American Scholar articles from March 2001

American Scholar archives from March 2001

The Deed of Gift.(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... In 1997, Andrew Levy stumbled on a brief reference to a Virginia planter named Robert Carter III, who, in 1791, freed at least five hundred slaves--more than any other slaveholder in American history. Why had Levy never heard of Carter? Why had...

The Row to Zanzibar.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... On a shelf in my study, I keep a black-and-white snapshot of me and my father taken forty years ago. I'm nine years old in the picture, but look closer to seven, and at this long temporal remove, I can still read the photograph with a pretty...

Poetry.
March 22, 2001... We met Ezra Pound at Grace Lounsbery's house, he came home to dinner with us and he stayed and he talked about japanese prints among other things. Gertrude Stein liked him but did not find him amusing. She said he was a village explainer,...

The Anti-Jefferson.(Robert Carter III)
March 22, 2001... Why Robert Carter III Freed His Slaves (And Why We Couldn't Care Less) There is only one known portrait of Robert Carter III. He posed for it sometime around 1749 in Thomas Hudson's London studio, and when one looks at the result two and a...

The Story She Knew.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Clouds above the calm sea trail their reflections all the way in from the islands, just as sloops stand over their own sails so lengthened on water that they look like ribbons of light, endless. One early...

The Last Week in May.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... I considered my death. I knew it was riding toward me like a man on a small white horse riding through falling snow, but no faster than the wild cherries were blooming then by the ditch, or the old pear tree, ...

Above Settle.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... The contour lines come fast, like flood-marks or the ancient tracks of animals circling a fire. Finally I reach the top, and in all four directions there they are: the stone barns, the moors, the sheep scattered like...

Driving Myself Sane.
March 22, 2001... I never drove till I was twenty-five. Why not is connected to various family dynamics that I pay therapists to hear about, so I had better not violate professional confidences by repeating the whole story here. The short version is that I was...

Which Side Are You On, Boys?
March 22, 2001... I never once asked my friend the documentary filmmaker Leo Hurwitz whether he had actually been a member of the Communist Party, but one day in his kitchen, ten floors above West End Avenue, he told me something like the truth. We were talking...

Tide.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... If I don't catch it right now, the look of the bay at the lowest fide, with the sun stamping on it, the uncovered sand like clay, if I let it go for some more important thing, or just look away for a...

Northampton.
March 22, 2001... Northampton courthouse, September 1960. I am sitting with my colleague, mentor, and friend Newton Arvin, who is one of three members of the Smith College faculty charged with possessing pornography. I recall a large space, the unimpressive...

Fat.
March 22, 2001... I spend much of my life looking at cells through a microscope. Of all the cells I see, few are as distinctive as the human fat cell. Inside, a large fat globule steamrolls the rest of the cell's contents flat against the outer membrane until...

Something to Think About.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Scientists have detected that the neutrino, once thought to be massless, most likely has mass. --Scientific American It's the news of the day: neutrinos, the ghostliest of particles, are something, almost immeasurable, ...

A Matter of Definition.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... Everywhere he went, the abyss followed: A round black spot on the carpet, A bridge that collapsed behind him with each step, An open grave in exactly His shape. One day his head grew so ponderous, Heavy with...

The Oracular F. R. Leavis.
March 22, 2001... For more than forty years, Frank Raymond Leavis was an insistently hovering presence in the intellectual and academic life of Britain and America. Sternly and abrasively contemptuous of what he considered the easy adulation and routine puffery...

The Bishop's Theory Revisited.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... The redwood falling in the Mendocino Wilderness is not encumbered by our hearing or not hearing it, twigs swirling, cracking wood, rocks plummeting and the trunk crashing into red loam. The camera clicks,...

Writing Letters for the Blind.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... For fifteen cents, or twenty, in the script I'd mastered from Miss Hartung, I wrote Saturday letters for Bill Nelson, who Sat blind with a white cane beside his chair. He loved the letters in return, the lines ...

We Are All Bohemians Now.(counter-culture)
March 22, 2001... Being a bohemian in America has always been a delicate matter. If bohemianism meant only keeping late hours, taking drugs, and drinking too much espresso, this would not be the case. In fact, it means claiming some form of privileged access to...

Desert.(spiritual and psychological aspects)
March 22, 2001... It has been nearly fifty years since I lived year-round in that part of extreme West Texas which belongs to the Chihuahuan Desert; but my mind is connected to it still, as though magnetized by, or magnetizing, its strange mineral soils and the...

Grave Robbing.
March 22, 2001... Her body stolen by fiendish men, Her bones anatomized, Her soul, we trust, has risen to God, Where few physicians rise. --Inscription on a tombstone in Hoosick, New York The body in question belonged to a nine-year-old girl named Ruth...

Cambridge, March 1900.(Excerpt)
March 22, 2001... In the spring of 1900, members of the Harvard University community tried their hands at an exercise in collective journal-keeping. Proposed as a faculty project by Professor William Morris Davis, a geologist, the initiative grew to include...

Fitzgerald's Afterglow.
March 22, 2001... Though it was The Great Gatsby we were "doing" for A level, not Tender Is the Night, my English teacher got me to read it anyway. I was seventeen and remembered practically nothing about it--but I never quite forgot it. This, it turns out,...

THE CASH NEXUS: MONEY AND POWER IN THE MODERN WORLD, 1700-2000.(Review)
March 22, 2001... THE CASH NEXUS: MONEY AND POWER IN THE MODERN WORLD, 1700-2000 by Niall Ferguson. Basic Books. $30. Niall Ferguson, a startlingly young professor of the history of politics and finance at Oxford, is a force of nature, or at any rate a...

PEIRESC'S EUROPE: LEARNING AND VIRTUE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.(Review)
March 22, 2001... PEIRESC'S EUROPE: LEARNING AND VIRTUE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY By Peter N. Miller. Yale University Press. $40. No one who has read Middlemarch is apt to forget George Eliot s portrait of the learned Mr. Casaubon, that "bat of erudition,"...

TINKERING WITH EDEN: A NATURAL HISTORY OF EXOTICS IN AMERICA.(Review)
March 22, 2001... TINKERING WITH EDEN: A NATURAL HISTORY OF EXOTICS IN AMERICA By Kim Todd. W. W. Norton. $26.95. In 1858, the poet William Cullen Bryant spent an inspiring evening at the New York home of Eugene Schieffelin, best remembered today as the...

LITERATURE AND THE GODS.(Review)
March 22, 2001... LITERATURE AND THE GODS By Roberto Calasso, translated by Tim Parks. Knopf. $22. The Elusive Gods Literature and the Gods could have been an enchanting little book. Roberto Calasso's reading is wide, his topic tantalizing; he seems...

FAST FOOD NATION: THE DARK SIDE OF THE ALL-AMERICAN MEAL.(Review)
March 22, 2001... FAST FOOD NATION: THE DARK SIDE OF THE ALL-AMERICAN MEAL By Eric Schlosser. Houghton Mifflin. $ 25. You Want Fries with That? Early in Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser's expose of the fast-food industry, there's a remarkable little...

THE READER REPLIES.
March 22, 2001... LINGUISTICS Mark Halpern's "The End of Linguistics" (Winter) has a message for all English-speaking people: Do not allow your words to carry inborn prejudices. As Bill Moyers has said, "You are the language you speak." However, I...

Opium.(social history)(Brief Article)(Excerpt)
March 22, 2001... Two centuries ago, opium was like aspirin. Every household had some, usually mixed with alcohol in the form of laudanum, and used it as an analgesic for aches and pains, hangovers, toothache, and hysteria. Shelley drank laudanum to calm his...