Puritan Mind Research Articles

F. O. Matthiessen's Modernist Hawthorne

F. O. Matthiessen's Modernist Hawthorne

Early New England: A Covenanted Society by David Weir

EARLY NEW ENGLAND: A COVENANTED SOCIETY by David Weir. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. Ecumenical consensus proposes full communion as the goal of the ecumenical dialogues. Within this ecclesiological vision, governance has three dimensions: personal, collegial, and communal oversight. The Catholic contribution to this vision is the ecclesiology of hierarchical communion, with its emphasis on the personal role of the bishops in communion with the bishop of Rome. This vision does not obscure the communal role of the whole People of God or the collegial structures whereby this personal service is exercised. The principal complementary gift to this hierarchical theology of communion is the covenant theology to emerge in the Reformed tradition . Under the sovereignty of God, the covenantal interdependence of the whole people of God is expressed in collegial structures to which any and all expressions of personal episcopé are held to be accountable. In the pilgrimage toward full communion, the gift of covenant collegiality and hierarchical mutuality will need to find avenues for dialogue and reconciliation. This volume is a summary of research on covenantal structures of governance , civil and ecclesiastical, in seventeenth century New England. During this period what have become the states of New England was part of old England. The pilgrim fathers set up colonies of separatist and nonseparatist Calvinist congregations in Massachusetts and other colonies of the east coast of North America, from Nova Scotia to South Carolina. Ironically, from 1642 until the 1660 restoration, the Puritan churches became the established Church of England. Those colonists who left England to separate from the established Church in order to establish a new covenantal, converted community in the new world became the state enforced religion in both old and new England during this period. The book, part of the Emory University Studies in Law and Religion, analyzes in detail the documents of this period—covenants, charters, contracts and confessions—their diversity and the covenantal theologies that lie behind them. In pursuing this study, the author has researched and synthesized a vast amount of unpublished material. He looks in detail at this rich array of documents, most of which are Reformed congregational in origin. But some are Baptist from the Rhode Island colony, or civil covenants, especially after the restoration of 1660, which allow for a certain range of Protestant religious diversity, following the acts of toleration in old England in the period of the restoration. The author is able to document the diversity of the approaches to the covenant relationbook reviews 537 538 the jurist ships, especially in the civil societies of the period, and to revise the received wisdom about the uniformity of the “Puritan Mind.” He is also able to document the evolution of contractual and constitutional thinking which developed out of the covenantal principles of the early Reformed colonists. This research is of interest not only to the scholars ofAmericanAngloSaxon Protestantism or of the wider Reformed tradition. Given the influence of British Protestantism on modern legal thinking, on the institutions of post revolutionary American society, and on the civil religion that under girds American public life, this study discloses important new insights on the commonAmerican heritage. Likewise, it demonstrates alternate modes of church order and governance to those of the traditional episcopal forms of the pre-Reformation and the Anglican heritages. Each community, intentionally and in light of their reading of the biblicalcovenant ,theexigenciesoftheirownrelationshipwithGod,withone another, and with the society they were building, developed its own formulationsofrightsandresponsibilities .Oncetherewasevenamodesttoleration in all of England, new and old; and charters for civil society were handed down by authorities, all of whom would have been authorized by the established Church of England in its restored episcopal form, the utopian, puritan experiment was inevitably due to unravel. Even more fundamental to the erosion of covenantal theology and the community of visible saints were the accommodations to the unconverted members of the community and to the children “born” into the covenant, but not themselves yet full communicants in the congregations. The book provides chapters on the European background of the puritan movement and covenant theology, and the early colonial charters of the century. There are chapters on the civil covenants, the church covenants for the Puritan congregations, and for those...

The Columbia companion to American history on film: how the movies have portrayed the American past

IntroductionPart I. Eras The Puritan Era and the Puritan Mind, by Edward IngebretsonThe 1890s, by Joseph MillichapThe 1920s, by John TibbettsThe 1930s, by Carlton JacksonThe 1960s, by Chris LovettThe 1970s, by Zia HasanThe 1980s, by William J. PalmerPart II. Wars and Other Major Events The American Revolution, by Cotten SeilerThe Civil War and Reconstruction, by Alicia BrowneLawrence KreiserThe Cold War, by Phil LandonThe Korean War, by Phil LandonThe Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War, by James YatesThe Vietnam War, by Peter C. RollinsWestward Expansion and the Indian Wars, by James SandosWorld War I, by Peter C. RollinsWorld War II: Documentaries, by Peter C. RollinsWorld War II: Feature Films, by Robert FynePart III. Notable People The Antebellum Frontier Hero, by Mike BirdwellChristopher Columbus, by Anthony ChaseThe Founding Fathers, by Cotten SeilerIndian Leaders, by Robert BairdThe Kennedys, by Harris J. ElderAbraham Lincoln, by Martin JacksonRichard Nixon, by Don WhaleyFranklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, by Michael ShullBabe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, by Douglass NoverrHarry S. Truman, by Martin JacksonGeorge Washington, by John D. ThomasPart IV. Groups African Americans After World War II, by Michael ShullArab Americans, by Jack G. ShaheenAsian Americans, by Terry HongCatholic Americans, by Peter HolloranChildren and Teenagers in the Twentieth Century, by Ron GreenIrish Americans, by Peter HolloranItalian Americans, by Stacey DonahueJewish Americans, by Solomon DavidoffMexican Americans, by Scott BaughNative Americans, by Jacqueline KilpatrickRadicals and Radicalism, by Michael ShullDavid WiltRobber Barons, Media Moguls, and Power Elites, by Michael ShullDavid WiltWomen from the Colonial Era to 1900, by Sarah PearsallWomen in the Twentieth Century, by June SochenPart V. Institutions and Movements Baseball, by Gregory McNameeCity and State Government, by Thomas HalperDouglas MuzzioJessica MuzzioCivil Rights, by Ray ArsenaultCongress, by Anthony ChaseThe Family, by Steve MintzFootball, by Dale HerbeckJournalism and the Media, by Robert BairdThe Labor Movement and the Working Class, by Michael ShullDavid WiltMilitias and Extremist Political Movements, by Michael J. RileyThe Political Machine, by James HanlanThe Presidency After World War II, by Peter C. RollinsPrivate Schools, by Ron BrileyPublic High Schools, by Ron BrileyPart VI. Places The Midwest, by John TibbettsThe West and the New Western, by James HanlanNew York City, by Joe Dorinson George LankevichThe Sea, by Mary MalloyThe Small Town, by John TibbettsThe South, by Owen GilmanSpace, by Michael DenisonSusan OptSuburbia, by David WiltTexas and the Southwest, by Mark BusbyThe Trans-Appalachian West, by Mike BirdwellPart VII. Themes and Topics Crime and the Mafia, by Ron WilsonDrugs, Tobacco, and Alcohol, by Jennifer Tebbe-GrossmanElections and Party Politics, by Anthony ChaseFeminism and Feminist Films, by June SochenRailroads, by Joseph MillichapSexuality, by Bill BrigmanSlavery, by Robert B. ToplinPart VIII. Myths and Heroes The American Adam, by Charles MalandThe American Fighting Man, by Robert DoyleDemocracy and Equality, by Thomas DohertyThe Frontier and the West, by R. Phillip LoyHollywood's Detective, by David WiltThe Machine in the Garden, by John TibbettsSuccess and the Self-Made Man, by Hannu Salmi

The concept of America in the Puritan mind

This article focuses on the conceptualization of America in Puritan prose works. My assumption is that, with the help of a multitextual approach, i.e. the consideration of several prose works from several authors of the Puritan era, such as William Bradford, William Byrd, John Cotton, Edward Johnson, Cotton Mather, Mary Rowlandson, Thomas Shepard, William Stoughton and John Winthrop, we can develop a detailed account of the way Puritans understood their immigration experiences. My analysis is presented within the framework of conceptual metaphor analysis as proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Lakoff and Turner (1989), and of conceptual blending analysis as given by Fauconnier and Turner (1998). The two methods complement each other and combine our knowledge of the Puritan concept of America present in various literary texts.

Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy

selving of Thomas Gray William Cowper and the condition of England which way I fly - Cowper's The Castaway and other poems Wordsworth, Bunyan and the puritan mind indeterminancy of meaning in The Ancient Mariner Keats, politics and the idea of revolution the Shelleyan psychodrama - the dream of youth, Alastor, taking stock, taking wing - Julian and Maddaio, Adonais authoring the self - Byron's Childe Harold III and IV Dorothea's awakening - a note on Middlemarch Thomas Hardy and the forms of making - interpreting Jude the Obscure.

Conflicts of Law: Reconsidering the Influence of Religion on Law in Massachusetts Bay

AbstractThe idea that there were different points of view in seventeenth century Massachusetts Bay is not a new one. Several recent studies have undermined Perry Miller's monolithic “Puritan Mind”—demonstrating there were many strands of thought even among the nominally orthodox, and suggesting that we think of the settlers in New England as members of a movement with many ideas, rather than holders of a single point of view.While the idea that there were divisions within the category of Puritan is not a new one, the extent to which that ideological pluralism had a practical impact on the Bay colony's institutions, from its families to its governing system, has not yet been explored. This paper is a preliminary effort to demonstrate how ideological pluralism led to different conceptions of law, and had a practical effect on the legal system developed in the first generation of settlement in Massachusetts Bay.

Theocracy in Massachusetts: reformation and separation in early Puritan New England

This volume explores the eschatological and millennial dimension in the Puritan mind, to show that out of a unique apocalyptic interpretation of history Puritans were not only able to justify their migration to America with sacred, providential history, but also able to define the meaning of their holy experiment in the course of salvation history. As the Puritan emigrants themselves perceived it, their errand into the wilderness was not simply a utopian search for religious reformation but an earthly stand against the power of Satan and the Antichrist.

Gracious Laughter: The Meditative Wit of Edward Taylor.

Increase Mather, Edward Taylor, and Jonathan Edwards were important figures in seventeenth and eighteenth-century New England, their lives and contributions overlapping in significant ways: Mather and Taylor were close contemporaries, with Edwards's birth occurring when other two men were in their sixties; all three were Puritan ministers; Edwards and Mather were college presidents and influential in their own time; and three together represent complementary facets of best of Puritan mind. The three books under review a biography of Mather, a philosophical study of Edwards's Freedom of Will, and a critical analysis of Taylor's selected poetry offer, through various genres, insight into early American life and thought. Michael G. Hall's The Last American Puritan is first biography of Increase Mather in over forty years. Hall views Mather as the leading exponent of Puritan culture at its peak in 1670s, decade when self-awareness was most fully articulated and before social, political and intellectual forces that would erode Puritanism had taken effect. The nine chapters of biography move in precise chronological order, with detailed descriptions of both commonly and lesser

Misbegotten Muses: History and Anti-History by Richard C. Poulsen

Reviews 283 Writings About Butte; Remembering the Agricultural Frontier; Literature of Modern Montana; Contemporary Fiction; Contemporary Poetry),each intro­ duced by an informative and thoughtful essay. The editing of this anthology, which took over three years, is masterful: a random selection of entries will reward the reader with the verve and vividness and compelling drama of the writing. But the volume is unwieldy and daunting; I found myself avoiding picking it up to read for this review because it was so massive. I can’t see it being used—as it should be—as a text in high schools in Montana. Although the editors seem wedded to the idea of “one big book,” I think Montana literature would be better served if the material were divided into two volumes, one of early works, the other of modern and contemporary writing. Another small improvement that mightbe considered for future editions:page headings not only of the section titles, but of the authors as well. That would make it easier to dip into the collection—the most enjoyable way, I find, of reading an anthology. All in all, though I’m weighed down by the size, I’m elevated by the inspiring contents of this marvelous anthology of both familiar and unfamiliar works. NANCY PROTHRO ARBUTHNOT United States Naval Academy Misbegotten Muses: History and Anti-History. Richard C. Poulsen. (New York: Peter Lang. American University Studies, Series IX: History; vol. 32, 1988. 211 pages, $36.50.) Unhappy with the restrictions imposed on experience by historians, sci­ entists and other codifiers, Richard Poulsen in Misbegotten Muses seeks to speak to the unspoken, to spaces instead of things, to what is not there instead of what is there—to a reality lying beyond the usual modes of discourse. It is guru time, in short, and other gurus (Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marshall McLuhan, Roland Barthes, Joseph Campbell, Jacques Derrida, Black Elk) are assembled to bolster fifteen loosely-linked essays on such topics as the Donner Party, Mormon migration, Manifest Destiny and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a great book, we are told, because it resists conventional literary analysis and evokes a past “impervious to the inroads of history: there are no systems here” (147). That statement pretty much sums up Poulsen’s concerns. History, as his subtitle indicates, is the villain, and he fingers historians for encasing the illimitable past in rigid chronologies and the like and preferring their systems to reality’s untidiness. Systematization may be necessary, “but nihilation isalso essential to make sense of the individual’s journey toward the great truth of living, vibrant, inter­ human relations” (55). And so it goes. Folk culture is natural, open-ended, life-affirming; history is artificial, closed, life-denying, “a noise devoid of human meaning” (104). 284 Western American Literature Myth expresses “verities,” history only “manifest fictions” (88). It victimizes the past by “measuring an illusion of reality rather than feeling the pulse of a significant human event” (87). Thus the inability of historians to enter the Puritan mind or any unfamiliar territory. Not that feeling the pulse of the past is easy. It requires considerable groping, judging from Poulsen’s prose: “And yet some explanations seem insufficient to cope with, appreciate, the immense pervasiveness of certain folk, certain mythological images. It is one problem to be able to explain, prove, that animals. . .” etc. (60). This stylistic hesitancy, throat-clearing, is distracting, puzzling, given the author’s equal penchant for flat pronouncements. Those he disagrees with are wrong, even disgustingly so. And when he isnot lecturing historians for misrepresenting the past, he is lecturing the sources they use (the Donner Party survivors, for instance) for misunderstanding their own experiences. Yet all he offers are fortune cookie profundities: “facts are illusions of measurement which portray the mind of the researcher, not the condition of the thing observed” (86) ; “History is a divinity” (107) ; “Truth is the unending reflection of an image” (119); “Science is a system of measured prejudices” (120) ;“Chaos, like truth, is unbearable” (125) ; “Human life is a tissue of spaces” (135) ; “Satisfaction and greatness are antithetical” (147). One thinks of Herbert Spencer’s strain...

American Women Writing Fiction by Mickey Pearlman

284 Western American Literature Myth expresses “verities,” history only “manifest fictions” (88). It victimizes the past by “measuring an illusion of reality rather than feeling the pulse of a significant human event” (87). Thus the inability of historians to enter the Puritan mind or any unfamiliar territory. Not that feeling the pulse of the past is easy. It requires considerable groping, judging from Poulsen’s prose: “And yet some explanations seem insufficient to cope with, appreciate, the immense pervasiveness of certain folk, certain mythological images. It is one problem to be able to explain, prove, that animals. . .” etc. (60). This stylistic hesitancy, throat-clearing, is distracting, puzzling, given the author’s equal penchant for flat pronouncements. Those he disagrees with are wrong, even disgustingly so. And when he isnot lecturing historians for misrepresenting the past, he is lecturing the sources they use (the Donner Party survivors, for instance) for misunderstanding their own experiences. Yet all he offers are fortune cookie profundities: “facts are illusions of measurement which portray the mind of the researcher, not the condition of the thing observed” (86) ; “History is a divinity” (107) ; “Truth is the unending reflection of an image” (119); “Science is a system of measured prejudices” (120) ;“Chaos, like truth, is unbearable” (125) ; “Human life is a tissue of spaces” (135) ; “Satisfaction and greatness are antithetical” (147). One thinks of Herbert Spencer’s strain­ ing after a universal law. “Evolution,” he wrote, “is a change from an indefin­ ite, incoherent homogenity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations.” A contemporary translated: “Evolution is a change from a nohowish, untalkaboutable, all-alikeness, to a somehowish and ingeneral-talk-aboutable not all-alikeness, by continuous something-elsefications and sticktogetherations.” Poulsen’s nihilation, in turn, translates as a subjectivity devoid of other than personal significance. Of course, this is the opinion of an historian. BRIAN W. DIPPIE University of Victoria, B.C. American Women Writing Fiction. Edited by Mickey Pearlman. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989. 236 pages, $20.00/$10.00.) In her seminal essay, “The Masculine Wilderness of the American Novel,” Carolyn G. Heilbrun writes of the standard, now even classical “texts” of American literature as exclusively male—that is to say, concerning man alone, the solitaryhero, an individual pitting strength and durability against society in an adventurous and mythic journey to knowledge. Whether or not the knowl­ edge readers have come to through reading this fiction is the same as the hero’s—existential, escapist, vindicating—the fact remains that for generations of readers this literature has defined “American character” and the corollary issues (social, political, religious, psychological) that apparently concern us. Reviews 285 Mickey Pearlman points out in his introduction to American Women Writing Fiction not only the now evident alternate view of women writers to this masculine perspective, but how identity is tied for women not in “lighting out for the territory,” but in memory and family. He notes, however, that the purpose of this collection is not to argue that women write about memory, identity, family, and space and that men do not. Rather, he notes that women writers as represented by the voices in this book are aware of the change in the lives of contemporary American women, the tension that provokes, and the resulting refocusing on the themes identified above. While feminist criticism records and explicates the growing awareness of American women writers the last forty years of their role as female artists, this volume avoids both social and biological explanations for this phenome­ non. The collection includes the work of ten critics, the essays written particu­ larly for this volume and published here for the first time. Bibliographies of the works of these authors, also original, as well as substantial bibliographies of criticism about them, are included. The choice of the writers Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Gordon, Joan Didion, Louise Erdrich, Alison Lurie, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Toni Cade Bambara, Gail Godwin, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Mary Lee Settle offers widely divergent considerations of regional, ethnic, generational perspectives. In this case, diversity also points to a complicated and commingling assembling of writers who more broadly reflect who we are. This volume isrecommended for critics, professors...

"To All Angels and Saints": Herbert's Puritan Poem

all Angels and Saints is locus classicus The Temple for establishing of Rome to Herbert;1 it seems to show him as only most uneasy and faint-hearted of Protestants. Surely committed Protestant would long to crave [the] special aid of angels and saints and Virgin, or would express his regret at now not feeling free to act on this desire. This poem seems to manifest, clearly and poignantly, the reluctance of conservative Anglicans to give up the old devotions; it seems especially to prove that in Herbert, as Donne, devotion to Mary, though suppressed, is not easily rejected.2 There would seem, to borrow a phrase from poem, to be no appeal from view of Herbert proposed by Martz, Ross, and others on basis of all Angels and Saints. Its author simply could not have been a wholehearted Protestant. This view misrepresents both poem and its relation to Herbert's religious position as a whole. To see all Angels and Saints as reluctantly Protestant, one must either focus exclusively on its first half (as Ross and Grant do) or see it as riddled with crippling ambiguities (as Martz does), because second half of poem-straightforwardly read-places Herbert more company of Cartwright and Milton than that of Andrewes or Cosin (or Saint Frangois de Sales). As Helen White alone among Herbert's critics has noticed, what is ultimately striking about all Angels and Saints is not its Catholicism but its Puritanism; one can see at work it some of most historically characteristic and significant features of Puritan mind.3 It is this, rather than its apparent hankering after Rome, that gives poem a unique and important place Herbert's aouvre. Paradoxically, moreover, we shall also see that it is precisely Puritanism of poem that allows for-in a sense, creates-its apparent Catholicism. It would be well at this point to have text before us.

The Shape of the Puritan Mind: The Thought of Samuel Willard

The Shape of the Puritan Mind: The Thought of Samuel Willard

The Shape of the Puritan Mind: The Thought of Samuel Willard

The Shape of the Puritan Mind: The Thought of Samuel Willard

The Shape of the Puritan Mind: The Thought of Samuel Willard

Journal Article The Shape of the Puritan Mind: The Thought of Samuel Willard. By Ernest Benson Lowrie. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. xiii + 253 pp. Charts, notes, bibliographical essay, and index. $12.50.) Get access Charles W. Akers Charles W. Akers Oakland University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 62, Issue 1, June 1975, Pages 104–105, https://doi.org/10.2307/1901318 Published: 01 June 1975

Racism and the Puritan Mind

FOLLOWING GUNNAR MYRDAL'S LEAD of a generation ago, numerous social scientists have documented in abundant detail the discrepancy which exists between what Americans profess and what they practice in the realm of race relations. More recently, Robin Williams carried the analysis a bit further by observing that there is at least one important internal contradiction existing within the value system itself. He noted that Americans are deeply committed to such values as freedom, equality and humanitarianism, while simultaneously giving widespread currency to group superiority themes, including racism.1 In his 1968 study of the racial attitudes of 2,584 urban, white Americans, Schuman provided some interesting insights into the curious ambivalence of the value system. He discovered that about 80 percent of the white Americans in his sample reject the idea that whites are born with greater mental capacity than blacks. This apparent rejection of racism, however, was countered by the fact that 54 percent of the same sample laid the blame for the blacks' inferior socioeconomic status not on the institutionalized patterns of discrimination in society, but on something about Negroes themselves such as a lack of motivation which prevented blacks from achieving equality.2 It is the contention of this paper that such logical inconsistencies are by no means the result of the peculiar machinations of modern capitalism and democracy, but can be traced back at least three centuries to the attitudes which those strangely American Puritans of Massachusetts Bay held toward the Indians during a century of sustained cultural conflict. The Puritans have frequently been victimized by contemporary scholars who commit the sociologically unpardonable sin of stereotyping; and sociologists, ironically, are probably more guilty than anyone else. The treatment accorded the Puritans by many modern scholars tends to be both simplistic and pejorative. The very word

The Shape of the Puritan Mind: the Thought of Samuel Willard. By Ernest Benson Lowrie. Pp. 253. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. 7.50.

Journal Article The Shape of the Puritan Mind: the Thought of Samuel Willard. By Ernest Benson Lowrie. Pp. 253. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. £7.50. Get access The Shape of the Puritan Mind: the Thought of Samuel Willard. By Ernest Benson Lowrie. Pp. 253. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. £7.50. Charles Smyth Charles Smyth Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume XXVI, Issue 2, January 1975, Pages 489–491, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/XXVI.2.489 Published: 01 January 1975

The Jacksonian Economy (review)

book reviews345 covenant concept in die Civil War era. The idea of America as a covenant nation under God's judgment for the sin of slavery played a prominent part in the jeremiads of New School sermons and pamphlets during the War (p. 201). Finally, political historians will want to test Marsden's assumption that there was no correlation between political loyalties and die various Presbyterian party lines (p. 50), and tiiat evangelicals in general were politically nonaligned prior to the Civil War but strongly Republican thereafter because the War "reinforced die identification of Christian reform and Republicanism" (p. 240). The political implications of pre- or post-millennial theologies also need to be explored (pp. 193, 197). In sum, this is a sympathetic, balanced analysis of the evangelical mind during the Middle Period that will long remain a standard sequel to Perry Miller's work on the Puritan mind. Hopefully, Professor Marsden will pursue further the question raised in his suggestive epilogue and a subsequent article in the Westminster Theological Journal (1970), namely, the relation between the New School—Old School denominations and twentieth century fundamentalism and liberalism in the Presbyterian Church. This is a big order, but worthy of a scholar owning both a bachelor of divinity degree and a history doctorate. Robert P. Swierenga Kent State University The Jacksonian Economy. By Peter Temin. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.Pp. 208. $1.95.) Professor Temin is an economist who has done some homework that historians should have done years ago. His book demonstrates once again the fallacy of assuming that past events necessarily occurred the way highly biased observers said diey did, by revealing the shakiness of the conventional wisdom concerning the Jackson era boom and its aftermath. Temin contends tiiat the boom of 1834-37 was not a product of Andrew Jackson's influence on banks, that neither the Specie Circular nor the Deposit Law of 1836 created sufficient pressure to trigger the Panic of 1837, and that the contraction period of the early 1840's was not as bad as it is customary to think. Disregarding the long-influential verdicts of Biddle and Gallatin, Temin has explored and combined fairly available but neglected data—for example, Treasury Department reports on the condition of state banks, 1834-41—to show instead that "The economy was not the victim of Jacksonian politics; Jackson's politics were the victims of economic fluctuations, (p. 17)." Briefly, Temin's revisionist thesis is that the boom resulted not from bank note over-issue but from the retention of silver in this country, made possible by changes in the tripartite trade in specie, opium and capital involving the United States, China and Britain. Indeed, bank 346CIVIL WAR HISTORY reserve ratios, the ratios of specie to money, remained essentially unchanged during the inflationary years, and the land boom, instead of encouraging banks to over-issue notes with each recycling of land sale proceeds, served to damp inflation by absorbing some of the increased money supply. Temin also convincingly argues that the Panic of 1837 rose not from domestic economic causes (though he admits that the Specie Circular had psychological significance) but from pressures imposed by the Bank of England and from the impact of those pressures on American cotton prices. And he points out that the hard times of 1839-43 are more accurately styled "deflation" than "depression," for unlike the period 1929-33, they witnessed actual increases in real consumption and in gross national product. It is hard to fault Temin's effort except to note that he makes the standard version of Jacksonian economics a bit too monolithic; he fails, for instance, to note the divergent and not uninfluential recent interpretation of the period by Douglass North. Otherwise he has made his case well and has stated it with great clarity. More, perhaps, than most revisions , Temin's will be inconvenient to reconcile with the accepted version, but all who deal with the Jacksonian period will now have to confront the task. Rodney O. Davis Knox College Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 1800-1851. By Donald B. Cole. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970. Pp. xi, 283. $10.00.) In this well-researched...

Art and History in Bradford's of Plymouth Plantation

VEN if it hadn't been praised over a dinner of Boiled Philadelphia Capon, English Snipe, and Fried Bananas Glace' as a work unparalleled human annals since the story of Bethlehem,2 William Bradford's history Of Plymouth Plantation would still be unique in the literature of early America. Despite the long, occasionally bitter debates which have eddied about the Puritans, critics and apologists alike seem content to agree that at least this one work is an authentic masterpiece and an American classic.3 Historians continue to rely on it, as they have since the time of Nathaniel Morton, in constructing their own accounts.4 Intellectual and literary historians diligently mine it for passages illustrating their larger, more general arguments about the Puritan Mind,5 providential historiography,6 Puritan prose

The Poetics of Emily Dickinson

I put on my bonnet tonight, opened the gate very desperately, and for a little while the suspense was terrible-I think I was held in check by some invisible agent, for I returned to the house then without having done any harm. 1 That night Emily Dickinson, after trembling at the gate, by her own choice closed it and went back to her father's house, which she was almost literally never to leave again. The moment was, for her, not only decisive, but archetypal, for it embodied in miniature the drama of her life-a house she would not leave, a gate she desired yet feared to pass, a belief that renunciation was an elevation, the piercing virtue which both skewered her soul, and yet, as the Puritan mind conceived it, punctured the tissue of mortality and let in the light from eternity. That round point of radiant light, beacon and wound, is the center of a poetry and a life obsessed with death, fixed on the mysterious gate to an equivocal beyond, driven by a powerful will-to-closure, a drive that punctuated her life, like her poems, with the dash, that verbal sign which both divides and connects, which rushes forward and yet, simultaneously, arrests. Death, she wrote, is the Hyphen of the Sea, 2 the sign dividing off what came before, yet carrying the eye, as death does the soul, into the place where the sea of eternity opens up, if indeed the eye be not deceived. This equivocal moment of closure -impetus and hesitation-was to be the focus and to determine the form of her poetic genius. It will help explain the peculiar hieroglyphic quality of her language, the acute compression of her poems, the particular emblems which obsessed her, and the tendency toward opposition and negation which enlivened her syntax and diction. Consciousness, she wrote, is the only home of which we

The Puritan Mind in Transition: The Philosophy of Samuel Johnson

N I752 an American colonist by the name of Samuel Johnson pubI lished a treatise on formal philosophy entitled Elementa Philosophica. Benjamin Franklin, who printed the book in Philadelphia, reported to Johnson that he had heard of no exceptions yet made to your great work, nor do I expect any, unless to those parts that savor of what is called Berkeleyanism, which is not well understood here.1 The tactful Franklin did not report that the book was selling quite slowly and that the lack of criticism was, in great part, due to the fact that no one was reading it. And since Elementa Philosophica was not only dedicated to George Berkeley, but also intended as an explication of philosophical tenets that were rooted in Berkeley's metaphysics, Franklin's comments indicated that those people who had bothered to purchase the book had either objected to or failed to comprehend the main thrust of its message. Historians of American philosophy have tended to agree with Johnson's contemporaries. It is conceded that Elementa Philosophica had a certain historical significance-it was the first textbook in philosophy published in America and became a part of the curriculum at the College in Philadelphia and later at King's College in New York. But the content of Elementa Philosophica has never been regarded as worthy of serious study. I. W. Riley saw fit to devote a chapter of his American Philosophy: The Early Schools to Johnson, whom he called the double of Berkeley. Riley went so far as to declare that Johnson's metaphysical system was the most clear and consistent presentation of idealism that had as yet appeared in the colonies; but Riley was neither clear nor consistent in his brief analysis of Johnson's philosophy. Herbert