Portraits of Victorian Snobbery

          . . . . . "In a Class of Their Own" is a long read look at fiction's descriptions of the middle-class's social snobbery; in the UK Guardian's Books section:

From Cranford and Pooter, the middle-class snob novel ploughed on through Orwell, Kingsley Amis – and even Margaret Drabble. But where is it now?

What is perhaps the most interesting to this reader in terms of the essay is looking back all through about 200 years of social eras of middle class snobbery aspiration when perhaps as never before the unique form of what was called the white middle class here in the U.S. is in a state of unprecedented anxiety about its place in the rapidly changing world.  If one is to believe the media this U.S. white middle class no longer is about aspiration to be recognized as belonging to a higher sphere by carefully acquiring all the correct material possessions and acquaintance while eschewing all the wrong ones, but is living in sheer terror of losing the place this demographic has taken for granted for so long.  This would probably mean losing the motor boat and at least two of the 3 - 4 other vehicles in that garage that is so huge that it is at least half the square footage of the rest of the huge house. 

This article doesn't articulate any of this, though it goes up through authors of the 20th century who are still working in the 21st, such as Margaret Drabble.



So far it seems that authors of fictional middle class snobbery here in the U.S. haven't touched upon the projection of our angry white middle class anxiety of losing place upon The Immigrant and, as always, going back to the colonial eras, the African American.  Unlike in Victorian England where the projection was put upon white people who came from some taint of agriculture and mill working connections, here in the U.S. it has gone straight to race and nationality, denial of science and rationality and refusal to believe in man-made climate change. I don't recall this in Victorian fiction, beyond, say Disraeli's political novels concerning Zionism -- and his objective was quite other than this.  In Victorian fiction the middle class aspires to a higher rank.  Those who are anxious about falling are the upper classes -- always for the sheer lack of the ready since daddy, brothers, uncles, granddads gambled it away and without entail the land would be gone too.  


Or as the author of the essay puts it:

If rather fewer class comedies get written in the early 21st century, the explanation can be put down to fracturing demographics. A social scientist recently calculated that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as “the middle classes”, merely a dozen or so socio-economic categories with some kind of affinity to what used to be thought of as the essential tenets of bourgeois life. All this sets those novelists bent on writing amusingly about class the almost insuperable difficulty of establishing their terms, and – even more problematic, perhaps – convincing readers of the accuracy of their judgments. . . .

Unlike the Victorians, the current USian white middle class isn't terrified of who might think they deserve to be invited to one's dinner table, as so few bother with either a table or dinner, preferring to order in from Dominos, Fresh Direct, whatever. White middle class fiction writers now worry about the right to write the Outsider -- dare they culturally appropriate?  will anyone believe their appropriation since they don't personally know any Others to indeed sit down and have dinner with at all?

What the British Did During The Blitz

A new book declares the real beginning of the sexual revolution took place in England, with London the epicenter target of the Blitz.

Long article in The Daily Mail:

"Adapted from The Secret History Of The Blitz by Joshua Levine, to be published by Simon & Schuster in partnership with the Imperial War Museum on July 30 at £16.99."

The Blitz intensified sexual desire. A full two decades before the so-called permissive society of the Sixties, a dramatic, if understated, sexual revolution was already taking place — one which would, significantly, prove to be a forerunner of the mores by which Britons live today.

We Can Lay A Wager That No One Else Woke Up Today With This Question

Why did European at the start of the medieval period begin to wear hats, and caps and ever more elaborate (and frequently downright silly and other times downright ugly) headgear if they were the privileged classes?

The Greeks and the Romans didn't wear big silly things on their heads by-and-large, other than hoods from their cloaks and battle helmets. True, the odd laurel leaf crown showed up at drinking parties and ceremonies honoring poets, generals and dictators.

But not this sort of thing.

Or these.

Now this is quite attractive.  Naturally, it's Italian, who drew many fashion ideas from both Africa and the Turks.

But this sort of thing (poor Katherine of Aragon!) is downright hideous, and surely most uncomfortable (but since when has fashion ever been interested in comfort?).


Men generally had more attractive headwear, it seems, though the head on which the hat was hung may not have been so attractive.  Thinking Henry VIII.

Where did this thing begin?  With the Church?

It's hard not to think Monty Python made these up.

Liverpool's International Museum of Slavery and Andrea Arnold‘s film of *Wuthering Heights*

Looking into the New York Times Wednesday morning, the first day after getting back from England and our visit to Liverpool's International Museum of Slavery on Monday* -- imagine the thrill I felt reading that Andrea Arnold's 'black' Wuthering Heights was finally opening here. Mr. Earnshaw finds Heathcliff in the gutters of Liverpool, from where he brings the child to his Yorkshire family farm on the moors. I've been anxious to see this film ever since first reading about in the English papers last year.

Andrew O'Hehir says Arnold's Wuthering Heights is his film Pick of the Week; he makes his case for his judgement with passion. The reviews in the NYC papers have been favorable. But Michael Atkinson in the Village Voice, who may well know his film history, doesn't know the history of the African diaspora or slavery.  He blithely declares:

In the 1770s, when the story is set, a black child was rare, even in Liverpool, the African chattel of the busy Brit-run slave trade going almost exclusively to British, Spanish, French, and Portuguese colonies in the Americas.

Atkinson is wrong. See this, from the Liverpool International Slavery Museum site:

Of the little research into the Black presence in Britain during the slave trade period most has focused solely on London, yet Liverpool had a considerable Black population during the 18th and 19th centuries, many of whom were slaves. Although there seems to be no evidence of large scale slave auctions taking place here, slaves can be found advertised for sale in the early Liverpool newspapers. Merchants would also place 'WANTED' advertisements in the press, demonstrating their eagerness to purchase an African servant.

As well as slave sales, there were also advertisements for runaways, showing that Black people did not accept their enslavement in Britain passively. The newspapers also show the reality of life for Black people in Britain's most important slave trading port after the lauded Mansfield Decision of 1772. The last slave sale advertised in a Liverpool newspaper took place in 1779, seven years after Mansfield had ruled in the case of James Somersett.

Church records of the time also give us a great insight into the African presence in the town and show many Black people being baptised and buried in Liverpool churchyards. From these records and others, we know there were many free Black people living in Liverpool during the latter part of the 18th century, including students and craftsmen, as well as soldiers and sailors who fought with honour during the American War of Independence and the Napoleonic Wars.

Atkinson doesn't comprehend that enslaved Africans and free people of color existed in ports all over the world, side-by-side, even in countries like England, that didn't have a domestic slave trade, but allowed slavery. It wasn't until 1772 and the Somerset (Mansfield) Decision that domestic slavery in England was overturned (This, incidentally frightened the American colonial slaver owners all way to the bottom of their pockets -- and their account books -- that the Decision paved the way for Abolitionists to have their way throughout the colonies; this fear was another reason the southern power elite spent so much energy creating the propaganda agitation for political independence from England.)

As well, everywhere ships and the sea provided many jobs for men of color, whether slave or free.  Among other sources for this, particularly in Liverpool, Marcus Rediker's The Slave Ship: A Human History, provides extensive, tragic documentation.

Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights opens here in NYC today, at the Film Forum, which is just a few blocks away from here.  I'll be there.
------------------------


* Among other exciting information gleaned even from this truncated visit to the museum is that several Liverpool slave traders -- all very powerful, very wealthy and very respected citizens of the city -- traded in slaves directly with slave owners in Maryland and Virginia throughout the 18th century, until the War for Independence.

Pheasants Under Glass: *Brideshead Revisited* & *Dance to the Music of Time*

Stray thoughts while re-watching Brideshead Revisited and Dance to the Music of Time -- both of which I've re-read a few times.

The English of the class(es) portrayed in this novels are Pheasants Under Glass:

Pheasant under glass was an earlier era's idea of the ultimate of expensive food consumed at tables of homes or restaurants vastly beyond the status and means of the average person. The pheasants were presented under glass, supposedly, to hold in the aroma and flavor of the fine cognac and other special ingredients such as mushrooms used in the preparation of the dish. 

The domes of Oxford domes, the dome of an ancestral architectural monstrosity of a house, the domes of Venice. The narrators of both Brideshead and Dance know all three.

In Temporary Kings (1973)  Jenkins, the narrator of Dance to the Music of Time's  volumes, attends a Venetian literary conference in 1958. During their enchanted summer of Et in Arcadia Ego, Sebastian and Charles depart from Brideshead to Sebastian’s father in Venice.  All enchanted men of their class go to Oxford, get to Venice and Italy in their youth – and if they don't live themselves in domed ancestral piles as children, as young fellows they visit those who do: Ryder to Brideshead and all the other piles he paints later, and Jenkins to the Flitton estate, and all those he visits during his life.

What else the works have in common: the alcoholic failures of Sebastian Flyte and Charles Stringham ; the insufferable Samgrass and Widermerpool; the ultra-successful but crass deal-makers Rex Mottram and Sir Magnus Donners. But there's no Brideshead parallel to Dance's mad, bad, self-destructive fatal Pamela Flitton, unless you can see her faintly in Head's malicious character of Anthony Blanche.

Stringham is tragic: a character whose alcoholism transforms into authentic spiritual humility.  This a stark contrast with Sebastian’s self-exile in Morocco, in service to an illiterate German brute, while remaining a drinker. Cordelia, Sebastian's devoutly Catholic sister, insists that Sebastian is not only best loved of God, but is a saint.  Important question to resolve -- is it because Sebastian is homosexual, so not even Waugh's sympathy can transmute him into sainthood, despite stating so? Committing homosexual acts, knowingly, willingly, and unrepentently, is a mortal sin.  Powell's Stringham is straight,  or at least asexual by the time he reaches his sainthood of accepting his failures and working to commit no harm?

The shared loathing of  WWII's military life of the narrators, a military that brings them under the command of loathsome twits such as Widmerpool -- who cannot resist torturing those of lesser rank when the opportunity arrives  -- and being surrounded by people who are not their class in education or understanding.  However, Jenkins, a deeper personality, with a wide curiosity about people and the world, finds respect and friendship with many of his fellow soldiers, whereas by now snobbish Ryder can or will. I didn't get the impression that Ryder started a snob, but turned into one because of his friendship with the Flytes-Marchmains and their like.  He marries a friend of Julia's and despises poor Celia, as he despises all the people of the set, other than the Flytes-Marchmains, just as they dismiss as fundamentally unimportant anyone who isn't themselves.

Brideshead (1945) seems to manage in one novel, in the years the two works share, what Powell takes decades and 12 volumes (1951-1975) to do. Waugh’s novel begins during WWII, but flashes back to 1922, when Charles Ryder and Sebastian go up to Oxford. Powell’s first novel begins at the public school Charles and Nicholas Jenkins attend, in 1921-22, and concludes at Oxford.

Both narrators are involved in car accidents while at Oxford – sometimes I get confused between these works, as they have so much in common, in incident, location and characters. So I had to look this one up, and it is the case.  Both Ryder and Jenkins are in a car accident because the driver-friend is inebriated.

I keep wondering who is this uncle of Charles Ryder’s –is this the father of his cousin, Jasper, who advises and scolds Charles at the start and conclusion of his first Oxford year? Jenkins has an important uncle too.

Brideshead Revisited (television miniseries 1980); the classic onscreen Head.  was adapted by John Mortimer (Rumpole of the Bailey); it is widely regarded as among the best miniseries ever made.

Dance to the Music of Time (television miniseries 1997); adapted by Hugh Whitmore does not share the same reputation as Head -- but it is worth watching if you are the sort of person, who, like me, likes to watch this sort of thing.

It's more difficult to successfully adapt a 12 volume novel series into 416 minutes of television than a single short novel into 659 minutes.  As well. Brideshead had a much larger budget -- and fewer characters.

Re-watching confirms the feeling I've had since my first reads of these two different work of literature:

Jenkins and his circles were ultimately interesting. Many of them were decent and compassionate people. Moreover, they all did things, accomplished things, even the horrible Widmerpool, even the washed up Stringham.

Whereas Charles Ryder is right about himself and the Marchmains -- they lived wasted, useless lives. The problems of Brideshead's people -- none of them are interesting, at least by the later years. Charles's father was initially amusing, looked at from the outside, but he wreaked destruction on his family. Lady Marchmain was a bore but she too supposedly destroyed her family. I could see the terrible effect of Ryder senior, but I was told of Lady Marchmain's, which was so awful, that her husband left her, and her children, at least Sebastian, hated her. It has never been clear to me just why this was the case. It still is not, but I don't care either.

History Has Lost A Great Personage

As you can see from the quote at the top of Fox Home, the loss of this great historian feels deeply personal.

Forwarded via Voices From Haiti:

[ " http://www.voicesfromhaiti.com/2012/07/dr-michel-rolph-trouillot-haitis-gold-rush/

Dr. Michel-Rolph Trouillot & Haiti’s Gold Rush
Jul 07, 2012 ~ Written by voicesfromhaiti

Every year at the big award ceremonies there’s a special block of time reserved for stars whose blindingly brilliant lights have been extinguished. A larger-than-life screen usually hangs above the audience. Everyone looks skyward—to view the lineup of mind-blowing talent that once seemed so formidable, if not immortal. As audience members blink back tears, everyone secretly wonders when their turn will come to be “honored” in this way. Will their picture even make it to the sky-screen? Will someone accidentally forget to include them in the lineup? Who will mourn their passing? Will anyone beside close family members even remember their contribution? Will anyone–especially strangers–really, really care?

“Haiti lost one of the greatest men who ever lived,” said Leslie H. of Professor Michel Rolph Trioullot who passed away July 6, 2012. “He is revered among anthropologists worldwide. His book, Silencing the Past, is like a sacred text on college campuses. . .”

M.C. said: “What bothers me about Prof. Trouillot’s passing is that I never had a chance to tell him in person how his writings changed my life. I should have told him that, you know. But I didn’t want to bother him. Iwanted to have something important to say when I approached him. Everyone who knew Prof. Trouillot says he was as generous and giving as he was brilliant. I should have told him that his writing changed the course of my entire life.”

Sabine B. said, “My heart breaks now because Haiti has lost a giant among thinkers. I mourn, also, because there are so many people out there who don’t even know they should be mourning. They don’t even know the real significance of this loss.”

On the other side of the ocean, the island from which Dr. Michel Rolph Trouillot came is busy being reconstructed. Everyone is figuring out ways to harvest fruit from all the trees that have yet to be planted. While all the super-sizing of Haiti continues without a break, while investors rush to scrape the gold mines clean, let us heed Dr. Trouillot’s words and remember not to silence the past. Let us use the ropes of the past to ring the bell of Haiti’s real future.

Remember, also, that Haiti’s greatest treasures reside not in the mines but in the minds of our thinkers, especially our elders. The gold they possess in abundance is available, if we would only ask. First, however, we must recognize, honor, and respect our elders. Respekte grandmoun yo! The treasures they carry inside their heads are priceless. Acknowledge, appreciate, and celebrate our elders now, lest– against their own will–they take all the gold with them.

Rest in perfect peace, Dr. Trouillot. VoicesfromHaiti celebrates your immeasurable contributions to Haiti and the world. We send our sincere condolences to those who have only begun to feel the sting of your passing.

(c) VoicesfromHaiti/Share Widely.

Selected works of Dr. Michel-Rolph Trouillot:

1977 Ti difé boulé sou Istoua Ayiti. New York: Koléksion Lakansièl.
1988 Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy. Johns Hopkins University Press.
1990 Haiti: State against Nation. The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. Monthly Review Press.
1995 Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press.
2003 Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. Palgrave

__________________________________________________

I did not know Dr. Trouillot personally, but I had the good fortune of having my writing appear alongside his in an anthology called Mozayik, edited by another great mind who passed away earlier this year: Roger Savain.

Please visit the following links for more on this national treasure.

Bob Corbett reviewed Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History in 1996

Nadève Ménard and Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’s invite tributes, recollections, and words you might wish to share about Dr. Trouillot on http://tandenou2.blogspot.com/ " ]

I Must Tell You About The Mothers Who Copulate With Donkeys! + *Kiss You Down South*

Our friend, Elijah Wald, has his new book just out, The Dozens: A History of Rap's Mama. Among the illustrations, getting a whole page to itself, and a long caption, is the Stela of Great Chief Of Militia Nesdjehuti c. 725 BC) reads (right to left)

[ "A donkey shall copulate with him, a donkey shall copulate with his wife, his wife shall copulate with his child." The Egyptian term for copulate was n-k, cognate with the Arabic nik, whence the French nique, as in nique ta mére. The concept survves in Swahili, mama yako anatombwa na punda, "Your mother copulates with a donkey," quoted in the filmCotton Comes to Harlem. (Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Tanslation by Jac. J. Janssen.) " ]

And, why yes, if you should ask, el V is credited in the acknowledgments -- his kind of book fo shu! Actually, it is wonderful, and makes great reading aloud, which of course it would, the subject being what it is. Eiijah's books are always great -- his previous title was, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll, a valuable and entertaining study of the Billboard Number One hits from the time it began. You can just hear Elijah chortling away as he writes all those Bad Words on every page and knowing that the Oxford University Press will be publishing them.

El V's having a photo shoot of self, hat and guitar for Kiss You Down South's cover art.  Why yes, the album - cd - whatever is finally coming out!

The Horse: From Arabia to Royal Ascot – British Museum Exhibit

Full article here, plus illo, plus links to other illos. It may not tell you anything you don't already know, but it's always a pleasure to see horses!


This is the sort of illo the article links to, though you have to scroll down the wiki site to find it, Moghul ruler, Akbar, hunting deer from horseback:

[ " John Curtis, one of the curators, explains that there has been much advance interest in the show. Horses, magnificently wordless in themselves, excite passionate differences of opinion in their admirers and the museum has been petitioned, urging that certain breeds be championed. But the museum has faced a challenge: "Most of our exhibitions are monocultural, whereas the horse exists in all cultures." And so partly to avoid a bewildering miscellany, the decision has been taken to put Arab horses in charge of the narrative.The domestication of the horse is thought to have taken place on the western Euraisan steppes, probably in Kazakhstan, around 3,500BC (the exhibition includes what may be the earliest depiction of a horse and rider, a terracotta mound from Mesopotamia). But the narrative then advances through Islamic history and showcases the emergence of the Arab horseIt reveals that the bloodlines of modern thoroughbreds can be traced back to three Arabian stallions imported into England in the 18th century (the Darley Arabian, the Byerley Turk and the Godolphin Arabian). The journey we take includes astounding Arab rock paintings of horses and then fetches up in Victorian England to consider the horse's influence on society (the horse traffic jams were terrible), before a racy finish at Ascot and in the modern world." ]

Additionally, something we may wish to consider, which information is not included within the article, but provided by a commentator to it: this is the second exhibit at the British Museum this year sponsored by the House of Saud, i.e. see concentration on the Arab horse in history.

In the modern era museums became, among other things, the supreme expression of who holds power, and how much power is held. This has been always the case with the horse, a signature of class, rank, wealth and power.

2011: Foxessa Read 11 Books

(+ many, many more, but these reflect the most significant theme of all my reading, the endless expressions of violence that is the history of us .... )

Gordon, Lyndall.  (2010) Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds. Viking. 

Emily Dickinson’s poem “My Life Had Stood – A Loaded Gun” can be found here. A short series of essays on the poem by various American poets can be found here.

This is an American tale of emotional violence and a desperate quest for upward social mobility, during which homes became battlefields of the heart, littered with casualties. The book’s apt title comes from Emily Dickinson’s poem, # 764:

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -

In Corners - till a Day

and concludes:

For I have but the power to kill,

Without - the power to die –

Gordon conveys the excitement with which women readers and writers of the day greeted the emergence of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Dickinson’s letters describe how much she anticipated each new work by these women, as when she sought out Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte immediately upon its publication. She requested that Emily Bronte’s poem, “No Coward Soul Be Mine” be read at her funeral, but she squarely agreed with Charlotte Bronte’s famous rejection of Jane Austen: “The passions are perfectly unknown to her: she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood . . .”

The book’s presentation of the cultural and social matrices that formed the characters of Dickinson and her community are impressive, as in her account of the effect of the second Great Awakening upon Dickinson: she would not be saved, though the pressure put on her to do so made her so ill she had to leave school. Dickinson was as reclusive as the Brontes and Browning, and Gordon carefully describes the homes, gardens, and landscapes of Dickinson’s Amherst, with details from primary sources and her poems. But Gordon’s somewhat sensationalist central subject is the affair between Emily Dickinson’s puritanical, patriarchal brother, Austin, and the gorgeous home wrecker, Mabel Loomis Todd. 

Austin and Emily’s grandfather had founded Amherst College, and like his father before him, Austin served in the powerful position of college treasurer. He married Emily’s best friend, whom she called ”my soul mate”: the cultivated, vivacious Susan Huntington Gilbert, a highly regarded hostess to a long list of accomplished, famous and important friends who helped make Amherst one of the centers of New England’s intellectual and academic life. Though Dickinson never showed the largest portion of her work to anybody, Susan was permitted to see many of her poems, and some were written about her.

Enter the antagonist. In contrast to the socially prominent, financially secure Dickinsons, the enchanting Mabel Loomis Todd grew up in poverty,  Her husband, David Peck Todd, was a morally careless adventurer-astronomer. A charming, conniving seducer and an early advocate of what was then called “free love,” he did well from his wife’s long affair with Austin, who obtained for him Amherst college positions at levels beyond his professional qualifications. The part of the book that tells this story is founded upon a great deal of speculation, the sort that makes for splendid historical fiction. However, for a non-fiction study, there’s so much “it could have been,” “it might be,” and “perhaps,” that a researcher would need to take care in using this work as a source.

The economic and emotional destruction of the affair between Austin and Mabel was carried down through at least three generations, and split literary and Amherst communities. At one point in her struggle to get Austin to acknowledge her publicly as his true life partner, Mabel Loomis Todd requested in a letter that he kill Susan. Fortunately, Austin was too dumb -- or too smart – to understand what she wrote, and never responded to the letter’s request, at least not in writing, or any other way, as far as we know. Mabel succeeded in pushing Susan out of Austin’s life, at the price of being socially outcast by the community she’d expected to lead through Austin. She never married Austin, who died in 1895; Susan outlived him.

However, Mabel made her fame and fortune from the poetry of Austin’s deceased sister Emily, claiming both poetry and poet. Although Mabel never met Dickinson, or  read any of Dickinson’s poems until after the poet’s death in 1886, she conned the greater number of Emily’s poems out of Austin and Emily’s sister Lavinia after Lavinia discovered them. Mabel never returned them, and, in a brilliant career move, went on to edit the poems (their first publication was in 1890), while constructing a persona for Emily as the White Dove of Amherst, which has plagued Dickinson’s image ever since, though Dickinson was no demure pigeon. It was the great era of the traveling lecturer, and Mabel toured, reading Dickinson’s poems while garbed in white, as “her” Emily supposedly read them to her. The grab of both poet and unpublished poems alienated Mabel's former ally, Austin and Emily’s sister Lavinia. Austin’s son hated her, and legally fought Mabel’s possession of the family land Austin had gifted Mabel’s husband.

Speaking as a reader who argues with books as she reads them, I wonder how much to trust Gordon’s understanding of Dickinson’s inner life. Oddly, she believes that Emily Dickinson had no interest in the subjects of slavery, abolition or the Civil War. But was there a person alive in the entire country who didn’t think about the Civil War, all the time, while it was going on? * Emily Dickinson was a politically informed adult. Her father was a congressman, and she lived in an intellectually active, abolitionist atmosphere at a time when the Civil War was devouring and mangling the young men of every town and family in New England. Not only is Dickinson’s work marked by its variety of images of, and addresses to, Death, she employed frequently the imagery of the same Civil War army weaponry illustrated in newspapers and publications of the day. 

Writers write what they know, and Emily Dickinson knew what the people around her felt, and she knew what she saw. For Dickinson, who lived in the years before, during, and after the Civil War, violence in all its forms was as familiar as the garden path between her house and Susan’s. 

_________________________

* Other than Nathaniel Hawthorne, that is, who carried on a many-year sulk fest that everybody else wouldn't let him ignore it because they thought and talked and wrote about it all the time!

Here follows a short list of some of the other most interesting books I read this year. All of them are about America, violence and money too.

Lemay, J.A. Leo. (1991). The American Dream of Captain John Smith. University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville and London.

Lukács, Georg. (1938 – 1962 -- 1983). The Historical Novel. University of Nebraska Press.

Remini, Robert V. (1977) Andrew Jackson Vol. I: The Course of American Empire 1767 – 1821. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. NY, and Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition 1998.

              “               (1981) Andrew Jackson Vol. 2: The Course of American Freedom 1822 – 1832. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. NY, and Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition 1998.      
                “              (1984) Andrew Jackson Vol 3: The Course of American Democracy, 1833-1845. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. NY, and Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition 1998.
*Note: These volumes are no longer in print and available only through dealers.

Simmon, Scott. (2003). The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Slotkin, Richard. (1973) Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600 – 1860. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown.

              “             (1985) The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800 – 1890. Atheneum, New York.
              “             (1992) Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier In Twentieth Century America. Atheneum, New York

White, Edward G.  (1968) The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister. Yale University.