Publications:
Books
Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love
in Nineteenth-Century
America. (Oxford University Press, 1989; paperback, 1992)
A history of the private, intimate reality of nineteenth-century
American Victorians, emphasizing the male as well as
female role and analyzing evidence of the intellectual
and emotional life of both sexes as they interacted together.
Using manuscript letters, the sexual values and behavior
of mainstream Americans in the nineteenth century are
compared to public advice of the time as well as current
historiography. Topics include letter-writing and reading,
courtship, marriage, male and female sex roles, and the
ideology and practice of romantic love. The neglected
role of romantic love in the development of American
society and culture is a major interpretive theme of
the volume. Evidence is presented on the contribution
of romantic love to American individualism, secularization,
and the movement toward male-female equality.
Articles
"
Clifford Geertz and the Concept of Culture" Prospects:
An Annual of American Cultural Studies, Jack Salzman,
ed., vol. 8 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
31-47.
Book Reviews
Review of Lois Palken Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan:
New Woman, New Worlds. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1984, in The Western Historical
Quarterly 17 (January, 1986), 79-80.
Review essay of Maxine L. Margolis, Mothers and Such:
Views of American Women and Why They Changed. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984,
in Huntington Library Quarterly 49 (Autumn 1986),
423-427.
Review of James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary
Life in The Western Historical Quarterly 22(May
1990), 246-248.
Review of Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender
and Culture at the Fin de Siecle in Archives
of Sexual Behavior: An Interdisciplianry Research Journal 22
(Dec. 1993), 647-650.
Review of Marilyn Holt, The Orphan Trains: Placing
Out in America in Montana: The Magazine of Western
History 44(Winter 1994), 78-80.
Featured Review of Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck
Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices in American
Historical Review (December 1993), 1559-1561.
Work In Progress
Tentative title: The Funniest Joke in the World: The
Untold Story of Mark Twain A book utilizing three
crucial sources: the diaries of Jean Clemens, Mark Twain's
youngest daughter; the diaries of his surrogate wife
and secretary, Isabel Lyon; and an unpublished 450 page
manuscript written by Twain to untangle the web of lying,
deceit, and betrayal that surrounded the last years of
his life.
