Historians have long recognized the unprecedented expansion of federal power during the Civil War. Moreover most scholars agree that the expansion of federal power manifested itself most immediately and profoundly in the abolition of slavery. In a sense, through the Emancipation Proclamation, the Republican administration injected the national government into the domain of civil rights, and by doing so imbued federal power with a distinct moral purpose. The passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments codified this expression of federal authority, rejecting the bedrock tenet in American republican thought that centralized power constituted the primary threat to individual liberty.

Historians generally agree that in the 1950s and 1960s organized labour in the United States had become thoroughly bureaucratized. This is often explained as part of a general process of growth and maturity. In their lean, radical youth in the 1930s, those American unions which had launched the Congress of Industrial Organizations had aimed at two targets: to organize and bargain collectively, as promised by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act; and then to use this power to press for wider industrial democracy and social reform. By the time the CIO was reunited with the American Federation of Labor in 1955, this picture had been substantially changed. Increasingly labour cooperated with management and had become part of the white, male, liberal corporate power structure which ran the American capitalist industrial and political system. This military-industrial complex was the indispensable basis, not just for American prosperity but the whole Cold War strategy of containment of communism through the Pax Americana.

Ever since it was first staged in May 1992, Mamet's Oleanna seems, on both sides of the Atlantic, to have been perceived, publicised and reviewed almost exclusively as a manifestation of backlash sexual politics — that is, as a work characterised by outrage and hostility towards the agenda of contemporary feminism. Although the play entered the public arena too late to be addressed in Susan Faludi's 1992 study Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, its attitudes have typically been read as symptomatic of the same aggrieved and aggressive masculinity which Faludi diagnoses in such exemplary texts as Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990). The play also lends itself with deceptive ease to a comparison with one of Faludi's most alarming paradigms of backlash popular culture, the Hollywood blockbuster Fatal Attraction. Both narratives depict a fundamentally decent man, loyal to wife and family, who becomes the target of and is almost destroyed by the machinations of a vengeful single woman. In both cases the action culminates in an explosive physical assault on the offending female character. And, in performance, the violence of both denouements releases and apparently sanctions a similar surge of vicarious male aggression. Howls of “Kick her ass!” and “Kill the bitch!” were a regular occurrence at screenings of Fatal Attraction, and audience reaction to Oleanna has often followed the same pattern: Elaine Showalter reports a male acquaintance saying “I nearly climbed up on the stage to kick the shit out of the little bitch myself.”

The term “isolationism,” still used today in discussions of contemporary United States policy, is “ fittingly…identified with a revulsion against the entanglements of world war.” For analysts using this concept, isolationism means American withdrawal from political connections with the rest of the world (no treaties and permanent alliances) and idealism in foreign policy (no secret clauses or deals). They consider that it has characterized American foreign policy since the first president took office and was expressed in Washington's Farewell Address in 1796 for the first time. Although the term appeared only in 1922, it is thus applied to early American foreign policy, as Lawrence S. Kaplan does in the chapter entitled “Toward isolationism: the Rise and Fall of the Franco-American Alliance 1775–1801” of his Entangling Alliances with None: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Jefferson. According to Kaplan, this speech “became an enduring symbol of America's isolation,” and he defines early “isolationism” as follows: “…a freedom to enjoy access to all ports interested in receiving American products. It meant further a freedom from subservience to any foreign power, of the kind which had forced them into the service of a maternal economy or of dynastic wars in the past. Finally, it extended to a self-image of virtue and innocence that would be protected by advancing principles of peaceful relationships among nations.”

Even if one thinks, like Albert K. Weinberg, that “isolationism” is a “poor theory,” which “has placed the discussion of American foreign policy in a sad predicament of obfuscation,” one has to admit with him that “mere scholars can change no social habit.”

In the relatively short history of Hemingway studies, a significant controversy has erupted as to how early and to what degree Gertrude Stein influenced Ernest Hemingway's early style. The earlier commentators (whose works date roughly from 1952 to 1973) agree that Gertrude Stein significantly influenced Hemingway's early style from 1921 to 1924. For instance, Philip Young writes that “similarities between his prose and hers suggest indeed that he learned a lot. What she had tried to do in the days when Hemingway was a boy was remarkably like what the young man was going one day to try to do, too.” Charles Fenton concurs, writing that Hemingway responded to Stein's method “between 1922 and 1924, the period of Miss Stein's greatest personal importance to him.” Carlos Baker reports that Stein provided sound advice and that “nearly any 23-year-old author could profit by it,” which is “what Hemingway did whenever he sat down at the typewriter.” Finally, Sheldon Grebstein concludes that “Hemingway brought [Stein's] experiments to fruition and made it [her style] a major resource of his style.”

Women's traditional place on the American frontier has been as invisible helpmate or at best as some shadowy figure who appeared occasionally when describing pioneer homes and lifestyles. Until recently, historians followed the individualistic and linear progression of Frederick Jackson Turner westward across the continent and found no need to discuss the activities of both sexes. Euro-American men were fully capable of explaining the frontier, both as authors and as subjects. But the American frontier is no longer one-dimensional. Increasing numbers of female historians have insisted on not only placing women in the midst of established pioneering ventures, but have widened western horizons to discuss different pioneers and new economic and social roles for women of all ethnic and racial groups. Women's place on the frontier has now become so central that it is impossible to make any sense of new settlement patterns without examining the experiences of both men and women and their relationships to each other.