When President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in August 1996, it brought to an end the much vilified sixty-one-year-old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) programme. Although few mourned the passing of AFDCper se many liberals were alarmed by the nature of the changes. AFDC had effectively been a cash maintenance programme for poor single-parent families with the costs shared between federal and state governments. The PRWORA repealed AFDC and some smaller related programmes, with Washington giving its former share of funding to the states in the form of a new block grant, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). The existing entitlement nature of AFDC was ended with the states given new discretion in determining TANF eligibility. Overall considerable responsibility for the implementation of welfare policy was devolved to the states. The bill, however, did set a maximum time limit for individual receipt of federal TANF funds. After two years, welfare recipients must engage in a recognized work effort to continue to receive help, with a total five-year limit on TANF money. Opposition to these measures was overwhelmed by the demand for significant reform of the welfare system. Previously this demand had been thwarted through a combination of Washington gridlock and the limited scale of those changes which were enacted. In 1996, however, the dam holding back reform was breached at the high tide of anti-welfare sentiment. The despair this provoked among liberals should perhaps have caused them to reflect on their part in blocking previous attempts at an overhaul of AFDC. In particular, the elder statespersons of liberalism might regret their role in helping defeat President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan (FAP).

Beltings and beatings play a prominent role in Twain's boy fictions. In “The Story of the Bad Little Boy” (1865), Jim is “always spanked…to sleep” by his mother and, instead of a good-night kiss, “she boxed his ears when she was ready to leave him.” While in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884–85), when Huck stays with pap in the cabin in the woods, “by-and-by pap got too handy with his hick'ry, and I couldn't stand it. I was all over welts.” It is the prevalence of such punishments, and attempted punishments, in Tom Sawyer's young life that provides the starting-point for my present analysis of childhood discipline and its fictional representation in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). For to focus on the different types of punishment Tom undergoes, the supervisory controls which are placed over him, and the way he responds to them, is to suggest a reading of Twain's novel as illustrative both of the changing forms of domestic discipline being introduced in America in the 1830s and 40s, and the spaces in which that discipline functions. In pursuing this line of inquiry, I build on previous work on the development of modern American social regulation in the antebellum period, and particularly that by G. M. Goshgarian and Richard H. Brodhead.

Historians have on the whole ignored the ideas of the segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s. They assume, apparently, that racism – which historians have studied from every conceivable angle – is enough to explain how and why people fought to preserve a racist institution in a specific time and place. The civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s did not make that assumption: they attacked specific and concrete institutions, hoping that the “hearts and minds” of southern racists might give up their racism after the institutions were destroyed. Segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s, in turn, tried to defend those institutions, not just politically, but culturally and intellectually as well. A full understanding of the destruction of those institutions requires an understanding of the way they were defended. Racism, after all, existed long before the specific legal forms of segregation and disfranchisement were created – and shows every sign of outliving them. Historians who ignore the cultural and intellectual defenses of those specific forms miss a crucial historical question: why did segregationist arguments ultimately fail to inspire the southern white population to defend those forms of racism successfully ?

Robert Creeley's long and productive writing life has resolutely witnessed personal rather than public change. Notoriously self-absorbed, his reticent poetry is fiercely individual in style and solipsistic in outlook. Like the poet, a man of few words, wryly humorous and intelligently self-contained, Creeley's poems seem determined “to say as little as possible as often as possible.” Yet the tightly crafted economy of this poetic idiom masks a curious amplitude which is easy to overlook. The tension between the persistent “circularities” in Creeley's work, his concern with the dualistic energies of contradiction and paradox, and the brevity with which such concerns are typically addressed, is worth noting, especially in the light of Creeley's abiding friendship with fellow poet, Robert Duncan, of whom Creeley once remarked:

I've always felt very close to him as a writer, although our modes of writing must seem to readers quite apart. I tend to write very sparely, and Robert has a lovely, relaxed and generous kind of movement. But…[he] showed me kinds of content that I hadn't previously recognized.

Somewhat to the surprise of the critics and the public, the exiled company of the Royal Opera House had a great success with their production of Benjamin Britten's “operetta,” Paul Bunyan, just before Christmas, 1997. Everyone knew the difficulties in advance – for instance, the piece has absolutely no dramatic momentum – but no one seems to have foreseen that the splendid music would carry all before it in a theatre, or that a highly accomplished cast would find so many moments of real comedy and pathos in performance. Even now it is hard to imagine the piece entering the regular repertory, but it is easy to foresee frequent revivals, and still more frequent concert performances.

To an Americanist, however, the work presented as many unexpected problems as pleasures. The fault was entirely W. H. Auden's. His libretto is in many respects as brilliant and beautiful as the music (though at times it sinks to doggerel) but the theme he expounds sticks in my craw. Once upon a time the New World, he says, was nothing but virgin forest. Then Paul Bunyan, the giant, was born, and dreamed of felling trees – of being the greatest logger in history. And such he became. When the forests had all been cleared, “America” had emerged – the America of the farmer, the clerk, the hotel manager, and Hollywood. Paul Bunyan therefore moved on, leaving his followers with the message, “America is what you make it.”

The difficulty is not simply that this myth of America seems ecologically and historically unsound to anyone who knows something of the pollution and despoliation inflicted by American logging companies; nor even that the total elimination of the natives from the story (except for one reference to fighting Indians) is a grave falsification; nor even that the accumulation of these and many other simplifications produce an effect that in today's terms is politically incorrect and in 1941 seems to have been thought patronizing. It is that to anyone with actual knowledge, however slight, of American history, Auden's myth is so inaccurate as to make any suspension of disbelief largely impossible. To take but one detail: as Auden said himself, Paul Bunyan is a post-industrial-revolution myth: he is a product of the nineteenth-century frontier, in the tall-tale tradition. The loggers, like the mountain men, the boatmen, the cowboys, and the slaves, were at the mercy of large economic forces; they consoled themselves for their impotence by developing the legend of the giant lumberjack who was invincible and omnipotent. The forests were far from virgin: if they were silent it was because first the game and then the original inhabitants had been driven off by the process of European settlement. Even in 1939, when the influence of F. J. Turner was at its height, Auden could have discovered these points – probably did discover them. But he chose to ignore them.

Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, $16.95). Pp. 252. ISBN 0 8223 1864 4.

Paul R. Spickard, Japanese Americans: The Formation and Transformation of an Ethnic Group (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996, $28.95). Pp. 225. ISBN 0 8057 7841 1.

Gordon Chang, Morning Glory, Evening Shadow: Yamato Ichihashi and his Internment Writings, 1942–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, £35.00). Pp. 552. ISBN 0 8047 2733 3.

Appearances can be deceiving, sometimes they are fatal. In 1982, Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American, entered a Detroit bar with some friends. Ronald Ebens, a foreman at a Chrysler automobile plant, and his stepson Michael Nitz, a laid-off Chrysler assembly-line worker, also came into the same bar. It is uncertain what exactly prompted Ebens to derisively call Chin a “Jap” and scoff: “It's because of you motherfuckers that we're out of work!” What is indisputable, however, is the sequence of events which took place after the insult. In the wake of the abusive remark, a fist-fight erupted between Ebens and Chin. The brawlers were evicted from the bar. Ebens and Nitz went to their car and grabbed a baseball bat. Observing that Ebens was in possession of a bat, Chin and his companions fled from the bar's parking lot. Unwilling to be thwarted by this escape, Ebens and Nitz stalked Chin. After a twenty minute pursuit, Ebens and Nitz cornered Chin. Nitz held Chin while Ebens beat him on the head with the baseball bat. Four days after this attack, Chin died from his head wounds.

What makes the murder of Vincent Chin particularly hideous is the perverse element of mistaken identity that led to his death. Ronald Ebens took Chin for a “Jap.” At one level of interpretation, this visual blunder comments on the blind spots of racist thinking, where categorical forms of reasoning isolate us between our prejudices and our self-serving interests. Ebens saw an Asian face and automatically made it the target of his frustration. At another level of interpretation, Eben's racial slur, although inaccurate in ethnically identifying Chin, strangely articulates the conceptual incongruities and cultural displacements that occur in representations of ethnicity and race. Chin's physical appearance made him vulnerable to ethnic mistranslation and an eventual victim of racist misrepresentation. In short, there is (much like pronouncing two people husband and wife) a performative aspect to Ebens's misrecognition of Chin's identity. To put it grimly, Chin's figurative transformation literally concluded in his execution.

David J. Eicher, The Civil War in Books: An Analytical Bibliography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997, $39.95). Pp. 432. ISBN 0 252 02273 4.

Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1997, $24.95). Pp. 222. ISBN 0 674 16055 x.

Judith N. McArthur and Orville Vernon Burton (editors), “A Gentleman and an Officer”: A Military and Social History of James B. Griffin's Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, $30.00). Pp. 382. ISBN 0 19 509311 9.

A. K. McClure, Abraham Lincoln and Men of War Times: Some Personal Recollections of War and Politics during the Lincoln Administration (Bison Books edition, with introduction by James A. Rawley; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996, £18.95). Pp. 496. ISBN 0 8032 8228 1.

James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, £20.00). Pp. 256. ISBN 0 19 509023 3.

John Michael Priest, Before Antietam: The Battle for South Mountain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992; pbk 1996, £15.99). Pp. 455. ISBN 0 19 510712 8.

Jack D. Welsh, Medical Histories of Union Generals (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1996). Pp. 442. ISBN 0 87338 552 7.

Donald Yacovone (editor), A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997, $26.95). Pp. 372. ISBN 0 252 02245 9.

Like Ol' Man River, Civil War historiography just keeps rolling along. It changes course occasionally, leaving behind bayous of stagnant argument, while it carves out new lines of inquiry and debate. The books under review here follow the meandering course of this great river of historical writing. There are two scholarly editions of the writings of Civil War soldiers, one northern one southern, one black one white. There are two reference works, each of them bearing the rather idiosyncratic stamp of its editor. The immensely detailed battlefield narrative, as exemplified by John Michael Priest's book on South Mountain, adheres to a tradition of Civil War historical writing that resists changing historiographical fashions, and continues to appeal to a readership which knows the kind of military history it likes, and simply wants still more of it. Another honoured tradition in Civil War literature is the reprint of a “classic” written by someone who lived through the conflict, and Alexander McClure has good claims to inclusion in this category. Finally, there are two quite brief books by two heavyweight historians, James McPherson and Gary Gallagher, who address some of the perennial Civil War issues, such as why did men fight and go on fighting, and which is more in need of explanation: why did the Confederacy lose, or how did it manage to fight for so long?