For many years, Arthur M. Schlesinger observed, the American colonists were too occupied with living the present to explore their own past. Such historical works as were written generally confined themselves to a single province. Perhaps the most important intercolonial work of the early eighteenth century was compiled by an Englishman: Daniel Neal's History of New-England (1720). In the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature the entry for Neal is immediately preceded by that for John Oldmixon (1673–1742), miscellaneous Whig compiler and butt of the Tory wits. This may serve as a reminder that Oldmixon, too, wrote a pioneering work of colonial history – a flawed, prolix but deeply interesting book which merits more scrupulous attention than it generally gets.

Ante-bellum southern history has undergone extensive revision in recent decades. Now that the hoary myths of Cavalier aristocracies, monolithic sectionalism, and Confederate chauvinism have receded, historians are better able to evaluate the ante-bellum political history of the South. Only recently, however, have scholars begun to examine the question of party formation in the Jacksonian South, a development of the 1830s, without the conceptual blinders of economic or sectional determinism. In this essay on party formation and development in Jacksonian America, the political structure in four Southern states will be emphasized. I shall present both an institutional view, which stresses party structure, organization and leadership, and a behavioural view, which emphasizes the politics of masses of voters and the interaction of social groups.

Elections satisfy both the practical and the theoretical requirements of classical democratic theory if they answer one question only: Who shall rule? Judged by this test the American elections of 7 November 1972 returned as clear and unequivocal an answer as the United States Constitution permits – crystal-clear as to individuals, equivocal as to parties and political forces. But the student of politics and society cannot resist treating elections as data-gathering devices on a wide range of other questions, on the state of the public mind, on the relative potency of pressure groups, on the internal health of the political parties, and, of course, on the shape of things to come. In this ancillary role American elections, despite the generous wealth of statistical material which they throw up – so much more detailed and categorized (though often less precise) than our own – Suffer in most years from one severe limitation, a limitation which in 1972 was particularly conspicuous; they do not engage the interest of more than a moderate percentage of the American citizenry. In 1972 that percentage was as low as 55 per cent, i.e. out of an estimated eligible population of 139,642,000 only 77,000,000 went to the polls. Since this circumscribes the conclusions which can be drawn from the results themselves, as well as constituting a phenomenon of considerable intrinsic interest, it seems worthwhile to begin any examination of the 1972 elections by an analysis not of the votes counted but of those which were never cast.

The United States Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson falls into that category of unfortunate opinions which have few defenders. Its only supporters currently are those who affirm their belief in and advocate the merits of legally-enforced racial segregation as state social policy. This support, however, is bereft of intellectual substance and is correctly ignored or dismissed by most scholars. Reputable students of the court have without exception been unremittingly hostile to the opinion of the court, because of the presumed socially deleterious ramifications of the judgement. Furthermore, the opinion of Mr Justice Brown has been criticized for logical and legal shortcomings and has been labelled by one scholar as being an exercise in ‘conservative sociological jurisprudence’.3 It is the purpose of this paper to suggest that Brown's judgement has been misrepresented. Despite the fact that the decision gave a constitutional imprimatur to racial segregation, the logic of the opinion owes more to a philosophy of judicial restraint and respect for precedent than to a belief in conservative sociology or racial superiority. The court was in Plessy merely affirming its understanding that the Louisiana statute under review was consonant with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and was not commenting on the merits of racial segregation as governmental policy.

In October 1865 Cambridge University was offered an endowment for a lectureship in the History and Institutions of the United States. In February 1866, after full and open discussion, the Senate of the University, which was composed of all Masters of Arts, voted to reject the offer. This false start to American Studies in Cambridge was no mere donnish eccentricity, but an indication of the attitudes of conservative Englishmen to the United States at the close of the Civil War.

Newspaper files for the period 1830–60 indicate that a number of American Minstrel Shows visited Ireland at a time when the Irish Anti-Slavery movement was particularly vigorous. The shows occasioned considerable comment in the press, but, surprisingly, little or none among the abolitionists, who were usually avid readers of anything in the press pertaining even remotely to the U.S.A. and the Negro. Yet the popular Irish image of the Negro must have been in part determined by such performances, and for this reason they deserve some attention. Irish audiences were also, in this period, treated to dramatizations of episodes in Negro life and to the exhibition, as curiosities, of African tribesmen; but by far the most common was the American Minstrel Show.

Kipling's ripest comments on the United States are to be found in the late (1926) short story, ‘The Prophet and the Country’. The tale begins with the breakdown of the narrator's car on the Great North Road late one summer night. A passing American offers shelter in his trailer, and a tow in the morning: which offers are accepted. The generous fellow-traveller is Mr Tarworth, a former realtor from Omaha, Nebraska, five years a widower. He drops a few hints about the Collective Outlook of Democracy, the Herd Impulse, and ‘the counterbalancing necessity for Individual Self-Expression’ and then launches artlessly into the story of his life. His own Primal Urge for Individual Self-Expression, we learn, came to him on his way home from his wife's funeral, when he had a Revelation qua Prohibition. Prohibition is the sin of Presumption, foisted on the American male by the American female. The sin will be duly punished, because to protect any race from the ‘ natural and God-given bacteria’ of civilization is to induce a condition of virginity which is terrifyingly vulnerable. ‘Immunise, or virg'nise, the Cit'zen of the United States to alcohol, an' you as surely redooce him to the mental status an' outlook of that Redskin. That is the Ne-mee-sis of Prohibition.’ Such had been Mr Tarworth's Revelation. The next question was, how to convey it to his fellow-countrymen. He decided to make a movie, even if ‘the Movies wasn't a business I'd ever been interested in, though a regular attendant’.

Students of the Socialist Party of America are well-acquainted with the extensive and persistent support it received from poor farmers, many of them tenants, in Oklahoma and Texas. David Shannon and, more recently, James Weinstein have both noted that the Socialist Party of Oklahoma had a more active and widespread membership than any other state branch of the Party. Both writers have also given proper emphasis to the shattering impact of repression upon the widely scattered and vulnerable Socialist locals in the rural areas of the Southwest after the United States entered World War I. Weinstein especially has suggested that the Socialist Party was a broadly-based and effective political organization, not only ‘in’ but ‘of’ the world of American workers and small farmers. Pointing to the vigour of the Socialist Party's support in the North and East after it opposed American participation in the war, Weinstein argues that an American Socialism attuned to American conditions and needs had much potential vitality and could have been a significant political force in the country. For this assertion Weinstein was sharply criticized by a reviewer who argued that he exaggerated the depth of the Party's support after 1912 and that he specifically failed to perceive the German ethnic origin of much of the Party's ‘new’ support for its anti-war position.

Between December 1893 and December 1895, the American Federation of Labor engaged in a running controversy over independent political action. It began at the Federation's annual convention of 1893, when T. J. Morgan proposed a political programme which was submitted to a referendum, and it ended when the New York convention of 1895 passed a resolution proposed by J. F. O'Sullivan of Boston, which banned party politics from the deliberations of the conventions. The climax was reached in the convention of 1894 at Denver, Colorado. There the political programme was debated for two days before being rejected. The Preamble of the programme committed the Federation to forming its own political party independent of the two existing parties; it was followed by eleven planks, most of which were traditional demands of labour. The sole exception was the tenth plank which demanded ‘The collective ownership by the people of all the means of production and distribution’. The debate centred on this plank, although Plank 3 (‘a legal eight-hour workday’) and Plank 4 (‘sanitary inspection of workshop, mine, and home’) were hotly discussed. In the end Plank 10 was amended to a land monopoly plank on the proposal of August McCraith, a printer, and this amendment made it clear that the convention had rejected the collectivism of the programme.

The most easily understandable reason for the absence of a strong geographical element in American Studies in Britain is the difficulty geographers specializing in America experience in carrying out research. While more and more of the primary source material used by geographers is in the form of quantitative data published by government and commercial agencies, the real primary source is the earth's surface, and thorough fieldwork is still a basic necessity. Clearly, if the material or evidence (whether in the form of soils, crops, retail stores, traffic networks, minority population groups or polluted rivers) is in Vermont or Nebraska, it is infinitely easier for the geographer to work there and teach there, than to teach in Britain and commute to his fieldwork in Winooski or Red Cloud.

In the summer of 1931 Joseph Hergesheimer, author of more than a dozen books of fiction, returned to Germany for a visit, his first since 1907. This very American trip is recounted in his Berlin (1932) forgotten book by a well-nigh forgotten writer. It is surely one of the most curious volumes of a literary type which, for all its vigorous and perceptive judgements, is itself something of a curiosity. By now, I suppose, it is a commonplace mat the travel book, the elegant bastard of genres, invariably reveals more about the traveller than about the geography he supposedly describes. This is true certainly for modern examples which come to mind – James's The American Scene (1907) Hemingway's The Green Hills of Africa (1935) or Steinbeck's Travels with Charley (1961). And whatever other defects mar, say, Truman Capote's Local Color (1950) or John Knowles's Double Vision (1964), the failure to impose personality on the scene –to let voice and stance, even with their inadequacies, shape and experience – is in large measure the source of our disappointment in those books. Hergesheimer's Berlin does not fail for this reason. Like Local Color, it is mannered, and like Double Vision, it is thin; but it is not merely mannered and thin.

‘What is American about American Literature?’ is a question that is repeatedly answered too easily. A frequently offered solution is the claim that the dominant form of the nineteenth-century American novel is the Romance. Joel Porte, for example, confidently entitles his book on Cooper, Poe, Hawdiorne, Melville, and James The Romance in America. Porte begins his study with a sweeping assertion that the battle is over, the problem solved:

Thanks to a series of major critical studies that have appeared in the past decade and a half, it no longer seems necessary to argue for the importance of romance as a nineteenth century American genre. Students of American literature – notably Richard Chase – have provided a solid theoretical basis for establishing that the rise and growth of fiction in this country is dominated by our authors' conscious adherence to a tradition of non-realistic romance sharply at variance with the broadly novelistic mainstream of English writing. When there has been disagreement among recent critics as to the contours of American fiction, it has usually disputed, not the existence per se of a romance tradition, but rather the question of which authors, themes, and stylistic strategies deserve to be placed with certainty at the heart of that tradition.

‘ The Black Cat ’ is one of Poe's neat little studies of obsession. Joseph Moldenhauer has said that these first-person tales of terror should be regarded less as studies of deranged minds than as controlled exercises in madness. We may take his point that there is little ‘ clinical ’ observation and that the obsession is seen from within, but may add further that the subjects of these tales are the irrational motives themselves, and therefore Poe does not need to create a motive for the motive. That is, ‘ The Black Cat ’ is a study of the ‘ murdering impulse ’ of the sort noted by Benjamin Rush in his Sixteen Lectures (1811) by whose account of a famous poisoner of cats it may have been suggested. It is not particularly a study of the effects of the ‘ murdering impulse ’ but rather of the impulse itself, which Poe simply cloaks in a non-specific narrator ‘ self ’. Poe's habitual use of the monologue or confessional form, and his claustrophobic interiors, are both calculated to produce a sense of internalized action, and the scenery of the tales is usually the chamber of the haunted mind, of which the poem ‘ The Haunted Palace ’ is only the most explicit version. The lack of a touchstone in ‘ real ’ surroundings, of an objective point of view, together with the sense of identification induced by first-person narration, combines to ensure that the internalized action is not seen from a position safely outside the distorted consciousness but, necessarily, from within.

Nick Carraway, the narrator of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), is slightly taken aback by some of his host's remarks in the course of an otherwise bantering conversation during his first visit to the Buchanans' East Egg residence:

‘Civilization's going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? … Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved … This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or those other races will have control of things … The idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are, and … And we've produced all the things that go to make civilization – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?

Since the publication of Mr Sammler's Planet in 1969, it has been difficult to anticipate the development of Saul Bellow's fiction. Although this novel is Bellow's most disappointing work, its obvious limitations are anticipated in Herzog. There is a strong thread of ambiguous irony which, in Bellow's most recent novel, has deepened into unintentional parody. This is, I would suggest, a symptom of Bellow's inability to balance his protagonists' subjective reality with a convincing version of their social milieu.

Some six years ago Gordon Wood closed a brief discussion of mobs in the American Revolution by asking whether, if the mob was no less a mob than its European counterpart, the revolution was any less a revolution. Three recent full-length studies, Pauline Maier's From Resistance to Revolution, Richard D. Brown's Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts and Patricia U. Bonomi's A Factious People, deal in significant part with mob, or, as I will call it, crowd activity in early America, although in none of them does it form the main subject. The approach to it of all three is fresh and sophisticated but, as the cliché goes, they raise as many questions as they answer. This essay will look first at the questions they answer and then go on to the ones they raise.

Edith Wharton frequently likens Lily Bart, the heroine of The House of Mirth (1905), to a flower. Her name is ‘Lily’; when she kisses Lawrence Selden ‘her face turned to him with the soft motion of a flower’ in her privileged station in life she is an ‘orchid basking in its artificially created atmosphere’; and, in sum, she is‘ the fine flower and complete expression ’ of the ideals of beauty and social grace held by the old New York aristocracy. Most significant, however, is Mrs Wharton's use of rose imagery when describing Lily. For example, when Lily came to her friend Gerty Farish after having narrowly escaped the unwelcome advances of Gus Trenor, Gerty reflected that everything about Lily was ‘warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose’. Indeed, the entire society of which Lily is ‘the fine flower’ diffuses a ‘rosy glow’. Those who stroll these ‘rosy shores of pleasure’, such as Judy Trenor, have complexions of ‘rosy blondness’. The fastest rising star in the economic and social firmament is Simon Rosedale, ‘a plump, rosy man of the blond Jewish type …’

An age of faith — such as the 1930s appear to be in retrospect — is almost certain to become an age of quarrels among the faithful. They divide into bitterly hostile sects, each with a different leader and each hoping for support from one group or another among the infidels. Such quarrels disfigure the pattern of the 1930s, especially toward the end. Looking back from another age, however, one is surprised to find how much the American writers in different factions, as well as those standing apart from any faction, radical or conservative, were affected by the same fears and aspirations for human society. ‘ There is a great destiny ’, Emerson says in his journal for 1841,

which comes in with this as with every age, which is colossal in its traits, terrible in its strength, which cannot be tamed, or criticized, or subdued. It is shared by every man and woman of the time, for it is by it they live. As a vast, solid phalanx the generation comes on, they have the same features, and their pattern is new in the world. All wear the same expression, but it is that which they do not detect in each other. It is this one life which ponders in the philosophers, which drudges in the laborers, which basks in the poets, which dilates in the love of the women….

During the last decade William Appleman Williams has become one of the most influential of contemporary American historians. In particular, the comprehensive interpretation of United States foreign policy which he originally expounded in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland and New York, 1959; revised edition, New York, 1962) has attracted many adherents in these years of the Vietnam war and the rise of the ‘New Left’. A school has developed and in a number of monographs and articles Williams's interpretative framework has been applied to various episodes and aspects of American foreign policy. Now Williams has edited a volume of essays, largely by members of this school, which ‘can be used as the basic guide for a course in American foreign relations’. Its appearance, following the recent publication in this country of Williams's own substantial work on the background to the Spanish-American War and America's acquisition of the Philippines, provides an appropriate occasion for a general review of the interpretation.

Robert Lowell's The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket is dedicated to ‘Warren Winslow, Dead at Sea’. Academic treatments of the poem point out that Winslow, Lowell's cousin, was killed in action at sea in World War II, though as to the more specific details of his death there is little agreement among the scholarly commentators. Here are four versions, in the order of their appearance in print:

During World War II, the naval vessel on which Lowell's cousin, Warren Winslow, was serving disappeared and no Ishmael survived to explain her fate.