Few American writers have been so rooted in a single place as Henry David Thoreau. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, sixteen miles west of Boston, Thoreau spent nearly all his short life, some forty-four years, in the vicinity of his native town – “the most estimable place in all the world” he deemed it – with only brief sojourns beyond New England. Like many of his contemporaries, he did try out the big city, living close to Manhattan in 1843, an aspiring writer, age twenty-six, with hopes of a literary career. But he quickly recoiled from the urban scene. “I don't like the city better, the more I see it, but worse,” he wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it. It is a thousand times meaner than I could have imagined. … The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population.” Homesick, he was back in Concord within six months. Only once did he stray outside the United States, for a week-long excursion to Montreal and Quebec. To this “Yankee in Canada,” it was a disappointing jaunt. “What I got by going to Canada was a cold.” Thoreau was simply happiest in his hometown, where he “traveled a good deal,” exploring the ponds, woods, and fields, observing and provoking the neighbors, and transforming his chosen ground, in Walden and in his journals, into a sacred site on the American literary landscape. Concord, he declared, is “my Rome, and its people … my Romans.”

Although a good deal of recent critical attention to Melville's writing has followed the lead of Robert K. Martin in addressing the issue of sexuality, the predominant themes in discussions of “Bartleby” remain changes in the nature of the workplace in antebellum America and transformations in capitalism. But, if one of the abiding mysteries of the story is the failure of the lawyer–narrator to sever his relationship with his young scrivener once Bartleby embarks upon his policy of preferring not to, it is a mystery that makes sense within both of these critical discourses. On the one hand, the longevity of the relationship dramatizes a tension implicit in Michael Gilmore's suggestion that the lawyer–narrator straddles the old and the new economic orders of the American market-place. Although he may employ his scriveners “as a species of productive property and little else”, his attachment to his employees is overwhelmingly paternalistic and protective. On the other hand, James Creech suggests that Pierre (published the year before “Bartleby”) is a novel preoccupied with the closeting of homosexual identity within the values of an American middleclass family, while Gregory Woods describes Melville as the nearest thing in the prose world of the American Renaissance to the Good Gay Poet Whitman. In this critical context the longevity of the relationship suggests that the lawyer–narrator's desire to know Bartleby, to protect him, to tolerate him, to be close to him, to have him for his own, and then to retell the story of their relationship, needs to be considered in relation to sexual desire.

During the height of the 1840 presidential campaign season, the Democratic editor, Charles Gordon Greene, printed in his Boston Morning Post the following lampoon of the September 10 Bunker Hill Whig Convention: “ ‘Madam, I am astonished that you do not wave your handkerchief; I thought that the women were all whigs,’ said a gentleman to a lady while the procession was passing by them on Thursday. ‘You are mistaken, sir,’ was the answer – ‘the whigs are all women.’ ” Greene efficiently slung this partisan mud at the 80,000 men and women who demonstrated their support for the Whigs at the gathering. The editor fastened upon the opposition's previous pronouncement that “ ‘The Ladies are all Whigs’ ” and inverted it to effeminize men who would vote for William Henry Harrison. “The Whigs are all women,” “Colonel” Greene now declared. On this page of one of Boston's most widely read dailies, the gender of both Whig men and women was questioned and distinctions between them became blurred in unflattering ways. Greene thus defiled both sexes with one swift printed gesture.

The St. Louis Hegelians existed as a loosely organized group from approximately 1858 to 1880. Before the Civil War they participated in the St. Louis Literary and Philosophical Society which dissolved when most of its members left the city to fight in the war. After the guns fell silent, a few of these “respectable vagabonds,” most notably Henry Conrad Brokmeyer and William Torrey Harris, organized the St. Louis Philosophical Society in January 1866. Both organizations were part of a larger “St. Louis Movement” which included an art club, an Aristotle club, a Shakespeare society, the St. Louis Academy of Science, the St. Louis Philharmonic Society, and the Academy of Useful Science. All of these organizations were primarily composed of local professionals – public school teachers and administrators, judges, and attorneys.

In April 1859 a group of well-to-do manufacturers and Republican politicians coaxed a reclusive Henry Carey, Philadelphia's pre-eminent economist, from his study to a public dinner in his honour. One hundred and twenty five names were at the foot of an invitation to dine at the opulent La Pierre Hotel in recognition of Carey's “service in behalf of American industrial interests.” The banqueting hall glittered with brilliantly illuminated chandeliers trimmed with floral arrangements; at one end a banner proclaimed “Protection to American Labor,” although, curiously, none of the guests looked as though they actually laboured; strung across the other end of the hall another banner blazoned “Harmony of Interests,” but only one interest sat at table. These two slogans encapsulate Carey's world view. He had a vision of an ideal America in which small manufacturing towns would spread across the land. To him “association ” allowed farmers to exchange products with neighbouring mechanics and to develop America beyond the stage of primary producer. Towns would grow into cities, generate a social and cultural life, and cities would trade with other cities. By such a process all underdeveloped nations would achieve economic maturity. Through the free association of co-operating individuals, town and country and capital and labour achieved harmony. The only way to overcome the baneful effect of British imperialism was through the protective tariff. To Carey's way of thinking, free trade was the antithesis of association because it created “centralization,” a system in which a core industrial capitalism traded manufactures for raw materials with a faraway and less developed periphery. Trading at such a distance allowed a merchant class to intervene and siphon off the hard-won efforts of labour. Free trade led to wild, speculative fluctuations in economic activity, periodic overproduction as consumers were not matched by producers, and long-term underdevelopment of the agricultural regions of the American South and West which lay outside the orbit of north-eastern manufacturers. Carey's ripened theoretical position was consequent upon the enormous changes experienced by American society during the decades of the 1830s, 40s and 50s. Like all utopias, the future was intimately linked to the hopes and fears of the present. To the growing but still subaltern class of manufacturers that rubbed shoulders at La Pierre's dinner tables, he offered a comforting vision of American small-town life as an antidote to the reality of British social polarization and class conflict.

At the start of Pagan Spain (1957), Richard Wright recalled a 1946 conversation with Gertrude Stein; she encouraged him to visit Spain: “ ‘You'll see what the Western world is made of. Spain is primitive, but lovely. ’ ” Wright meditated on his fascination with that country, an obsession rooted in the Civil War's political upheaval: “The fate of Spain hurt me, haunted me; I was never able to stifle a hunger to understand what had happened there and why” (PS, 10). Wright wrote as a leftist, as a political writer who had published anti-Franco articles. In his interest in Spain, and especially in his “hunger to understand” its fate after the fall of the Republic, Wright kept company with many mid-century American artists. Hemingway is the most famous instance of a writer engaged with Spanish affairs, but forms of Hispanophilia have marked the lives of many writers and painters. In his account of a trip to Madrid in 1947, Saul Bellow recalled: “ ‘And then of course I had followed the Spanish Civil War and knew as much about what had gone on in Spain between 1936–8 as a young American of that time could learn.’ ” At around that time, the Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell was creating his series of Elegies to the Spanish Republic, a parade of largely black canvases dominated by oblique representations of archetypal Spanish subjects such as bullfighting. As Arthur Danto has written of these images: “ ‘Spain’ denotes a land of suffering and poetic violence and political agony, and ‘Elegy’ carries the literary weight of tragedy and disciplined lamentation. ”

James E. Cronin, The World The Cold War Made. Order, Chaos and the Return of History (New York and London: Routledge, 1996, £15.99). Pp. 344. ISBN 0 0415 90821 3.

Richard M. Fried, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold War America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, £25.00). Pp. 220. ISBN 0 19 507020 8.

Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron. Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, £25.00). Pp. 554. ISBN 0 521 64044 x.

Michael Kort (ed.), The Columbia Guide to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, £32.00). Pp. 366. ISBN 0 231 10772 2.

Joseph M. Siracusa, Into the Dark House. American Diplomacy and the Ideological Origins of the Cold War (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 1998, $36.95 cloth, $14.95 paper). Pp. 288. ISBN 0 941690 81 4, 0 941690 80 6.

There was a time not so long ago when it seemed that there was nothing new to be written about the origins of the Cold War. The topic appeared to have become stale, with the same battles being refought, along familiar lines. Cold War studies have not abated, however, and indeed have been reinvigorated by a number of developments. The writer on American involvement in the Cold War now has to consider how to integrate Eastern bloc material into their work, and the developing theses of scholars from other Western nations, and from within the US to respond to the prevailing intellectual trend in much of academia to focus on ideology, culture and discourse.