The presidential election of 1848, known as the Free Soil election, marked the emergence of antislavery sentiment as a determining political force on a national scale. In this book Joseph G. Rayback provides the first comprehensive history of the campaign and the election, documenting his analysis with contemporary letters and newspaper accounts. The progress of the campaign is examined in light of the Free Soil movement: agitation for Free Soil candidates and platforms at the national conventions proved ineffective, and the nominations of Zachary Taylor and Lewis Cass completed the major parties' alienation of the various antislavery groups. Thwarted in their attempts to capture the national parties, the Free-Soilers formed a massive coalition, which met in Buffalo, and formally created the Free Soil party, nominating their own candidate, ex-President Martin Van Buren. The Whigs and the Democrats, forced by the new party to take a position on the touchy slavery question, attempted to use Free Soil to elect their candidates -- in the North by claiming, it in the South by disclaiming it.Rayback concludes that the Free Soil election was one of the most significant in American history, a turning point in national politics that marked the end of the Jacksonian Era. Although Taylor was elected president, Van Buren took about ten percent of the popular vote away from the Whigs and the Democrats. It was the first presidential election in which a third party made substantial inroads on major party loyalties, one in which the electorate indicated a desire for a moderate solution to the problem of slavery extension -- a solution that was attempted by the Thirty-first Congress with its Compromise of 1850.

Walter Clyde Curry, a well-known student of Milton, analyzes the origins and unique construction of the grand stage upon which Milton presents the drama of human destiny in Paradise Lost. Through close examination of four entities -- Heaven of Heavens, Hell, chaos, and the World -- a greatly expanded view is provided of the poet's concept of space and God's relation to total creation. In facing structural and philosophical problems Milton is shown to be neither a materialist, nor an eclectic, nor a pantheist, as many scholars have insisted; he emerges rather as a master syncretist of widely divergent materials and as a devout theopantist. Curry has established a firm basis for a better understanding of the poet's methodology and for a clearer insight into his artistic accomplishments

For Americans the Civil War was simply an internal conflict, and they have emphasized its military exploits and the romantic myths that have grown up around it. They have given little regard to its international aspects. In truth, however, the American Civil War attracted worldwide attention. Other nations followed the fortunes of the war and sought to understand its goals because they saw that the fate of the American system would likely have a profound effect on their own social and political economies. One such nation was the United States' southern neighbor Mexico, and in Mexican Lobby Thomas Schoonover reveals the efforts of Matias Romero, Mexico's representative in Washington, to influence American leaders in his country's favor.Romero, appointed in 1859, served the liberal government of Benito Juarez, which had just emerged from its own civil War of Reform and now had to contend with a French invasion under Maximilian. He proved an indefatigable worker, who sent his government voluminous reports on the American situation and on his meetings with American leaders. Translated and published here for the first time is a representative selection of memoranda of his conversations with Washington officials and politicians.Romero attempted to forge stronger trade ties with the United States, establish better sea and rail links, and, above all, encourage military intervention to oust the French. In seeking these ends Romero was not above meddling in domestic politics. The memoranda show him supporting efforts to secure the resignation of Secretary of State Seward and cooperating with radical moves to defeat Lincoln's election in 1864 and, later, to impeach Andrew Johnson.Copies of Romero's official correspondence are rare in the United States and in Mexico and have never been translated. Mexican Lobby makes readily available a body of material that will be valuable to historians of the Civil War, Latin America, and American diplomacy.

In 1919 the Soviet government directed Ludwig Martens to open a trade bureau in New York. Before his deportation two years later, Martens had established contact with nearly one thousand American firms and conducted trade in the face of a stiff Allied embargo. His work planted the seeds for growing commercial ties between the U. S. and the U.S.S.R. throughout the 1920s.Because the United States did not recognize the Soviet Union until 1933, historians have viewed the early Soviet--American relationship as an ideological stand-off. Katherine Siegel, drawing on public, private, and corporate documents as well as newly opened Soviet archives, paints a different picture. She finds that business ties flourished between 1923 and 1930, American sales to the Soviets grew twentyfold and American firms supplied Russians with more than a fourth of their imports. American businesses were only too eager to tap into huge Soviet markets.Under the Soviets' New Economic Policy and first Five Year Plan, American firms invested in the U.S.S.R. and sold technical processes, provided consulting services, built factories, and trained Soviet engineers in the U.S. Most significantly, Siegel shows, this commercial relationship encouraged policy shifts at the highest levels of the U.S. government.Thus when Franklin D. Roosevelt opened diplomatic relations with Russia, he was building on ties that had been carefully constructed over the previous fifteen years. Siegel's study makes an important contribution to a new understanding of early Soviet-American relations.

In this study of the structure of core city expenditures, Mr. Bahl analyzes the functional relationship between per capita expenditures and selected economic, demographic, and sociological factors. He finds that the problems central to intercity variations in per capita spending are directly related to the coordination of fiscal and physical planning and that economic and social areas, not corporate boundaries, represent the most appropriate planning units. Mr. Bahl extends the static analysis of the pioneering work of Harvey Brazer to a comparative static and temporal context, comparing through regression techniques the factors underlying per capita variations in 198 Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area cities, from 1950 to 1960. His results suggest that the different levels may be primarily attributed to interactions between the central city and the urban fringe and to disparities in the dependence on inter-government revenues.

Curiosity about the human mind -- what it is and how it functions -- began long before modern psychology. But because the mind and its processes are so elusive, they could be described only by means of metaphor. Michael Kearns, in this prize-winning study, examines the development of metaphors of the mind in psychological writings from Hobbes through William James and in fiction from Defoe through Henry James. Throughout the eighteenth century and even into the early nineteenth, metaphors of the mind as a relatively simple entity, either mechanical or biological, dominated both those engaged in psychological theorizing and novelists ranging from Richardson and Smollett through Dickens and the Brontes.In the nineteenth century, such psychologists as Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain conceived of the mind as a complex organism quite different from that embodied in earlier thinking, but their figurative language did not keep pace. The result was a tension between theoretical expression and actual discussion of mental phenomena.

In this study of the life of a Spaniard who came to Mexico as a conquistador and remained as a civilian citizen of New Spain, C. Harvey Gardiner gives his readers a fresh view of the warfare between Spaniard and Indian and of the less dramatic processes of colonization which established European culture in America.Conquest and colonization, usually treated separately in the histories of the period, are here shown as phases in the life of a man who was not conspicuous among the conquerors, but was representative of the Spaniards of his generation who came to the new world in search of opportunity. Martín López attained some importance in the Mexican campaign as designer and builder of the brigantines which figured importantly in the Spanish victory at Tenochtitlan. Upon returning to civilian life, Lopez became one of the many conquistadors who found the rewards for his services under Cortes inadequate and sought redress in a long series of court battles. His career after the conquest brought him little wealth, but touched upon many aspects of the political, social, and economic life of the new country.

Throughout his career Mark Twain viewed the relations between the individual and his community with mixed feelings, and this book explores both the ambiguities of Twain's attitude and their effect upon his fiction. In the earlier novels -- most notably The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn -- the protagonist enjoys a dual position -- at liberty to follow his own inclinations while retaining his conventional place as a respected member of the community -- and the resolutions of these works are built upon this duality. Facing realities which the earlier fiction evaded, Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court found himself in a dilemma that he was unable to resolve: the community was no longer seen as a moral refuge and, most importantly, the individual was no longer seen as superior to the community standards against which he revolted. Thomas Blues contends that Twain's failure to reconcile this opposition largely accounts for the bitter, cynical fiction at the close of his career, and through use of the individual-community relationship he offers here fresh interpretations of Twain's most widely read novels.

Mark Twain enthusiasts will welcome this study of the great writer's attitude toward the Bible -- and of the influence of Holy Writ upon both the man and the artist. While the theological beliefs of Twain have been well documented, Mr. Ensor's study is the first to consider only his familiarity with the Bible and the extensive use of it in his writings. The Bible elicited by turns pious, skeptical, comical, and even hostile reactions in Twain, but he could not ignore it. Mr. Ensor examines manifestations of these conflicting impulses from the early newspaper articles to the autobiographical dictations; he suggests that from the Bible Twain may have derived three images that recur in his works: the Prodigal Son (Twain often saw himself in the Bad Boy pose); Adam (representing for Twain an unjust loss of innocence he shared with all mankind); and Noah (Twain saw himself as a prophet warning civilization of impending doom).

Modern man is beginning, painfully, to learn that he can continue to enjoy basic resources like water only through careful planning and control. This book indicates what social scientists have contributed in the past and seeks to encourage their future participation in this critical area.The study first describes the background of water use planning and defines the specific problems of control. Then five social scientists, representing the fields of anthropology, economics, geography, political science, and sociology, review the contributions their disciplines have made and discuss the problems they can do most toward solving. Concluding chapters offer additional commentary and provide an overall evaluation of the present situation in water resource management and suggestions for more meaningful participation by social scientists.

Irwin T. Sanders has translated his own experience as a social scientist into a practical, easy-to-read guide to community improvement. An impressive array of additional experts has teamed up with him to supply selected guideposts on twenty-one special problems in community organization. This popular handbook has been called by many civic workers the most practical, down-to-earth tool they have known for community engineering. Issued in two editions with a total of seven printings, it is now republished in a convenient, paper-bound form containing the complete text of the 1953 revision.

In his earlier work on King Lear, Mr. Heilman combined a number of critical procedures to form a new and important approach to Shakespearian criticism. His study of Othello displays the maturity of insight and skill in analysis the years have brought him in developing his critical method. Mr. Heilman takes account of stage effects; he traces out literal and symbolic meanings; he analyzes plot relationships; he examines characters in terms of both their psychological and their moral situations, and style in relation to both character and meaning. He traces some effects due to historical meanings which have now been lost by certain words, and he tries to measure the impact of the drama upon, and its significance for, the modern consciousness.Mr. Heilman argues that Othello is at once "a play about love" and "a poem about love," and endeavors to find out how the poetry modifies and even helps determine the nature of the whole. He looks at numerous aspects of "action" (physical activity, psychological movement, intellectual operations) and "language" (speech habits, image types, recurrency in both literal and figurative language), and examines the essentially "dramatic" function of all of these. He finds the dramatis personae interwoven in relationships which may be seen, from one point of view, as "plot" and, from another, as the embodiment of complex themes. He treats Othello and Iago as figures that are not only fitted to a given stage but also represent permanent aspects of humanity-Iago with his "strategies against the spiritual order" and Othello with his "readiness in the victim."

Loving Arms examines the war-related writings of five British women whose works explore the connections among gender, war, and story-telling. While not the first study to relate the subjects of gender and war, it is the first within a growing body of criticism to focus specifically on British culture during and after World War II.Evoking the famous "St. Crispin's Day" speech from Henry V and then her own father's account of being moved to tears on V-J Day because he had been too young to fight, Karen Schneider posits that the war story has a far-reaching potency. She admits -- perhaps for all of us -- that such stories "had powerfully shaped my consciousness in ways I could not completely resist."How a story is narrated and by whom are matters of no small importance. As widely defined and accepted, war stories are men's stories. If we are to hear an "other" story of war, then we must listen to the stories women tell. Many of the war stories written by women insist that war is not the condition of men but rather the condition of humanity, beginning with relations between the sexes.For the five women whose work is examined in Loving Arms -- Stevie Smith, Katharine Burdekin, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Doris Lessing -- this latter point was particularly relevant. Their positions as women within a patriarchal, militarist culture that was externally threatened by an overtly fascist one led to an acute ambivalence, says Schneider. Though all five women perceived the war from substantially different perspectives, each in her own way exposed and critiqued the seductive power of war and war stories, with their densely interwoven tropes of masculinity and nationalism. Yet these writers' conflicting impulses of loyalty to England and resistance to the war betray their ambivalence.Loving Arms will interest students of twentieth-century British literature and culture, gender studies, and narratology. Even today, we maintain an unabated love affair with the war story. But unless we listen to what the women had to say fifty years ago, we are doomed to hear only "the same old story."

Jorge Manrique was the greatest poet of fifteenth-century Castile and one of the three or four greatest in Spanish literature. Frank A. Domínguez offers here an introduction to Manrique's poetry and the first book-length study of him in English in fifty years. After presenting the biographical and historical context of Manrique's poetry, Domínguez examines the poet's love lyrics, describing the large fund of commonplaces and forms that Manrique's verses share with those of other poets of his age. Manrique's highly stylized language and parallel verse structures express the obsession of the lover with the beloved. Moreover, his attention to parallel construe the world's greatest.In treating the Coplas, Domínguez not only offers a sensitive reading of the elegy but also examines questions of text, structure, and style. Like the love lyrics, the Coplas present a high incidence of parallel structures that make for clarity and symmetry. Domínguez also finds that the complex stylistic relationships of the verses provide the Coplas with a unity that is deeper and more fundamental than has generally been perceived.This study, eclectic in its critical approaches, will be the standard English work on Manrique for years to come.

Although Rasselas has received more critical commentary than almost any other work by Samuel Johnson, Edward Tomarken's book is the first full length study to focus on his tale of the Prince of Abyssinia. This anomaly arises, as Tomarken shows, because Rasselas has remained resistant to the customary critical approaches of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, consistently eliciting new kinds of insights and raising new sorts of problems.Tomarken' s contribution is a new methodology to explain this phenomenon. He sees Johnson's early writings, London and Irene, as instances of the writer trying with only partial success to achieve what he first realized in The Vanity of Human Wishes, a means of permitting literary form to refer to conduct. Later works, such as The Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, are viewed as further developments of this method, which achieved its fullest expression in Rasselas and the Life of Pope.Such a reading of Johnson develops an aesthetic that operates on the margins between the literary and the extra-literary. Although Johnson's own critical view was unable to accommodate such a position, Tomarken shows that in practice he moved toward it by a process of trial and error manifest in his poetry and narratives. When raised to the level of critical method, this approach goes beyond the assumptions not only of Johnson's day but also of our own.Tomarken's theoretical coda demonstrates how the choices of current critical theory, like those in the marriage debate in Rasselas, can be understood to interact with one another. Specifically, he proposes a dialectical relationship for two approaches hermeneutics and structuralism-usually seen as opposed to one another. This innovative study will interest not only Johnson scholars but all those concerned with critical theory.

"Here we are on the banks of the Nueces in the grand camp of the army of occupation." So wrote Lt. Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh Dana when in 1845, not many months before the outbreak of the Mexican War, he joined the white-tented encampment of General Zachary Taylor in Texas. And so he continued writing during the uncertain life of camp and campaign for the better part of the next two years. In these letters to his wife, published here for the first time, Dana provides a detailed, firsthand view of the United States' war with Mexico -- fighting off the Mexicans from within Fort Brown during the initial attack; hearing the distant thunder of artillery as Taylor's army marched to the rescue of the beleaguered Seventh Infantry; occupying Matamoros; taking Monterrey, street by street with the defenders firing from the housetops. After Monterrey, Dana was at the siege of Veracruz and on the march to Cerro Gordo. Badly wounded in the attack on Telegraph Hill at Cerro Gordo, he was left on the field for dead, but was rescued by a burial party a day and a half later. Following the Mexican War, Dana went on to become a major general during the Civil War and later to have an illustrious career as a railroad executive. Nearly one hundred of his letters about the Mexican War survived and are now in the archives at West Point. From them Robert Ferrell has edited this vivid, eyewitness narrative.