A. Kristen Foster

Cities in America’s early republic developed on the edge of two worlds. The majority of these urban areas had been born in colonies that belonged to European powers, including England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. In this colonial world, cities hugged the Atlantic coast and served the interests of Europe’s mercantile empires. After the American Revolution, however, urban areas developed in line with the interests of the United States, expanding geographically, economically, politically, socially, and culturally. The cities of the early republic were central to the first debates about the fate of the fast-changing republic. On 23 September 1800, on the verge of wresting power from the first generation of Federalist politicians, the Republican Thomas Jefferson wrote to his old friend Dr. Benjamin Rush that he viewed “great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.” Jefferson, ever the champion of the independent farmer, argued that cities “nouri...

ambitious than Gibson’s.2 Future studies will have to determine the extent to which stories of ambitious and masculine women cut across racial and ethnic lines. Such research will require rejecting the assessments of previous literary critics who, beginning in the 1860s, dismissed story papers as lowbrow trash. Now that feminist critics have rescued women’s domestic novels from such biased assessments, Cohen urges us to look to the story papers to recover a richer and more varied tradition of women’s writing. For now, the short story “Hero Strong” would make a great addition to any college course that touches on women’s literary achievement in the Civil War era. Corinne T. Field

emphasized the reality of moral ambiguity and revolted against the mythology of moral purity embedded in the Motion Picture Production Code that the rating system replaced in 1968. The horrors of Vietnam and the lies voiced and dirty tricks perpetrated by President Nixon and his henchmen resulted in a widespread lack of trust in American policy and Americans’ actions. Seventies filmmakers did not make movies in a creative vacuum. Rather, they were influenced significantly by the likes of Hitchcock, Houston, and others, as well as by film noir and the French New Wave. Kirshner acknowledges these influences. In making a persuasive argument about the significance of and the critiques in seventies films, however, he, out of necessity, ignores the often significant critiques of the postwar corporate-capitalist social and economic order evident in earlier films such as Abraham Polonsky’s anti-corporate gangster-syndicate film Force of Evil (1948); Nicholas Ray’s cult western critique of McCarthyism and corporate consolidation Johnny Guitar (1954); Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s commentary on American racism No Way Out (1950), featuring the fledgling actor Sidney Poitier; and even Nunnally Johnson’s screen adaptation of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), to name only a few. Earlier filmmakers working under the politically oppressive historical context of McCarthyism created movies with critical themes, and they did much to crack the code before it eventually shattered in 1968, providing the likes of Mike Nichols, Roman Polansky, Alan Pakula, and others the liberty they enjoyed to create the outstanding cinema Kirshner analyzes so well. Hollywood’s Last Golden Age is an excellent book, well argued, clearly written, and free of the theoretical jargon that plagues so much film scholarship. It provides undergraduates, graduate students and general readers without much historical knowledge of these years just enough to enable them to understand the astute connections Kirshner makes between “politics, society, and the seventies film in America.”

... Mark Voss-Hubbard Eastern Illinois University Charleston, Illinois “Let a Common Interest BindUs Together”: As-sociations, Partisanship, and Culture in Phila-delphia, 1775–1840. By Albrecht Koschnik. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Page 2. ...