During his life, as after his death, Charles A. Beard was a controversial figure. An unsympathetic Allan Nevins dismissed him as the exponent of “a smart, hard materialism.” His former student and long-time friend Raymond Moley regarded him as the exemplar of a “hard-bitten realism,” a realism heavily laced with skepticism toward “orthodoxy — even his own earlier orthodoxies.” His “real spirit,” the “essential ‘style’ of the man,” his friend and neighbor Matthew Josephson found, “was realistic, skeptical, pragmatic.” Yet there was another side to Beard. He had, an admirer wrote, “a deep concern about human beings, a profound respect for human dignity.” The philosopher Irwin Edman, who took his course in American government when an undergraduate at Columbia, recalled how he conveyed to his students not simply his “passionate concern for an understanding of the realities of government,” but his “ideal of government: the liberation of the energies of men.” The problem, his wife perceptively recognized, was that Beard was such “a highly complicated person” that he “cannot be classified into any mere category of man, thinker, historian. He was not mentally static enough for that simplification.”

Beard's multifarious accomplishments and activities were more than sufficient to fill the lifetimes of several men.

The Times of London had kept a close watch on the developing American sectional conflict of the 1850s. Despite charges of ignorance which were persistently levelled against it, the quality of its American intelligence in the years leading up to the war remained consistently high. Since 1854 a young New York lawyer, Bancroft Davis, had provided informative weekly reports on political, diplomatic and economic affairs, whilst between July 1856 and December 1857 the paper possessed in Louis Filmore an experienced and talented Special Correspondent in the United States. After Lincoln's election, however, it became clear that Davis, who was based in New York City, was not up to dealing with a political crisis of the magnitude of secession and to this end William Howard Russell, the hero of the Crimea and the most famous reporter of his day, was despatched to the United States as The Times's new Special Correspondent. Russell arrived in New York on 16 March 1861 and less than a month later embarked upon what was to prove a highly successful tour of the Confederate States.

A major characteristic of the social and spatial morphology of urban areas in advanced capitalist societies is the residential segregation of different socioeconomic, life style, and ethnic groups. The basic rationale for this segregation is common to most societies, as is its production via the operation of housing markets. In addition, however, each country has its own particular characteristics which accentuate the general processes. One such characteristic in the United States is the nature of the local government system in most States.

The aim of this paper is to identify die main features of that system as they apply to the geography of residential separation. The discussion is set within die context of the general processes of American local government and indicates how these have encouraged segregation. The paper then turns to a discussion of the use of the courts and die Fourteendi Amendment to challenge the amalgam of housing market and local government processes, and evaluates the likely outcome of the series of challenges.

Emerson's essay on “Gifts” perceptively highlights the ambivalence felt in gift-giving or receiving, an ambivalence which lies at the heart of Saul Bellow's most recent novel, Humboldt's Gift. The importance of literal gift-giving has been insufficiently recognised as a factor which governs the action of the novel, our understanding of which is enhanced by an examination and application of the sociological analysis of gift-exchange.

Gift-exchange has been most extensively studied in relation to the North-West Coast American Indians, notably the Kwakiutl, in whose culture the “potlatch” is a central activity. The term “potlatch” is applied to a variety of gift-giving ceremonies, involving both the giving away of quantities of possessions and their wilful destruction. The whole of a man's worldly goods may be dispersed or destroyed in this fashion, in an attempt to maintain status. To eclipse a rival chief, for example, a man may destroy all his own accumulated wealth. While in theory the “gift” is spontaneous and disinterested, in practice it is based on political or economic self-interest.The gift of property implies an obligation in the recipient which, if not fulfilled, results in his loss of face.