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Sucheng Chan. This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860-1910. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. xxv + 503 pp. $40.00. Joan M. Jensen. Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants to North America. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1988. x + 350 pp. $32.50. South Asians in North America: An Annotated and Selected Bibliography, ed. Jane Singh, et al. Berkeley Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies, University of California, 1988. viii + 179 PP. $12.00; institutions $18.00. Harry H. L. Kitano & Roger Daniels. Asian Americans: Emerging Minorities. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1988. ix + 214 pp. Roger Daniels. Asian America Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850. Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1988. xviii + 394 pp. $24.95. Ronald Takaki. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History ofAsian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. ix + 571. $24.95.

“I don't think I'll have anything very interesting to tell you.”When I met and interviewed Karl Ragnar Gierow in his office at the Royal Swedish Academy, Stockholm, February 27, 1973, he at first expressed skepticism about whether there was any Eugene O'Neill story to be told. But I had earlier paid several visits to the archives of the Royal Dramatic Theatre (Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern/ Dramaten); had closely researched the historic O'Neill world premieres (1956–62) while Gierow was Dramaten's General Intendant (Manager); and had been carefully coached by Stig Torsslow, the theatre's venerable Dramaturg, concerning Gierow's exploits in acquiring, translating, and producing four of O'Neill's posthumous plays. These comprised Long Day's Journey into Night (February 10, 1956); A Touch of the Poet (March 19, 1957); Hughie (September 18, 1958); and More Stately Mansions (November 9, 1962). I had come to my appointment with Gierow bearing some essential facts and with plenty of questions about Long Day's Journey and the playwright's widow, Carlotta Monterey O'Neill. Gierow was cordial, accommodating, and forthcoming with marvelous remembered details. I returned to Finland (where I was a Senior Fulbright-Hays Scholar) full of appreciation for Torsslow's avuncular counsel and Gierow's vivid recollections. I carried along voluminous notes from my longsought interview and copies of some O'Neill scripts from Dramaten for the Library of Åbo Akademi.

While T. M. Parrott's proposal that Shakespeare may have written the title‐role of King Richard II "for his own interpretation as an actor” suggests an interesting area of bibliographical research, the prevailing unreliability of facsimile editions of Shakespearean quartos makes investigation of presumed authorial pointing in Q1 —theoretically rhetorical or dramatic, rather than syntactical—both hazardous and frustrating. Still, the neophyte American bibliographer (who must resort to such texts), if forewarned concerning the nature of tamperings in photo‐lithographic facsimiles—made‐up lines, editorial “emendations” of original punctuation, occasional alteration of details in printers’ ornaments, and sometimes even outright forgeries—should find the liabilities well worth braving.

No one at the Indian Bureau, in Washington, seemed interested when, early in the summer of 1876, Indian Agent John P. Clum suggested taking a carload of his San Carlos Apaches back East –“to see the greatness of our United States and become impressed by the progress of their white brothers.” So Clum relates in the semi-autobiographical book Apache Agent.Two years before, in Feburary, 1874, he had been commissioned :by President Grant as Agent for the Apaches at the San Carlos Indian Reservation, Arizona Territory.

John Brougham (1810-1880), America's most prolific dramatist, left over 160 identifiable scripts. He was also a leading nineteenth-century actor in England, Ireland, and the United States; intermittently a theatrical manager in Boston and New York; an embattled comic journalist; and author of numerous chauvinistic stories and poems about Ireland. Yet just over a century since his death, he remains virtually unknown to the present generation of playgoers, readers, and even scholars. Arthur Hobson Quinn's mandarin History of the American Drama (1923) cites Brougham as "British" one who simply followed "a British stage tradition" and "did not respond instinctively to American themes."1 Quinn's pervasive nativist, elitist bias and post-Victorian predilection for stage-realism conditioned him to deprecate the Irish-American author, misunderstand his practiced comedic artifice, and even ignore his patriotic Revolutionary melodramas. Brougham lived and worked, wrote and published, in the United States fully thirty-three years over half his adult life but that wasn't "American" enough for Quinn. The single major factor contributing to the scholarly neglect of Brougham's topical burlesques and multi-ethnic urban comedies probably has been Quinn's pioneering, subjective, influential chapter, "American Comedy Types, 1825-1860," whose fabricated gallery of "native" characters and inclusive genre hierarchy have since hardened into unassailable critical mythology. It is noteworthy that, whereas Quinn's idiosyncratic essay includes no Irish immigrant characters, Brougham's 1850s social comedies contain no stage Yankees. Both Quinn and Constance Rourke, the author of American Humor (1931), were Irish-surname Americans; but in their amalgamationist writings, Irish-American authors and IrishAmerican literary types have been undervalued or simply left out as is the case in regard to the work of John Brougham. His solid contributions to Irish-American immigrant literature, in particular, deserve to be better known.