The place was Salem, noon on an autumnal day in 1634 as Nathaniel Hawthorne told the story. The town's train band has assembled to be put through its paces. Fluttering in the wind is the military ensign featuring the royal colours – the red cross of St. George on a white field. Captain John Endecott receives a message from Roger Williams, who has just returned from Boston. The note tells of a plan by the king to send a governor general to rule Massachusetts and establish episcopacy. “Endecott,” writes Hawthorne, “gazed round at the excited countenances of the people, now full of his own spirit, and then turned suddenly to the standard-bearer, who stood close behind him:”

‘Officer, lower your banner!’ said he.

If Susan Sontag is not a writer behind whom a school or substantial following has gathered, this has much to do with the unsystematic nature of her work. Her studies of thought and culture are not the work of a systematic theorist; they are too much involved with personal taste and response, too free-ranging and open-ended to attract disciplined followers. Sontag's writings receive little direct critical attention at present, though she is often quoted on photography or film, or used to support various theses on post-modernism. Her writings reward more rigorous analysis, especially as the work of this American critic would seem to complement and yet significantly depart from the theorizing of more commonly acknowledged European thinkers – structuralist and post-structuralist – with whom she is contemporary.

Dylan Thomas, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Van Gogh, Paul Tillich, Wolfgang Borchert, Joyce, Kate Chopin: these are only some of the writers and artists in whose work the example or influence of Walt Whitman has been detected over the past few years, and as anyone who has kept abreast of Whitman criticism will be instantly aware, the list could be lengthened considerably. Comparison and influence studies are such a common feature of Whitman scholarship, and he is so firmly established as one of the most provocative mid-nineteenth-century forerunners of modern literature and art, that it would seem virtually impossible to provide a hitherto unexplored instance which is worth more than a glance. Yet the name of the great twentieth century singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie has never been advanced in this context, even though similarities between the two figures have been noted in passing by commentators on Guthrie at least since the publication in 1943 of the latter's autobiography, Bound for Glory. Such neglect must be ascribed at least in part to a lingering academic bias against the study of popular culture in general and of song lyrics in particular.

James Gillespie Blaine has been seen by his contemporaries and historians alike as the archetypal late nineteenth-century politician. Acclaimed by supporters as the “Plumed Knight” and derided by opponents as the “continental liar from the state of Maine,” his political career was impressive. He was Speaker of the House of Representatives, Senator from Maine, came within 2,000 New York votes of winning the Presidency in 1884, and was twice Secretary of State. But his reputation endures mainly as a corrupt and unscrupulous politico. Historians have labelled him immoral, demagogic and “openly anti-British.” They have depicted him as a spokesman for a “seething” late nineteenth–century Anglophobia who was “excessively political, notably in his penchant for cultivating the Irish at Great Britain's expense.” This aspect of Blaine's reputation has been misinterpreted. However, he can still stand as the personification of politics at a time when the spread-eagle rhetoric of campaigns co-existed with pragmatism in policy formulation.