It is just under a decade since the historian Theodore Hershberg, a close student of American minority groups and a founder of the then new Journal of Ethnic Studies, announced the demise of the “Age of Aquarius,” pronouncing at the same time its displacement by the “Age of Ethnicity.” In so proclaiming he also, figuratively at least, announced the passing of one of the oldest of American ideals: the notion of the “Melting Pot,” that social process by which the ethnic elements of American society would all be boiled down into a national cultural amalgam by way of their “Americanization.” In announcing the advent of the Age of Ethnicity, Hershberg gave tacit recognition to the fact that the melting pot model of ethnic group accommodation to American culture had now been pre-empted, officially and normatively, by the notion of “cultural pluralism.” There was no further need for amalgamation at all: each group was now to proceed to celebrate its origins, its distinct culture, and its fellowship in any way it pleased, as one of its fundamental American “rights.”

On reflection, it may seem that in some respects the timing of the Hershberg prophesy is odd, even perverse. Many specialists were even then about the business of eliminating ethnicity altogether as a major factor in American culture, pronouncing the vestigial ethnic elements in US society virtually “assimilated.”

During his life, as after his death, Charles A. Beard was a controversial figure. An unsympathetic Allan Nevins dismissed him as the exponent of “a smart, hard materialism.” His former student and long-time friend Raymond Moley regarded him as the exemplar of a “hard-bitten realism,” a realism heavily laced with skepticism toward “orthodoxy — even his own earlier orthodoxies.” His “real spirit,” the “essential ‘style’ of the man,” his friend and neighbor Matthew Josephson found, “was realistic, skeptical, pragmatic.” Yet there was another side to Beard. He had, an admirer wrote, “a deep concern about human beings, a profound respect for human dignity.” The philosopher Irwin Edman, who took his course in American government when an undergraduate at Columbia, recalled how he conveyed to his students not simply his “passionate concern for an understanding of the realities of government,” but his “ideal of government: the liberation of the energies of men.” The problem, his wife perceptively recognized, was that Beard was such “a highly complicated person” that he “cannot be classified into any mere category of man, thinker, historian. He was not mentally static enough for that simplification.”

Beard's multifarious accomplishments and activities were more than sufficient to fill the lifetimes of several men.

The political status of the District of Columbia is once again the subject of debate in the United States. The District, which forms Washington's central city enclave, an area of some 69 square miles, is closer now than ever before to achieving its oldest political ambition, that of full representation in Congress. A bill to allow such representation by Constitutional amendment was passed for the first time by both the House and the Senate in 1978. Since then, State legislatures have begun to consider ratification of the Amendment with the result that this long-standing issue has entered a new phase.

Throughout its existence, Washington, D.C. has had a more distinctive and more complex political geography than is commonly supposed. Until the recent decision to support the measure, Congress had consistently opposed the idea of giving full voting rights to the District of Columbia. When the city of Washington was created at the end of the eighteenth century, the legal detachment of a Federal District from the States by means of cession was regarded as crucial to its future role as the permanent seat of government, and to the exclusive legislative control Congress was to exercise over such a district. As a result, the lack of Congressional representation became an early source of discontent, and for nearly two hundred years, D.C. has been trying to escape this particular consequence of its unique position within the federal structure.

Washington, D.C. has been called “both the most American and the least American city in the United States,” and this paradox is apparent in the States' often ambivalent views of the nation's capital.

If reports are to be believed, “waiting for Bakke” was the main preoccupation of the Washington press corps in the Spring of 1978. The case had been argued before the United States Supreme Court in a blaze of publicity, and, while the nine judges were considering the arguments, there was no shortage of commentators to “advise” the Court. As one of these “advisers,” Ronald Dworkin, noted “No lawsuit has ever been more widely watched or more thoroughly debated in the national and international press before the Court's decision.” Thus when Mr. Justice Powell began to read the opinion of the Court in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a “hush enveloped the courtroom.” The audience was hushed but expectant because it believed that it was about to witness a judgement of momentous historical importance. The pre-decision coverage suggested that the Court was either going to give or deny its constitutional imprimatur to the principle of affirmative action or preferential treatment. But unfortunately the judgement did not live up to its advance publicity. It did not definitively decide the issue, in fact it decided remarkably little. True, Allan Bakke did win and the University of California lost. However, the fate of affirmative action programmes was not resolved, and indeed despite the Supreme Court's pronouncements in two further cases, United Steelworkers of America v. Weber and Fullilove v. Klutznick, continues to hang in the constitutional balance.

No fanfare or stirring resolves marked the founding of Connecticut's first antislavery organization. Quietly instituted late in the summer of 1790, the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom and the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage soon betrayed a lack of direction and purpose. Upon reading the newly-drafted constitution of the Society, one Connecticut minister decided, “It does not appear that the Society is of much importance as it respects its influence in this State, as there is here scarcely a claim for its exertions.” And yet, during the five uneventful years of its existence, the organization attracted a large contingent of hyper-Calvinist ministers like Benjamin Trumbull, moderate Calvinists like Yale's Ezra Stiles, and unrepentant liberal clergymen like James Dana. All of the ministers involved were Congregationalists. The Society also included a number of prominent and pious laymen and even a sprinkling of prominent and openly irreverent ones. If the Society's work is compared to the ambitious programs of sister organizations in New York and Philadelphia, however, it appears that the Connecticut Society did not do much more than enlist the moral support of religious, political, and social leaders in the state.

The Times of London had kept a close watch on the developing American sectional conflict of the 1850s. Despite charges of ignorance which were persistently levelled against it, the quality of its American intelligence in the years leading up to the war remained consistently high. Since 1854 a young New York lawyer, Bancroft Davis, had provided informative weekly reports on political, diplomatic and economic affairs, whilst between July 1856 and December 1857 the paper possessed in Louis Filmore an experienced and talented Special Correspondent in the United States. After Lincoln's election, however, it became clear that Davis, who was based in New York City, was not up to dealing with a political crisis of the magnitude of secession and to this end William Howard Russell, the hero of the Crimea and the most famous reporter of his day, was despatched to the United States as The Times's new Special Correspondent. Russell arrived in New York on 16 March 1861 and less than a month later embarked upon what was to prove a highly successful tour of the Confederate States.

A major characteristic of the social and spatial morphology of urban areas in advanced capitalist societies is the residential segregation of different socioeconomic, life style, and ethnic groups. The basic rationale for this segregation is common to most societies, as is its production via the operation of housing markets. In addition, however, each country has its own particular characteristics which accentuate the general processes. One such characteristic in the United States is the nature of the local government system in most States.

The aim of this paper is to identify die main features of that system as they apply to the geography of residential separation. The discussion is set within die context of the general processes of American local government and indicates how these have encouraged segregation. The paper then turns to a discussion of the use of the courts and die Fourteendi Amendment to challenge the amalgam of housing market and local government processes, and evaluates the likely outcome of the series of challenges.

In nothing is the difference between the Presidency today and in the nineteenth century more clearly symbolised than in the matter of accessibility. Today the President is closely guarded both for reasons of security and to save him from unreasonable calls on his time, and what is unreasonable is defined pretty strictly. For example, Mr. Walter Hickel, when he was Secretary of the Interior, found it impossible to get an interview with President Nixon on a matter he thought important. He took the desperate step of leaking his views to the press, and was dismissed for his pains.

Such an episode was inconceivable in the nineteenth century. Everyone knows the story of the reception at the White House on New Year's Day, 1863. So many people called to shake hands with Abraham Lincoln on that day, as was their right, that when he went upstairs to sign the Emancipation Proclamation he could hardly hold the pen steady. And everyone also knows the story of the riotous installation of Andrew Jackson in 1829.

It was then considered highly un-republican, indeed dangerously aristocratic, for a President to seclude himself; and Jackson, whose predecessor, John Quincy Adams, and successor, Martin Van Buren, were both ferociously criticised for their airs and graces (Adams's crime was that he had installed a billiards table in the White House) was particularly careful to give no cause for offence.

“The Americans,” observed a European expatriate in 1837, “do not laugh at honest bluntness, or good-natured simplicity.… If Jonathan is to laugh, he must have a point given him, or, in other words, he must laugh to some purpose.” To Vienna-born Francis Grund, contemporary comic melodrama and its first cousin minstrelsy demonstrated beyond all doubt that his adoptive countrymen were decidedly “fond of laughing at the expense of their neighbors.” “English, French, Dutch, and German,” he noted, “are in turn made to suffer the stings of American wit.… The Irish, of late, has [sic] become very popular.” Grund's commentary reflected both the frequency with which ethnic characters of all sorts were portrayed upon the mid-nineteenth century American stage and, in particular, the emerging public taste for the stage Irishman. A tourists' guidebook to New York City published in 1850 pointed out that six of its seven principal theaters had been turned over to the “burlesque and broad fun” of melodrama and minstrelsy and to Irish character pieces especially. Twice during the 1830s, the British actor Tyrone Power conducted triumphal tours of the United States by relying upon a repertoire of Irish parts.

The history of the United States has been described again and again as the history of change, motion and instability. From Tocqueville to Turner, from Bancroft to Billington, from Berthoff to Thernstrom, the accent has been laid on the dynamic — whether it be democratisation, westward expansion, immigration, internal migration or “Americanisation.” It would appear almost incontrovertible that by 1900 the American people were unsettled, in search of order, pressured by the “M Factor,” responding unhappily to industrialism. Yet a number of questions may be asked: where, leaving aside the American Civil War as a very special case, is the evidence of large-scale dissatisfaction with and rebellion against the status quo; where is the evidence that, as the nation expanded west and its institutions extended over ever wider territories, they weakened and fell into disrepute; why did the United States succeed in reaching the Pacific in one piece rather than as several republics, as some of the Founding Fathers feared? One answer might be that the American people formed a consensus after all, but that is not the argument here. It is not necessary to involve the whole American people in an explanation of continuities, for the purpose here is to show how conservative, stabilising cultural control was in one case successfully provided by the few and not the many.

“I consider the war of attempted secession, 1860–1865, not as a struggle of two distinct and separate peoples,” wrote Whitman in Specimen Days and Collect, “but a conflict (often happening, and very fierce) between the passions and paradoxes of one and the same identity.” He interpreted the Civil War as a violent expression of the persistent conflict between democratic and broadly anti-democratic tendencies within the one “identity” of American republicanism; and he emphasized that this conflict was as much a subtle feature of social and political life in the North as it was in more blatant form the underlying cause of the war between North and South.

The ante-bellum years had seen the political life of the North dominated by Democrats against whom, in “The Eighteenth Presidency,” Whitman had directed some of his coarsest and most unforgiving (if unpublished) invective:

Office-holders, office-seekers, robbers, pimps, exclusives, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men,…deaf men, pimpled men, scarr'd inside with the vile disorder, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth.

Emerson's essay on “Gifts” perceptively highlights the ambivalence felt in gift-giving or receiving, an ambivalence which lies at the heart of Saul Bellow's most recent novel, Humboldt's Gift. The importance of literal gift-giving has been insufficiently recognised as a factor which governs the action of the novel, our understanding of which is enhanced by an examination and application of the sociological analysis of gift-exchange.

Gift-exchange has been most extensively studied in relation to the North-West Coast American Indians, notably the Kwakiutl, in whose culture the “potlatch” is a central activity. The term “potlatch” is applied to a variety of gift-giving ceremonies, involving both the giving away of quantities of possessions and their wilful destruction. The whole of a man's worldly goods may be dispersed or destroyed in this fashion, in an attempt to maintain status. To eclipse a rival chief, for example, a man may destroy all his own accumulated wealth. While in theory the “gift” is spontaneous and disinterested, in practice it is based on political or economic self-interest.The gift of property implies an obligation in the recipient which, if not fulfilled, results in his loss of face.

The remarkable originality of Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925) has been long recognized. From Sinclair Lewis's early appreciative essay onwards, the novel's significant advance over Dos Passos's three previous novels, its break with constricting convention, and its technical boldness have been repeatedly noted. Dos Passos's broad concern remains that of the traditional realist–the heavily itemized portraiture of urban social life–but in Manhattan Transfer that portraiture is energized and given fresh impact by new modes of description and new principles of narrative structure. These innovations have customarily been traced to the influence of modernist experimentation in the novel, and Dos Passos's debts to James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Marcel Proust have been established. Yet an explanation of Dos Passos's conception of form which confines itself to literary modernism alone must be regarded as incomplete. Dos Passos's heightened visual sense and the marked painterly and cinematic qualities of his work indicate that it is to the twentieth-century pioneers in the visual arts, as well as to the pioneers in fiction, that we must look for formative influences.

Dos Passos enjoyed a lifelong interest in the visual arts. After Harvard he went to Spain to study architecture, and at one time as a young man he was unsure whether to choose fine art or literature as his main avenue of creative expression.