The Colonial New England town has always intrigued American historians but, paradoxically, few historians until recently have placed the colonial town under a microscope and studied it in detail. Most, instead, like George Bancroft and Herbert Baxter Adams, simply heaped accolades upon it. Even the Progressive historians, writing in an age of scientific history and seeking to debunk the myth of town meeting democracy, still did not apply a close scrutiny to the actual sources but instead also talked in generalities. The only real exceptions to this pattern and the only persons to delve deeply into local sources were Charles Andrews in his River Towns of Connecticut and G. E. Howard in his Introduction to the Local Constitutional History of the United States, both published in 1889. The next serious professional local study did not appear until 1961. In the intervening seventy-two years hundreds of local histories were written, but by antiquarians who frequently wrote with intelligence and felicity but seldom asked the significant questions that a professional historian would. Indeed, to be involved in local history implied, to people living in this time period, that a person was an antiquarian and not a true historian. However, since 1961 a number of historians have attempted to put the New England town under a microscope and ascertain some specifics to replace the generalities.

The experiences and impressions of the officially accredited British military and naval observers in the war of 1898 between the United States and Spain have been recounted in an earlier number of this journal. However, in an era when it was still possible for the enthusiastic amateur to take a keen personal interest in such events, even to the point of direct participation, the activities of one such unofficial eye-witness of the campaign in Cuba are worthy of note.

This article is the substance of a report, submitted to the Board of the British Library in 1974, on a short visit to research libraries in the United States made in October and November 1973. The author was at that time in charge of the United States Collection and Superintendent of the North Library in the British Library Reference Division (formerly the British Museum Library); the primary purpose of his visit was to see what implications for the British Library the American situation might seem to suggest. The opinions expressed are, of course, those of the author only, and not of the Board. The original report was prefaced by a detailed acknowledgement of the great hospitality, kindness and co-operation that the author received throughout his visit, and he is glad of this opportunity to express his gratitude publicly, though necessarily less specifically.

Gary, Indiana, was the great symbol of urban-industrial America in the Progressive Era, the largest attempt at urban genesis and town planning ever undertaken by American industry. It was an enormous undertaking – nothing less than the creation of the largest integrated iron and steel complex in the U.S.A., complete with its supporting city. Unfortunately, the greatest of America's company towns never lived up to the hopes of its founders, U.S. Steel. Hailed as the New Industrial Utopia, it rapidly degenerated into a dreary industrial conurbation; Gary represented the failure of large-scale industrial city planning.

The editors of Moby-Dick as Doubloon sagely remark: ‘ Everything written about the book in 1851–1852, when reviews were affecting Melville's audiences and probably himself, is inherently more interesting than everything written in, say, 1951–1952 ’, This view is adequate reason for presenting the full text of over a dozen uncollected, unnoted reviews of Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Red-burn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence Man, appearing in ten journals of the period: in Philadelphia, the Dollar Newspaper and The Spirit of the Times; in New York, Fisher's National Magazine and Hunt's Merchant's Magazine, Holden's Dollar Magazine, The Golden Rule, The Home Journal, and Peterson's Ladies' National Magazine; in Syracuse, the Literary Union; and in Boston, the Boston Weekly Museum. Five of these titles appear in books and articles devoted to other Melville reviews. The most interesting review is that in the Literary Union, which is unusually ingenious in its presentation of very perceptive comments. In view of the number and diverse nature of the reviews and notices, it seems preferable to group them by journal titles, with brief introductory comments for each, rather than by date or the titles of Melville's novels.

Recent American experimental fiction, in response to the fictive behaviour of the emerging realities of a technetronic culture, moves beyond the interpretive modernist novel in which the fictionist interpreted the ‘ human condition ’ within the framework of a comprehensive private metaphysics, towards a metamodern narrative with zero degree of interpretation. The mistrust of the epistemological authority of the fictive novelist is mainly caused by the pressures of the overwhelming actualities of contemporary America which render all interpretations of ‘ reality ’ arbitrary and therefore simultaneously accurate and absurd.

A reader familiar with Bernard Malamud's works is likely to turn to a new novel by this well-established writer with certain expectations. He will probably count on meeting again Malamud's variant of the Yiddish shlemiel: the fool-victim, who is the butt of fate and men, bungling his way through life, but who somehow manages to endure it all, helped by his foolhardy persistence and his wry grimaces and shrugs. Among other strands that enter into the fabric of a Malamud novel or story there is the all-too-human female character – one hesitates to dub her ‘ heroine ’ – whose gift of love tends to be a dubious blessing. The male protagonist's personality and destiny are often given depth and scope through the motif of the double; this is not exactly the Romantic Doppelgänger, but rather two characters whose destinies are linked in various ways, sometimes in a (spiritual) father-son pattern. The heroic-unheroic action will very likely take place in an atmosphere of isolation and imprisonment, the ghetto being a prototypical setting. The past will most certainly play a small but important role as a means of creating depth and resonance; it may appear as history, legend or myth. Touches of a pastoral world – trees, flowers, birds – will hint at possibilities of freedom, purity and innocence. The shlemiel will never really be attuned to these happier strains; nevertheless there will most probably be a movement in his development toward a qualifies rebirth, a limited redemption, which will have to be bought with suffering and commitment. This might be the commitment of the artist, and the satisfaction of wholehearted dedication will be balanced and often outweighed by anguish and doubts of purpose and ability. Malamud always lightens the sombre picture with humour and wit; this is achieved by colourful ‘ Jewish ’ echoes: self-deprecating jokes and home-made sayings and proverbs which tend to reduce tragedy to something trivial and commonplace.

‘ There is always one theme in Mary McCarthy's fictions ’, writes Alfred Kazin in Bright Book of Life: ‘ none of these awful people is going to catch me. The heroine is always distinctly right, and gives herself all possible marks for taste, integrity and indomitability. Other people are somehow material to be written up. ’ Whether or not one accepts this as fair, one is inclined to agree that a pattern of identification exists between the novelist and her fictional heroines. A reader of McCarthy's non-fiction is also often struck, particularly of late, by the extent to which self-portrayal can become central to her treatment of a subject. The inward play of her imaginative response is frequently as much the substance as the servant of her outwardly avowed literary purpose, or the onward momentum of her narrative line. The intellectual, aesthetic or moral assurance of her self-characterization exerts defining pressure on her materials, be they those of the critic or the polemicist, the autobiographer or the reporter. This pressure of personality indeed relates more than it distinguishes, sometimes even fuses, these various literary roles, along with a number of their respective techniques.