For many years, Arthur M. Schlesinger observed, the American colonists were too occupied with living the present to explore their own past. Such historical works as were written generally confined themselves to a single province. Perhaps the most important intercolonial work of the early eighteenth century was compiled by an Englishman: Daniel Neal's History of New-England (1720). In the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature the entry for Neal is immediately preceded by that for John Oldmixon (1673–1742), miscellaneous Whig compiler and butt of the Tory wits. This may serve as a reminder that Oldmixon, too, wrote a pioneering work of colonial history – a flawed, prolix but deeply interesting book which merits more scrupulous attention than it generally gets.

The United States Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson falls into that category of unfortunate opinions which have few defenders. Its only supporters currently are those who affirm their belief in and advocate the merits of legally-enforced racial segregation as state social policy. This support, however, is bereft of intellectual substance and is correctly ignored or dismissed by most scholars. Reputable students of the court have without exception been unremittingly hostile to the opinion of the court, because of the presumed socially deleterious ramifications of the judgement. Furthermore, the opinion of Mr Justice Brown has been criticized for logical and legal shortcomings and has been labelled by one scholar as being an exercise in ‘conservative sociological jurisprudence’.3 It is the purpose of this paper to suggest that Brown's judgement has been misrepresented. Despite the fact that the decision gave a constitutional imprimatur to racial segregation, the logic of the opinion owes more to a philosophy of judicial restraint and respect for precedent than to a belief in conservative sociology or racial superiority. The court was in Plessy merely affirming its understanding that the Louisiana statute under review was consonant with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and was not commenting on the merits of racial segregation as governmental policy.

Students of the Socialist Party of America are well-acquainted with the extensive and persistent support it received from poor farmers, many of them tenants, in Oklahoma and Texas. David Shannon and, more recently, James Weinstein have both noted that the Socialist Party of Oklahoma had a more active and widespread membership than any other state branch of the Party. Both writers have also given proper emphasis to the shattering impact of repression upon the widely scattered and vulnerable Socialist locals in the rural areas of the Southwest after the United States entered World War I. Weinstein especially has suggested that the Socialist Party was a broadly-based and effective political organization, not only ‘in’ but ‘of’ the world of American workers and small farmers. Pointing to the vigour of the Socialist Party's support in the North and East after it opposed American participation in the war, Weinstein argues that an American Socialism attuned to American conditions and needs had much potential vitality and could have been a significant political force in the country. For this assertion Weinstein was sharply criticized by a reviewer who argued that he exaggerated the depth of the Party's support after 1912 and that he specifically failed to perceive the German ethnic origin of much of the Party's ‘new’ support for its anti-war position.

‘What is American about American Literature?’ is a question that is repeatedly answered too easily. A frequently offered solution is the claim that the dominant form of the nineteenth-century American novel is the Romance. Joel Porte, for example, confidently entitles his book on Cooper, Poe, Hawdiorne, Melville, and James The Romance in America. Porte begins his study with a sweeping assertion that the battle is over, the problem solved:

Thanks to a series of major critical studies that have appeared in the past decade and a half, it no longer seems necessary to argue for the importance of romance as a nineteenth century American genre. Students of American literature – notably Richard Chase – have provided a solid theoretical basis for establishing that the rise and growth of fiction in this country is dominated by our authors' conscious adherence to a tradition of non-realistic romance sharply at variance with the broadly novelistic mainstream of English writing. When there has been disagreement among recent critics as to the contours of American fiction, it has usually disputed, not the existence per se of a romance tradition, but rather the question of which authors, themes, and stylistic strategies deserve to be placed with certainty at the heart of that tradition.

Nick Carraway, the narrator of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), is slightly taken aback by some of his host's remarks in the course of an otherwise bantering conversation during his first visit to the Buchanans' East Egg residence:

‘Civilization's going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? … Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved … This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or those other races will have control of things … The idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are, and … And we've produced all the things that go to make civilization – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?

Edith Wharton frequently likens Lily Bart, the heroine of The House of Mirth (1905), to a flower. Her name is ‘Lily’; when she kisses Lawrence Selden ‘her face turned to him with the soft motion of a flower’ in her privileged station in life she is an ‘orchid basking in its artificially created atmosphere’; and, in sum, she is‘ the fine flower and complete expression ’ of the ideals of beauty and social grace held by the old New York aristocracy. Most significant, however, is Mrs Wharton's use of rose imagery when describing Lily. For example, when Lily came to her friend Gerty Farish after having narrowly escaped the unwelcome advances of Gus Trenor, Gerty reflected that everything about Lily was ‘warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose’. Indeed, the entire society of which Lily is ‘the fine flower’ diffuses a ‘rosy glow’. Those who stroll these ‘rosy shores of pleasure’, such as Judy Trenor, have complexions of ‘rosy blondness’. The fastest rising star in the economic and social firmament is Simon Rosedale, ‘a plump, rosy man of the blond Jewish type …’

Robert Lowell's The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket is dedicated to ‘Warren Winslow, Dead at Sea’. Academic treatments of the poem point out that Winslow, Lowell's cousin, was killed in action at sea in World War II, though as to the more specific details of his death there is little agreement among the scholarly commentators. Here are four versions, in the order of their appearance in print:

During World War II, the naval vessel on which Lowell's cousin, Warren Winslow, was serving disappeared and no Ishmael survived to explain her fate.