While American Studies continues to be a popular subject in universities and colleges on both sides of the Atlantic, several influential critics have recently expressed some sense that its methodological direction appears increasingly uncertain. To be sure, there never was a time when this field's methodology has not been problematic: arguments about what American Studies should include, and indeed whether its eclectic narratives could reasonably be said to constitute an academic discipline at all, have circulated many times since the rapid growth of the subject in the late 1940s. This development has been well documented over the last few years. Philip Gleason has shown how the end of the Second World War led to a patriotic desire to identify certain specifically American values and characteristics; this led to various mythic idealizations of the American spirit in seminal critical works of the 1950s; and this in turn was followed by a more empiricist reaction in the 1960s and 1970s, when social scientists and historians of popular culture were concerned to demystify those earlier, holistic images of a “virgin land” and an “American Adam.” These are old controversies, and I do not intend to rehearse them in detail here. From the perspective of the early 1990s, what is more urgent is to consider how, or indeed if, the field of American Studies might continue to make an important contribution to our understanding of the United States, as well as a significant intervention within the world of learning more generally.

Only in recent years, largely as a consequence of developments in women's history, have scholars begun to explore the role of women in the building of the welfare state. By placing gender at the centre of their vision, these historians have questioned established certainties and undercut old paradigms. Analysis of the role of women in welfare has, moreover, influenced the wider history of women, bringing to light new facets of a major organizing concept for historians of women: the interaction between public and private spheres. This paper, therefore, has two linked purposes: to review recent scholarship on women's role in welfare and, through an analysis of the juvenile court movement, one of the major social welfare reforms of the Progressive Era, to identify issues of controversy and debate among historians of women and welfare.

A Modernist at heart, writing in the wake of the polyglot tradition firmly established in the first half of the twentieth century by Joyce's operatic Babels and Pound's symphonic Cantos, Robert Lowell was a poet who spoke in many voices, a master of linguistic personae. Switching with baffling ease from the “otherworldly” Puritanic gloom shrouding his recreation of his New England ancestors, to the very worldly evocation of his own personal life, he was a writer with a keen ear for layering various types of discourse within the span of one poem. What is more, as was the case with Joyce or Pound, his mastery of tone and voice enabled him to let his readers overhear what I am tempted to call a “cultural polyphony” sounding in each of his texts, in the fleeting utterance of one single word — or better still, as I hope to demonstrate, in the discreet note of one syllable, one letter.

The formation of the New Deal coalition has been the subject of much scholarly discussion, as have the theories of voting behaviour which have informed that discussion. This essay seeks to investigate both the history and the theory. First, it analyses the timing and mechanics of the participation of Philadelphia's Italian-Americans in the Roosevelt coalition. Italian-Americans were a key component of the Democratic majority nationwide, and as pre-New Deal Republican bailiwicks that began to turn Democratic in the 1930s, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia are ideal settings to study the forging of the Roosevelt coalition not only on the federal but also on the state and local level. Secondly, the essay tests some hypotheses about the New Deal realignment. It suggests that none of the standard hypotheses convincingly explains what was happening in Philadelphia's Italian-American community in the 1930s and 1940s.

The publication of Toni Morrison's new novel Jazz with its insistent jazzy themes and rhythms will have concentrated the minds of critics on the relationship of her work to America's most important indigenous artistic form, jazz music. However, in their headlong rush to foreground the impact of jazz on Toni Morrison's latest novel critics should be wary of isolating this novel as her only jazz-influenced work. All of her novels have been informed by the rhythms and cadences of a black musical tradition and in this article I want to stress the centrality of jazz music stylistically to her whole corpus of work. Morrison herself has acknowledged the centrality of a musical aesthetic to her work in interview after interview long before the publication of Jazz:

…a novel written a certain way can do precisely what spirituals used to do. It can do exactly what blues or jazz or gossip or stories or myths or folklore did – that stuff which was a common wellspring of ideas…

Morrison is writing out of an oral tradition which foregrounds musical performances as well as other oral forms. Some critics have acknowledged the importance of jazz to her work, notably Anthony J. Berret in his article “Toni Morrison's Literary Jazz”. But, despite some provocative and illuminating comments, his is not a systematic account of the use of a jazz mode in Morrison's fiction and I wish in this paper to attempt a more rigorous analysis of her early novels, outlining her willed use of a jazz aesthetic as a pivotal structural device.