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Upon Byron's death, the territory of epic lay blasted by firestorm. It was a field to be gleaned perhaps by the very old, the very young, or the expressly marginal (Barrett, Hemans, Bowles), but it was deserted by nearly every mature writer able to appreciate how Don Juan had despoiled the genre's ordinary means. The abiding epic energy of the 1820s flowed, as towards a last refuge, into Last Things themselves, imagined under the aegis of apocalypse. Poems of deluge, rehearsals of Armageddon, and visions of judgment by Pollok, Atherstone, and others secured a vantage from which to contain authentically epic effects of vastness, mass movement, and high seriousness within a universalizing narrative — albeit at the cost of unbudging orthodoxy and drastically terminal simplification.

Some Seminoles disdained the peace treaty, but others wanted it and signed their adherence to the peace in December 1802. Kinache of Miccosukee, however, returned to aid Bowles. He still tried to cause more harm. Indians, however, refused to surrender all prisoners, and sporadic attacks continued at San Marcos. Anti-Bowles chiefs wanted the 4,500-peso reward. Since Seminoles and Lower Creeks were deserting him, Bowles sought and failed to find help from the Upper Creeks. Many chiefs refused to hear his harangues. In early 1803, Bowles rapidly lost supporters. At the May Indian conference, his final Seminole supporters surrendered Bowles, who had attended the meeting, to guards who conveyed him to New Orleans. They received 1,500 pesos immediately and more money later. Bowles was sent to Havana in June 1803, and it ended the turmoil that he had caused.

The chapter focuses on ‘personality’, a key term in the period that named at once the practice of making public attacks on private character, and the power to persuade readers that they were granted access to the writer's private self. The first was widely regarded as the besetting sin of the public press of the period. The second was almost as widely agreed to be the presiding virtue of its literature. The two senses of the word were, I argue, in uncomfortably close association.

In his December 17, 1803, letter to Aaron Burr extolling the glories of Florida, Jacob Lewis urged him to seek out John McQueen as the source of “the necessary information”. In 1797 and 1798, McQueen opposed British privateers by installing the Queseda Battery. McQueen was one of the operators of slavedriven plantations across the border in the United States, though in justice to him, he seems to have had his own ideas about slavery, albeit none so radical as those of William Augustus Bowles or Burr. This chapter discusses Burr's arrival at Fort George Island in 1804; his meeting with John Houstoun McIntosh and his lady, Eliza Bayard; his travel through Campbelltown whose hinterland, Cumberland and Scotland counties, had manifested their preference for him over Thomas Jefferson in the previous three presidential elections; Burr's time in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia; and his participation in the impeachment trial of Samuel Chase of Maryland, whom the Republicans in the House of Representatives had voted to impeach.

This chapter describes how Bowles returned to the Gulf Coast and sought leadership of the southeastern Indians, using gifts to sway the Natives to accept him as their leader and promising them more if they accepted him. McGillivray lost prestige because of his Treaty of New York with the United States that ceded land. To increase his arms for the Indians, Bowles seized the Panton trading store in Apalache, which turned him into an enemy. José de Hevia convinced Bowles to journey to New Orleans, where the governor arrested him as a criminal. In Havana the captain general shipped him to Spain.

John Thelwall, the radical activist, posed a double challenge to Coleridge — as a materialist atheist and as a man with decided views on poetic form. This chapter argues that these two elements were intimately connected. Their disagreement became centred on Coleridge's idolised Bowles, whose verse Thelwall considered debilitatingly sentimental both in its emotive metrical emphasis and in its melancholy retrospection, which contrasted with Thelwall's own ‘vivifying principle’ of ‘animal vitality’, a material electric stimulus to thought and action. He continued his ‘sparring’ by annotating his wife's copy of Bowles's Poems, which Coleridge had given her, and gave vent to his mockery of Bowles's elegiac sympathies. But in the late summer of 1797, after visiting Nether Stowey, Thelwall's own poetry began to express his deep need for a common life of ‘kindred sympathies’ and ‘sweet converse’ with his friend. Within Thelwall too there were evident tensions and contradictions.

During the invasion crisis of the spring of 1798 Britain's ‘one common life’ was under threat. Pamphlets instructed the populace on how to organise themselves to confront both revolution abroad and potential insurrection at home. This chapter explores the subtle politics of looking ‘homeward’ at this time. Coleridge's ‘Fears in Solitude’ is read in the context of Sheridan's House of Commons speech of 20 April, when the opposition orator finally gave his support (but only conditionally) to the government. It argues that Coleridge's poem (dated 20 April) is a response to Sheridan's rallying cry for a pragmatic national unity of interest during the crisis, but without abandoning the cause of reform. The link to Sheridan supports a more tactical and robust reading of the politics of ‘Fears in Solitude’, and highlights the national dimension of several themes that have run through the book.

The trial of the officers who surrendered was delayed until 1804–1805 because of the slowness in assembling testimony. The charges were inflated and ignored evidence, and the guilty findings were expected. Only Portell, however, suffered, because higher appeals courts never reviewed his case. Bowles, meanwhile, refused to participate in his trial, which made it impossible to proceed, and, tired of incarceration, starved himself to death in 1805. Spanish hold of the Gulf Coast continued to weaken in the years after Bowles, and Spain's involvement in numerous domestic and colonial conflicts forced it to surrender the Floridas to the United States.

The continuities of literary history discussed in the Burkean contexts of Chapter 3 are also central to this chapter, which looks at Wordsworth's poem not as an expression of the ‘egotistical sublime’, but as a sociable text that values continuities of several kinds. The chapter recovers the ‘inland murmur’ of Wordsworth's poem, moving upstream to its sources in the work of Thomas Warton and his school, especially in its echoes of a tradition of ‘riverbank’ poetry that can be traced back to Warton's ‘River Loddon’ sonnet of 1777 and the poems of his protégé William Lisle Bowles. The chapter discusses how Wordsworth's text is in dialogue with these earlier revisitings of a common ‘native stream’, an organic motif that linked a poet's personal history to the recovery of a poetic tradition.

In Autumn 1796, Coleridge assembled this privately printed pamphlet of twenty-eight sonnets by twelve poets, including four each by Southey, Lloyd, Lamb, and himself, and designed it to be bound up with the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles, who for Coleridge had created ‘a sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world’ in poems that ‘domesticate with the heart’. The collection is viewed as an attempt by Coleridge to engage with the fraught domestic and personal problems of his friends Lamb and Lloyd, who were both in crisis. The chapter argues that it is an organised collection with a structured argument and a directed message, and that the result is virtually a ‘lost’ Conversation Poem, a dramatic ‘converse’ meditating on themes of self and society, friendship and social action, and moving from single lonely thoughts to a more integrated sense of ‘one common life’.

This chapter explains how Christopher Isherwood came to write his Berlin stories, the source of his Sally Bowles novella that became the basis for John van Druten's play I Am a Camera (1951) and then Joe Masteroff's libretto for the musical. The chapter supplies a detailed reading of the theme of reality and unreality that is central to Sally Bowles's story; it also draws comparisons and contrasts between the fictional Sally Bowles and her real‐life counterpart, Jean Ross. Moreover, it analyzes the flaws‐mainly distortions in characterization and politics‐in van Druten's play and the 1956 British film adaptation of it, and it shows how Harold Prince became interested in creating the musical.

This chapter summarizes the evolution of the American economics profession from 1885 to the present. It notes the efforts to suppress the free cultivation of ideas, in particular those associated with Marxism, and its failure as a profession to anticipate the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession that started in January 2008. A brief account of the denial of tenure to Samuel Bowles at Harvard University is provided, an explanation is given for the subsequent hiring of a large group of radical economists at the University of Massachusetts and not elsewhere, and the conversion of three economists from traditional economics to radical political economics is described.

Simon Rottenberg, who was hired from Duke University to replace Kindahl as Department head, resigned from the head position during the spring of his first year in office. Tensions were raw and the Department was in turmoil. The provost then appointed the Dean of the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, a political scientist, as acting head of the Economics Department. And it was this dean who added six radical political economists to the Department's faculty in addition to several other appointments. Subsequently the Dean relinquished his acting head position and Norman Aitken became Department chair.

This chapter sketches Bowles's life to 1791, discussing displaced British merchants who wanted to retain their trade with the southeastern Indians and who used Bowles to further their commerce. Bowles soon wanted a greater role among the Creeks and Seminoles and to replace McGillivray as an Indian leader. The Creeks sought weapons to defend their lands from encroaching Americans, and Bowles journeyed to England to seek help in trading on the Gulf Coast.

This chapter discusses both Bowles's travels and Apalache during these years. Colonial authorities sent Bowles to Spain and the Philippines as a prisoner. He created so much mischief in Manila that the governor sent him back to Spain, but he escaped on the return journey. Bowles returned to England and again sought help for his Muskogee state. Great Britain provided little. Apalache, meanwhile, remained restless. The Creeks had no comparable leader upon McGillivray's death in 1793. The Seminoles continued to seek goods from Nassau while the Georgians encroached on Creek lands. Spain's 1795 treaty with the United States placed most Creek lands in American hands. Fort San Marcos sustained heavy damages again in a hurricane, which underscored the weaknesses of Spanish defenses in West Florida.

Captain Tomás Portell became commandant at Fort San Marcos in 1798, which continued in a decrepit condition and with insufficient soldiers. Spain was at war again with Great Britain, which brought its privateers and warships to the Gulf Coast, and hindered sending Spanish supplies to Pensacola and Apalache. Marking the new United States–Spanish boundary upset the Natives. Spain used its Mississippi River gunboats on the Gulf Coast to protect small supply vessels, guard Fort San Marcos, and try to seize Bowles. Folch, Bouligny, and Casa-Calvo disputed the assistance Apalache needed. Bowles, meanwhile, returned to the Gulf Coast determined to create his state of Muskogee, losing most of his weapons and gifts when his ship sank off the Gulf Coast. He assumed the title of Director General and attracted Seminoles and some Lower Creeks to his cause through promising to bring in more goods. Upper Creeks, however, resisted him and incipient warfare began. Casa-Calvo sent an expedition to capture Bowles. Folch disputed many of Casa-Calvo's orders.