the rising generation of the twentieth century that ‘Mrs Doubleday became a classic character, the Carrie Nation of the American liberal epos, her ax forever lifted against “the truth of American life”’. Equally dear to the hearts of the new generation of Americans was the belief that both the puritanical publishers and the equally puritanical reviewers tried to prevent the ‘immoral’ Sister Carrie from coming before the American public. That this belief is still widely held is testified to by the recent studies of Philip L. Gerber, W. A. Swanberg, and Yoshinobu Hakutani.
The Modern Republican Party: Resurgence or Decline?
Authors: Rae Nicol C.
Published: January 2009

In the study of contemporary American politics the phenomenon referred to as the “decline of party” has aroused considerable debate. Many writing on this subject maintain that American parties have been in a longterm and irreversible process of secular decline. Others hold that American parties have merely changed their role in the political system and although increasingly eliminated from presidential politics have developed considerably as national political organisations. This latter thesis has particular reference to the Republican party. The GOP has won four of the last five presidential elections, and has developed its national party organisation to a level of efficacy and sophistication unprecedented in American history.
The Author as a Brand Name: American Literary Figures and the Time Cover Story
Authors: Moran Joe
Published: January 2009

When Time magazine profiled him in March 1964, John Cheever wrote an entry in his journal which imagined his daughter Susan's thoughts:

After they put Daddy's picture on the cover of Time, he seemed to lose something… I don't mean like Dorian Gray or anything but like a savage who thinks that if he is photographed he will have lost part of his image. A man came up to the house … and painted a picture of Daddy. It was painted in a definite style, a magazine cover style, and Daddy seemed to get himself mixed up with all the kings and presidents and so forth who had been on the cover before him. I mean he seemed in some way locked into the cover, fixed there, impressed on the paper. Once I lost my temper at him and said I don't think anybody's impressed by the fact that you had your face on Time magazine … They have all kinds of people; broken down ball players and crooks. It hurt his feelings, you could see.

Cheever's words give some suggestion both of the importance authors attached to the Time cover story, which at the peak of the magazine's influence was widely perceived as the apotheosis of American fame, and of their confusion over what it actually signified. This essay aims to explore this ambivalence by investigating the ways in which Time featured novelists, poets and playwrights as the subjects of its cover stories in the period from the magazine's first issue in 1923 to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it began to lose some of its status as “the National Poet Laureate.” Time owed this status to its position as champion of the “middlebrow,” being designed “for the lady from Dubuque … and for the President of the United States” and combining commercial success with semi-institutional legitimacy.
Isolationism of a Kind: Two Generations of World Court Historiography in the United States
Authors: Dunne Michael
Published: January 2009

With these apocryphal words from the proverbial doughboy, Charles Homer Haskins lightened his presidential address to the American Historical Association in December 1922. Haskins's theme was the historical and historiographical relevance of Europe to Americans, two subjects on which he could speak authoritatively. Dean of the Harvard Graduate School, an outstanding scholar of medievalism and the Mediterranean, Haskins was best known to his contemporaries as a member of Woodrow Wilson's research team at the Paris Peace Conference, the so-called Inquiry. In the course of his address Haskins surveyed the current state of American writing on European history and pronounced it moderately satisfying; but his underlying anxiety could not be disguised. Since he believed that all the “great European wars” had been “in every instance…American wars” and therefore “world wars,” Haskins feared the consequences of any American political and academic neglect of Europe. In Haskins's ambiguous formulation: “European history [was] of profound importance to Americans.”
Jonathan Edwards and his Scottish Connections
Authors: Simonson Harold P.
Published: January 2009

It is customary to associate Jonathan Edwards with the town of Northampton. That he was born in East Windsor (Conn.), was graduated from Yale College in New Haven, served a Presbyterian church in New York City, wrote his great treatises –A Careful and Strict Enquiry into … Freedom of Will(1754) andThe Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin(1758) – in Stockbridge (Mass.), and died as president of the College of New Jersey in Princeton does not mitigate the local association. For it was in Northampton where Edwards came of age theologically. He served as its minister from 1729 to 1750, following his grandfather Solomon Stoddard, who had served the same parish for the preceding sixty years. As with the one, so with the other: Northampton was Stoddard and it was also Edwards, a dynasty holding sway for over eighty years and commanding the religious spirit up and down the length of the Connecticut Valley.
The Technomyth in Transition: Reading American Popular Culture
Authors: McGregor Gaile
Published: January 2009

In the opening pages of his 1971 study, Politics as Symbolic Action, Murray Edelman underlines his belief that “psychological characteristics, social interaction, and political acts are alternative expressions of the same phenomenon.” In the discussion that follows, however, he tacitly privileges the political aspect of the transaction to an extent that quite undermines his initial image of an interdependent network of reactive/responsive processes. The bias is an understandable one, given his anxiety to counter the naive view of “governmental acts as reflections of people's cognitions.” It is also, unfortunately, a problematic one, insofaras its implication of a self-consciously Machiavellian political leadership deliberately manipulating public affect to its own ends simply substitutes for one misapprehension another equally naive.
Alchemy and Hawthorne's Elixir of Life Manuscripts
Authors: Swann Charles
Published: January 2009

Thoreau first told me about this predecessor of mine;…that here…dwelt, in some long past time, in this man who resolved never to die…

It gave me a stronger interest in this spot; and according to my custom, I mused and meditated, and thought within myself, and tried to make out what manner of man this might be, that deemed it within his power to subvert the usual conditions of humanity. …Had he discovered …the great secret philosophers used to seek for?
Redefining the New Deal: Some Thoughts on the Political and Cultural Perspectives of Revisionism
Authors: Kidd Stuart
Published: January 2009

Thirty years after the publication of Arthur Schlesinger's The Crisis of the Old Order and two decades after the “New Left” provoked a modicum of self-examination by established historians of the New Deal, there is still no general revisionist work or interpretation of the 1930s of the stature of Schlesinger, Leuchtenburg or Freidel. Despite twenty years of revisionist challenges, the notion of the 1930s as an affirmative and progressive era in American history remains dominant and commands broad acceptance. Revisionist analysis has appeared marginal to the dominant interpretations of the New Deal and has been either easily accommodated or effortlessly dismissed by the “liberal historical establishment.” This does not validate the dominant discourse so much as suggest that dissenting historians have pursued unrewarding lines of enquiry in challenging prevailing orthodoxy about the nature and significance of the New Deal. Whatever their differences, revisionists have shared with the “liberal establishment” the assumption that it was public policy which ensured the State's survival during the severe economic crisis of the 1930s and which provides the touchstone for historical evaluation of the New Deal. In the course of this review of the overarching concerns of historical writing about the New Deal it is intended to suggest that new perspectives and points of reference are required, and are being developed, to reinvigorate revisionist historiography of the New Deal period, and to shed light, in particular, on the State's ability to withstand crisis. As the debate over slavery was enlivened and sharpened by the introduction of cultural perspectives, so historical analysis of the New Deal stands to derive similar benefit.
Taking the Lead: the States' Expanding Role in Domestic Policymaking
Authors: Piccigallo Philip R.
Published: January 2009

To an increasing degree, the American states in recent years have taken the lead in domestic policymaking. In many areas — education, economic development, welfare reform, health care, housing and the environment, among others — state governors and legislatures are providing the initiative in identifying public needs, setting policy agenda and devising effective programmes to implement them.
“Age of the First Person Singular”: the Vocabulary of the Self in New England, 1780–1850
Authors: Masur Louis P.
Published: January 2009

If we only considered how near and intimate is the subject of the study of the self, we might suppose that of all studies it would be the most easy. And since it carries us back to the object of our most lively affections, we might think it would be most agreeable, and that we should proceed to it by natural impulse. Yet it is precisely the contrary.
Like “a Drop of Water in the Stream of Life”: Moving Images of Mass Man from Griffith to Vidor
Authors: Bush Gregory W.
Published: January 2009

King Vidor's 1928 film “The Crowd” examines the life of an “average” New Yorker, John Sims, who grows up dreaming of boundless opportunities for success yet remains stuck as a low-level clerk in a large corporation. Bored with office work, John invents advertising slogans and eventually wins $500 in a contest. He rushes home with an armful of toys and clothes for his family and jumps ecstatically about the room with his wife. From the window he displays a newly purchased scooter to his children across the street, then watches as his little girl runs to receive her gift and is struck by a huge truck careening down the block. John rushes out to find her surrounded by a large and anonymous crowd. In his grief he lifts the injured child high above them, an unconscious sacrifice to the seemingly mindless speed and swirling masses that rob modern urban people of their innocence and hope for individual fulfillment.
Carry Me Back: Nostalgia for the Old South in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture
Authors: Glazer Lee , Key Susan
Published: January 2009

Nostalgia for an idyllic antebellum South permeated both cultivated and vernacular arts in post-Reconstruction America. Bock's popular mode, along with his fictional persona and artificial dialect, contrasts with Bagby's high-minded autobiographical voice, but both the Northern purveyor of popular ballads and the Southern man of letters look back longingly to the same idealized past. While it is not surprising that writings of the fallen Southern aristocracy should resonate with nostalgia, the nostalgic voices of Northerners pretending to be former slaves are less comprehensible. Yet both men's memories of the Old South proved marketable.
The Soldier and the Aesthete: Homosexuality and Popular Culture in Gilded Age America
Authors: Blanchard Mary W.
Published: January 2009

The aftermath of civil strife, note some historians, can change perceptions of gender. Particularly for males, the effect of exhaustive internal wars and the ensuing collapse of the warrior ideal relegates the soldier/hero to a marginal iconological status. Linda L. Carroll has persuasively argued, for instance, that, following the Italian wars, one finds the “damaged” images of males in Renaissance art: bowed heads, display of stomach, presentation of buttocks. In fact, male weakness and “effeminacy” can, notes Linda Dowling, follow on the military collapse of any collective state. Arthur N. Gilbert argues, in contrast, that historically in wartime, male weakness in the form of “sodomites” was rigorously persecuted. From 1749 until 1792, for instance, there was only one execution for sodomy in France, while, during the Napoleonic Wars, the period of 1803–14, seven men were executed. Such analysis suggests that, in the aftermath of civil wars, cultural attitudes toward effeminate or homosexual men shifted from suppression or persecution during martial crisis to one of latitude and perhaps tolerance in periods following the breakdown of the military collective.

The aftermath of America's Civil War, the decades of the 1870s and 1880s, provides a testing ground to examine attitudes toward the soldier/hero and toward the effeminate male in a time of social and cultural disarray. At this time, an art “craze,” the Aesthetic Movement, captured popular culture. Aestheticism, seen in the eighteenth century as a “sensibility,” had, by the nineteenth century, an institutional base and a social reform ideology.
Revisions, Rememories and Exorcisms: Toni Morrison and the Slave Narrative
Authors: Hamilton Cynthia S.
Published: January 2009

Belovedis a self-conscious examination of the possibilities and limitations of the story-making process, both for the individual and for the community. Because slavery is a highly emotive subject and because historical narratives of slavery are so controversial, the exercise is a particularly potent one. The basic problem of the novel concerns the need to transform facts of unspeakable horror into a life-giving story, for the individual, for the black community, and for the nation. It is a problem which encourages compulsive repetition and avoidance; hence the stories of slavery proliferate. On the individual level the stories are shaped by the points of view of a variety of characters; on a wider level, by the demands of different types of utterance and by the structuring power of different kinds of historical perspectives and linguistic formulations, including, most significantly, generic forms. This profusion of storytelling makes the statement at the end of the novel, that “this is not a story to pass on” exceedingly problematic, for there is no single referent for the pronoun “this”, and the article “ a ” seems singularly inappropriate in view of this profusion.
Party Formation and Development in Jacksonian America: the Old South
Authors: Folsom Burton W.
Published: January 2009

Ante-bellum southern history has undergone extensive revision in recent decades. Now that the hoary myths of Cavalier aristocracies, monolithic sectionalism, and Confederate chauvinism have receded, historians are better able to evaluate the ante-bellum political history of the South. Only recently, however, have scholars begun to examine the question of party formation in the Jacksonian South, a development of the 1830s, without the conceptual blinders of economic or sectional determinism. In this essay on party formation and development in Jacksonian America, the political structure in four Southern states will be emphasized. I shall present both an institutional view, which stresses party structure, organization and leadership, and a behavioural view, which emphasizes the politics of masses of voters and the interaction of social groups.
AF of L Leaders and the Question of Politics in the Early 1890s
Authors: Finn J. F.
Published: January 2009

Between December 1893 and December 1895, the American Federation of Labor engaged in a running controversy over independent political action. It began at the Federation's annual convention of 1893, when T. J. Morgan proposed a political programme which was submitted to a referendum, and it ended when the New York convention of 1895 passed a resolution proposed by J. F. O'Sullivan of Boston, which banned party politics from the deliberations of the conventions. The climax was reached in the convention of 1894 at Denver, Colorado. There the political programme was debated for two days before being rejected. The Preamble of the programme committed the Federation to forming its own political party independent of the two existing parties; it was followed by eleven planks, most of which were traditional demands of labour. The sole exception was the tenth plank which demanded ‘The collective ownership by the people of all the means of production and distribution’. The debate centred on this plank, although Plank 3 (‘a legal eight-hour workday’) and Plank 4 (‘sanitary inspection of workshop, mine, and home’) were hotly discussed. In the end Plank 10 was amended to a land monopoly plank on the proposal of August McCraith, a printer, and this amendment made it clear that the convention had rejected the collectivism of the programme.
The Functions of Geography in American Studies
Authors: Minshull Roger
Published: January 2009

The most easily understandable reason for the absence of a strong geographical element in American Studies in Britain is the difficulty geographers specializing in America experience in carrying out research. While more and more of the primary source material used by geographers is in the form of quantitative data published by government and commercial agencies, the real primary source is the earth's surface, and thorough fieldwork is still a basic necessity. Clearly, if the material or evidence (whether in the form of soils, crops, retail stores, traffic networks, minority population groups or polluted rivers) is in Vermont or Nebraska, it is infinitely easier for the geographer to work there and teach there, than to teach in Britain and commute to his fieldwork in Winooski or Red Cloud.
Industry and Idleness in Colonial Virginia: A New Approach to William Byrd II
Authors: Manning Susan
Published: January 2009

The inception of American regionalism is routinely identified by scholars in either Robert Beverley or William Byrd II, both native Virginians who wrote intensely local works (The History and Present State of Virginia, 1705 ; The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, Run in the Year of Our Lord 1728) which are amongst the enduring literary products of colonial America. The regional base of both works is immediately apparent in their subjects and setting; but to stop here is to leave critical questions unanswered, questions which have in recent years begun to be addressed by ethnographers and historians such as David Bertelson, Michael Zuckerman and Kenneth Lockridge. In particular, Lockridge's study, meshing biography, history and social psychology, has proposed an illuminating “reconstruction of Byrd's personality” from his writings, an account which stresses Byrd's cultural predicament as a provincial Virginian who strove to be an English gentleman. My purpose in this paper is not to challenge such an interpretation, nor to propose an alternative historical viewpoint, but rather to add the perspective of literary criticism to our reading of Byrd's prose itself. I shall argue that the “ southernness” of Byrd's writing is a characteristic less of his subject matter — his Virginian material — or of his biographical limitations, than of his style, and that the History of the Dividing Line charts enduring preoccupations of Byrd's writing career which reached perfectly self-conscious apotheosis in this, his most carefully composed and corrected work.
Writing Up the New Negro: The Construction of Consumer Desire in the Twenties
Authors: Rhodes Chip
Published: January 2009

On the eve of the publication of his first novel,The Fire in the Flint, Walter White received a letter from T. S. Stribling, whose novel Birthright had inspired White to writeFirein the first place. Both novels tell the story of a Northern-educated black's return to his Southern hometown with the intention of uplifting the black community and improving race relations. In his letter, however, Stribling makes it clear that the similarities between the two novels end there.

Fire's main character, says Stribling, is so “poky in love making… I rather suspect a big healthy passion wouldn't have hurt.” He proceeds to criticizeFire's ending in which the main character is lynched following much violence against his family: “The repeated murder and the repeated burning is what I object to. That may be quite natural, and I admit that lynchings are monotonous, but art is the escape of life from monotony. ” At this point, it appears that Stribling is offering the standard critique of much politically-charged literature. He seems to be accusing White of being factually accurate, but aesthetically uninteresting. However, in a follow-up letter responding to White's defense of the novel's ending, Stribling criticizes White for being inaccurate:

Here you are, a young Negro writer with a very fine promise. I insist that you write in the big style, in the unhurried style that shows human beings as they are… Now White, detach yourself, my boy. Cut away, be a camera, not a gatling gun.
An Oasis: The New York Intellectuals in the Late 1940s
Authors: Wilford Hugh
Published: January 2009

The early political activities of the New York Intellectuals, during the 1930s and World War II, form part of the canon of twentieth century American intellectual history. Their involvement in the American Communist movement, their crucial decision to renounce Stalinism, their brief adherence to Trotskyism, and their eventual disillusionment with Communism, are all well documented. Similarly, a great deal is known about them in the 1950s, especially about the role they played in the “Cultural Cold War” as America's leading anti-Communist intellectuals, helping to launch and run such organizations as the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), and CCF's American affiliate, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF). Comparatively little, however, has been written about them in the period immediately after World War II, the second half of the 1940s. Accounts of their political evolution usually break off some time about 1945 and resume in 1949, only months before the founding of the CCF. The aim of the present study is to fill this gap in our knowledge, first by examining in some detail the history of Europe-America Groups (EAG), a political organization created by a group of New York Intellectuals during the late 1940s, second by analyzing Mary McCarthy's 1949 novelThe Oasis, which contains a fictional portrayal of EAG and constitutes a revealing fictional record of the Intellectuals’ political position at this date, and third by tracing the organizational origins of the ACCF and CCF.
In Search of Al Schmid: War Hero, Blinded Veteran, Everyman
Authors: Gerber David A.
Published: January 2009

During an intense firefight at the Tenaru River on Guadalcanal in August of 1942, Marine Private Al Schmid, a Philadelphia metal worker, shared a machine gun emplacement with two other young Marines: Johnny Rivers, a Native-American from rural Pennsylvania, and Lee Diamond, a Jew from Brooklyn. During many hours of night combat, as wave after wave of Japanese tried unsuccessfully to cross the Tenaru and overwhelm the thin line of American defenders, first Rivers was shot and instantly killed, and then Diamond was severely wounded. Furious over the death of his friend and fighting for his life, Schmid continued to try to ward off the enemy. Toward the end of the battle, which was to prove decisive for securing Guadalcanal, he was wounded by a grenade fragment. One of his eyes was immediately destroyed and the other was greatly damaged. Now sightless, Schmid continued, with what little aid the barely conscious Diamond could provide, to fire the machine gun. Eventually he was credited with killing two hundred Japanese before his position was relieved in the morning. Schmid spent much of the next two years in military hospitals, where unsuccessful efforts were made to save what little sight remained to him, and where he began the process of blind rehabilitation.
“A Very Pleasant Patriarchal Life”: Professional Authors and Amateur Architects in the Hudson Valley, 1835–1870
Authors: Sweeting Adam W.
Published: January 2009

In an 1856 issue ofHarper's New Monthly Magazinethe literary critic and biographer T. A. Richards conducted his readers through a house tour of famous literary residences in the Hudson River Valley. His itinerary and choice of authors were typical of the time. By using the picturesque vocabulary common to antebellum travel literature, Richards offered a vicarious glimpse into the domestic arrangements of successful writers and artists. He painted an edenic picture of gentility in the midst of the Hudson Valley's natural splendor. We read, for example, of the “broad lawns and slopes of Placentia,” the Hyde Park estate of the novelist James Kirke Paulding; and the “mysterious evening shadow” of Susan Warner's home on Constitution Island, just off West Point. “Dearest to us of all,” Richards added, was Sunnyside, Washington Irving's renovated Dutch farmhouse at Tarrytown. These elegant and vaguely romantic properties seemed utterly appropriate for the literary elite of the region. Like Hawthorne's Old Manse, they were architectural spaces indelibly suited to their masters' talents and temperaments.