Before Columbia: The FWP and American Oral History Research

This article compares and contrasts the approaches of the NewDeal Federal Writers' Project and the Columbia Oral HistoryProgram in an effort to reconsider the paradoxical history oforal history research in the United States and its relationshipto how many oral historians today look at their work and thehistory of their field. As it turns out, the theoretical andsocial concerns of the FWP projects are closer to current theoreticalconcerns of oral historians than the work Allan Nevins conductedin the early years of the Columbia project. The article alsoshows how awareness of the history of the intellectual and culturalcurrents that affect oral history projects in general, and theFWP's work in particular—interviews with former slaves,tenant farmers, industrial workers, and members of ethnic minorities—canhelp us analyze and use those materials. It argues that an awarenessof continuity and discontinuity in the history of oral historymakes it possible for today's oral historians to have a productivedialogue with their predecessors in the field.     

The Gothic-Romantic Hybridity in Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales

ABSTRACT

Mary Darby Robinson is well known for writing her final volume of poems, the Lyrical Tales (1800), as a direct answer, sometimes poem by poem, to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads. What has been less studied is how deliberately hybrid in style and allusions her response-poems are in the Tales, especially how prominently they foreground Gothic imagery, theatricality, and hyperbole in poems that also ape the emerging “romantic” mode of the Ballads themselves. Part of that “cheekiness,” I argue, stems from the condemnation of the Gothic that both Wordsworth and especially Coleridge had articulated in print, while also echoing it, albeit in highly modified ways, in their poetry. Most of what Robinson attempts with her hybrid Tales, though, develops the penchant in Gothic for symbolizing deep and unresolved ideological conflicts in Western culture. Her answers to Wordsworth and Coleridge, which I exemplify with selected Robinson Tales, therefore, bring out those very conflicts underlying, haunting, and even tormenting the speakers and the subject-matter in the original Lyrical Ballads.     

Mysticism and Epistemology: The Historical and Cultural Theory of Michel De Certeau

Michel de Certeau: Les chemins d'histoire. Edited by Christian Delacroix, François Dosse, Patrick Garcia, and Michel Trebitsch.     

Book reviews

Women in the Muslim World. Edited by Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978. 698 pp. $30.00.

Iran: Monarchy, Bureaucracy and Reform under the Qajars: 1858–1896. By Shaul Bakhash. London: Ithaca Press (St. Anthony's Middle East Monographs, No. 8), 1978. £7.50.

Iran: The Illusion of power. By Robert Graham. London: Croom Helm, 1978. 228 pp. £7.95.

An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry. Selected and translated with an introduction by Ahmad Karimi‐Hakkak. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1978 (Bibliotheca Persica: Modern Persian Literature Series, Number 1), xvii + 203 pp. $15.

Entrepreneurs of Iran. By Mohammad Reza Vaghefi. Palo Alto, Calif.: The Altoan Press, 1976. 196pp.     

The Geography of the Mathematics Research Collaboration Graph

Social networks have become a hot topic for research in the last decade or so. I study one such network in considerable detail: the graph of research collaborations among mathematicians. This graph displays many of the characteristics that various authors have found common to social networks in general. My “geographical” analysis includes the size of this graph, the distribution of the degrees of its vertices, its connectivity, the distances between its vertices, and its clustering coefficient. I also discuss the playful concept of Erd?s numbers. Las redes sociales se han convertido en un tema de gran interés de investigación durante la última década más o menos. El autor analiza una de esas redes a detalle: el grafo de las colaboraciones de investigación entre matemáticos. Este grafo muestra muchas de las características comunes que varios autores han encontrado en redes sociales en general. El análisis “geográfico” incluye el tamaño de este grafo, la distribución de los grados de sus vértices, su conectividad, las distancias entre sus vértices, y su coeficiente de concentración o clustering. El estudio también trata el concepto lúdico de los números de Erdos. 社会网络已成为近十年来研究的热点。作者详尽地研究了数学家间研究合作图。该图显示了不同作者间常拥有一般社会网络共有的许多特性。本文的地理分析包括图的大小、顶点的分布度与连结性,不同边之间的距离以及聚类指数。同时还讨论了有趣的Erd?s 数的概念。     

Book Reviews

George, Alexander L., and Juliette L. George. Presidential Personality and Performance. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. Pp. x, 304. $75.00, hardbound; $25.00, softbound.

Epstein, David, and Sharyn O'Halloran. Delegating Powers: A Transaction Cost Politics Approach to Policy Making Under Separate Powers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xvi, 320. $59.95, hardbound; $19.95, softbound.

Kahn, Kim Fridkin, and Patrick J. Kenney. The Spectacle of U.S. Senate Campaigns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 278. $57.50, hardbound; $18.95, softbound.

Michaels, Judith E. 1997. The President's Call: Executive Leadership from FDR to George Bush. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Pp. x, 348. $50.00, hardbound; $22.95, softbound.

Savage, James D. Funding Science in America: Congress, Universities, and the Politics of the Academic Pork Barrel. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xiii, 219. $49.95, hardbound.

Stid, Daniel D. The President as Statesman: Woodrow Wilson and the Constitution. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1998. Pp. xi, 231. $35.00, hardbound.

Steven Shull. American Civil Rights Policy from Truman to Clinton: The Role of Presidential Leadership. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1999. Pp. xv, 294. $64.95, hardbound.

Yalof, David Alistair. Pursuit of Justices: Presidential Politics and the Selection of Supreme Court Nominees. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. x, 296. $27.95, hardbound.     

The Reagan Presidency and the Reagan Experiment

Fred I. Greenstein, ed., The Reagan Presidency: An Early Assessment. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Pp. 196. $7.95 softbound. John L. Palmer and Isabel V. Sawhill, eds., The Reagan Experiment: An Examination of Economic and Social Policies under the Reagan Administration. Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute Press, 1982. Pp. xvii, 523. $29.95 hardbound; $12.95 softbound.