This article traces the changing terrain of the food stamp program in the pivotal decade of the 1970s. In 1969, President Richard Nixon promised to put an end to hunger in America, “for all time.” However, in the fifteen years following this announcement, policymakers erected boundaries around the scope of public food welfare programs. In this article, the author highlights key continuities between earlier, modest attempts at program reform under Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter and the later Reagan-era assault on welfare spending of the early 1980s.

In Cane the reader is immediately struck by Jean Toomer's bold manipulation of a collage technique; he abandons progressive plotting, instead assembling a variety of disparate forms and genres. As well as signalling the heterogeneity of the collage elements through typographical layout, he stretches and scrambles familiar forms, breaking them, splitting them open and stitching them onto other genres. In a letter to Toomer on 25 April 1922, Waldo Frank describes the effect of these broken forms: “in the reading the mind does not catch on to a uniformly moving Life that conveys it whole to the end, but rather steps from piece to piece as if adventuring through the pieces of a still unorganized mosaic.” As Frank points out, Toomer abandons linear narrative and “uniform” progression, subjecting the reader to chaotic surprises and unexpected truths revealed through the process of piecing together the meaning of seemingly random fragments.

Much has been written about community in Yoknapatawpha; a great deal of it reads like an apology for Arcadia. Cleanth Brooks is a persistent offender:

The little town is old-fashioned and backward looking. It is suspicious of any outsiders who would disturb its life, and when it cannot expel the alien, it tries to wall him off in a kind of cultural cyst as bees enclose with waxen walls a beetle or wasp that has got inside the hive.

The activities of Jefferson, Miss., in Light in August strike me as being less benevolent than the activities of bees. However, my point is more general: even in “old fashioned” communities people do not “Know who they are and where they belong” (xviii) as of a timeless right. They know because they engage in social exchanges which substantiate or qualify their belonging.

Recently Myra Jehlen has undertaken a class-based analysis of such exchanges. In Class and Character in Faulkner's South she discovers “the living pulse” of Yoknapatawpha in its “tangled social context.” As a result, she pleads with some justification for a shift of interest towards class in Faulkner scholarship:

William Faulkner was obsessed by history … [and] he drew characters whose inner lives are essentially linings for selves tailored to unalterable social patterns.… His people's tragedy is that their interior world has been co-opted by an external world they never made and apparently no one can ever unmake, (p. 1)

If reports are to be believed, “waiting for Bakke” was the main preoccupation of the Washington press corps in the Spring of 1978. The case had been argued before the United States Supreme Court in a blaze of publicity, and, while the nine judges were considering the arguments, there was no shortage of commentators to “advise” the Court. As one of these “advisers,” Ronald Dworkin, noted “No lawsuit has ever been more widely watched or more thoroughly debated in the national and international press before the Court's decision.” Thus when Mr. Justice Powell began to read the opinion of the Court in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a “hush enveloped the courtroom.” The audience was hushed but expectant because it believed that it was about to witness a judgement of momentous historical importance. The pre-decision coverage suggested that the Court was either going to give or deny its constitutional imprimatur to the principle of affirmative action or preferential treatment. But unfortunately the judgement did not live up to its advance publicity. It did not definitively decide the issue, in fact it decided remarkably little. True, Allan Bakke did win and the University of California lost. However, the fate of affirmative action programmes was not resolved, and indeed despite the Supreme Court's pronouncements in two further cases, United Steelworkers of America v. Weber and Fullilove v. Klutznick, continues to hang in the constitutional balance.

“But he has no sense of history!” is a cry that is all too familiar in many Jamesian commentaries. The following essay attempts to provide a corrective to this complaint by reading Washington Square as a critique of a particular moment in the development of the bourgeois temperament. It is not insignificant that this is the only novel for which James chose a specific locale as a title, because historical time and geographical place are the issues which overtly confront the reader, to an extent (excepting The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima) insisted upon as nowhere else in James's works. The time is, predominantly, the difficult period of the late 1830s and early 1840s, and the place is that area of lower Manhattan which awkwardly bastions itself against contemporary turbulence.

Dr. Sloper's deliberate choices of resistence are carefully located within a changing landscape, choices which match the period of Manhattan's most rapid expansion whereby the Island below Canal Street was condensed by overwhelming commercial pressure.

The historical debate over the Spanish-American War of 1898 is being reopened on both sides of the Atlantic. Until comparatively recently historians gave confident answers to the questions of the causes and consequences of the war. Moral assumptions about America's true mission were never very far from the surface of the interpretations which had won general acceptance in the United States. America's involvement in world affairs and more especially the acquisition of an empire was viewed as a perversion of her mission. There existed a consensus of opinion among historians that President McKinley and his administration were not in control of policy; that they were swept forward by a tide of public feeling, by political considerations, and by Congressional pressures they found impossible to resist. It was believed that war had been foisted on the American people by those who manipulated public opinion, by mass hysteria cleverly fomented by sectional interests, by the newspapers, by business pressure groups, and by jingo senators. Responsibility for the acquisition of the Philippines was uncritically ascribed to a junior member of the administration, Theodore Roosevelt, who when Assistant Secretary of the Navy, it was alleged, had plotted the whole thing with his friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Rigorous research is challenging every one of these assumptions. The strategic aspects of American foreign policy, and more particularly the influence of naval officers on national policy, have been seriously studied by only a few historians, whose work has as yet little affected the ‘classical’ textbook versions of American policy before the war with Spain.

The British Museum Library was established by statute in 1753, and since then the development of its collection of printed books has passed through three major phases corresponding to, and interacting with, three phases in the development of the aims and organization of scholarship in general.

The acceptance by the United States of responsibilities in the Philippines was regarded with widespread approval in Britain. It was believed that American administration of the archipelago would not only bring benefits otherwise unattainable to the Filipinos, but that it would also be to Britain's advantage. An immediate consequence might be support for British policies in East Asia, reducing the relative power in that area of, especially, Russia and Germany; a longer-term consideration, reflecting a major obsession of the time, was the hope of Anglo-American association in the ‘moral’ enterprise of extending ‘Anglo-Saxon’ civilization and influence. Accordingly, American activities in the Philippines were regarded at the outset with sympathetic interest and given close attention. But during the next decade sympathy diminished and interest declined, and by about 1907 little trace of the initial response remained. The reactions to American policy towards the Philippines among informed and influential people are revealed by a study of journals of opinion.

There is no comprehensive study of Federalist opposition to the War of 1812. The fragmentary studies that exist suggest a party divided between New England extremists on the one hand and moderates in the Middle and Southern States on the other. In this interpretative framework, Federalists to the south and west are invariably portrayed as “good” Federalists, that is, as patriots who consciously and decisively rejected New England's leadership in order to support the war or at least maintain a discreet neutrality. A closer examination of the subject, however, suggests that this view is largely false.

No recent student of American historiography has failed to acquire a passing acquaintance with some of the historical writing of the American Socialist A. M. Simons. No treatment of economic determinism in American thought omits at least a footnote of credit to Social Forces in American History, published in 1911, in which the irascible radical touched upon ideas and interpretations that Charles Beard and others were to develop with less heat and less haste. Simons's treatment of the American Revolution and the Constitutional Convention, of the Jacksonian era, and of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, sounded themes that became staples of debate within the historical profession. In fact, however, Simons's history has a distinction that goes beyond its role as the first Marxist interpretation of the American past, or as an expression of ‘progressive history’. It is part of a much older, larger and many-sided body of thought that made up an attack upon the genteel tradition in American intellectual and cultural experience. In literature, that attack developed a set of responses that recent scholars have termed the ‘vernacular tradition’. By examining Simons's historical writing in the context of the vernacular tradition, one can see that his history is much more than a Marxist curiosity. His history was shaped both by experience and ideology, and it was intended to be a cultural critique as well as an economic one.

M. W. – I'd like to begin with a question about the Fugitive group. Would you say that there was any special critical emphasis in these early Fugitive discussions of poetry? You have said before that there's a fallacy in assuming there was a systematic programme behind the Fugitive group.

Some six years ago Gordon Wood closed a brief discussion of mobs in the American Revolution by asking whether, if the mob was no less a mob than its European counterpart, the revolution was any less a revolution. Three recent full-length studies, Pauline Maier's From Resistance to Revolution, Richard D. Brown's Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts and Patricia U. Bonomi's A Factious People, deal in significant part with mob, or, as I will call it, crowd activity in early America, although in none of them does it form the main subject. The approach to it of all three is fresh and sophisticated but, as the cliché goes, they raise as many questions as they answer. This essay will look first at the questions they answer and then go on to the ones they raise.