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 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 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.

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.’

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.