The study of Africa began long before African studies in America. In the United States today the words ‘African studies’ imply a formalized, academic structure of centres, programmes, institutes, postgraduate theses, publications, professional associations, conferences, finances from the foundations, grants from the government, etc., etc. Three and a half centuries ago, when the first blacks came to the New World, the study of Africa in America was outrageously informal: the cherishing of the memories of the ancestral continent from which the slaves had been forced.

After the firm establishment of the English Atlantic colonies, and before the emergence of ‘the American identity’, these provinces participated with the metropolis in a political and economic ‘empire’. If ‘empire’ might be challenged as conveying too much political or economic meaning, it might also be challenged as conveying too little social meaning. Was the English Atlantic at the opening of the eighteenth century a civilization, a culture, a society, or a community? Though these terms are maddeningly ill-defined and somewhat interchangeable, they are suggested here as a scale of increasing social cohesiveness, from a relationship that is primarily inherited and parallel (civilization, culture) to a connexion that is primarily based upon the sharing of current ideas, institutions and interests (society, community). One essential pre-requisite for such sharing is a network of communications judged adequate by the people using it.

During the 1830s Vermonters had largely come to accept the sobering fact that their golden age had ended, that no longer would an investment be almost certain to be rewarded nor would rapid growth take up slack and obscure economic problems. After having been the fastest growing state in the Union at the turn of the century, in the 1830s Vermont's population increased by only 11,000 souls, a meagre four per-cent. Without the old boom psychology for support during this turbulent decade, Vermonters coped with chronic cholera epidemics and severe economic dislocations and at the same time experienced a virtual exodus that caused one-third of their towns to lose population. The social fabric clearly reflected the strain as the society desperately sought outlets, and flocked to a variety of movements. Many readily responded to revivalism and, forgetting the teaching of their orthodox divines, easily adopted the word of prophets and millennialists. They turned to egalitarian reforms, anti-slavery agitation, and abolitionism. In politics they rejected the tradional parties of J. Q. Adams and Henry Clay or Jackson and Van Buren for the social nostrums of Anti-Mason candidates.

The period of Reconstruction in the South was marred by frequent outbreaks of racial violence and South Carolina undoubtedly achieved a certain notoriety in this respect. Yet this phenomenon of recurring violence – even in its best known manifestation, the Ku Klux Klan – has not really received much intensive study from either the ‘revisionist’ school of Reconstruction historians or any local historians of the South. There is still a great deal of uncertainty about the questions of why the Ku Klux Klan came into existence in the Southern states, and who organized and participated in its vigilante activities. These questions can be easily posed but, largely because of the lack of source materials which bear directly upon them, they have proved to be extremely difficult to answer satisfactorily.

In his seminal work Virgin Land (1950), Henry Nash Smith depicted the bymbolic meaning that Americans attached to their Western empire during the nineteenth century. The West appealed to the American imagination variously as a possible passage to India, a land to be filled, farmed and civilized and a land to lend territorial grandeur to the existing American nation. But a certain squeamishness pervaded the attitudes of many upper-class Easterners to Western society itself, and only towards die end of the nineteenth century did they begin to show a marked enthusiasm for life in the West, and for their own pioneering origins.

We have learned recently from the work of a number of historians that the process of national mobilisation and the erection of unprecedented controls over industry during World War I offered to important groups of American liberals models for permanent collectivist reform and institutional renewal. The ease with which such controls were dismantled ought not to obscure the remarkable attraction they appeared to have in 1917 and 1918. It is clear that agencies such as the War Industries Board, the Railroad Administration, the War Labor Board, the Inquiry, and the National Board for Historical Service attracted not only the wartime enthusiasm of intellectuals; these agencies were seen to contain potential for peacetime use.

The ‘long hot summers’ of the 1960s undoubtedly helped stimulate the growth of black studies in the United States and led to an urgent re-examination of the black ghettoes which have become a feature of every major Northern city. Much of this work, however, has tended to concentrate on the economic, political and sociological problems posed by the ghetto. Historians, for their part, have become increasingly aware of how much research still needs to be done to explain the origins and development of the ghetto, especially in the crucial period between 1890 and 1940. Fortunately the rebirth of black studies has coincided with the emergence of the ‘new urban history’, and when the work of several scholars now in progress reaches fruition we may have a clearer picture of the historical problems posed by the growth of the ghetto. In particular, we should be able to evaluate the speed with which blacks were able to exercize effective political and economic power by comparison with other white ethnic groups.

In his influential study, Art and Life in America, Oliver W. Larkin describes the famous Armory Show of 1913 as an ‘explosion’ in the history of American art. Few would quarrel with this view; indeed, the author's choice of the noun does no more than proper justice to the sudden and powerful impact of the Armory event upon the American public. Certainly, at least with regard to a popular audience for art ‘explosion’ is an appropriate description. Unlike the public, on the other hand, the select group of artists represented by works in the Show itself proved that they were ready for that historic moment. They had practised and created, and over the years the biographical accounts of how they prepared themselves and their art have gradually filled an important place in the larger explanation of why the ‘explosion’ went off at all.

The scope of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, which celebrated, albeit a year late, the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America, ranged over many centuries, numerous nations and almost every type of human achievement. The 27 million people who came to the five months long Fair were able to see Grace Darling's boat or Spanish galleons of Columbus's time; they could follow the history of transport from coracles to cars; they could see the latest in Krupp's cannon and Bell's telephone in a classically styled Machinery Hall six times the size of the Coliseum. With the exception of Louis Sullivan's golden Transportation Pavilion, the buildings which housed the Fair, covered uniformly with staff, composed a classical ‘White City’, grouped round a complex of lagoons and fountains on Chicago's Lake Front.

At the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Nigger Jim is a free man. ‘Nothing More to Write’ Huck calls that final chapter. But for Jim, surely, it could only have been a beginning. Jim was now free to purchase his wife from off that neighbouring plantation, as he had planned all along ‘saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free state he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent…’ Now even Miss Watson's Jim could claim ‘a new name’, in token courtesy to that wayward spinster; and as Mr Watson maybe, if he could not buy his own two children, he might even yet have to ‘get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them’. Was not that a more likely outcome for Jim than more ‘howling adventures amongst the Injuns’ as planned by those youngsters, Huck and Tom?

‘The composer’, begins the chapter on music in Harold Stearns's 1922 compendium, Civilization in the United States, ‘here lives in an atmosphere that is, at the worst, good-natured contempt. Contempt, mind you, not for himself … but for his very art …At best, what he gets is unintelligent admiration, not as an artist, but as a freak’. The best that the composer can expect, the article continues, is that by expressing himself he may, by some miraculous accident, express the great remote and inarticulate ‘American soul’. This same year, 1922, saw the publication, at the author's expense, of 114 Songs by the remote but very articulate composer and insurance agent, Charles E. Ives. This book of songs was a result of an effort, as the composer put it, to clean house – to hang out on the line for all to see the result of twenty-five years of ignored composition. When the songs and other compositions of this incredibly creative period were sorted, one would find, as the Stearns article suggested, an expression of the American soul, no longer so remote and inarticulate.

M. W. – I'd like to begin with a question about the Fugitive group. Would you say that there was any special critical emphasis in these early Fugitive discussions of poetry? You have said before that there's a fallacy in assuming there was a systematic programme behind the Fugitive group.

Towards the end of his life, Langston Hughes wrote an article about Harlem during the 1920s. In his narration, he paused fondly over memories of Sugar Hill. At 409 Edgecombe, the address of the ‘tallest apartment house’ on the hill, lived Walter and Gladys White, who gave frequent parties for their friends; Aaron and Alta Douglas, who ‘ always had a bottle of ginger ale in the ice box for those who brought along refreshments’ Elmer Anderson Carter, who succeeded Charles S. Johnson to the editorship of Opportunity; and actor Ivan Sharpe and his wife Evie. Just below the hill, in the Dunbar Apartments, lived W. E. B. Du Bois as well as E. Simms Campbell, the cartoonist. Nearby was Dan Burley, a black journalist and a boogie-woogie piano player. Hughes recalled the excitement of those days: ‘Artists and writers were always running into each other on Sugar Hill and talking over their problems and wondering how they could get’ fellowships and grants from benevolent organizations. One evening, Hughes and six of his compatriots gathered in the Aaron Douglas apartment and decided to start a literary magazine,‘the better to express ourselves freely and independently – without interference from old heads, white or Negro.’ From that initial discussion at 409 Edgecombe came Fire in its one and only issue of November 1926. Two years later, some of the same persons began another literary magazine, this time called Harlem.

Since Thoreau's reputation today rests largely on his grasp of concrete reality – on his ability to suggest what he called the ‘hard bottom and rocks’ of that reality in his prose – the connexion between his works and the theories of the mystic Swedenborg does not receive much attention. In recent studies of Thoreau, when the Swedish mystic appears in die text, the mention is commonly brief and dismissive: Thoreau's imagination is often defined in contra-distinction to that of the ‘saint’ of the Transcendentalists. Answering a friend's enquiry in 1856, Thoreau himself admitted that he had not read Swedenborg, ‘except to a slight degree’, but he also stated that he had the highest regard for the mystic's ‘wonderful knowledge of our interior and spiritual life’. The ‘wonderful knowledge’ to which Thoreau here refers was revealed to Thoreau, and to his age, in the theory of ‘correspondence’ between the ‘interior and spiritual’ and the exterior, natural – or material – world. To be aware of that wisdom, Thoreau did not need to read much in Swedenborg's own works, since die theory of correspondence was ' thanks to a number of interpreters ' in the air of New England when Thoreau was developing as a writer.

In the Introduction to the first volume of The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press, 1966– ), Andrew Hilen recognizes that his edition can make no claim to completeness: there are still likely to come to light some of the early letters known to have been written but which he has been unable to trace. Though he considers it improbable that the rinding of lost correspondence will necessitate any fundamental reassessment of the poet's character or of his literary work, Hilen thinks it ‘nevertheless obvious that many of these unrecovered letters contained information that would interest both Longfellow's biographer and the critic of his poetry’ (pp. 4–5). These comments are perfectly applicable to the letters from Longfellow to Mrs Emma Marshall, nee Martin, which are to be found in Beatrice Marshall's memorial of her mother, Emma Marshall, a biographical sketch (London, Seeley & Co., 1900).

Indian activists have recently complained about the pernicious attentions of white Indian ‘experts’, but they are likely to endure these attentions so long as their people retain a distinct cultural identity and national status. Unlike anthropologists and administrators, historians have not shaped the public policies applied to the native Americans, and so their expertise has seemed comparatively harmless. Yet having played a considerable part in misrepresenting the Indians, scholars have a duty to set the record straight with a minimum of unprofessional moralizing.

Writing in 1853 Harriet Beecher Stowe, defending the veracity of her famous novel, declared:

The worst abuse of slavery is its outrage upon the family; and as this writer views the subject it is one which is more notorious and undeniable than any other.

To native writers emerging in the 1920s The Education of Henry Adams (1918) spoke with an immediacy and an authority now difficult to reconstruct. Sherwood Anderson, whose own Winesburg, Ohio (1919) would soon become another model for young writers, was puzzled by Adams's book. But he was intrigued enough by it to grapple with its ideas in the pages of his own autobiography. Scott Fitzgerald, who as a child had known Adams, not only studied the Education but paid its author a writer's compliment by putting him into This Side of Paradise. At one point, in fact, Fitzgerald had even decided to call his first novel The Education of a Personage. On the basis of the Education T. S. Eliot branded Adams a ‘sceptical patrician’, damning him as an ineffectual product of his New England heritage, but not disdaining, all the while, to snap up from die Education images and phrases for his own poetry. Ernest Hemingway, who consciously sided with Eliot on absolutely nothing, would have found himself, had the occasion forced itself, hard put to disagree with Eliot's radier summary judgement of Adams. Nevertheless, all things considered, it remains my conviction that one important way in which Hemingway's work resembles Eliot's, and both resemble Fitzgerald's, is that in certain basic characteristics it is what it is because of The Education of Henry Adams.