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.

During the past fifty years few subjects of historical consequence have been more controversial than that of the population history of the American Indian. At one extreme, in 1939 Alfred L. Kroeber estimated the population of pre-Columbian North America at about 900,000. At the other extreme, in 1983 Henry F. Dobyns estimated it at about 18,000,000. Since the total North American Indian population by the early twentieth century was no more than 350,000 to 450,000, the human question concealed in the statistical controversy is staggering: did the North American Indian population decline by a ratio of about 2 to 1 between the end of the fifteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century – or did it decline by 50 to 1 ? Or more?

Despite all the talk of protectionism in both rich and poor countries there has probably never been a time when the idea of economic autarchy has been less popular than the 1980s. The so-called “New Protectionism” of the 1980s has several historically novel dimensions but far from being “New” the essential idea is the very ancient one of corporations encouraged by the governments of the countries in which they are domiciled attempting to gain competitive advantages over those from other countries by fair means and by foul. The traditional charges of low cost producers flooding markets with cheap, and sometimes dangerously inferior goods, the use by foreign governments of unfair incentives to exporters (export subsidies), and the imposition of quantitative import restrictions by importing countries, are flying around global commerce to a degree that has some very sober politicians, policy makers and economists publicly worried for the very future of the global system and, by implication, world security. To put it bluntly, the ideologues of “free trade” or “liberalization” as it is increasingly being labelled, argue that the “New Protectionism” if it is permitted to spread will inevitably lead to a “New Depression,” and this may well lead to global anarchy not only in commerce but also in the politico-military relations between nations.

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.

A Son at the Front is the story of a war fought, as Edith Wharton said, “from the rear,” a war in which the art of portrait painting becomes a deadly weapon. In John Campton's World War I Paris, where the fashionable portrait painter wields his paintings in a behind the lines battle to gain, as he says, “possession” of his grown son, Wharton probes the sexual politics underlying the development of modernist aesthetics by writing a new kind of war novel. The novel invokes and then questions a central trope of the fiction and poetry that, until recently, has been identified as The Literature of the Great War.

He has, I am convinced, one of the strongest, most abundant minds alive in the whole world, and he has the smallest penetration. Indeed, he has no penetration. He is the culmination of the Superficial type… here he is, spinning about, like the most tremendous of water-boatmen… kept up by surface tension. As if, when once he pierced the surface, he would drown.

The world of Tom Sawyer, both that of the character and of the novel which bears his name, is a world dominated by fences; the neat, straight palings that surround the Widow Dougla's property, the fence around the Teacher house over which the lovestick Tom gazes longingly after Becky, and all the other upright boundaries delineating St. Petersburg respectability. As the central icon of the novel, Aunt Polly's white-washed fence appropriately represents the care and maintenance of order to which the town is committed, an order upon which both Tom and his story depend. Although Twain first identifies St. Petersburg as a poor, shabby, frontier village, it is far from defenseless in its confrontations either with shabbiness or wilderness. Well ordered by its fences and undergirded, like Tom's story, by the central institutions of civil and cultural order — the court, the school, the church — it is a society where things have been assigned their proper places and where the primary function of the St. Petersburg elect is to tend those places. This is a world overseen by guardians and Sunday superintendents, schoolmastes, and judges, authorities who, if sometimes mistaken, or even slightly absurd, are essentially benign and nearly always reliable. Thus it is that the minister, praying for the community's children, does so in the context of a hierarchy of responsibility that from country officials to the President of the United States, an ordering presence that, among other reassuring work, is to guarantee the well-being of the young. As though to provide the fullest representation of this benevolent system, Missouri's most important senator, Thomas Hart Benton, makes a cameo appearance in the novel, albeit one in which he is judged of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as a book about boyish freedom, it affirms at every turn an order of the most conventional sort and depends upon that order for the version of boyhood it depicts.

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.