Inadvertently an error crept in, at proof stage, to Dr J. R. Pole's article: we apologize to him and to our readers for this, and we would like to correct it. On page 69 the sentence to which footnote I refers should, of course, read ‘George F. Kennan's trenchant critique…was followed shortly by Professor John M. Blum's…’ As it stands, the text is wrong, the footnote is correct.

The conduct of Sir William Johnson at the treaty of Fort Stanwix was regarded unfavourably by contemporaries and has been strongly criticized by historians. There is little to choose between the Board of Trade report of April 1769 and the view of Professor Billington, who holds that the Superintendent ‘mercilessly fleeced the Indians who trusted him as their protector’ while concluding ‘one of the worst treaties in the history of Anglo-Indian relationships’. There was ample cause for bewilderment and anger. Johnson had obtained a boundary line which deviated in three major particulars from that which he had been instructed to secure. This act of disobedience was a consequence of the need of land speculators to gain control of regions forbidden to them by royal instructions but vital to their financial hopes. Johnson, in his own right a great landlord and speculator, sacrificed his public duties to private gain, even though this involved the betrayal of innocent Indians.

The similarities that existed between the political and social theories of the newly independent Americans in the 1780s and those of the liberal-minded French under the Ancien Régime have, for many years, been a subject of fairly repetitive discussion. The parallels have been traced, the influences classified, and the practical debts (even to individual French thinkers) time and again acknowledged. The comparisons have in fact attracted the interest and attention of so many types of scholars that the work has been done with a thoroughness that is not surprising. And upon examination of the relevant works it would certainly appear that the critical attention given to the subject, on the national scale, has been so complete that its various aspects have been, long since, almost exhausted.

Millenarianism was an important element in early nineteenth-century Evangelical Christianity. The majority of British and American Evangelicals favoured a post-millennial Advent, and looked forward to a thousand years of heaven on earth which were to precede Christ's Second Coming. The great religious and benevolent societies—tract and Bible societies, foreign and domestic missionary societies and the like, whose progress in Britain and America was closely linked—were sustained by the hope that their work and even their very existence were signs of the approaching Millennium. Within the major Evangelical denominations as well as the smaller sects, there were also ‘students of prophecy’, who took a closer interest in the allegorical and prophetic books of the Bible than the majority of their contemporaries, but this interest was by no means limited to the fanatical or eccentric. These ‘students’ read their Bibles with the extreme literalism common to Evangelicals at this time, and in their exegeses disputed the time and circumstances of the Second Advent. Many supported the idea of a post-millennial Advent, while others argued that Christ's return had already taken place at the destruction of Jerusalem. Some favoured a pre-millennial Advent; that is, that Christ would return before the thousand years of heaven on earth.

In former years there existed a widespread assumption that, throughout the nineteenth century, the United States was an isolationist power. Its policy, according to this thesis, had been articulated in Washington's Farewell Address, was accorded bipartisan acquiescence in Jefferson's First Inaugural, and was reaffirmed in the Monroe Doctrine. Until the Spanish–American war of 1898 isolationism prevailed, confident and more or less unchallenged; and then it suddenly collapsed, virtually without a struggle, leaving the Americans free to enter without inhibition on their new status of world power.

Political parties in representative democracies have, as two of their most significant functions, to facilitate popular participation in the decision-making process and to implement, through control of governmental organs, those policies which are popularly favoured. Judged by these criteria, American parties are dysfunctional—so one critical school argues. American parties, they charge, are responsible neither to their members nor voters and are so organized and operated that they fail to govern effectively. When, in the early 1950s, this case against American parties had its greatest acceptance in the discipline, a number of critics contrasted American parties unfavourably with British parties. As an earlier generation of political scientists had urged Americans to adopt British institutions of government, so the critics of American parties favoured reforms which they thought were characteristic of British parties. If American parties became more like British parties, they argued, those parties would be more responsible and effective. Defenders of American parties refuted the critics' diagnosis and prescription by emphasizing the many environmental and institutional differences between Britain and the United States. British experience simply was not applicable in the U.S., they maintained. As study of British parties progressed an even more devastating rejoinder to critics of American parties emerged. Various findings began to suggest that although British parties obviously were much more cohesive in the legislature than were American parties, they were not nearly as responsible as the critics had assumed.

Richard Schechner, the editor of the Tulane Drama Review, greeted Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a ‘persistent escape into morbid fantasy’. Like W. D. Maxwell, a member of the Pulitzer Prize advisory board, he found it a filthy play and indicted it for its ‘morbidity and sexual perversity which are there only to titillate an impotent and homosexual theatre and audience’. More perversely he saw in the play ‘an ineluctable urge to escape reality and its concomitant responsibilities by crawling back into the womb, or bathroom, or both’. His revulsion was shared by other critics who similarly misapprehended Albee's intention in a play which, far from endorsing illusion, remorselessly peels off protective fantasies in order to reach ‘the bone…the marrow’. Indeed, as Alan Schneider, the play's Broadway director, has asked, ‘is Albee not rather dedicated to smashing that rosy view, shocking us with the truth of our present-day behaviour and thought, striving to purge us into an actual confrontation with reality?’ (my italics).

It has always been the unique desire of the American artist to attempt to order all experience in terms of the work of art and to make his life continuous and integral with the work. This poses certain problems for the artist for he thus becomes personally responsible not only for his imaginative redefinition of life but also its enactment in plural reality. In singing himself Whitman believed he was singing all America. His declaration that ‘The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,’ makes the point precisely. But not all have felt the Whitmanian synthesis an easily attainable one. Washington Allston, in his Lectures on Art and Poems, had already stated the problem which was to occupy the American artist throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:

In The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King Bellow is, of course, using a fictional convention invented by Mark Twain. The language of Huckleberry Finn embodies every naïve, shrewd, awkward, or painfully honest attitude of a South-Western boy. Without forgetting this mimetic performance, however, we see that the words act directly on the sensibility of the reader in terms of his literary expectations. He is kept alert by fresh and vital rhythms and by idiomatic phrases which attract by their very incorrectness. His excitement is not primarily a response to the authenticity of the language he hears, although this is an important part of the effect. It is a response to a tension of style, involving the counter-pointing of the rhythms and incorrectnesses of a South-Western small town idiom against Victorian literary and subliterary language. Huck's relief on emerging from the Grangerford–Shepherdson feud is communicated by language which excludes, yet is aware of, fireside scenes in Dickens and the melting cadences of ‘Home, Sweet Home’: ‘I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.’