I’ve been thinking a little bit about a class I’m teaching again in the spring called “The U.S. Viewed from Abroad,” so I dug up and worked over some old thoughts that will probably never reach the classroom.Viewing the American Scene[1] in 1904 after a twenty-year absence from his native country, Henry James took in Manhattan Island from the bay. The skyscrapers, he wrote, are “extravagant pins in a cushion” or yet,growths…arisen to be ‘picked’ in time with a shears; nipped short off, by waiting fate, as soon as ‘science’ applied to gain, has put up on the table, from Read more