Inadvertently an error crept in, at proof stage, to Dr J. R. Pole's article: we apologize to him and to our readers for this, and we would like to correct it. On page 69 the sentence to which footnote I refers should, of course, read ‘George F. Kennan's trenchant critique…was followed shortly by Professor John M. Blum's…’ As it stands, the text is wrong, the footnote is correct.

Granville Sharp (1735–1813) was the son of Thomas Sharp, Archdeacon of Northumberland, and grandson of John Sharp, Archbishop of York. He first became well known through his persistent efforts to secure a judgement from the courts that no man could be a slave in England—efforts which were crowned with success in the Somerset case of 1772. Sharp's attack on slavery attracted the attention of the Philadelphia Quaker, Anthony Benezet (1713–84), one of the pioneer opponents of slavery in the colonies. Benezet and Sharp opened a correspondence about colonial opposition to the slave-trade, especially the Virginia petition to the Crown against it. This correspondence in its turn induced Benjamin Rush (1745–1813), a physician in Philadelphia, to write to Sharp. Thus began the exchange of letters, destined to continue for thirty-six years, which is printed here.

The conduct of Sir William Johnson at the treaty of Fort Stanwix was regarded unfavourably by contemporaries and has been strongly criticized by historians. There is little to choose between the Board of Trade report of April 1769 and the view of Professor Billington, who holds that the Superintendent ‘mercilessly fleeced the Indians who trusted him as their protector’ while concluding ‘one of the worst treaties in the history of Anglo-Indian relationships’. There was ample cause for bewilderment and anger. Johnson had obtained a boundary line which deviated in three major particulars from that which he had been instructed to secure. This act of disobedience was a consequence of the need of land speculators to gain control of regions forbidden to them by royal instructions but vital to their financial hopes. Johnson, in his own right a great landlord and speculator, sacrificed his public duties to private gain, even though this involved the betrayal of innocent Indians.

The early reactions by American intellectuals to the psychoanalytic ideas of Sigmund Freud offer an interesting case study in the ‘Americanization’ of ‘foreign’ ideas. While the heyday of Freudian influence on the lay intelligentsia came after the World War—probably in the 1920s—and the maximum penetration of specialized disciplines by Freudian concepts came after 1930, already by 1917 identifiable and influential groups of thinkers had discovered Freudian ideas, and had reacted to them. The reaction sometimes took the form of outright rejection, but more often that of some form of assimilation, some attempt to use Freudian doctrine in support of a pre-existing ideology, or even to recast present doctrine in the light of Freud's theories. These early reactions foreshadowed the kinds of polemical and ideological utility which psychoanalysis would have on a larger scale after 1920; these first adaptations and reworkings of Freudian ideas prefigured such latter accommodations of Freud to America as Neo-Freudianism and ‘adjustment psychology’. Psychoanalysis quickly became an accepted polemical tool in literary and political debate. To neoromantic radicals it offered a new method of personal salvation by sloughing off skins of civilized repression. On a more complex level of thought, it became one element in the construction of a positivist and determinist system of psychology. At the same time, and sometimes by the same men, it was used—and radically revised—in the ideological endeavour to assimilate deterministic psychology to the persistent optimistic, activist moral code, which many scholars were anxious to harmonize with their new science.

The past, in the course of its ever-recurring encounters with the demands inflicted on it by the present, enjoys one inestimable advantage: it cannot answer, it is not even listening. ‘We ask and ask, thou smilest and art still’, we might almost say, giving to Arnold's ponderous lines a touch of unintended meaning. In spite of appearances to the contrary, even the American past is in the same position. Even after the lapse (the ‘revolution’, as Gibbon would have said) of more than three and a half centuries of continuous settlement, the historian who has been educated entirely in the tradition and the environment of the United States needs rather more than his European contemporary's normal degree of subtlety if he is to free himself from the peculiarly American version of the space-time continuum.

The similarities that existed between the political and social theories of the newly independent Americans in the 1780s and those of the liberal-minded French under the Ancien Régime have, for many years, been a subject of fairly repetitive discussion. The parallels have been traced, the influences classified, and the practical debts (even to individual French thinkers) time and again acknowledged. The comparisons have in fact attracted the interest and attention of so many types of scholars that the work has been done with a thoroughness that is not surprising. And upon examination of the relevant works it would certainly appear that the critical attention given to the subject, on the national scale, has been so complete that its various aspects have been, long since, almost exhausted.

The British Museum Library was established by statute in 1753, and since then the development of its collection of printed books has passed through three major phases corresponding to, and interacting with, three phases in the development of the aims and organization of scholarship in general.

Millenarianism was an important element in early nineteenth-century Evangelical Christianity. The majority of British and American Evangelicals favoured a post-millennial Advent, and looked forward to a thousand years of heaven on earth which were to precede Christ's Second Coming. The great religious and benevolent societies—tract and Bible societies, foreign and domestic missionary societies and the like, whose progress in Britain and America was closely linked—were sustained by the hope that their work and even their very existence were signs of the approaching Millennium. Within the major Evangelical denominations as well as the smaller sects, there were also ‘students of prophecy’, who took a closer interest in the allegorical and prophetic books of the Bible than the majority of their contemporaries, but this interest was by no means limited to the fanatical or eccentric. These ‘students’ read their Bibles with the extreme literalism common to Evangelicals at this time, and in their exegeses disputed the time and circumstances of the Second Advent. Many supported the idea of a post-millennial Advent, while others argued that Christ's return had already taken place at the destruction of Jerusalem. Some favoured a pre-millennial Advent; that is, that Christ would return before the thousand years of heaven on earth.

Writing almost four years after The Crucible was first performed, Arthur Miller seemed uncertain how to describe the ethics of the society he had tried to reproduce in the play. He notes, for example, that the Puritans' ‘religious belief did nothing to temper [their] cruelty’ but instead ‘served to raise this swirling and ludicrous mysticism to a level of high moral debate’. ‘It is no mean irony’, Miller continues, ‘that the theocratic persecution should seek out the most religious people for its victims.’

In former years there existed a widespread assumption that, throughout the nineteenth century, the United States was an isolationist power. Its policy, according to this thesis, had been articulated in Washington's Farewell Address, was accorded bipartisan acquiescence in Jefferson's First Inaugural, and was reaffirmed in the Monroe Doctrine. Until the Spanish–American war of 1898 isolationism prevailed, confident and more or less unchallenged; and then it suddenly collapsed, virtually without a struggle, leaving the Americans free to enter without inhibition on their new status of world power.

It is well known that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in England in June 1876, almost six months before its appearance in the United States, and that the publication of the English edition was negotiated with Messrs Chatto and Windus by Moncure Daniel Conway. Clemens had given him a copy of the manuscript when Conway was returning to England after an American lecture tour at the beginning of 1876, and had authorized Conway to act on his behalf. Jacob Blanck records that the book was advertized in the Athenaeum of 10 June as ‘ready’, listed in the Publishers' Circular and Booksellers' Record on 16 June, and reviewed in the Athenaeum on 24 June.

Political parties in representative democracies have, as two of their most significant functions, to facilitate popular participation in the decision-making process and to implement, through control of governmental organs, those policies which are popularly favoured. Judged by these criteria, American parties are dysfunctional—so one critical school argues. American parties, they charge, are responsible neither to their members nor voters and are so organized and operated that they fail to govern effectively. When, in the early 1950s, this case against American parties had its greatest acceptance in the discipline, a number of critics contrasted American parties unfavourably with British parties. As an earlier generation of political scientists had urged Americans to adopt British institutions of government, so the critics of American parties favoured reforms which they thought were characteristic of British parties. If American parties became more like British parties, they argued, those parties would be more responsible and effective. Defenders of American parties refuted the critics' diagnosis and prescription by emphasizing the many environmental and institutional differences between Britain and the United States. British experience simply was not applicable in the U.S., they maintained. As study of British parties progressed an even more devastating rejoinder to critics of American parties emerged. Various findings began to suggest that although British parties obviously were much more cohesive in the legislature than were American parties, they were not nearly as responsible as the critics had assumed.

Richard Schechner, the editor of the Tulane Drama Review, greeted Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a ‘persistent escape into morbid fantasy’. Like W. D. Maxwell, a member of the Pulitzer Prize advisory board, he found it a filthy play and indicted it for its ‘morbidity and sexual perversity which are there only to titillate an impotent and homosexual theatre and audience’. More perversely he saw in the play ‘an ineluctable urge to escape reality and its concomitant responsibilities by crawling back into the womb, or bathroom, or both’. His revulsion was shared by other critics who similarly misapprehended Albee's intention in a play which, far from endorsing illusion, remorselessly peels off protective fantasies in order to reach ‘the bone…the marrow’. Indeed, as Alan Schneider, the play's Broadway director, has asked, ‘is Albee not rather dedicated to smashing that rosy view, shocking us with the truth of our present-day behaviour and thought, striving to purge us into an actual confrontation with reality?’ (my italics).

It has always been the unique desire of the American artist to attempt to order all experience in terms of the work of art and to make his life continuous and integral with the work. This poses certain problems for the artist for he thus becomes personally responsible not only for his imaginative redefinition of life but also its enactment in plural reality. In singing himself Whitman believed he was singing all America. His declaration that ‘The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,’ makes the point precisely. But not all have felt the Whitmanian synthesis an easily attainable one. Washington Allston, in his Lectures on Art and Poems, had already stated the problem which was to occupy the American artist throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:

In The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King Bellow is, of course, using a fictional convention invented by Mark Twain. The language of Huckleberry Finn embodies every naïve, shrewd, awkward, or painfully honest attitude of a South-Western boy. Without forgetting this mimetic performance, however, we see that the words act directly on the sensibility of the reader in terms of his literary expectations. He is kept alert by fresh and vital rhythms and by idiomatic phrases which attract by their very incorrectness. His excitement is not primarily a response to the authenticity of the language he hears, although this is an important part of the effect. It is a response to a tension of style, involving the counter-pointing of the rhythms and incorrectnesses of a South-Western small town idiom against Victorian literary and subliterary language. Huck's relief on emerging from the Grangerford–Shepherdson feud is communicated by language which excludes, yet is aware of, fireside scenes in Dickens and the melting cadences of ‘Home, Sweet Home’: ‘I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.’