OCCUPATION AND ETHNICITY IN FIVE NINETEENTH-CENTURY CITIES: A COLLABORATIVE INQUIRY

Abstract

Literary critics and historians often interpret authors and authors' works as more or less significant, but are reluctant to quantify those works. The interdisciplinary field of creativity studies, however, poses methods of quantifying the eminence of an author's works. This study uses four measures from that field (anthology entries, scholarly citations, entries in books of quotations, and auction sale records) and one measure from the fields of computational linguistics and data mining (ngrams using millions of books digitized by Google) to assess the eminence of John Milton's thirty-one prose works1. For the purpose of this study, Milton's short “A Letter to a Friend Concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth” (1659) was not included in the quantitative analysis out of concern with possible conflations and confusions with letters in Milton's Familiar Letters. and their relation to his greater achievement in epic poetry. These measures indicate the singular eminence of Areopagitica, Milton's 1644 tract on the liberty of unlicensed printing.     

John Marshall,McCulloch v. Maryland,and the Concept of Constitutional Sovereignty

Scholars have long debated John Marshall's intent in his famous opinion in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). Despite long-standing disagreement concerning the character of Marshall's nationalism and federalism, interpretations of the opinion typically rely on an incomplete picture of the case. This analysis revisits McCulloch to illustrate his support for national and state sovereignty as defined in the Constitution. It then moves beyond the opinion itself to examine Marshall's defense of McCulloch in a series of newspaper essays he authored in the aftermath of the case. Situated alongside the McCulloch opinion, these essays show that Marshall was as much concerned with defending the sovereignty of the Constitution as he was with adjudicating political authority between national and state governments.