bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
History, Politics, and Health in Early American Thought: The Case of David Ramsay
Authors: Friedman Lawrence J. , Shaffer Arthur H. 
Published: January 2009

In 1785 physician-politician David Ramsay of Charleston publishedThe History of the Revolution of South Carolina. Contemporaries praised it highly. Four years later Ramsay produced a more ambitious work,The History of the American Revolution. It established his reputation both in America and abroad as the new nation's leading historian. Thus in a few short years Ramsay went from a locally prominent physician and State legislator to an important national cultural and literary figure. The American reading public found his approach to history to its tastes. He expressed a set of ideas about American history in general and the Revolution in particular that were common currency in the United States. But he expressed them for the first time in well-reasoned and documented historical narrative: in volumes that were suitably pro-American, yet judicious in their treatment of Britain, that made a strong case for American uniqueness while maintaining the ideal of the United States as a model for the world.Ramsay's histories alone would attract our interest as the first and most influential historical analysis of the American Revolution and the ratification of the Federal Constitution. But Ramsay's writings and his career as physician and politician are also significant because they launch us upon a journey into the mind of one of the new nation's most articulate spokesmen on historical, political, and medical issues. There is, to be sure, little in the general pattern of his life to distinguish him from a number of his contemporaries among the professions and political figures of second rank. Ramsay seldom formulated original ideas. His importance was not simply, or even primarily, that of a political or historical philosopher or medical innovator.
Moulding the Industrial Zone Aesthetic: 1880–1929
Authors: Stilgoe John R. 
Published: January 2009

Zenith comprises three cities. At the outskirts is Floral Heights, a streetcar suburb of Dutch colonial houses three miles from downtown. Central Zenith, a commercial-retail focus of fireproof ten- to thirty-five-story office towers of Indiana limestone or yellow brick and stores selling everything from dictaphones to scarves, hums with speculative prosperity. On suburb and downtown Sinclair Lewis focuses almost all of the action of his 1922 novel Babbitt. But between Floral Heights and Babbitt's high-rise real estate office is a third city, an industrial zone Lewis calls South Zenith, although it encircles the city center. South Zenith is “a high-colored, banging, exciting region: new factories of hollow tile with gigantic wire-glass windows, surly old red-brick factories stained with tar, high-perched water tanks, big red trucks like locomotives, and, on a score of hectic side-tracks, far-wandering freight-cars from the New York Central and apple orchards, the Great Northern and wheat-plateaus, the Southern Pacific and orange groves.” It is a place of foundries, automobile factories, shops where five thousand men work under one roof, a place threaded with high-speed railroads.However much reviewers argued about the character of Babbitt and his lifestyle, philosophy, and usefulness as a “type,” few questioned the setting of the novel. Indeed, newspapers in five cities, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Duluth, and Minneapolis, each proclaimed that its municipality was the prototype of Zenith, and Minneapolis actually celebrated a “Babbitt Week.”
The Galaxy and American Democratic Culture, 1866–1878
Authors: Scholnick Robert J. 
Published: January 2009

During the post-Civil War decades, the major Eastern literary magazines – the Atlantic, Scribner's, Harper's – came to serve, in Malcolm Cowley's phrase, as the “principal voices of the genteel era.” The business of the magazines – with Boston's Atlantic at the head – was delivering “culture” to the middle class. As Walt Whitman wrote in his essay “Personalism,” published in The Galaxy in May 1868, “The writers of a time hint the mottoes of its gods. The word of the modern, say these voices, is the word Culture.” But in pointing out that the culture everywhere advocated by American writers was based largely on European models, Whitman exposes a pathetic irony: “Never, in the Old World, was thoroughly upholster'd exterior appearance and show, mental and other, built entirely on the idea of caste, and on the sufficiency of mere outside acquisition – never were glibness, verbal intellect, more the test, the emulation – more loftily elevated as head and sample – than they are on the surface of our republican States this day.” In their slavish worship of European models and consequent devaluation of the native, American writers had become the high priests of a thin and bloodless “culture” that was distributed abroad through the magazines.Whitman shrewdly recognized, as Alan Trachtenberg has written, that genteel culture had become an instrument of “social control.”
Crèvecoeur Revisited
Authors: Cunliffe Marcus 
Published: January 2009

Almost every twentieth-century discussion of American history, literature, culture or character makes reference to J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur'sLetters from an American Farmer, a book first published in 1782. Anthologies usually find space for an excerpt from Crèvecoeur. A particular favourite is the third chapter, ‘ What Is An American? ’ Here is the best-known, the most-quoted, the almost tediously familiar paragraph from that chapter:What, then, is the American, this new man? He is neither an European nor the descendant of an European …Heis an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the East; they will finish the great circle … The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. This is an American.
Climate, Health and Black Labor in the English Americas
Authors: Puckrein Gary 
Published: January 2009

“ Son George,” Sir Henry Colt wrote his progeny in the summer of 1631, “ I have taken pains day and night to collect this journal … because if you will prove a seaman and undertake voyages [to the New World] you may learn how to employ your time at sea, and who to thank for your conservation.” Appended to the diary were “ some rules for diet and health … the way being dangerous because of the change in climates, especially about the tropics.” Among other things, Sir Henry cautioned the younger Colt that he would find the “ torrid zone or middle region temperate enough,” but the most dangerous place would be the “ tropics under which you must pass for pestilent fevers … which have killed many in the hot season of year.” To reduce the possibility of sickness which was likely to occur as a result of travel into warm climates, Colt prescribed some precautionary measures.Sir Henry Colt lived in an age when such modern terms and concepts as anopheles mosquito, malaria, yellow fever, and immunization zones had little or no meaning. In his day, physicians had not established a connection between anopheles mosquito and malaria, or aedes mosquito and yellow fever. When counseling his son on how to remain healthy in the Americas, Colt had no reason to warn him that anopheles and aedes mosquitoes often served as hosts for parasites which were deadly to human beings, and hence the bites of these insects could be dangerous.Colt and his contemporaries did, however, hold coherent medical views about disease and its origins which informed their behavior in the New World.
Slave Trading in the Ante-Bellum South: An Estimate of the Extent of the Inter-Regional Slave Trade
Authors: Tadman Michael 
Published: January 2009

The domestic slave trade has always bulked large in discussions of the character of American ante-bellum slavery. Assumptions and arguments about the nature of master-slave relations, about family separations, and about the slave family have necessarily had much to do with slave sales and with the extent and character of the domestic traffic in slaves. All this has, however, been despite the fact that no satisfactory quantitative estimate of the trade has been available. Indeed, the standard work on the American domestic slave trade, Frederic Bancroft's Slave Trading in the Old South (1931), has recently been challenged in the studies of Calderhead (1972) and of Fogel and Engerman (1974), and those studies have in turn been questioned by, for example, Gutman and Sutch in Reckoning with Slavery (1976).The present study will seek to offer a more satisfactory estimate of the trade than has so far been available, and will argue that the trade accounted for the substantial majority (somewhere between 56 and 69 per cent) of the more than one million net inter-regional slave movements which took place in the South over the period 1820 to 1860.
Theories of American Labour Violence
Authors: Jeffreys-Jones Rhodri 
Published: January 2009

Labour violence is an indication of the nature of any society at a given time, and has been a catalyst of tensions and harbinger of change on many occasions in America since 1865. Furthermore, it has had in that country a braking effect on social reform. These aspects of labour violence have received their fair share of recognition and attention. Their investigation has uncovered a mass of useful evidence. For this reason, it is today possible to view labour violence with better understanding, and to approach directly the problem of its causes.Although historians have tried to explain labour violence, they have mostly done so obliquely or on the basis of unquestioned assumptions. Recently, for example, Herbert G. Gutman referred to labour violence repeatedly in his collection of essays Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, but focussed on “ patterns ” of disorder rather than on its causes, and belittled even these patterns by stating that they “ deserve brief attention.” Philip Taft, a long-surviving member of the John R. Commons school of labour history, tackled the problem of labour violence in American history because of renewed public interest in the subject occasioned by the race riots of the 1960s, but simply assumed throughout his work that wage-earners resorted to violence in response to oppressive conditions. The same undifferentiated assumption appeared in earlier work on labour violence, most notably in 1931 in Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America by the Jugoslav socialist immigrant, Louis Adamic. Adamic wrote absurdly that the racketeering of the Al Capone era was a “ phase of class conflict.”
A note on The Blithedale Romance, or ‘ Call him Fauntleroy ’
Authors: Swann Charles 
Published: January 2009

‘ FIVE-AND-TWENTY years ago, at the epoch of this story, there dwelt, in one of the middle states, a man whom we shall call Fauntleroy; a man of wealth, and magnificent tastes, and prodigal expenditure.’ This is the opening of chapter XXII of The Blithedale Romance which gives us old Moodie's story. We are told how ‘ Fauntleroy ’ led a life of conspicuous expenditure, and finding himself growing poor, ‘ he recoiled from this calamity ’:To avoid it – wretched man! – or, rather, to defer it, if but for a month, a day, or only to procure himself the life of a few breaths more, amid the false glitter which was now less his own than ever – he made himself guilty of a crime. It was just the sort of crime, growing out of its artificial state, which society (unless it should change its entire constitution for this man's unworthy sake) neither could nor ought to pardon. More safely might it pardon murder.
Hawthorne: History versus Romance
Authors: Swann Charles 
Published: January 2009

‘What is American about American Literature?’ is a question that is repeatedly answered too easily. A frequently offered solution is the claim that the dominant form of the nineteenth-century American novel is the Romance. Joel Porte, for example, confidently entitles his book on Cooper, Poe, Hawdiorne, Melville, and James The Romance in America. Porte begins his study with a sweeping assertion that the battle is over, the problem solved:Thanks to a series of major critical studies that have appeared in the past decade and a half, it no longer seems necessary to argue for the importance of romance as a nineteenth century American genre. Students of American literature – notably Richard Chase – have provided a solid theoretical basis for establishing that the rise and growth of fiction in this country is dominated by our authors' conscious adherence to a tradition of non-realistic romance sharply at variance with the broadly novelistic mainstream of English writing. When there has been disagreement among recent critics as to the contours of American fiction, it has usually disputed, not the existence per se of a romance tradition, but rather the question of which authors, themes, and stylistic strategies deserve to be placed with certainty at the heart of that tradition.
The Dangers of Femininity in Willa Cather's Fiction
Authors: Bailey Jennifer 
Published: January 2009

When she was twenty-one, Willa Cather wrote, “The mind that can follow a ‘mission’ is not an artistic one. An artist can know no other purpose than his art.… The feminine mind has a hankering for hobbies and missions.” From the outset of her writing career as a journalist, Cather was intensely conscious of what to her seemed a difficult anomaly: being a serious writer and being a woman. She believed that women were conditioned to think and write in a literal and “horribly subjective” fashion, so that their literary productions were “an infernal mess.” When she embarked on a full-time writing career at the age of thirty-nine, she insisted that to avoid a feminine mind, one must avoid a feminine way of life:One must have the power of refuse most of the rest of life … to be free, to work at [my] table — that is all in all. …. There are fates and fates but one cannot live them all. Some would call mine servitude but I call it liberation. Miss Jewett too, turned away from marriage.Cather's single-minded determination to succeed and her uncompromising way of life that would ensure success as a writer rather than a woman writer prompted her to reject her background in her first pieces of fiction. She lived in rural southern Nebraska for seven years, from the ages of ten to seventeen, and in some early short stories she portrayed small-town life on the Plains as narrow, spiritually crushing and dominated by terrible physical hardship.Jennifer Bailey is Lecturer in American Literature in the Department of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD.
Politics and the Social Order in the Work of John O'Hara
Authors: Sigelman Lee 
Published: January 2009

Classic works of fiction almost always raise “penetrating questions about the foundations and effects of the political regime, i.e. human nature and its implications for society.” But popular fiction, too, can be an instrument of social and political understanding. As Gore Vidal has argued:Writers of fiction, even more than systematic philosophers, tend to reveal unconscious presuppositions. One might even say that those writers who are the most popular are the ones who share the largest number of common assumptions with their audience, subliminally reflecting prejudices and aspirations so obvious that they are never stated and, never stated, never precisely understood or even recognized. John O'Hara is an excellent example of this kind of writer.
The Plot of Hawthorne'sThe Marble Faun
Authors: Goldman Arnold 
Published: January 2009

The Marble Faun'splot is alleged to be “Gothic” and impenetrable, its topography and history “guide-book,” its author external to his subject, too foreign (that is, American), too old (fifty-five), tired and ill to have had anything but a tourist's or artists' colony view of the Roman and Tuscan setting. Anyway, this charge runs, Hawthorne wrote Romances, fictions distanced from actuality and history, not outward-referring novels anchored in a context of exterior realities.In fact Hawthorne sets the action of his Roman novel in a complex field of Italian history, past and present. There is not only an evocation of the pre-classical and imperial history of Rome and its Christian, Medieval and Renaissance periods; the status of the Papally-dominated, Frenchgarrisoned city is carefully delineated. Hawthorne mobilises not only the panoramic history which has been sensed but insufficiently discriminated but also the contemporaneous politics of the Roman, and Tuscan, states. Nor is the novel set in no particular time, but in fact on a very precise time-scale, and it may even be datable, from Monday, 5 April 1858, to Thursday, 3 March 1859 (see the Appendix at the end of this essay, pp. 403–4).The Marble Faun'scontemporaneity remains unacknowledged.
Willy Loman and The Soul of a New Machine: Technology and the Common Man
Authors: Brucher Richard T. 
Published: January 2009

As Death of a Salesman opens, Willy Loman returns home “tired to the death” (p. 13). Lost in reveries about the beautiful countryside and the past, he's been driving off the road; and now he wants a cheese sandwich. But Linda's suggestion that he try a new American-type cheese — “It's whipped” (p. 16) — irritates Willy: “Why do you get American when I like Swiss?” (p. 17). His anger at being contradicted unleashes an indictment of modern industrialized America:The street is lined with cars. There's not a breath of fresh air in the neighborhood. The grass don't grow any more, you can't raise a carrot in the back yard. (p. 17).In the old days, “This time of year it was lilac and wisteria.” Now: “Smell the stink from that apartment house! And another one on the other side…” (pp. 17–18). But just as Willy defines the conflict between nature and industry, he pauses and simply wonders: “How can they whip cheese?” (p. 18).The clash between the old agrarian ideal and capitalistic enterprise is well documented in the literature on Death of a Salesman, as is the spiritual shift from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Carnegie to Dale Carnegie that the play reflects. The son of a pioneer inventor and the slave to broken machines, Willy Loman seems to epitomize the victim of modern technology.
A New England Gentleman: Theodore Lyman III, 1833–1897
Authors: Taylor P. A. M. 
Published: January 2009

Few small bodies of men have been more carefully studied, in recent years, than Boston's upper class. Winning their first fortunes in overseas trade, then transferring their capital to textiles and railroads, that class laid the foundations of America's Industrial Revolution as well as extending its own wealth and power. From such an economic base, so modern scholars assure us, they consolidated their class through marriage, through placing their sons in family firms or in the learned professions, and through guaranteeing the continuity of their fortunes, against incompetence or the claims of creditors and daughters' husbands, by the device of the family trust. They reached out to control or create institutions, whether Harvard, the Boston Athenaeum, or Massachusetts General Hospital. They played an important part in city government. In addition, it is alleged, they sought to control the masses through charities and the public school system. If all this characterized the first half of the nineteenth century, modern scholars assure us that in the second half atrophy set in as the city's growth slowed, as investments became more conservative, as political power was lost, as defensiveness and imitation replaced creativity. It must be added that some observers in those days, inside and outside the class, took the same view.Many of the facts are beyond dispute. Hugh M. Blaisdell, the self-made businessman in Robert Grant's novel The Chippendales, was correct in saying that Boston “hasn't a first-class fortune,” though many in the second class.
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.