“The true democracy of St. Louis, Edward I and Washington is forgotten,” lamented the American architect Ralph Adams Cram in 1917, “and a false democracy has taken its place.…” The assertion was no aberration of wartime hysteria, and was less eccentric in the early twentieth century than it would have been before or since. It gave pointed expression to a set of attitudes which had strong appeal to a significant number of Cram's countrymen, and which casts light on the perennial efforts of Americans to define their place in history and to balance the competing claims of tradition and innovation.

During the American sixties, the resurgent interest in Wilhelm Reich and the widespread impact of Marcuse's Eros and Civilisation encouraged the idea of coupling psychoanalysis and Marxism. Reich's works reminded radicals once again of the integral connection between political revolution and sexual freedom, while Marcuse's critique, a bold attempt of the mid-fifties to read Freud as a revolutionary utopian, suggested the desirability of a marriage between Marx and Freud, a marriage that would have seemed unnatural to many of the Old Left generation. Certainly, too, the writings of Norman O. Brown and Paul Goodman gave credence to the idea that sex, psychology, and radical politics were necessarily interrelated.

In one of James's best-known stories, “The Middle Years” (1893), the mortally ill author Dencombe, staying at Bournemouth for the sake of what remains of his health, gets an advance copy of his latest – and almost certainly his last – novel, which is called The Middle Years. Looking over what might have been thought to be his finished and dismissed work on his clifftop bench, Dencombe revises it:

Dencombe was a passionate corrector, a fingerer of style; the last thing he ever arrived at was a form final for himself. His ideal would have been to publish secretly, and then, on the published text, treat himself to the terrified revise, sacrificing always a first edition and beginning for posterity and even for the collectors, poor dears, with a second.

The first play I attended at my all-boys secondary school was Marlowe's Dr Faustus. The lower boys crammed in the gallery were not wholly engaged by grandiloquent Elizabethan cadences, nor by the laboriously unfolding plot. What stopped the whispering and fidgeting and then brought the house down was the scene in which Faustus, as reward for selling his soul, is allowed to kiss the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy. In this production the hell-bent Doctor had to make do with the prettiest boy in the school. Wild whoops, mating calls, indecent suggestions for further action rained down from the gallery. At the curtain call Helen again stole the show. Next morning, the Headmaster, a Scottish Presbyterian whose zeal for the Lord was second only to his zeal for rugby football, rebuked the school for the shameful scenes and prescribed a three-mile run to cool our ardour.

Charles H. Randall arrived in San Francisco in the late summer of 1849. He came a convinced believer in the California Dream. His first letter home to his parents told them firmly that there appeared “no limits” to his “chances of making money”. In August 1850 William P. Dangerfield said much the same. “Proverbial ships” were about to dock. It did not matter that on arrival Dangerfield and his party had but two dollars each. Gold was everywhere, wealth for all close at hand.

The disintegration of the American Communist Party in the Cold War years is normally ascribed to the repression mounted by most liberals together with the McCarthyites, followed by the general crisis of the international communist movement in 1956 provoked by de-Stalinization and the invasion of Hungary. The recent new histories of the CPUSA, which deal primarily with the 1930s, have replaced the view of the Party as an essentially passive agent directed by Moscow and filled with powerhungry leaders and politically-innocent members by one which sees it as composed of politically-conscious ordinary Americans who were active elements in a society in which they were rooted. This new perspective, which accepts communism as a legitimate part of the United States experience, for the most part sees CP developments in the thirties as constructive.

Your diddler is ingenious. He has constructiveness large. He understands plot. He invents and circumvents.

The attempt to bridge the chasm between multiplicity and unity is the oldest problem of philosophy, religion and science, but the flimsiest bridge of all is the human Concept, unless somewhere, within or beyond it, an energy not individual is hidden; and in that case the old question instantly reappears: – What is that Energy?

In recent years historians have begun to show considerable interest in the legal history of the South. But while much of this interest has touched on Southern lawyers and notions of professionalization, scant attention has been paid to the scores of black lawyers who were admitted to the bar in the post-Civil War period. Who were these men? Where did they acquire their legal training and at what cost? What sort of practices did they run? How successful were they? What follows is an attempt to answer some of these questions, taking as a case study the state of South Carolina, cradle of secession, and, by any measure, one of the most conservative (and recalcitrant) Southern states during the Reconstruction and Redemption periods.

The development and evolution since 1965 of a legally recognized right of privacy through decisions reached by the Supreme Court in the United States may be seen as evidence of one of two things. It represents either the Supreme Court's further usurpation of the authority of legislatures by its expansion of rights — areas never intended by the framers of the Constitution — or it demonstrates the creativity and sensitivity of Justices of the Court in finally making explicit what has been implicit in the broad language of the Constitution, namely, that a right of privacy has always belonged to the citizen. Whichever position one holds, there may be little doubt that the Court's excursion into this previously uncharted territory, with its subsequent “stops” along the journey at questions of contraception, abortion and, of concern in this essay, “unnatural” sexual acts, has given rise to considerable controversy and, in some instances, confusion.

Albert Chavannes is not a name that is mentioned often in intellectual histories of the United States in the late nineteenth century. Few nowadays are familiar with the work of this émigré farmer and businessman who lived for most of his life in Knoxville, Tennessee. Yet his achievement was impressive. Between 1883 and 1885 he edited and published The Sociologist, which was possibly the first monthly journal of its kind in the U.S.A. Inspired by Edward Bellamy's utopian novel, Looking Backward (1888), and the nationalist movement which resulted from it, he also wrote utopian fiction in two books, The Future Commonwealth (1892) and its sequel In Brighter Climes (1895). In the first of these novels Chavannes synthesized Darwinian theories of evolution and secular notions of progress to suggest that scientific sociological inquiry could aid rational planning in the cause of perfecting society. In the sequel, he built a firmer bridge from this dynamic sociology to a form of naive Marxism. Chavannes's work thus colours with European ideas and influences that distinctive American utopian tradition which retains a nostalgic faith in the realization of Jefferson's millennial democratic vision.

That the newspaper press in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake colonies was chock-full of advertisements for runaway convicts is a clear indication of the significance of transportation to America in that period. The existence of convicts in Virginia and Maryland stemmed from the provisions of the Transportation Act passed by the British parliament in 1718. This stated that felons found guilty of non-capital crimes against property could be transported to America for seven years while the smaller number of criminals convicted on capital charges could have their death sentence commuted to banishment for either fourteen years or life. Between 1718 and 1775, when the traffic ended with the approach of war, more than 90 percent of the 50,000 convicts shipped across the Atlantic from the British Isles were sold by contractors to settlers in the Chesapeake, where there was a continuous demand for cheap, white, bonded labour. Though many convicts were people who had resorted to petty, theft in hard times rather than habitual criminals, they were often viewed with jaundiced eyes in the Chesapeake as purveyors of crime, disease and corruption. They also had to endure, along with slaves and indentured servants, the everyday reality of lower-class life in colonial America: the exploitation of unfree labour. It is therefore not surprising that many convicts, like other dependent labourers, tried to free themselves from bondage by escaping from their owners.

The former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O'Neill, has observed “I hate to say it about such an agreeable man, but it was sinful that Ronald Reagan ever became President.…I've known every president since Harry Truman and there's no question in my mind that [Reagan] was the worst.” This is a severe indictment by a highly qualified observer. Nevertheless it is an opinion that will be challenged here. It will be argued in this article that far from being the “worst” of recent presidents Ronald Reagan, despite his failings, was more effective in office than most who have held the position in the last fifty years. However, as a preliminary to our analysis it may be useful to summarize the apparently formidable case against Reagan.