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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

In his autobiographical introduction to Slaughterhouse Five, looking back on the novel as completed process, Kurt Vonnegut writes, ‘I've finished my war book now. The next I write is going to be fun.’ This ‘war book’ marked, in many ways, though, the culmination of Vonnegut's fiction up to that point of time.