A great deal of criticism has celebrated Henry James's historical imagination or his lack of it; very little criticism has explored with any precision the sophisticated grasp of history that James exhibits in his novels and the various uses to which he puts his sense of history. Henry James himself had a passion for history and he sought it everywhere. Early in his writing career, in his biography of Hawthorne, James pointed out that ‘it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature’. Much later in his career, in The American Scene, James described his own ‘Hunger for History’ explaining that ‘history is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of “what happens”, but the much finer complexity of what we read into it and think of in connection with it ’. In its underlying form The American is not the kind of novel to compel one to reflect upon the ethos of a civilization or the social history of a culture, certainly not in the ways that Balzac's La Comédie Humaine or Tolstoy's War and Peace does. Nor is it the kind of novel that calls our attention to large historical trends. Yet to grasp the full stringencies of the story one should possess a strong historical awareness; for this novel provides an interesting example of how well James understood the historical implications of his subject.

It is a commonplace that American western fiction is ‘mythic’ and archetypal. It is also increasingly taken for granted that westerns reflect contemporary political and social issues and that one can learn much about American attitudes from a study of westerns as historical documents. Are these ideas reconcilable? One answer would be that though the book or film may communicate certain contemporary messages to its local audience, it also conveys ‘universal truths’ to a wider public. To see how wrong this happy compromise is, one has only to consider the following typical cases, taken from various stages in the history of American western fiction. Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking stories seem to be set in an impossible never-never land, yet the author occasionally provides ’scholarly‘ footnotes relating the stories’ locales to real places in America. The dime novel Seth Jones, by Edward Ellis (1860), contains elaborate anthropological notes on Indians, but on the page following one of them the hero says, ‘“Howsumever, that don't make no difference, whether it's the Mohawks, Oneidas, or any of them blasted Five Nation niggers, they are all a set of skunks …”’ Emerson Hough pauses in the middle of North of 36 (1923) to provide a bibliography of sources for the facts about cowboy life on which he draws. The film producers D. W. Griffith and James Cruze (The Covered Wagon, 1923, is based on a romance by Hough) spent enormous amounts of money and energy to get costumes, settings and technical details historically accurate, when their plots moved to the old romance rhythms of love affairs and escapes from fates worse than death.