Like other unusual “ New Englanders ” of the post-Civil-War era — Henry James, George Santayana, W. E. B. DuBois — Henry Adams needed to cross his native with an alien culture before he could flourish. The fusion was made possible by the stroke of fortune which in 1861 sent his father as American Minister, accompanied by Henry as his private secretary, to England.

In 1959 Herman Feifel edited a volume of interdisciplinary essays titled The Meaning of Death. The collection was a valuable contribution in a neglected area. It also marked an apparent change in national mood. After an extended period, death was once more a respectable academic topic of discussion and consideration. In the decade that followed a considerable amount of work was published in this field, ranging from such scholarly yet compassionate volumes as Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' On Death and Dying to a literature of social criticism epitomized in Jessica Mitford's best-seller, The American Way of Death. By 1970, one scholar would observe, more material had appeared on death, grief, and bereavement in the five years following Feifel's book than had appeared in the previous hundred years.

Like other early nineteenth century religious and social reform movements the anti-slavery societies operated on a trans-Atlantic basis, with a regular exchange of ideas and personnel between Britain and the United States. The process was facilitated by the shared ideology and common background of many abolitionists on both sides of the ocean. This was especially true of the Quakers who had played such a prominent part in the early anti-slavery movement. British Quaker families were intermarried and maintained a network of religious and family contacts throughout the United Kingdom. They also maintained such close contacts with American Friends that historians have talked of a Quaker Atlantic community. That community shared many common social values and suffered similar religious tensions in its contacts with both Unitarianism and the more pervasive Evangelicalism.

It is no doubt symbolically very appropriate that, in the Bicentennial year, all of the seven Nobel Prizes awarded should go to Americans. Of course there is more to it than that; it is also a signal of a decisive shift, evident over this century, in the international balance of intellectual, cultural and literary power. In the early years of the century, English and Irish writers were notable in the list of awards for literature; not until 1930 did the Prize for Literature pass to an American. Since that time, the number of awards to English writers has markedly faded (and some of the more recent, to Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell, have indicated a generous view among the awarding committee of what literature is), while the number going to American writers (admittedly of somewhat varied quality) has markedly increased. The Prize is conventionally associated with writers not only of international reputation but also of international perspective, of a broad humanistic scale and scope; and both in the matter of reputation and moral capaciousness American writers have increasingly tended to become obvious candidates. But if, on occasion, the Prize has been strangely awarded, it would in fact be hard to fault the choice for 1976, Saul Bellow; difficult to find a contemporary writer who shows the same richness and variety, along with the same sharp modernity, of achievement.

The American West has traditionally held a special appeal for the imagination of the citizens of the United States because it has come to represent so much for them. Not only has the vast expanse of land lying roughly to the west of the Mississippi River been the home of a number of America's most celebrated figures — Buffalo Bill and Billy the Kid, Sitting Bull and General Custer — and many of the country's national symbols — the six-gun and the Stetson hat, the homesteader and the pioneer, the cowboy and the Indian — but the “ western experience ” itself has also been looked upon as a basic theme in American life. From Frederick Jackson Turner's now-famous essay of 1893, which served to move discussions of Western America into academic circles, to Henry Nash Smith's analysis of 1950, which examined the mythical and symbolic dimensions of America's “ virgin land,” the story of the West has been viewed as one of the most enduring organizing concepts for understanding America's development and the characteristics of its people. While much of this matter is well-known today and common to the study of the United States, it is but little known that the cluster of ideas associated with the American West has also had implications for what might seem, at first mention, a somewhat unlikely place: Africa.

Traditionally, colonial scholars have focussed their attention on the North American continent, where dramatic conflicts with Britain culminated in Revolution. No major article or book has yet dealt with British West Indians as active participants in the pre-Revolutionary struggle. This study attempts to correct that situation. Focussing on the Stamp Act crisis, it seeks to clarify the role of island colonists during the pre-war period and argues for a comprehensive appraisal of that role.

Samuel Eliot Morison died in Boston in May 1976. He had been born there in 1887; he had spent much of his life in the Brimmer Street house his grandfather had built; and he could refer to Francis Parkman as “ my grandfather's friend.” I never met him; I have never discussed him with his colleagues and friends; and I do not propose writing a personal tribute. Rather, having re-read some four-fifths of the books he wrote, and perhaps nine-tenths of the words, I seek to describe his development, to explain why I judge him to be a great historian, and to show what manner of historian he chose to be.

Before he took over the management of the Economist in 1860, Walter Bagehot had not had much occasion to notice the United States, at any rate in his published writings. During the 1850s he had been too taken up with banking, and literary criticism, and expounding the value of stupidity in politics. To be sure, in 1859 he decided that the time had come to discredit the American example. The English were becoming disquietingly interested in democracy, a system as to which he had all the usual mid-Victorian doubts and a few extra. So he told the world, through the National Review (which struggling Unitarian quarterly he edited) that the vulgar American voters sent only vulgar men to Congress: “ men of refinement shrink from the House of Representatives as from a parish vestry ”; and that America was too unlike England to be a safe model. Then, just as he became editor of the Economist, the secession crisis and the Civil War erupted. It was incumbent on him to pronounce on these events, and it would have been most uncharacteristic of this sunny, self-confident man to shirk such a responsibility.

As the principal materials for a study of values, The Ugly American (1958) and Fail-Safe (1962) fit well together. Though each was written by two authors, they have one author in common, the late Eugene Burdick. Both were best-selling novels and made into movies. Both were political cautionary tales, seeking to present dire realities in fictional form. The Ugly American, making the case for a more adept social and economic war on communism in South-east Asia, prompted a Congressional investigation of foreign aid and formed part of the climate which later produced the “ low-technology ” Peace Corps and the Kennedy interest in sophisticated-seeming counter-insurgency. Fail-Safe, attacking the beautiful but dangerous, “ high-technology ” nuclear weapons systems of the Cold War, was written in part as a deliberate campaign for arms control and caused a secret Pentagon review of safeguards against accidental war. Both books attracted attention at the Kennedy White House, and in keeping with New Frontier images, both featured the tough but humane professional, socially sensitive but highly controlled. Self-reliant and resourceful individualists, the heroes of these books are, nevertheless, geared to draw on highly-tuned supporting organizations as well as intensive training or experience.

Blacks were a significant minority of the Cherokee Nation throughout the nineteenth century, first as slaves and later as freedmen. An 1830s census shows that the Cherokee Nation at that time consisted of: 13,536 Indians; 147 intermarried white males; 73 intermarried white females; and 1,277 slaves. In 1860 there were approximately 23,000 Cherokees and 2,500 blacks in the Cherokee Territory. And according to the United States Census of 1890 the total population of the Cherokee Nation was 56,309, including 5,127 persons of Negro descent.

Comparative history is as old as Herodotus, but only in the past quartercentury has it come into its own as an academic discipline. Yet historians, scholars of American history in particular, have generally fallen behind their colleagues in the other social sciences in developing and applying comparative methodology or models which could illuminate their teaching or open new vistas in their research. As a result, teaching and scholarship in United States history tend to be characterized by parochialism, ethnocentricity and an emphasis upon American uniqueness or “ exceptionalism.” Political scientists, sociologists and economists have increasingly studied the process of development and modernization since the end of World War II, doing more to stimulate comparative studies than all of their predecessors during the past century. While many of these social scientists have demonstrated only a superficial knowledge of history, leading them often to deal statically with the societies they are studying, some of them have at least made the effort, avoided by most American historians, to apply the comparative method to American history.

Shortly after Julian West awakened to Edward Bellamy's utopian Boston of the year 2000, he was given his first look at the city by his host, Dr. Leete. West nearly fainted at the “ prodigious thing which had befallen me.” Still in a daze, he was asked by Dr. Leete what surprised him most about the new Boston. “ I really think,” West responded, “ that the complete absence of chimneys and their smoke is the detail that first impressed me.” The city, as Bellamy went on to describe it, was an affair of fine buildings set in “ inclosures.” There were “ large open squares filled with trees, among which statues glistened and fountains flashed.” Julian West could see the Charles River, a “ blue ribbon winding away to the sunset,” and to the east was the harbor, “ not one of its green islets missing.” West's initial notice of the absence of smokestacks, coupled with Bellamy's first (and almost his only) physical description of the city, pointed up one of the most striking facts about Boston in the year 2000. The new city was park-like, even pastoral, in character. The entire apparatus of industrialism was kept sedulously out of sight, and the landscape, both physical and social, had come to look quite pre-industrial.

For American trade unions and labour organizations, immigration was a constant source of concern and anxiety during the second half of the nineteenth century. In their attempts to eliminate the more harmful consequences to their members of this flood of foreigners, they adopted and promoted a series of remedial measures, ranging from informal co-operation with the First International in the late 1860s, to attempts to strengthen the immigration law in the 1880s and early 1890s. None proved satisfactory. Pressure for further restriction built up and in 1897 the American Federation of Labor, to which most trade unions were affiliated, approved by a massive five-to-one majority a relatively new restrictive measure, the literacy test. This test was the central feature of an immigration bill sponsored by Senator Lodge, which had been approved by both houses of Congress in 1896 but vetoed by President Cleveland. The test was intended to discriminate against immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe where levels of literacy were low. For Lodge, who had opposed a general head tax because it was insufficiently discriminatory, the literacy test “ would tell exclusively on the most undesirable portions of immigration.”

Deliverance does not at first sight appear a poet's novel. The style is colloquial, low-key, middle-class Atlanta; there is no abundance of metaphor; the clearly indicated beginning, middle and end of the action appear in that order; and no one in it seems immediately to be overburdened in the way of sensibility. Images, when they occur, are sharply delineated but not apparently freighted with hidden significance, vide:

Revolution — both the American Revolution and the general idea of revolutionary change — is an important theme in Cooper's work. Several novels are set in, and deal with, the Revolutionary period; others approach the Revolution by indirection, offering redefinitions of the period and its significance as it were by analogy (I am thinking of novels such as The Waterwitch and The Red Rover which, while they are not set in the Revolutionary period, offer their subjects as images and judgments of the Revolution); still other novels treat the problem of revolution in Europe. The conditions for, and likely results of, revolutionary change in Europe are also discussed in the non-fiction; the American Revolution is continually redefined; and in the incomplete New York the desirability and possibility of a new Revolution are considered.

“ Tranquility is the first duty of every citizen ” has never been an American motto. “ What is impressive to one who begins to learn about American violence,” Richard Hofstadter once remarked, is its “ extraordinary frequency, its sheer commonplaceness in our history, its persistence into very recent and contemporary times, and its rather abrupt contrast with our pretensions to singular national virtue.” If, as Hofstadter complains, violence has been overlooked in American history, the maintenance of peace, particularly the significant role of the militia in public disorders — “ the most important single form of domestic violence in American history ” — has been almost totally ignored by historians. For example, Marcus Cunliffe's otherwise excellent study of the military mind in ante-bellum United States devotes two sentences to the subject, a rather surprising omission in view of the, quite correct, contemporary opinion that “the Militia are, after all … neither more nor less than an Auxiliary Police Force, and for the last forty-odd years that is the only duty they have ever been called on to perform.”