President Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 was quickly followed by a wave of instant history, mainly produced by those who worked closely with him in the White House. Sorensen, Schlesinger and Salinger all published their memoirs in the mid-sixties, while O'Donnell and O'Brien followed suit in the early seventies. It was inevitable that their assessment of the Kennedy Presidency would be a favourable one and it was equally inevitable that it would generate a reaction from those who believed that the Kennedy myth needed to be destroyed. The instant history of the sixties has now given way to the instant revisionism of the seventies and John F. Kennedy is getting a distinctly unfavourable press. Leaving aside foreign affairs, it is Kennedy's handling of civil rights to which the revisionists are most antagonistic. Here the relationship between the President and Congress is brought sharply into focus. It is argued that Kennedy did not put before the legislature the wide-ranging and bold commitments on civil rights made during the election campaign; that his approach to the problem was tailored to suit the sensibilities of the southern Democrats in the House and Senate, and that he studiously avoided offering moral and political leadership to the country at large. Thus Henry Fairlie blames Kennedy for “ procrastination and tokenism”; Lewis Paper argues that Kennedy's handling of civil rights “ did not speak well of his success as a public educator ” and Bruce Miroff, perhaps the most outspoken of all the critics, places Kennedy's performance in the context of “ pragmatic liberalism rooted in elite politics ” — an approach which he unhesitatingly condemns.

“ Son George,” Sir Henry Colt wrote his progeny in the summer of 1631, “ I have taken pains day and night to collect this journal … because if you will prove a seaman and undertake voyages [to the New World] you may learn how to employ your time at sea, and who to thank for your conservation.” Appended to the diary were “ some rules for diet and health … the way being dangerous because of the change in climates, especially about the tropics.” Among other things, Sir Henry cautioned the younger Colt that he would find the “ torrid zone or middle region temperate enough,” but the most dangerous place would be the “ tropics under which you must pass for pestilent fevers … which have killed many in the hot season of year.” To reduce the possibility of sickness which was likely to occur as a result of travel into warm climates, Colt prescribed some precautionary measures.

Sir Henry Colt lived in an age when such modern terms and concepts as anopheles mosquito, malaria, yellow fever, and immunization zones had little or no meaning. In his day, physicians had not established a connection between anopheles mosquito and malaria, or aedes mosquito and yellow fever. When counseling his son on how to remain healthy in the Americas, Colt had no reason to warn him that anopheles and aedes mosquitoes often served as hosts for parasites which were deadly to human beings, and hence the bites of these insects could be dangerous.

Colt and his contemporaries did, however, hold coherent medical views about disease and its origins which informed their behavior in the New World.

The domestic slave trade has always bulked large in discussions of the character of American ante-bellum slavery. Assumptions and arguments about the nature of master-slave relations, about family separations, and about the slave family have necessarily had much to do with slave sales and with the extent and character of the domestic traffic in slaves. All this has, however, been despite the fact that no satisfactory quantitative estimate of the trade has been available. Indeed, the standard work on the American domestic slave trade, Frederic Bancroft's Slave Trading in the Old South (1931), has recently been challenged in the studies of Calderhead (1972) and of Fogel and Engerman (1974), and those studies have in turn been questioned by, for example, Gutman and Sutch in Reckoning with Slavery (1976).

The present study will seek to offer a more satisfactory estimate of the trade than has so far been available, and will argue that the trade accounted for the substantial majority (somewhere between 56 and 69 per cent) of the more than one million net inter-regional slave movements which took place in the South over the period 1820 to 1860.

In February 1921 Irwin Granich, not yet transformed into “ Michael Gold,” published “ Towards Proletarian Art” in The Liberator. This essay has been described as “ the first significant call in this country [the United States] for the creation of a distinctly and militantly working-class culture.” What Gold meant by “ proletarian art” remains unclear. He uses “ proletarian” interchangeably with “ masses,” and suggests that Walt Whitman was the discoverer, without quite realizing it, of proletarian art in America. The proletariat for Gold were nothing less than heroic possessors of Life — “ The masses know what Life is, and they live on in gusto and joy ” — who have been thwarted by society from the full realization of their artistic and cultural heritage. Gold's thought was dominated by a lyrical and mystical celebration of the modern industrial worker, tinged by frustration at the bitter waste of human potential under capitalism.

Labour violence is an indication of the nature of any society at a given time, and has been a catalyst of tensions and harbinger of change on many occasions in America since 1865. Furthermore, it has had in that country a braking effect on social reform. These aspects of labour violence have received their fair share of recognition and attention. Their investigation has uncovered a mass of useful evidence. For this reason, it is today possible to view labour violence with better understanding, and to approach directly the problem of its causes.

Although historians have tried to explain labour violence, they have mostly done so obliquely or on the basis of unquestioned assumptions. Recently, for example, Herbert G. Gutman referred to labour violence repeatedly in his collection of essays Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, but focussed on “ patterns ” of disorder rather than on its causes, and belittled even these patterns by stating that they “ deserve brief attention.” Philip Taft, a long-surviving member of the John R. Commons school of labour history, tackled the problem of labour violence in American history because of renewed public interest in the subject occasioned by the race riots of the 1960s, but simply assumed throughout his work that wage-earners resorted to violence in response to oppressive conditions. The same undifferentiated assumption appeared in earlier work on labour violence, most notably in 1931 in Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America by the Jugoslav socialist immigrant, Louis Adamic. Adamic wrote absurdly that the racketeering of the Al Capone era was a “ phase of class conflict.”