Far and away the most important activity of the Virginia assembly of 1748–9 was a wholesale revision of the colony's laws. The result of two years' hard labour by a special committee of leading members of the Council and House of Burgesses, this revision was the first in more than forty years and many laws were obsolete, inadequate or contradictory. Indeed, there had not been a printed edition of the laws for some sixteen years and the newer and more remote counties lacked copies of them. At the end of the session Lieutenant Governor Sir William Gooch congratulated the assembly on its accomplishment of a laborious but worthwhile task and submitted the revision to the Board of Trade in a routine fashion. The response of the home government was anything but routine, and the resulting series of events was to inaugurate the process by which, over the next quarter century, Virginia's confidence in the home government to deal sympathetically and responsibly with its problems was slowly eroded.

Richard Mather's promising pastoral career in England suddenly ended in 1634 with the wholesale suspensions inaugurated by Archbishop Laud. With no choice other than submission to the Church of England, Mather set sail for New England and, in so doing, joined a large scale folk migration that was to total over 15,000 people in the decade between 1630 and 1640. Encouraged by the early successes of the ‘ Great Migration ’ to New England, Mather took the birth of his son in 1639 as a sign and named him Increase ‘ on the Account of the great Increase of every sort, which God favoured the country with about the time of his nativity ’. A year after Increase's birth, Richard Mather's joy was once again chastened when there ensued a remigration to England such that, in Increase Mather's words, ‘ since the year 1640, more Persons have removed out of New England, than have gone thither ’. Leading in the removal from New England were nearly half of the highly trained ministers and university men who, in large measure, accounted for the uniqueness of the New England settlements.

Studies of the Massachusetts communities of Newburyport and Boston have revealed a high rate of geographical mobility for their populations, in excess of what had been previously thought. Because of the difficulty in tracing out-migrants these works have concentrated on persisters, though to do so is to give an incomplete picture of communal progress. Peter R. Knights in his study of Boston between 1830 and 1860 attempted to follow his out-migrants but was only able to trace some 27 per cent of them. The problem of out-migration is generally regarded as being too large for solution through human effort, but important enough now to engage the computer. What follows bears on the subject of out-migration, for it is an analysis of where part of the migrating populations of the east went in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, namely to San Francisco.

Charles Sumner's Supplementary Civil Rights Bill, which after a tortuous legislative history became law as the Civil Rights Act of 1875, was intended to spell out in specific terms the procedural guarantees of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and so to outlaw racial discrimination in public accommodation, entertainment and transport, in juries, churches and publicly supported schools and charities. The measure was not only the culmination of Sumner's life-long efforts on behalf of the Blacks, but also the only comprehensive attempt made by Congress during Reconstruction to secure racial equality. Yet the purpose of the Act was undermined even before its passage by die racial ambivalence and political calculations of its supporters, while the challenge it made to traditional concepts of American federalism was defeated in 1883 by the Supreme Court's decision that it was unconstitutional. The nature and extent of this challenge, however, becomes apparent only in the context of the pressures that shaped Republican legislation.

Half a century before Jacob Riis and Jane Addams groped for the conscience of the nation with their exposures of urban misery, a few determined citizens were already fighting the long battle to liberate the huddled wretches of the cities. In Boston some of the techniques of the later social agencies were anticipated as early as the 1830s by Joseph Tuckerman's Association of Delegates from the Benevolent Societies, but it was New York City which really pointed the way to the future. In the twenty years before the Civil War a number of bodies were founded in the city which in time became permanent welfare institutions. They were in large part the products of conditions similar to those which produced the scientific philanthropy, Social Gospel, settlement house and other social movements of the late nineteenth century, and, like those movements, they anticipated many of the attitudes of the social workers of the Progressive era. It would be a mistake to press the parallel between ante-bellum reform and social Progressivism too far, but the two phenomena shared some common characteristics. Like many Progressives, the urban reformers of the ante-bellum years tended to come from pious middle-class backgrounds, and a number of them began life as missionaries before being drawn into social work. They were a fact-finding generation, investigating social problems with an unprecedented thoroughness, energetically uncovering evidence and compiling statistics with which to open the eyes of an indifferent public. They were very conscious of the social chasm between the rich and the poor and they did what they could to bridge it.

The good things about America, Santayana wrote to Van Wyck Brooks, ‘ are football, kindness, and jazz bands ’. To many this remark would typify the philosopher's lifelong disdain of American life. But Santayana meant his description as a compliment. For he saw football and jazz as manifestations of a healthy spontaneity and goodwill. Of course, there is no question about his ambivalence towards the United States; he loathed what he took to be a lethal presence in the American psyche – a prosaic utilitarianism and moral poverty. Yet he could not write off those qualities that in part redeemed the brave new world: ‘ There is much forgetfulness, much callow disrespect for what is past or alien; but there is a fund of vigour, goodness, and hope such as no nation ever possessed before.’

The problem of defining a coherent cultural identity is one that has confronted generations of Afro-Americans. As part of the justification and defence of slavery and the slave trade many whites rationalized their actions by arguing that all Africans were cultureless savages. The same combination of guilt and arrogance induced them to attempt to suppress and denigrate surviving elements of a culture whose very existence they had already denied. Most black Americans responded to these pressures by rejecting Africa and their African heritage as a source of shame and by trying to deny and to erase their blackness. Malcom X clearly understood this when he proclaimed in 1965: ‘ We have been a people who hated our African characteristics. We hated our black heads, we hated the shape of our noses …, we hated the color of our skin.’ Identification with the dominant white culture took many forms. For some Blacks it involved the use of hair straightening and skin bleaching; for others it meant the elimination of any ethnic quality in their speech, dress, cuisine and religion; for many more it meant a life of morality and hard work lived according to the dictates of the Puritan ethic. The loss of any distinctive cultural identity involved in this process was made worse by the unwillingness of white society to recognize and accept the Afro-American as part of the dominant culture. In these circumstances many blacks found themselves in a cultural limbo without an adequate self-image. White domination of the media meant that they sometimes felt literally invisible. James Baldwin drew attention to this dilemma in a speech delivered in June 1963, when he noted that:

A black child born in this country … discovers two terrifying things. First of all he discovers that he does not exits in it, no matter where he looks – by which I mean books, magazines, movies – there is no reflection of himself anywhere … [if] he finds anything which looks like him, he is authoritatively assured that this is a savage, or a comedian who has never contributed anything to civilization.

The Gilded Age saw the emergence of a number of figures who produced alternative theories to the dominant doctrine of laissez-faire. One such alternative theorist was Henry George (1839–97), a man of pronounced individualist proclivities who invoked the Jeffersonian tradition of sturdy agrarian independence as a corrective to an unbalanced economy which, he believed, was driving a destructive wedge between rich and poor. Today, George is regarded primarily as an economic reformer and his best-selling book with its jingling title, Progress and Poverty (1879), is read for its analysis of post-bellum America and for the panacea that it propounds: a levy on the value of land which, because it was designed to replace all other taxes, came to be called the Single Tax. In contrast, George's religious beliefs have received scant attention from his biographers and historians of the period, who have done little more than note that he was a devout Christian. This oversight has been rectified in a recent article by Fred Nicklason, ‘ Henry George: Social Gospeller ’, which draws attention to the religious orientation of George's writings and discusses his relations with churchmen. Yet although Nicklason stresses the importance of George's religious activity, he asserts that ‘ George himself moved from an initial concern for the single tax as a social reform to a deep-seated regard for its divine sanction ’. I believe that this is a misconception of George, and I shall try to show that his visionary experience led him to regard himself as a religious leader and prompted him to formulate his social theory. I also hope to demonstrate that his messianic pretensions grew with his following and that it was his religious role, rather than the Single Tax, which during his lifetime not only made disciples but also influenced theorists who were otherwise unsympathetic to his economic bolus.

Public regulation of broadcasting in the United States effectively began during the First World War. The history of such regulation, from its beginning to the present, is essentially a catalogue of governmental attempts to keep pace with extremely rapid technological and commercial developments. Thus the regulation of broadcasting should be viewed more as a series of empirical adjustments to changing circumstances and conditions than as expressing a coherent philosophy or theory of administration. But, in their attempts to deal pragmatically with abuses in the broadcasting industry, regulators found themselves evolving principles and standards which served to define and clarify the relationship between the government and the broadcasting interests. The purpose of this paper is to examine this relationship and to account for the gulf which has developed between the ‘ theory ’ and the practice of broadcast regulation.

The character, modes, and forms of artistic expression in any epoch are in many ways governed by prevailing intellectual and philosophical points of view. What is considered ‘ good taste ’ by the patron of painting, poetry or music will often seem quite incredible to future generations because intellectual bases of perception and appreciation change so inexorably and often so quickly. If the final judgment about what is satisfying (not to mention ‘ beautiful ’) in a work of art must finally be left to each individual to decide for whatever reasons he feels important, this in no way alters the fact that a work of any period can be seen to exhibit aspects that are characteristic of its creator and audience. By studying a selection of works from a historical period, we are able better to understand not only the works themselves, but at least some particular characteristics of those who produced them, and those for whom they were intended. In a comparative study of the arts we will most quickly reach productive ends using what Erwin Panofsky terms an Iconological approach, a search for ‘ intrinsic meaning and content ’. This angle of vision looks to underlying principles to reveal important generalizations about attitudes of nations, periods, classes, or religions, or philosophical persuasions ‘ unconsciously qualified by one personality and condensed into one work ’. The scholar's work becomes synthetic, rather than just analytic. In the search, one must recover and ponder the ‘ intrinsic meaning ’ of every document of civilization available which relates to the work under consideration. Panofsky mentions specifically the areas of politics, poetry, religion, philosophy, and social tendencies of personality, period and country.

Belief that the Supreme Court is overburdened is not new. In the years after the Civil War, the expansion of the United States, both territorially and economically, enlarged the work of the Justices enormously, for not only did the number of cases on which they were required to pass judgement increase but the miles they had to travel within their own circuits also multiplied hugely. In 1891 the Circuit Courts of Appeal Act was passed, establishing intermediate courts between the District Courts, product of the original 1789 Judiciary Act, and the Supreme Court itself. Whereas in 1890 before the Act was passed 623 new cases were filed, in the 1892 Term only 275 were, and the Court was soon able to reduce its backlog. Nevertheless the number began once again to drift upwards so that by 1923 nearly 750 appeals and petitions for certiorari, on most of which the Justices were obliged to pronounce, reached the Supreme Court. Following intense lobbying by Howard Taft, at that time Chief Justice, a major reform took place in 1925 which allowed the Court discretionary power over virtually all its docket.

In June 1974, Tim Findley reported the shoot-out between Los Angeles police and the Symbionese Liberation Army for Rolling Stone. Fully covered by TV, police fanaticism and the fantasies of Cinque entered every home:

People sat in their living rooms, watching an epic battle of American insanity, commenting to each other about the cases of ammunition being unloaded from the FBI car, about the small grin on the cop's face as he threw the bolt home on his rifle before firing another round into the blazing little bungalow in south Los Angeles. His base-ball cap and clumsy flak jacket along with his bolt-action rifle made him appear as a boy playing at a game in which all the battles are heroic spectacles – where just the imaginary bad guys fall dead.

The camera pans closer …

Henry James's The Ivory Tower (1917) has suffered a similar fate to that of other incomplete last novels; most critical discussion has centred on the way it would have ended, taking into account resemblances with earlier works. This line of enquiry has not been very profitable; James's late style is too complex and rich to tempt anyone to continue The Ivory Tower in the way that ‘ Another Lady ’ has recently gone on with Sanditon. In any case one cannot legitimately say one wishes that James had lived to finish The Ivory Tower, since in fact he lived on without doing so; he had enough time to complete it if he had wanted. His general intentions were clear as we know from the ample notes he left. Why then did James give up? He stopped with the outbreak of the First World War, no doubt on the day war broke out. The really interesting critical question with regard to The Ivory Tower is: What is there in the novel, in its design as well as in its completed opening, which James found contradicted by war? James's imagination found the creative act of writing The Ivory Tower incompatible with war-time experience. He turned to other work, such as The Sense of the Past.

Much has been made of Washington Irving's literary debts to Walter Scott. Influence there was, stretching back long before that day late in August 1817 when the laird of Abbotsford came limping up the gravel walk to greet his American visitor. But the relationship cannot be adequately expressed as Irving's discipleship to Scott. There were obligations on both sides.

To arrive at Pound's Canto XXIII from Poe's ‘ Sonnet to Science ’ is a problematic task for more and less obvious reasons. Part of the way in which we may make the approach is through the resonances of certain figures prominent in the history of ideas; in particular to Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born geologist and natural historian who was a central personality in Cambridge circles from his arrival in America in 1846 until his death in 1873. Apart from Edward Lurie's excellent biography, Louis Agassiz, A Life in Science (Chicago, 1960), the twentieth century bears only scattered reference to him, whereas the latter half of the nineteenth century celebrated his work enthusiastically and prolifically. Part of the reason for his diminished presence after the turn of the century lies undoubtedly in his position outside the mainstream of contemporary biological thinking, particularly as a result of his quarrel with Asa Gray during the 1850s; Agassiz was the only scientist of influential standing to oppose himself to the doctrine of Evolution. Consequently, he occupies a far less prominent place in the history of biology than he did in his own era.

Although many contemporary American novelists have rejected the straightforward representation of social reality in fiction, this rejection may occur for a number of reasons. In Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs it stems from a fear that the inanimate world is somehow superseding the animate, the sovereignty of the individual is being threatened. John Hawkes refers to the novelists ‘ who hope for more in the novel than trying to build brick walls of brick ’, and suggests that ‘ the true purpose of the novel is to assume a significant shape and to objectify the terrifying similarity between the unconscious desires of the solitary man and the disruptive needs of the visible world ’. Norman Mailer also remarks on this relationship in his essay ‘ The White Negro ’:

The second world war presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it. For if tens of millions were killed in concentration camps out of the inexorable agonies and contractions of superstates founded upon the always insoluble contradictions of injustice, one was then obliged also to see that no matter how crippled and perverted an image of man was the society he had created, it was nonetheless his creation, his collective creation (at least his collective creation from the past) and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?

In this paper I want to engage in a speculative manner with a number of issues, both moral and stylistic, that reverberate around the contemporary novel. I have chosen to focus this discussion on the idea of the mad hero because, in the concepts of madness and the heroic, vital elements in contemporary aesthetics coincide.