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(1992). The placement of the songs in Dekker's the shoemaker's holiday. English Studies: Vol. 73, No. 2, pp. 121-123.

Seeking to determine precisely what it means to be an American, John Harmon McElroy compares the cultural history of the United States with the cultural histories of Brazil, Canada, Europe, and Spanish America.McElroy demonstrates that American culture is the least European of the four continental cultures developed after 1492. He believes the essential variance stems from the fact that the United States is populated by people and their descendants who chose the United States as home. In contrast, because immigration to Canada, Brazil, and South America was controlled by the European governments, they reflect a stronger European cultural outlook and orientation than the United States.

Apres quelques remarques sur l'intention de l'auteur en ecrivant History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Colombus, l'A. decrit les materiaux et leur utilisation, et rapporte les jugements critiques ou elogieux des XIX et XXs. sur le travail accompli.

Late this past summer, my wife and I returned terize them as precise. Here again, therefore, we from a trip to the west coast to a rather startling have the Myth of Measurable Improvement. sight. We had been away for about ten days, and in that time, one of my pumpkin plants had Assumptions exploded across a large section of the back lawn. How then should we evaluate student writing if My pepper plants, too, had burst into flame, ripe our estimations seem particularly crude and red peppers like tongues of fire, licking out at the imprecise? Actually, the answer is not so much how, green stems. for many fine methods remain at our disposal, but Although I had nurtured these plants with litwhen to evaluate. I believe teachers of English, tle success throughout the summer, under benign writing instructors, should withhold judgment of neglect they had apparently thrived. Or had they? a student's progress until a suitable period of time Later, I comforted myself with the realization that has elapsed which would indeed allow for measthese peppers had indeed been growing all along; urable growth. We should not look for day-to-day I simply had to turn away for a week or so to growth, especially if our method of assessing that ascertain this growth. Prior to our holiday, I had growth is so imprecise. I base this prohibition on been estimating their growth---or lack of it-using premature evaluation of growth on three no refined tool or instrument; yet I assumed that assumptions. I could pass judgment on the state of these plants 1. The writing tasks we require of our students are so from my day-to-day evaluations. Such is the "myth varied that daily, or even weekly, evaluations ultimately of measurable improvement." become confounded with the variance of the written I borrow this phrase from Cy Knoblauch and assignments themselves. One particular student may Lil Brannon, lifting it specifically from Rhetorical perform marvelously in the descriptive mode, Traditions and the Teaching of Writing (1984). After while she languishes in her attempts to produce all, my topic is writing, not vegetables. As teachers quality exposition. Is she slipping? Has her proof English, we, too, perpetuate a fallacy if we congress fallen off? Her classmate writes an abysmal tinue to believe that we can measure growth in business letter, yet the following week he produces writing using crude estimations in a day-by-day a marvelously expressive narration. My, how he manner. That our evaluations are crude might be has improved! Few of us are duped, of course, demonstrated by simply asking twenty teachers to into making such spurious evaluations of such varrate a particular student text. These evaluations ied examples of discourse. This same spuriousness will no doubt vary considerably. Experience has exists, however, in our insistence on providing a shown that such variations will occur with any summative evaluation of business letters, or pertype of text with any group of teachers. We like to suasive essays, or literary compositions. The stuthink of our evaluations as reliable-and I think dents write each under a different context, in a they are-and valid, yet we could hardly characdifferent frame of mind, often for a different

For about 150 years, the United States pursued a policy of relatively unrestricted immigration. Since 1924, however, we have pursued a policy of drastically restricted immigration, with the restrictions based on considerations which many persons have believed to be discriminatory, unjust, and not based on facts. In the early I950's, it seemed that changes in this policy might be effected. The final result, the McCarranWalter Act,1 however, although undoubtedly a more efficient instrument than the 1924 law,2 still clashes with the democratic ideals held by most Americans and not only perpetuates most of the injustices of the earlier legislation, but adds new discriminations of its own. We shall here concern ourselves not with the entire law, but rather with the principle upon which it is based: that it is not desirable for the United States to permit more than a small amount of immigration, and that such immigration should be specifically and unequally allocated among various countries. The assumptions here embodied are that the place of birth of an immigrant is a reliable indication of his capability of becoming a desirable American, and that people from some countries are not sufficiently likely to become desirable Americans that we can afford to chance the entry of more than a hundred or two a year. It is a serious matter when a majority of Congress votes in favor of an immigration law based on the assumption that mankind is divided into fixed breeds, some superior to others. On the contrary, as Edward Corsi has said:3

T HE PRINCIPAL IDEOLOGICAL reference in Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand: A Chapter from an Abortive Romance" is to the "unpardonable sin" of the title-character; the principal event of the story is his suicide by leaping into a furnace. Hawthorne seems to connect the two, the sin and the suicide, in a peculiar way through the name Brand. Just before killing himself Brand feels that he has nothing further to seek; no more to achieve. "'My task is done, and well done!"' he thinks. What he has done is probably stated in his soliloquy of farewell