Ante-bellum southern history has undergone extensive revision in recent decades. Now that the hoary myths of Cavalier aristocracies, monolithic sectionalism, and Confederate chauvinism have receded, historians are better able to evaluate the ante-bellum political history of the South. Only recently, however, have scholars begun to examine the question of party formation in the Jacksonian South, a development of the 1830s, without the conceptual blinders of economic or sectional determinism. In this essay on party formation and development in Jacksonian America, the political structure in four Southern states will be emphasized. I shall present both an institutional view, which stresses party structure, organization and leadership, and a behavioural view, which emphasizes the politics of masses of voters and the interaction of social groups.

Newspaper files for the period 1830–60 indicate that a number of American Minstrel Shows visited Ireland at a time when the Irish Anti-Slavery movement was particularly vigorous. The shows occasioned considerable comment in the press, but, surprisingly, little or none among the abolitionists, who were usually avid readers of anything in the press pertaining even remotely to the U.S.A. and the Negro. Yet the popular Irish image of the Negro must have been in part determined by such performances, and for this reason they deserve some attention. Irish audiences were also, in this period, treated to dramatizations of episodes in Negro life and to the exhibition, as curiosities, of African tribesmen; but by far the most common was the American Minstrel Show.

Between December 1893 and December 1895, the American Federation of Labor engaged in a running controversy over independent political action. It began at the Federation's annual convention of 1893, when T. J. Morgan proposed a political programme which was submitted to a referendum, and it ended when the New York convention of 1895 passed a resolution proposed by J. F. O'Sullivan of Boston, which banned party politics from the deliberations of the conventions. The climax was reached in the convention of 1894 at Denver, Colorado. There the political programme was debated for two days before being rejected. The Preamble of the programme committed the Federation to forming its own political party independent of the two existing parties; it was followed by eleven planks, most of which were traditional demands of labour. The sole exception was the tenth plank which demanded ‘The collective ownership by the people of all the means of production and distribution’. The debate centred on this plank, although Plank 3 (‘a legal eight-hour workday’) and Plank 4 (‘sanitary inspection of workshop, mine, and home’) were hotly discussed. In the end Plank 10 was amended to a land monopoly plank on the proposal of August McCraith, a printer, and this amendment made it clear that the convention had rejected the collectivism of the programme.

The most easily understandable reason for the absence of a strong geographical element in American Studies in Britain is the difficulty geographers specializing in America experience in carrying out research. While more and more of the primary source material used by geographers is in the form of quantitative data published by government and commercial agencies, the real primary source is the earth's surface, and thorough fieldwork is still a basic necessity. Clearly, if the material or evidence (whether in the form of soils, crops, retail stores, traffic networks, minority population groups or polluted rivers) is in Vermont or Nebraska, it is infinitely easier for the geographer to work there and teach there, than to teach in Britain and commute to his fieldwork in Winooski or Red Cloud.

‘ The Black Cat ’ is one of Poe's neat little studies of obsession. Joseph Moldenhauer has said that these first-person tales of terror should be regarded less as studies of deranged minds than as controlled exercises in madness. We may take his point that there is little ‘ clinical ’ observation and that the obsession is seen from within, but may add further that the subjects of these tales are the irrational motives themselves, and therefore Poe does not need to create a motive for the motive. That is, ‘ The Black Cat ’ is a study of the ‘ murdering impulse ’ of the sort noted by Benjamin Rush in his Sixteen Lectures (1811) by whose account of a famous poisoner of cats it may have been suggested. It is not particularly a study of the effects of the ‘ murdering impulse ’ but rather of the impulse itself, which Poe simply cloaks in a non-specific narrator ‘ self ’. Poe's habitual use of the monologue or confessional form, and his claustrophobic interiors, are both calculated to produce a sense of internalized action, and the scenery of the tales is usually the chamber of the haunted mind, of which the poem ‘ The Haunted Palace ’ is only the most explicit version. The lack of a touchstone in ‘ real ’ surroundings, of an objective point of view, together with the sense of identification induced by first-person narration, combines to ensure that the internalized action is not seen from a position safely outside the distorted consciousness but, necessarily, from within.

An age of faith — such as the 1930s appear to be in retrospect — is almost certain to become an age of quarrels among the faithful. They divide into bitterly hostile sects, each with a different leader and each hoping for support from one group or another among the infidels. Such quarrels disfigure the pattern of the 1930s, especially toward the end. Looking back from another age, however, one is surprised to find how much the American writers in different factions, as well as those standing apart from any faction, radical or conservative, were affected by the same fears and aspirations for human society. ‘ There is a great destiny ’, Emerson says in his journal for 1841,

which comes in with this as with every age, which is colossal in its traits, terrible in its strength, which cannot be tamed, or criticized, or subdued. It is shared by every man and woman of the time, for it is by it they live. As a vast, solid phalanx the generation comes on, they have the same features, and their pattern is new in the world. All wear the same expression, but it is that which they do not detect in each other. It is this one life which ponders in the philosophers, which drudges in the laborers, which basks in the poets, which dilates in the love of the women….

Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) was one of America's most distinguished critics. As an international man of letters, he did not confine himself to literature alone, but also investigated main areas of human thought. He fluently pursued learning in seven languages, making it alive for American intellectual readers. He was indeed a ‘ superlative interpreter ’, as Alfred Kazin pointed out. Due to Wilson's wide horizons and perspectives, his works included such diverse areas as literature, politics, language, history and travel. During the 1930s he was mainly interested in political and industrial reporting, as well as studying Marxism, partly neglecting literary criticism. His activities of that decade were not only the outcome of an intellectual curiosity, but a personal need as well, that strongly influenced his political outlook. The growing concern for social justice and for the suffering of the lower classes was the dominant force in Wilson's thought during the thirties. One of the stages in his gradual radicalization was his association in 1934–5 with The Modern Monthly, an anti-Marxist journal. What led the prominent critic, the literary editor of the prestigious New Republic, to join the editorial board of the Monthly, a little magazine with a small circulation? What was Wilson's contribution to the magazine's political approach? Why did he resign after a fourteen-month editorship? How did his association with the editors V. F. Calverton and Max Eastman — who had been denounced by the Communist Party as ‘ social fascists ’ and Trotskyists — influence Wilson's political standing with the Communists? These questions deserve close examination.