James M. O'Toole

Another City upon a Hill: A New England Memoir. By Joseph A. Conforti. (Dartmouth, Mass.: Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2013. Pp. xii, 202.

that Emerson may have had in mind as he placed “The Sphinx” at the opening to his poetic oeuvre (p. 3). Even the most seasoned reader of Emerson will with this volume have the opportunity to experience him anew, as von Frank includes a selection of Emerson’s poetry to his first wife, Ellen Tucker, many of which are fragments never before published. In one example, a forlorn Emerson writes, after Ellen’s death by tuberculosis in 1831, “Why fear to die / And let thy body lie / Under the flowers of June” (p. 255). In another, a quatrain that provides variation upon a famous passage from the essay “Experience” (1844), Emerson seems to mourn not only Ellen’s passing but his own endurance. “The days pass over me,” he writes, “And I am still the same.” Though our demands we place upon his corpus shift, Emerson remains at the center of U.S. intellectual history. With The Major Prose and The Major Poetry, readers have an opportunity to assess whether and how that might continue to be the case, but also to listen to Emerson in new, unexpected ways.

19.95 paper;

Whether that has led, as Steve Bruce (incidentally, a homonym of a prominent English soccer manager) has argued, to the death of God (in Europe) or to what Danièle Hervieu-Léger terms more subtly a “société amnésiaque,” in which much of the population has lost the memory of its Christian past, is less certain. As soccer fans well know, teams that go down can also come back up, although whether that can happen when the players have themselves dissolved the team seems rather less certain.

18.99 e-book.)

Three archivists describe the development of archival programs that they formerly directed: the Archives of the Archdiocese of Boston, the Utah State Archives, and the Yale University Archives. Each case study provides a description of program development and analyzes the institutional setting and the role of managerial planning, communication, internal and external alliances, and professional standards. The three case studies, which were first presented in a session at the fifty-second annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists in Atlanta in October 1988, are accompanied by an introduction and commentary.

Evangelicals at a Crossroads: Revivalism and Social Reform in Boston, 1860-1910 (review)

Hoping to recover the story of “the forgotten people of the Old South,”David Gleeson helps reintroduce ethnicity into the way we look at the region’s white population, too often thought homogeneous. The Irish are a good case with which to complicate that picture, even though their percentage of the South’s population was never very large. Concentrated in cities like their Northern cousins, they faced a more complicated assimilation, having to become American and Southern at the same time. They largely succeeded, though to call this an example of “integration” is perhaps an unfortunate choice of words in this context. Through detailed research in an impressive array of archival sources, however, Gleeson has done more than any previous historian to track down Irish immigrants and what became of them.His discussion is orderly, framed by such obvious subjects as occupational patterns, family and community life, religion, and Irish participation in the war and its aftermath. The writing is clear enough, with only occasional bits of left-over dissertationese. He does not engage the “whiteness” studies of the recent literature (though they appear in footnotes), and his treatment of slavery, that elephant in the room of the antebellum South, is curiously confined to a single chapter, as if that were just one more topic among many. Still, as a work of compensatory history, this book makes a contribution to the scholarly discussion.