In Ghosts, the second part of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, a private eye called Blue is hired by a certain White to shadow a man called Black. Black lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn; Blue moves into an equally small apartment just across the street from Black. He is alarmed to discover that Black spends most of his time at his desk by the window, writing in a notebook with a red fountain-pen. In the evenings Black reads, and through his binoculars Blue can just make out the title of Black's book: Walden, by Henry David Thoreau.

Accordingly Blue obtains his own copy of Walden – a 1942 edition published, by coincidence, by one Walter J. Black – thinking it might help him solve the mystery of his assignment. But, like almost every reader of Walden, from Emerson to Stanley Cavell to Auster himself, Blue finds reading this book is “not a simple business”:

Whole chapters go by, and when he comes to the end of them he realizes that he has not retained a thing. Why would anyone want to go off and live alone in the woods? What's all this about planting beans and not drinking coffee or eating meat? Why all these interminable descriptions of birds? Blue thought that he was going to get a story, or at least something like a story, but this is no more than blather, an endless harangue about nothing at all.

The next day Blue tries the book again, and finally comes across a sentence he can understand: “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.” Blue realizes that “the trick is to go slowly, more slowly than he has ever gone with the words before.” Nevertheless, he still finds the whole business excruciatingly painful, and curses Black for torturing him in this way. “What he does not know,” the anonymous narrator remarks, “is that were he to find the patience to read the book in the spirit in which it asks to be read, his entire life would begin to change, and little by little he would come to a full understanding of his situation – that is to say, of Black, of White, of the case, of everything that concerns him.” Instead, Blue throws the book aside in disgust and goes out for a walk, not realizing “that this is the beginning of the end.”

My husband was a slave of de Sloans and didn't get to see me as often as he wanted to, and of course, as de housemaid then, dere was times I couldn't meet him, clandestine like he want me. Us had some grief over dat, but he got a pass twice a week from his marster, Marse Tommie Sloan, to come to see me…Sam was a field hand and drive de wagon way to Charleston once a year wid cotton, and always bring back something pretty for me.George P. Rawick, The American Slave : A Composite Autobiography, Vol. 2, Part 1 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972), 300.

Historians have found it difficult to assess the extent and nature of slave cross-plantation marriages (that is, where husband and wife lived on different slaveholdings). This is largely because white sources give no basis for estimating their scale or character. Estate papers and business records often list slaves belonging to a particular owner, but such lists give no indication of spouses and other relatives of those slaves who might belong to neighbours. Similarly, except for scattered comments on visiting privileges given to certain slaves, or references to the possible advantages and inconveniences of allowing slaves to marry off the plantation, owners took little interest in the vigour of such unions.

He has fertilized an A to Z of postwar creativity, quite literally from Kathy Acker to Frank Zappa; he has acted as godfather for literary countercultures from the Beats to the Cyberpunks; he has haunted our media zones as an icon of iconoclasm – and William Burroughs has remained a critical curse. Leaving aside what Burroughs' academic marginality tells us – about Burroughs or academia – the main reason he has hexed his critics is also the key to the proliferation of his image and its power of mimetic magic: those he does not repel, Burroughs fascinates. This is the basis to his distinct iconicity, infectious now across four decades.

Self-styled as El Hombre Invisible, Burroughs fully inhabits Maurice Blanchot's construction of fascination as “the absence one sees because it is blinding”: “Whoever is fascinated doesn't properly speaking, see what he sees. Rather, it touches him in an immediate proximity; it seizes and ceaselessly draws him close, even though it leaves him absolutely at a distance.” Unable or unwilling, Burroughs critics have done little with such knowledge other than to pass it on. Robin Lydenberg, author of the ground-breaking study Word Cultures (1987), could go back twenty years to quote Joan Didion praising Burroughs for “a voice so direct and original and versatile as to disarm close scrutiny of what it is saying”; so too, Robert Sobieszek in his artwork catalogue Ports of Entry (1996), could go back twenty to cite Philippe Mikriammos' formula, “vox Williami, vox monstrorum,” to account for the sound “which ultimately seduces the listener.” A voice that disarms scrutiny; a voice that seduces. In the critical context, to approach Burroughs disarmed and seduced has meant taking him on his own terms – and being taken in by him. Burroughs resists power to the extent that he also exercises it, understands power so well precisely because he has always worked from its deep insides. From the outset, this WASP scion of American big business (public relations on his mother's side, adding machines on his father's) was born to live out power's painful contradictions. His life as addict, homosexual, and writer literalized that undesired inheritance with a perverse vengeance, queering the legacy of “Poison” Ivy Lee and Burroughs computers by reincarnating it as a pathogenic cultural virus. And so Burroughs dedicated himself to immortality by becoming what Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene (1976), called a “meme”: “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” which propagates analogously to the genetic code and the parasitism of viruses, and is more than metaphorically “alive”. If memes survive by parasitizing human minds, so, reciprocally, can the mind survive through parasitic self-replication: the viral programme “simply says ‘Copy me and spread me around.’” This is Burroughs: “all poets worthy of the name are mind parasites, and their words ought to get into your head and live there, repeating and repeating and repeating.” He could scarcely be more explicit. And so to exempt Burroughs from the terms of his own critique is to miss the whole point of his textual politics – that is, not only his texts' analysis of power, but their own relation to it – since complicity in all he opposes is the condition of his work's extraordinary brinkmanship. As I have argued elsewhere, it may well be those who would gladly burn Burroughs who have best understood the unique force of his work, a force at its maximum in his two crucial decades, falling either side of The Naked Lunch (1959).

A large portion of colonial America's population on the eve of the revolution was composed of immigrants and children of recent immigrants. Because of the variety of ethnic groups involved, studies of how Americans reacted to the revolution should not be limited to generalizations. The involvement of different ethnic groups has been examined, but these studies seem largely to have concentrated on the wealthier and more politically motivated members of those groups. Examining the reactions of poorer members of ethnic groups has been difficult, since few of these people left significant documentation of their experiences. German redemptioners, an important sub-group of colonial American immigrants, seem to have been well represented among the lower orders of colonial American society. A memoir of Johann Carl Büttner's experiences in America prior to and during the revolution provides a revealing and detailed portrait of his reactions to the revolution. This portrait may well be an archetype for German redemptioners of the “lower sort.”

Gillis set down his tan cardboard extension case and wiped his black, shining brow. Then slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw: Negroes at every turn; up and down Lenox Avenue, up and down 135th Street; big lanky Negroes, short, squat Negroes; black ones, brown ones, yellow ones; men standing idle on the curb, women, bundle-laden, trudging reluctantly homeward, children rattle-trapping about the sidewalks; here and there a white face drifting along, but Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere. There was assuredly no doubt of his whereabouts. This was Negro Harlem.

This is the first sighting of Harlem for King Solomon Gillis, the protagonist of Rudolph Fisher's story “City of Refuge,” published in 1925 in Atlantic Monthly. Gillis has fled the South after killing a white man, and comes to Harlem, “with the aid of a prayer and an automobile” (3) to escape being lynched. His arrival sees him propelled into a carnivorous city of disorienting sounds, speed and subways until, like “Jonah emerging from the whale” (3), he is burped up into a sunny, calm and all-black Harlem. The spectacle of a public space peopled by “Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere,” seems to hold a utopian promise: “In Harlem, black was white. You had rights that could not be denied you; you had privileges, protected by law. And you had money. Everybody had money…The land of plenty was more than that now; it was also the city of refuge” (4). However, this vision of plenty and security ultimately proves chimerical for the naïve Southerner who fails to see beyond the surface effects of the urban scene. For Fisher, the turned around, “black is white” world of Harlem involves complex issues of racial agency and identification which are central to the narrative of modernity associated with the experience of migration to the North. In his work – and in that of Bruce Nugent and Nella Larsen, which also form the basis of this article – we find a recurrent focus on the urban scene of Harlem as a space of spectacular and spectacularised desire, and an understanding of racial identity as contingent and performative within this space.

From long experience and wide observation I have come to have little patience with the science of ethnology that consigns a man, or race of men, to generations of slow development.

Richard Henry Pratt, Proceedings of the National Education Association, 1895, 763

These people, who are with us and with whom we share a common fate, are a thousand years behind us in moral and mental development. Substantially the two races, {Negro and Indian} are in the same condition, and the question as to what education is best for them, and how such education is to be put within their reach, is pressing itself closely upon all thinking men and women.

Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Proceedings of the Department of Superintendence, Circulars of Information, No. 3, Bureau of Education, 1883, 139.

In the final two decades of the nineteenth century, Americans built an extensive system of Indian schools, largely financed by Congress and increasingly controlled from Washington. These schools were principally residential, boarding institutions. Their goal was to indoctrinate Indian children in white ways: to eradicate native tribal cultures. This campaign to transform native children into American citizens appeared to represent a clear declaration of faith in the equality and educability of the Indian. Today, its aggressive and misguided nature is recognized and the long-term consequences for all the tribes are beginning to be understood. But, while scholars acknowledge the blinkered ethnocentricism of Indian policy, they have not questioned that its goal was rapid Indian assimilation. Historians argue over the impact of pseudo-scientific racist ideas on the formulation of Indian policy; disagreements focus on the pre-Civil War period and the early twentieth century. However, it is generally accepted that, in the late nineteenth century, Indian affairs were dominated by a group of Christian reformers and their universalist, Christian ideals. These self-styled “Friends of the Indian” worked for legislative reforms to bring individual land ownership and citizenship to all adult Indians and schooling to their children. Their reform programme, historians have consistently argued, was driven by a single overriding assumption: Indians, once having discarded their savage lifestyle, were capable of joining American society as the white man's equal.

Academic analysis of impeachment is not a crowded field. Most pre-Watergate scholars rely heavily on interpretations of the Federalist Papers, on general constitutional histories and on the dubious lessons of the 1868 trial of President Andrew Johnson. Post-1974 works tend to draw from the works of Irving Brant (1972) and Raoul Berger (1973). Sterling Professor of Law at Yale, Charles L. Black Jr., first published Impeachment: A Handbook in 1974, with the declared intention of clarifying the theories and processes of impeachment for the layman. This guide, reissued in 1998, stimulates renewed debate on the ethics of presidential leadership and abuse of power whilst avoiding an excessive preoccupation with precedent and with the works of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. His use of “hypothetical,” contemporary examples to illustrate his points (a President's abuse of the I.R.S. to harrass opponents, unlawful impoundment of funds appropriated by Congress and unauthorized wars) reflects the tumultuous era in which his text was first published. Interestingly, despite his self-confessed aversion to the thirty-seventh President, the author is surprisingly sympathetic, by implication only, to some of the Nixon Administration's arguments with the Special Prosecutor's office. This reinforces the reader's impression of a politically neutral work which retains full force and relevance despite the passage of a quarter of a century. Many of Black's points, in fact, bear direct relevance to the trial of President Clinton, particularly his underlying concern that investigative mania might tempt rampantly partisan prosecutors to transgress not only on a president's legal rights as a citizen but also on his rights as Chief Executive. Dilys Hill (1999) raises a similar concern in noting Congress's insistence in 1994 that the Whitewater investigations into Bill and Hillary Clinton's business affairs continue despite the finding of Special Prosecutor Robert Fiske that the White House had not obstructed justice or been guilty of “ethical wrongdoing.”

Black criticizes the Supreme Court's 1974 decision to waive executive privilege and force the release of Nixon's private tapes, a view which places him foursquare with Clinton on the issue of compelling testimony from Secret Service agents, one of the most controversial elements of the Starr investigations. Black also opposes the notion that incumbent presidents should face trial in civil suits and one suspects he would disapprove of incumbents being called to give testimony in such actions (though this is not specifically stated). Black's view that all indictments should be suspended until after the president's term expires is one with which overworked White House lawyers would wholeheartedly agree.