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Reviews the book "The Pedagogical Wallpaper: Teaching Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper"," edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock.

A review of the book "The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond," by Hannah Gurman, is presented.

Reviews the book 'The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Symbol of the Movement, January 1957-December 1958,' volume IV, edited by Claybome Carson.

Reviews the book `Charlotte Perkins Gilman's `The Yellow Wall-Paper' and the History of Its Publication and Reception: A Critical Edition and Documentary Casebook,' edited and compiled by Julie Bates Dock.

Reviews the book `The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume 3: Birth of a New Age, December 1955-December 1956,' edited by Clayborne Carson and others.

Reviews the book `The Salmon P. Chase Papers, vol. I: Journals, 1829-1872,' edited by John Niven et al.

Reviews the book `The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume I: Called to Serve, January 1929-June 1951,' edited by Clayborne Carson, Ralph E. Luker, and Penny Russell.

Reviews the book `The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 28, Nov. 1st 1778-Feb. 28th 1779,' edited by B. Oberg.

Reviews the book `The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 29, March 1 Through June 30, 1779,' edited by Barbara B. Oberg and others.

This paper involves a close reading of Herman Melville's poem “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander,” published in Melville's 1866 collection Battle-Pieces. Realizing that Melville's poem is one of the first descriptions (ekphrases) of a photograph in verse, the paper explores how Melville's poem uses physiognomy to describe the subject of the photograph: an American Civil War general, who is only identified as “the Corps Commander.” In this way, Melville's poem reflects the nineteenth-century philosophical and popular notions of photography. These notions came to regard photography as a Neoplatonic medium capable of recording and revealing the inner character of its subjects. Relying on these conceptions of photography, Melville's poem describes the photograph of the Corps Commander as having the power to reveal the Platonic absolute of American masculinity, and thus it comes to hail the photograph as a semi-sacred image that has the power to draw Anglo-Saxon American men into a common brotherhood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Humbert's disdain for the roadside idiom of the "Hitchhiking Man" marks a departure from the freewheeling optimism of Kerouac et al., who embrace the liberation of the roadside vagrant. It I is i , however, emblematic of America's "flat architectural economy of the country's sprawling highways" (3), as Elsa Court notes of America's spatial roadside makeup, in which an ostensible motel archipelago, pocked with coffeehouses, gift shops, and gas stations, dominates the nation. The most compelling and engaging thread that Court pulls on here is the asymmetery between Humbert and Sal Paradise, the protagonist of Jack Kerouac's canonical asphalt elegy I On the Road i (1957). [Extracted from the article]

Since its 1953 publication, John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet has incited debate. The text's dialogue with the first published poet of colonial North America has been described as a factual study, a redaction of adultery and a veiled critique of modern society. It is seldom noted, however, that Berryman's strategy of “modulat[ing]” his voice into Anne Bradstreet's raises key questions regarding his reappropriation of her life and writing. Does Homage's conscious ventriloquism problematize its status as a “historical” poem? And how might this revised understanding illuminate the work's relation to America's origins? This paper proposes a more multifaceted context for Homage's composition than has hitherto been recognized. Through mapping the poem's rewriting of history, I demonstrate it to be the product of both national and literary anxieties: if voicing Bradstreet enables Berryman to interrogate the American Dream's legacy, her canonical status casts scrutiny upon the contemporary poet's role in an age of sociopolitical tensions. Foregrounding Berryman's public self-positioning in Homage invites a reassessment of his engagements with society that liberates his oeuvre from “confessional” designations. As a result, it opens the way for readings that might situate Homage and The Dream Songs within the wider tradition of American epic poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While Niedecker's “life by water” is the subject of many of her poems, reflecting the experience of living on the flood-prone island of Black Hawk, Wisconsin, the water imagery that saturates many of her poems also becomes a way of reflecting upon time as it is experienced, of consciousness as process, of subjectivity as something pulled along by a temporal stream. The poetics of temporal flow suggests Niedecker's interest in exploring forms of experience that fall outside conscious attention and that point to her affinity with the modernist philosopher of time, Henri Bergson, whose Creative Evolution she read in 1955. This paper examines some of the short, concise poems Niedecker wrote in the 1950s, together with the later, looser-limbed poems such as “Paean to Place” where she turns away from the objectivist principles of com pression in order to produce fluid, malleable poems commensurate with the flow of experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reviews the book `The Papers of George Catlett Marshall Volume 3: `The Right Man For the Job',' edited by Larry I. Bland and Sharon Ritenour Stevens. Focus on the letters, speeches and memoranda of General George Catlett Marshall.

Among wartime and postwar Americans, North and South, an appetite to narrate their experiences of preserving Union or achieving state sovereignty is reflected in their many accounts of the coming of the Civil War, its fighting, and its aftermath. Private letters from the home front and front line were regularly written and received; despite shortages of paper and ink, diaries and journals were diligently kept, recording experiences at both local and state levels; and memoirs and reminiscences, usually written many years after the events they describe, were produced for regional, national, and even international literary markets. These eyewitness accounts from a wide range of historical actors offer scholars, students, and general readers a remarkably detailed, intimate, and valuable glimpse of lived experience during four years of fighting that shaped a nation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reviews the book `The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case,' by David Rudenstine.

Reviews the book `Sino-American Relations Since 1900,' edited by Priscilla Roberts. Collection of papers about the history of Sino-American relations since 1900.