Usable Past Research Articles

In search of usable pasts

In search of usable pasts

Toward a Usable Past: Liberty under State Constitutions. Edited by Paul Finkelman and Stephen E. Gottlieb. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. 448p. $45.00.

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Toward a usable past: liberty under state constitutions

Toward a usable past: liberty under state constitutions

The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications

Preface The authors 1. Introduction Michael J. Hogan 2. An end to which Cold War? Walter LaFeber 3. The Cold War, the Long Peace, and the future John Lewis Gaddis 4. Quiet cataclysm: some afterthoughts on World War II John Mueller 5. Some lessons from the Cold War Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr 6. Nuclear Weapons and European security during the Cold War Samuel F. Wells, Jr 7. Victory in the postwar era: despite the Cold War or because of it? Alexei Filitov 8. The wicked witch of the West is gone. Long live the wicked witch of the East Bruce Cumings 9. The end and the beginning Ronald Steel 10. A balance sheet: Lippmann, Kennan and the Cold War Richard J. Barnet 11. Why did the Cold War arise, and why did it end? Raymond L. Garthoff 12. A view from below Noam Chomsky 13. The end of the Cold War in the Middle East Nikki R. Keddie 14. The end of the Cold War in the Near East: what it means for historians and policy planners Bruce R. Kuniholm 15. After the Cold War: the United States, Germany, and European security Hermann-Josef Rupieper 16. The end of the Cold War: a sceptical view Denise Artaud 17. The end of the Cold War, the new role for Europe and the decline of the United States Geir Lundestad 18. The fading of the Cold War and the demystification of twentieth century issues Gar Alperovitz and Kai Bird 19. The US government, a legacy of the Cold War Ernest R. May 20. Foreign policy, partisan politics and the end of the Cold War Michael J. Hogan 21. Beyond polarity in space and time David Reynolds 22. A usable past for the future Robert Jervis.

Deconstructive politics: A critique

Both Reiner Sch?rmann and John Caputo have recently published major studies in which they articulate what they take to be capital requirements of any contemporary responsible political thought and practice. Both acknow? ledge and detail their heavy debts to Heidegger's work. But each of them makes it explicit that his conclusions concerning politics are his own. Each, with some important differences from the other, characterizes his own position as deconstructivist. In this paper, I will not discuss the use either of them makes of Heideg? ger. Rather, I will concentrate on the conclusions for politics each of them reaches. I will argue, with some help from Merleau-Ponty, that both of their positions are insufficient for responsible politics. Though neither position is without merit, both are too underdetermined to provide adequate guidance either for political thought or for political practice. Both in effect deprive themselves of a genuine "usable past." Their failures are of different sorts, and Caputo's is perhaps less severe. Nonetheless, both are left with too meager resources with which to articulate a fully defensible politics. Such a failure may well be irremovable from any deconstructive politics. But even if it is not, an analysis of these two cases indicates, without explicit argu? ment, the plight of a politics which cannot avail itself of the tutelage of history.

Douglas John Hall's Use of Lutner's Theologia Crucis.

The Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall has consistently emphasized the need for a North American contextual theology. For too long the theology bandied about oil this continent has been borrowed from Europe, or even Latin America. These theological 'programmes' do not take into account the sitz-imleben of our society; hence Hall has proposed a vigorous and exciting exercise in the development of a uniquely North American contextual theology. Ironically however, the methodological framework Hall adopts is derived from a late medieval European, Martin Luther. While this may seem contrary to what Hall is attempting to do, the theology of the cross which Luther espoused provides an excellent basis for his contextual theology. Furthermore, by employing Luther, he immediately quells the fears of those who would assume that contextuality in theology means discarding all tradition. Contextuality, he contends, is not to be confused with relativism or 'situationalism': unlike them, it includes the quest for a 'useable past,' a past which keeps it from losing its specific Christian identity. While Hall recognizes the need for reflection on the Christian tradition, this does not mean he is willing to settle for the prevalent, majority tradition as the basis for his North American contextual theology. Instead, he opts for what he calls a 'thin' and often neglected tradition: Luther's theology of the cross. How he uses and modifies this frequently ignored tradition which Luther first named is the subject of my paper. Beginning with what Luther and then Hall mean by 'theology of the cross,' I will follow with an analysis of how Hall uses Luther's theology of the cross. I then conclude with a discussion of how other themes found in Luther's theologia cruces might strengthen and augment Hall's programme of contextuality.

The School of Hawthorne (review)

Book Reviews 287 Richard H. Brodhead. The School of Hawthorne. New York: Oxford U P, 1986. 215 pp. pb $11.95. Taking Hawthorne as Üie always canonical American novelist, the "great concatenator ," who above all others "pulls disparate writing into a coherent and continuous line," Richard Brodhead treats Üie "school of Hawthorne" as a paradigm of literary tradition. Into his theory of literary infuence Brodhead incorporates concepts such as the construction of authorship, canon formation and the sacralization of "high" culture, the role of social mediation in die history of taste, and, most important of all, the various social and historical constructions of whatever has passed into the past. His School of Hawthorne demonstrates that from among potential versions of past events, institutions construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct usable pasts in a dynamic series of creative revisionings. In studying how die past passes and is selectively recovered for new uses, how yesterday's rebellion becomes today's orthodoxy, Brodhead contributes a social dimension to Emerson's American scholarship of "creative reading." Rather than lament mat institutions were built on Hawthorne's tropes, Brodhcad finds that Üie past renews itself primarily by "continuing adaptation within" cultural insitituitons. He uses the vicissitudes of Hawthorne's reputation to demonstrate that "traditions can be reclaimed from institutional possession and made plastic again to their inheritors' wishes and needs." Brodhead starts his historical demonstration with the influential magazine industry and the canny promotional strategies of the publishing firm Ticknor and Fields that enabled Evert Duyckinck and James T. Fields to construct the public Hawthorne as an emblem of "high culture." In this process of commodification, high and low culture were separated into different marketplaces, and novels were elevated into new prominence as high art. Regrettably, üie analysis does not consider whatever ideas, influences, or models Nathaniel Hawthorne used to create himself as author. In this study of authorial selfcreation , the "founder" is himself without visible foundation except as a creation of his promoters. We must look elsewhere to learn how Hawthorne dealt with his uneasy assumption of authorhood and with his sense of failure. Reviewing the development of American literary historiography, Brodhead traces the different Hawthornes that time uncovered, a line composed of many separate strands, such as his symbolism, his plots, his character types (especially the daimonically obsessed ones), his theories about romance, and his conception of authorship. Drawing upon such a wide and open-ended range of Hawthornes, Brodhcad allows himself considerable breadth in defining a "school" of Hawthorne, a body that comprises novelists significandy influenced by him. Primarily, Brodhead is interested in those authors whose works show a deep "knowing" of Hawthorne, rather than those like Frederic, Crane, or Dreiser who allude to him in superficial ways. Once canonized by social institutions, Nathaniel Hawthorne was appropriated for various purposes by Herman Melville (no big surprise, but beautifully depicted), William Dean HoweUs (the big surprise), and, of course, Henry James, but all in different ways at different times. So prompt and successful was the canonization of Nathaniel Hawthorne, according to Brodhead, that later in life Hawthorne had to contend with himself as his own strong precursor, a presence so intimidating that it prevented him from achieving a final climactic phase to his authorial career. Brodhead attributes the weakness of Hawthorne's late fiction to this kind of anxiety radier than to illness or changing literary ideals. As Hawthorne's successors, Melville found or invented a prophetic Nay-sayer, HoweUs an august representative of high culture, Jewett and Freeman a license to create "supercharged monomanics," and James, among a great many other debts, the example by which he constructed his own idea of "achieved authorship." Very informative about 288 The Henry James Review the way changing times and social institutions elicited various aspects of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Brodhead underplays the psychological differences that also influenced what successors took from Hawthorne. In addition to what the changing canon served up to MelviUe, James, or Faulkner as appropriate models, we want to know what level of their personalities responded to what level of Nathaniel Hawthorne's personality. Brodhead provides some very fine readings of Hawthorne's works, often extending critical commonplaces into new intensity and enlightening new applications...

Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry (review)

288 The Henry James Review the way changing times and social institutions elicited various aspects of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Brodhead underplays the psychological differences diat also influenced what successors took from Hawthorne. In addition to what the changing canon served up to MelviUe, James, or Faulkner as appropriate models, we want to know what level of their personalities responded to what level of Nathaniel Hawthorne's personality. Brodhead provides some very fine readings of Hawthorne's works, often extending critical commonplaces into new intensity and enlightening new applications. For example, while showing Hilda's moral and erotic prudery to be constructive of, and a reflection on, the separation of the literary arts from popular culture, Brodhead demonstrates that The Marble Faun was a victim of the same process, devitalized by this very partitioning off of the emotional from the cultural life. Although this study of Hawthorne's influence lingers on James for four chapters, it manages to reach the important discipleship of Faulkner. It briefly mentions Hawthorne's importance to Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welly, and Flannery O'Connor, but not to Edith Wharton, who was rather inclined to minimize her greatest American precursor. This monumental study of literary influence studiously avoids discussion of its own precursors, the work of Jane Tompkins and Harold Bloom, for example, whose names are nowhere to be seen. Their presence can be inferred, however, from references to canon reform and canon bashing, which, we are told, consigns "old pasts to the same oblivion it rescues new ones from." The School of Hawthorne steers clear of polemical positions lest Brodhead's own theory of tradition construction resemble the "standard products of cheap conspiracy tiieories (the past as self-serving tool of a little band of power-hungry men), or else of die facile form of modern ahistoricism (history is a fiction too—like everything else)." Instead, this lucid and superbly written book (except for die irritating stylistic tic of using üie verb "gets" to mean "is" or "becomes") accepts the fact of cultural mediation as inevitable in tradition formation and even, in üie long run, as instrumental in üie construction of usable pasts. Gloria C. Erlich Princeton, N. J. Cheryl B. Torsney. Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989. 177 pp. $25.00. Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) was the only contemporary American writer, besides William Dean Howells, thai Henry James said he cared lo read in die mid1880s . Yet she, as Cheryl B. Torsney puts it, "appears in the literary histories like Mary Bartram, facing the fireplace wilh her back to us" (2). Indeed, supposed by many critics to be Üie Mary Bartram in James's life, Woolson is, Torsney observes, primarily remembered as the woman James could not love. Torsney notes that she is also represented as the lesser writer who supplied the master with germs for his fiction; James takes the title "The Figure in the Carpet," for example, from a phrase that appears in Woolson's notebooks that James read after her death. Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry, the first full-length study devoted to her in more than twenty-five years, does a great deal to establish Woolson's literary importance. Torsney's perceptive exploration of how Woolson lived as well as wrote about die life of a nineteenth-century woman artist enables us to see why James would have been drawn to her not only as a friend, but also as an American writer preoccupied with similar themes. In the opening chapters, Torsney probes the reasons why the literary reputation of James's "excellent friend Fenimore," as he styled his well-known countrywoman, should have been eclipsed to the point that only Jamesian scholars are likely to recognize Book Reviews 289 her name, thanks to Leon Edel's monumental biography. Born too late for Üie pre-Civil War triumph of women's domestic fiction and too early for üie advent of the New Woman's fiction, Woolson, Torsney argues, belongs to a "lost generation" of women writers. According to Torsney, women of this transitional generation have been overlooked because they had lost confidence in domesticity but had not yet found die means...

Anthills of the Savannah and Petals of Blood: The Creation of a Usable Past

The influence of the works of Chinua Achebe on those of Ngugi wa Thiong'o dates back to the early 1 960s when Ngugi, in the wake of Things Fall Apart, recognized in Achebe great novelist who had set about reclaiming the African past. Ngugi's first published novel, Weep Not, Child, while it focused on much more recent past, nonetheless incorporated many of the features of Things Fall Apart: title chosen from the work of Western canonical poet, story line examining how things fell apart for young Kenyan and his colonized society, and an ending in which the protagonist looks to suicide by hanging as solution. In the years that followed, Ngugi was to exhibit some of Achebe's concerns in his own works, such as criticism of contemporary political corruption and repression and desire to set the record straight by challenging Western versions of African history. At the same time, however, Ngugi began to distance himself from the model set by Achebe, believing that Achebe, though critical both of Western appropriation of African culture and of present-day corruption in government, failed to provide sufficiently radical critiques of neocolonialism or propose revolutionary solutions. By the time Ngugi published Petals of Blood in 1977, his own work had undergone what David MaughanBrown (1985, p. 180) calls a decisive ideological shift, creating significant gap between his approach and that of Achebe. Ngugi's dissatisfaction with Achebe perhaps reached its height when, in

The Secondary Technical School: A Usable Past?Gary McCullough

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Secondary Technical School: A Usable Past? Gary McCullough Valerie Dundas-GrantValerie Dundas-Grant Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Comparative Education Review Volume 35, Number 2May, 1991 Sponsored by the Comparative and International Education Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/447023 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1991 The Comparative and International Education SocietyPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Secondary Technical School: A Usable Past?

History and policy resistance and reform the new secondary education prep schools of industry meeting grounds of teachers the Crowther concept pioneers of the alternative road? TVEI - comparison and contrasts history as policy? the city technology college.

African Historical Studies Academic Knowledge as 'Usable Past' and Radical Scholarship

In this paper, I am less interested in the differences between the main competing schools, than in their similarities. The differences were often artificially emphasized at the expense of basic common assumptions. All approaches we have used in African studies are deeply rooted in 19th-century epistemology since the neo-Marxist epistemological break never materialized (Jewsiewicki, 1987). Notwithstanding the fundamental importance of Marxist approaches to the transformation of academic knowledge about societies in Africa, there was no intellectual revolution. The modern world system approach that belongs to the radical paradigm partially accounts for this failure. As knowledge is socially produced and strongly related to the power relationships, one cannot expect a radical epistemological break to occur in a society that is a historical product of 19th-century economic and social systems. In radical paradigm terms, how can one expect a capitalist mode of production to produce an epistemology and a theory that would be a “Copernican revolution” (Sahli quoted in Jewsiewicki, 1986: 5) in knowledge? As Martha Gephart (1986: iii) stated recently, “An overview paper is a fortuitous marriage of an important topic and… individual.” Such is the case of this paper initially commissioned as an evaluation of Marxist African studies. The final result mediates my personal history as an African scholar and my perception of the growing difficulties of African studies with ‘Africa,’ their invented object. (Mudimbe, 1988) In many respects the ambitions of this paper are similar to the goals of Meier and Rudwick (1986: xi): We grew less interested in analyzing specific works than in understanding the interrelations between the trajectory of a scholarly specialty and developments in the changing social milieu and in the profession at large . … Thus, this volume is not a standard historiography, but an examination of several topics that illuminate the rise and the transformation of black history as a research field.

Crafting a Usable Past: Consensus, Ideology, and Historians of the American Revolution

H TISTORIANS of America tend to be intellectual nationalists. They are, after all, both students and citizens of the society in which they live. They may feel a filial obligation to that society, a desire to celebrate its traditions and to affirm the relevance of themselves and their work. [T]he sense we make of the history of our national origins, noted Bernard Bailyn, helps to define for us, as it has for generations before us, the values, purposes, and acceptable characteristics of our political institutions and cultural life. In scholarship, these predilections tempt historians with the notion of a usable past-with the possibility of finding historical relevance and happiness. Historical memory is easily clouded by optimism, apologia, or sentimentality, and the past is too often recalled for present purposes. Celebrations of Jeffersonian or Jacksonian democracy, New Freedom or New Deal, Gilded Age or Great Society, however, all pale beside the historiography of the nation's primal moment. No other epoch has suffered the relentless energy of conservative and consensus interpretation that has attempted to -make a neat and attractive package of Revolutionary America.1 The last purely optimistic interpretation of the Revolution is usually

Maxine Hong Kingston's Autobiographical Strategy in The Woman Warrior

The Woman Warrior distends the traditional form of autobiography by its reliance on multiple protagonists, the circularity of its structure, and its use of myth and story. It expands our perception of what materials and techniques can be used to construct a useable past.

William Carlos Williams, the Arts, and Literary Tradition by Peter Schmidt (review)

126Rocky Mountain Review PETER SCHMIDT. William Carlos Williams, the Arts, and Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. 268 p. In his Autobiography, William Carlos Williams described the American artistic climate during the early years of his poetic development: "There was at that time a great surge of interest in the arts generally before the First World War. New York was seething with it. Painting took the lead. It came to a head for us in the famous 'Armory Show' of 1913" (New York: Random House, 1951, 134). Williams' contacts with contemporary American and European artists have been documented and explored in a number of fine studies of his life and poetry, most notably in Bram Dijkstra's pioneering study The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams, Dickran Tashjian's Skyscraper Primitives: Dada and the American Avant-Garde, 1910-1925, recent books by William Marling, Henry Sayre, and Christopher MacGowan, and Paul Mariani's biography William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. Taking full advantage ofprevious scholarship, Peter Schmidt not only extends our appreciation ofthe effects of Precisionism, Cubism, and Dada on Williams' verse as it evolved from 1913 to 1963, he also situates Williams in a variety of literary traditions. Arguing that each "influence from the visual arts ... led Williams back to a specific literary tradition, to particular authors and literary modes" (8), Schmidt traces the convergence of Precisionism with Williams' rethinking of the pastoral, of Cubism with his revitalization of the sublime ode, of Dada with his experiments with automatic writing and his understanding of American transcendentalism, and of Cubist and Dadaist collage with his transformation of the epic. Schmidt writes: "What is now needed are explorations of how even during the decade in which Williams wrote Spring and All he sought to integrate ideas from the visual arts with what in 1939 he called a 'usable past'—the full range ofboth American and European literary tradition. Accordingly, in this book I argue that in general Williams used the inspiration he gained from the arts not to write poems about pictures or even to create a visual poetics, but to return to and renew specifically literary traditions and modes" (7). Williams' interest in the Precisionists, among them the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and the painters Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, coincided with his celebration of the American tradition, his fascination with modern industrial technology, and his experiments with urban pastoral. Schmidt suggests that the Precisionists exerted "the most pervasive and long-lasting of all visual arts influences" on Williams (10), particularly because of their efforts to work in a native American idiom freed from the European past. The clarity, precision, sharp focus, and expressive but universal point of view of the Precisionist paintings and photographs took Williams well beyond Imagism in his poetry, and contributed to his rediscovery of the American transcendentalist heritage. Cultivating an Emersonian innocence and originality of vision, the Precisionists strove to capture "the lineaments of the spiritual as well as the material" in the natural world (24), and to realize an "idealized Arcadian vision of modern industry" not unlike Emerson's and Book Reviews127 Whitman's (32). Schmidt persuasively delineates the complex interplay between European pastoral and Emersonian idealism in William's urban poems and nature lyrics. The tenets of Cubism, particularly as they were introduced to American artists by de Zayas, Apollinaire, and Gleizes in such little magazines as 291 and The Little Review, inspired Williams throughout his career to experiment with polyphony, fragmentation, quotation, and collage, and to rethink the literary traditions of the ode and the epic. While Williams' later transformations ofthe ode are more self-conscious and openly allusive, Schmidt argues, his lyrics ofthe teens and twenties already display the "effusive style, contrasting voices, and elevated subject matter" of the sublime ode (80). Exploring the possibilities of Cubist collage, Williams extended his use of "found objects" from his Cubist odes to Paterson. The playfulness, pessimism, and subversive ironies ofDada inspired Williams' improvisatory experiments with automatic writing in Kara in Hell and in the poems ofthe decade that followed, and also left their mark on Paterson, which Schmidt reads as the...

Falling into Criticism

The tradition of cultural criticism-the terms seem forthright and upstanding. But there is enough wobble in and among them to make the project they collectively define something more elusive and more interesting than the retrieval of another usable past. Between the words American (belonging to a given nationality) and (an attitude or activity of questioning the status quo), there is some strain. The adjective, associated with national uniqueness and pride, reins in the noun, pulling against its energetic connotations of censorious or subversive analysis. The term cultural, which comes between the two like a buffer or mediator, works to absorb this tension, as does a secondary, narrower meaning that, through studies and literary criticism, both terms share, namely an academic specialization. It is the joint narrower meaning, one might say, that absorbs the stress, promises some kind of synthesis. Yet the narrowing toward the academic is also an expansion; the broader senses of American and lend to the narrower a certain grandeur without which the latter-merging as the academic that concentrates on culture-would be unable to resolve, or appear to resolve, their antagonism. I am proposing, in other words, that the title's apparently superfluous semantic energies assemble themselves into a narrative of expansive concentration in which criticism, including criticism directed at America, falls into or is reduced to an academic discipline specializing in culture, or--to say the same thing more positively-in which the latter tries to ground itself by more or less successfully laying claim to represent the former. To the extent that these essays are united by a common problematic, this narrative of the (perhaps happy) Fall-intoAcademia, a sort of professional creation myth of literary criticism, seems to name what they enact, wrestle with, open to scrutiny. Dissatisfaction with the academic status quo is the volume's implicit point of departure. (Why else we need a myth?) Kenneth Burke's approach, Paul Jay writes, would require a wholesale rethinking of specialized academic departments. Irving Howe makes the challenge more personal: lit-

American Folklore Studies: An Intellectual History

Folklore. Washington Irving and Mark Twain used it in their fiction; Sigmund Freud and William James incorporated it into their work; Henry Ford and Franklin Roosevelt promoted it. Their efforts were set against the background of folklorists who brought collections of traditional tales, songs, and crafts to the attention of a modernizing society. The ideas of these folklorists influenced how Americans thought about the character of their society and the directions it was taking. Here for the first time is a history of American folkloristic ideas and the figures who shaped them. Simon Bronner puts these ideas in cultural context, showing the interconnection of folklore studies with historical events, social changes, and intellectual movements. He follows the beginnings of American folklore studies in the antiquarian literature of the 1830s through the rise of folklore societies in the 1880s to the emergence of an independent discipline in the 1950s. In this progression, Bronner identifies several major themes tying folklore studies to intellectual history: first, the unearthing of a hidden, usable past; second, the charting of time and space; and third, the structuring of communication. More than a chronological or biographical history, this book is an interpretation of folkloristic ideas and their relationship to American society.

Review: A Usable Past: The New York State Archives

Book Review| January 01 1988 Review A Usable Past: The New York State Archives James B. Rhoads James B. Rhoads Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (1988) 10 (1): 64–65. https://doi.org/10.2307/3377816 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation James B. Rhoads; Review. The Public Historian 1 January 1988; 10 (1): 64–65. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3377816 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1988 Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

History and the Public: Legacies of the Progressive Era

In 1931 Carl Becker summoned his fellow professional historians to adapt their knowledge of the to Mr. Everyman's present needs. His call reflected a growing realization that the historical profession and the public had come to view history fundamentally different ways. Contending that history the academy and public was in lowest common denominator the same, Becker attempted to counter his colleagues' perceptions of an ever-widening gap between the two genres., In the half century since Becker's address, other historians have echoed his concern, wondering why communication between professional historians and the general public has steadily diminished even while the public's search for a usable past remains intense. In part, the divergence between professional historians and the public the twentieth century has been a result of specialization and the concentration of historical scholarship within colleges and universities. As universities employed more historians, advancement the historical profession resulted from publishing articles and monographs specialized disciplines for fellow scholar-teachers across the nation, rather than participating a variety of local historical enterprises for a general audience.2 Professional historians employed federal agencies since the 1930s, the National Archives, State Department, Pentagon, and National Park Service, also came to address their work largely to fellow specialists government, universities, and historic preservation.

The Authentic Mark Twain: A Literary Biography of Samuel L. Clemens by Everett Emerson, and: The Making of Mark Twain: A Biography by John Lauber

Reviews 251 as a model for further such volumes from U.C. Press; similar collections focus­ ing on the work of Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, William Everson, Jack Spicer, and Robert Creeley—collections which not only laud those poets’ strengths, but recognize their limitations—are sorely needed. LEE BARTLETT The University of New Mexico The Authentic Mark Twain: A Literary Biography of Samuel L. Clemens. By Everett Emerson. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. 330 pages, $29.95.) The Making of Mark Twain: A Biography. By John Lauber. (New York: American Heritage. Distributed by Ploughton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1985. 298 pages, $17.95.) In 1865, Mark Twain wrote to Mrs. Fairbanks, “I have a ‘call’ to litera­ ture, of a low order—i.e., humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit.” In The Authentic Mark Twain, Everett Emerson asserts that Twain’s “strongest suit” was not only humor but authenticity, for, after all, insisted Twain in 1868, “the end &aim of my ambition is to be authentic— to be considered authentic.” It is Emerson’s thesis—a thesis which makes for a good hook on which to hang a literary biography—that the “old, original, and authentic Mark Twain was a humorist” (273) who drifted from authenticity. Emerson, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, asserts that Twain moved from being an authentic western storyteller and platform lec­ turer employing a “vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains” (20) to becoming a vernacular novelist who would reach his greatest expressions of authenticity in The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and, Emerson asserts curiously, “Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut.” Emerson’s book, then, is a literary tour of Twain’s rise to authenticity, his search for “a usable past,” and, as a “badgered and harassed” artistbusinessman -husband, his increasingly artistic failures and near-failures, as seen in such “unauthentic” fragments as “A Murder, a Mystery and a Mar­ riage” and “The Autobiography of a Damned Fool,” and in such “botched” works as The Prince and the Pauper, Joan of Arc, Puddn’head Wilson, and Tom Sawyer Abroad. Emerson follows Van Wyck Brooks in attributing the failures to American cultural crassness and to Olivia Langdon Clemens, who “edited the man far more drastically than she edited the author” (115), thus helping to vitiate Twain’s“freedom and authenticity.” Bythe turn of the century, “Mark Twain had given up his aim of authenticity” (244) and turned to writing private, dark, unpublishable expressions while presenting to the public, as Louis J. 252 Western American Literature Budd demonstrates in his recent Our Mark Twain, a carefully groomed myth of vernacular authenticity. Everett Emerson has packed The Authentic Mark Twain with a wealth of new facts and hitherto unpublished material and has crafted this wellwritten literary biography into a significant contribution to Twainiana—a must for Twain scholars. In his slightly lighter-weight but nonetheless impressive biography, The Making of Mark Twain,John Lauber, a professor of English at the University of Alberta, has affectionately crafted an important survey of Mark Twain’s life, from his birth to his marriage to Olivia Langdon and the publication of The Innocents Abroad (1835-1870). Refreshingly, Lauber has no ax to grind, no thesis to assert. Instead, he sets about, in lively and readable prose, to portray the multi-faceted, complex, often self-contradictory Mark Twain we have come to love—though he does gentle some of the famous theses of the past, such as Van Wyck Brooks’ con­ troversial assertion (attacked by Bernard DeVoto) that Twain the artist was destroyed by America and Livy; and Justin Kaplan’smore recent treatment of the Mr. Clemens/“Mark the Double Twain” duality. Drawing upon newly available sources, Lauber corrects some longstand­ ing misconceptions, labeling a number of stories—such as young Sam’s oath, sworn to his mother, “to be a better boy,” his account of his two-week stint as a Confederate soldier, his adoption of his nom de plume, and his life as a miner and short-term millionaire—as either fictions or exaggerations. (I also have a “corrective...