He is tempted to cease battling; his blood begins to chill; he hears the frost-king's lullaby. But as he is about to yield to sleep, he is startled back into militance by the cry of a titmouse, a small “scrap of valor” that “just for play/Fronts the north-wind.” The courage of the bird returns to him his own and he adopts its Emersonian doctrine that “the soul, if stout within/Can arm impregnably the skin.”

The freshness that Emerson's contemporaries found in his writings derived largely from this brisk militant quality. In an age that Emerson thought lacking in a “literature of Heroism,” his own writings were a constant call to bravery (CWE, 2, 247–48). And his most consistent image for that bravery was the soldier. Men, he said, “should calmly front the morrow” as if it were a battle-formation; they should not be “cowards fleeing before a revolution,” but instead should be “advancing on Chaos and the dark” (CWE, 2, 47, 297). One's life should be “a battle, a conquest”; one should state his convictions as boldly as if he wereopening hostilities: “Every principle is a war-note” (CWE, 9, 353). Even those in sedentary occupations should display the bravery of warriors.

Woodrow Wilson was the first American President to leave the Western Hemisphere during his period of office, and, as befitted him, the circumstances in which he did so were neither casual nor frivolous. He went to Europe in late 1918 to take part in the peace conference following a war that the United States had played a crucial part in bringing to a decisive end. His aim was to secure a peace that accorded with the proposals he had set out in his Fourteen Points address of January 1918 and in other speeches — a peace that would be based upon justice and thus secure consent, that would embody liberal principles(the self-determination of peoples as far as practicable, the prohibition of discriminatory trade barriers), and that would be maintained by a new international organization in which the United States, breaking its tradition of isolation, would take part — a league of nations that would provide a general guarantee of “political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

The symbolism of this dramatic moment, with the American prophet coming to bring redemption to the Old World, imprinted on the minds of contemporaries an image of Wilson which has affected most subsequent historiography. Viewing events from Vienna, that special victim of the First World War, Sigmund Freud found “the figure of the American President, as it rose above the horizon of Europeans, from the first unsympathetic, and… this aversion increased in the course of years the more I learned about him and the more severely we suffered from the consequences of his intrusion into our destiny.”

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.”

Rome after the Second World War presented something of an anomaly. Of all the traditional capitals of European civilization it was the least affected by the conflict. Because of the Pope's presence, it had not been bombed, and it had escaped the heavy fighting in the campaigns to the south. Indeed, so easily was it taken that one film was to show the Eternal City captured by a single jeep. Italy was also faster to recover than any of the other combatants. American money flooded into the country, and political life was quickly under way again. All this made it a good place for visitors, a relative bright spot amidst a shattered landscape. Harold Acton, the English historian who went there in 1948, remarked that “After the First World War American writers and artists had migrated to Paris: now they pitched upon Rome.” Among those who visited Rome or lived there for a period after the war were Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Frederic Prokosch, Daniel Cory, Alfred Kazin, Samuel Barber, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick (slightly later), as well as Acton himself and a host of less well-known figures. Many were entertained by Lawrence and Babel Roberts, under whose influence “the Roman Academy became an international rendezvous for artists and intellectuals.” While they were there, a large proportion of these writers made a pilgrimage to the Convent of the Blue Sisters, where since 1941 George Santayana had been living in a single room.

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.

In the spring of 1827 the splendidly appointed steamship Albany slid for the first time into the waters of the Hudson River to begin what proved to be an eighteen-year career of commercial travel on that busy waterway. Two years earlier the opening of New York's Erie Canal linking Albany to its western sister city, Buffalo, had enhanced the already flourishing steamboat commerce on the Hudson, for that mighty river then became the principal access to the great westward water route that terminated with the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

With the gradual disintegration of the Democratic Party's New Deal coalition there has been regular speculation on the nature of party dealignment and realignment in the USA. Realignment affects the various levels of government and regions of the country differentially as the political landscape responds to underlying demographic and economic patterns. Groups of voters may reassess their traditional loyalties as they find their own, or their party's, policy priorities changing. Recent gubernatorial elections in Massachusetts serve to illustrate some of the internal pressures on the Democratic Party as the country enters the post-industrial era. In spite of the Democratic Party's dominance of the state's politics these elections have served as a battleground between groups of voters whose interests and concerns coalesce in a way that no longer can be explained solely in terms of traditional class position or economic interest, but also represent a clash between competing lifestyles.

An emergent post-industrial social setting, such as can be observed in Massachusetts, may be identified as possessing a number of interrelated components.

“But he has no sense of history!” is a cry that is all too familiar in many Jamesian commentaries. The following essay attempts to provide a corrective to this complaint by reading Washington Square as a critique of a particular moment in the development of the bourgeois temperament. It is not insignificant that this is the only novel for which James chose a specific locale as a title, because historical time and geographical place are the issues which overtly confront the reader, to an extent (excepting The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima) insisted upon as nowhere else in James's works. The time is, predominantly, the difficult period of the late 1830s and early 1840s, and the place is that area of lower Manhattan which awkwardly bastions itself against contemporary turbulence.

Dr. Sloper's deliberate choices of resistence are carefully located within a changing landscape, choices which match the period of Manhattan's most rapid expansion whereby the Island below Canal Street was condensed by overwhelming commercial pressure.

In recent years historians have emphasized the centrality of women to religious life, especially among the older Protestant denominations in the northeastern section of the United States. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women and girls were usually the majority of attenders at prayer meetings and Sunday services, made up the bulk of converts at revivals and provided the greatest number of candidates for church membership. They were also great fund raisers not only for their own congregations, but for a network of inter-denominational missionary agencies which sprang up during the first two decades of the nineteenth century and helped to impress a more evangelical character upon American society. As Nancy Cott has argued, ministers may have seen this work as part of woman's appropriate and subordinate “sphere,” but for the women themselves “evangelical religion nourished the formation of a female community that served…as both a resource and a resort outside the family.”

Nineteenth century novelists felt constrained to supply their readers with well-chosen epigraphs, and the personal canons from which they drew them, whilst seldom exclusively Biblical, provided a convenient index to their individual literary and philosophical predilections. Thomas Pynchon's canon is wilfully idiosyncratic and frequently apocryphal, but his epigraphs are no less apposite than George Eliot's; for in creating a fictional world out of what is largely palpable history Pynchon produces a homogenous medium which is neither fiction nor history. I have chosen the epigraph above because in addition to illustrating this admixture of fiction and history it also intimates to the reader an aspect of Pynchon's technique which may go some way towards explaining the rationale behind it. Some parts of Gravity's Rainbow, I think, might best be described as an attempt at writing a twentieth century “gospel.”

The Oxyrhynchus papyri, referred to in the epigraph actually exist. They were discovered in 1898 and 1904 in Egypt, and were fragments of purported sayings of Jesus of Nazareth dating from the second century A.D. Not until 1956, when the translation of a gnostic library discovered at Nag Hammedai in Egypt was completed, did it become clear that the Oxyrhynchus papyri were fragments of a work calling itself the Gospel of Thomas.