One of the darkest aspects of U.S. history and culture is encapsulated in crime perpetrated by law enforcement officials. In fact, police abuse of power has long been a footnote in analyses of governments' monopoly on legitimated violence. The history of modern policing itself indicates long-standing concern with excessive, sometimes brutal, control over citizens by law enforcement agents. Such concerns have been articulated variously over time by the public, academics, the press, and within law enforcement ranks. Much of this concern turns on perception, for police malfeasance is notoriously shrouded behind a “blue wall,” well-meaning law enforcement officials are genuinely interested in public perceptions of their services, and news of police malpractice flares selectively and variously across time.

In February 1941, thirty male San Quentin prisoners petitioned Governor Culbert Levy Olson of California (the state's first Democrat governor in the twentieth century) to stop the execution of Eithel Leta Juanita Spinelli, “a merciless gang leader called the Duchess,” who had been convicted, along with her common-law husband and another male accomplice, of the murder of nineteen-year-old Robert Sherrard. All three defendants were sentenced to die in the gas chamber. Former San Quentin warden, Clinton T. Duffy, remembered Spinelli as “the coldest, hardest character, male or female” that he had “ever known,” and utterly lacking in “feminine appeal.” Thus the presentation of a jailhouse petition to save her from the gas chamber rather perplexed him, and he remained firm in his belief that the majority of San Quentin's inmates were unconcerned by the impending execution. Nonetheless, the petitioners argued that Spinelli should not be executed and offered to take her place either in the death chamber, or to serve out her life term in the event of a commutation of sentence. According to Duffy, the prisoners asserted “that Mrs. Spinelli's execution would be repulsive to the people of California; that no woman in her right mind could commit the crime charged to her; that the execution of a woman would hurt California in the eyes of the world; that both the law and the will of the people were against the execution; that Mrs. Spinelli, as the mother of three children, should have special consideration; that California's proud record of never having executed a woman should not be spoiled”.

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” Toni Morrison, Beloved.

Freud's psychoanalytic theories of fear of castration and penis-envy transformed woman into not-man, thus defining her as “other” and “lacking.” His studies also gave a sexual component to relationships among women, marking them as potentially lesbian and hence deviant. Medical men of Victorian England and America consciously or unconsciously helped to justify gender roles and women's seclusion in the domestic on the grounds that their specific physiology made them slaves of their reproductive system. As women's ovaries presumably controlled their lives and their behavior, genitals determined social roles, and doctors urged mothers to remind their daughters that any deviation from their “natural” and legitimate functions as wives and mothers could ruin their health forever. The cult of True Womanhood conveniently idealized maternity and defined the virtues of obedience, piety, and passivity as essentially feminine, while it condemned the desire for an education or the practice of birth control as unnatural and dangerous to women and to the whole of society. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, hysteria became the most fashionable of the so-called “female maladies” among middle- and upper-class women, a fact that illustrates how physicians failed to dissociate scientific evidence from social views of the period. Victorian psychologists and gynecologists mimicked contemporary male attitudes, which sanctioned the doctrine of separate spheres, while affectionate bonds between women were regarded with suspicion, as they could lead to homosexuality.

If one forgets the past, he will not be prepared for the future.

The Militia of Montana

YES! TODAY JUST AS YESTERDAY.

The Michigan Militia

When the militia movement emerged in the United States during the mid 1990s its members were widely seen as simply the latest practitioners of what Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics.” There was much comfort to be had in this characterization. It fitted the militia movement into a long-standing model for understanding right-wing extremism in American life, one in which the principal characteristics of such extremism were readily understood: conspiratorial, Manichean, absolutist – if not apocalyptic – and, of course, paranoid. The problem with this approach, though, is that it tends to discourage any examination of mainstream culture's role in the creation or sustaining of those defined as extremists. It downplays the extent to which the pool of ideological resources employed by the extreme right exists not just on the margins of American life, but also in the very fabric of the American ideology. Little attempt is made to explore the extent to which the ideas and beliefs of these “extremists” are related to, and are drawn from, key periods in US history: from the American Revolution, the period of the constitutional settlement or the settling of the American West, for example. Yet such ideas and beliefs are absolutely central to how groups like the militias see themselves and the world around them.

Online diaries are at once thoroughly familiar and intensely new. Their publication on the Internet may be seen as upholding a long tradition in self-representational writing even as information technology modifies the forms and functions of such texts. Studying online diaries from a literary standpoint may therefore shed light on the development of new forms of writing, and contribute to assessing the extent of this transformation and its meaning. At the same time, viewing online diaries as primary sources may afford insight into the mores of ordinary people in contemporary America. Focusing on anonymous American diarists makes it possible to explore how this contemporary social practice reflects the transformations of the heartland in present-day America, how ordinary women and men, average Americans, make sense of their society and can be seen as representative of American culture, while at the same time engaging in the most personal kind of writing.

Excavation at Night (1908), George Bellows' second painting of the construction work undertaken for Pennsylvania Street Station, offers a dramatic depiction of the site that took up two full New York city-blocks. Bellows' decision to paint a nocturnal scene is vital to both the dramatic effect of the painting and its capacity to make an assertion about the ways in which the excavation could be perceived. In Electrifying America, David Nye suggests that the coming of electricity created the possibility of a new form of visual rhetoric. By making it possible to illuminate specific areas of the nocturnal city, electric light facilitated the privileging and deprivileging of certain spaces. By illuminating, and thus privileging, particular areas of the canvas, Bellows implements a similar rhetoric in Excavation at Night. Thus, illuminated by powerful electric lights, the snow covered far wall of the excavation and the row of buildings above it are placed in contrast, and possibly in opposition, with the man silhouetted by the light of the bonfire near the bottom edge of the canvas. The dramatic force of Bellows' “bravura” style raises the stakes in this contrast or opposition between the small-scale human activity around the fire and the large urban story of the excavation. In this article I intend to theorise Bellows' handling of smallness as an “anecdotal mode,” to suggest that “anecdote” may function both negatively and positively, and to show that this mode becomes particularly problematic when it is applied to city scenes.

H. W. Brands, The Strange Death of American Liberalism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, paperback edition, 2003, £9.95). Pp. 200. ISBN 0 300 098 24 3.

Michael J. Gerhardt, The Federal Appointments Process: A Constitutional and Historical Analysis (Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, revised and expanded paperback edition, 2003, £18.50). Pp. 406. ISBN 0 8223 3199 3.

William G. Howell, Power without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action (Princeton NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003, cloth £29.95, paper £12.95). Pp. 239. ISBN 0 691 10269, 0 691 10270 8.

Drew Noble Lanier, Of Time and Judicial Behavior: United States Supreme Court Agenda – Setting and Decision-Making, 1888–1997 (Selinsgrove PA: Susquehanna University Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2003, $42.50). Pp. 276. ISBN 1 57591 067 5.

Byron E. Shafer, The Two Majorities and the Puzzle of Modern American Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003, cloth $35, paper $19.95). Pp. 356. ISBN 0 7006 1235 1, 0 7006 1236 X.

One does not have to be an especially sophisticated philosopher of explanatory method to appreciate that, in explaining change in human affairs, much depends on the situation of and level of analysis adopted by the would-be explainer. Do the dots connect or are they mostly what they appear to be – just dots? Reality, according to Bertrand Russell's famous aphorism, is either a bowl of connected jelly or a bucket of disconnected shot. It all depends on the observer, who, of course, is also part of the reality being considered.