These are the letters of a common man, who was both a soldier and a recent immigrant. Valentin Bechler knew little English and was imperfectly literate in his native German. He evinced no martial spirit, but thought of his military service as a job of work. His letters place more emphasis on camp and hospital than on the battles in which he was engaged. To the historian, Bechler is all the more valuable a witness for these reasons; for all too often war and immigration are to be seen only through the testimony of exceptional men. Almost equally valuable are his wife's letters from Newark, New Jersey, which show, in a form equally unpolished, what life was like on the home front for a family both foreign and poor.

American historiography has always been preoccupied with American history. This is still the case in our present time. It is a natural phenomenon which applies in the same sense to other nations. Like other nations, too, America has always had historians who devoted themselves partly or exclusively to the study of the history of foreign lands. Within their guild they always were and still are a minority. Their position vis-à-vis the reading public and also vis-à-vis the subjects of their interest is more problematic than that of the historians who concentrate on the national past. For the American historian of foreign lands the question of a specific historical sense is not only inescapable but also more difficult to answer than for his colleague who writes on American history. As Leonard Krieger has pointed out a few years ago, this historical sense may be defined as the capacity to understand the temporally distant in its own terms together with the consciousness of its relations with the familiar. When the American historian of extra-American (i.e. in our case European) history finds the temporal distance extended by the geographical and cultural distance, he is quite naturally tempted to start out by asking of his subject: ‘What is it to me or I to it that I should aspire to study and understand it?’ This basic question can lead to interesting historiographical results, but it can also lead into the sterility of mere antiquarianism.

One would expect from the relatively sophisticated industrial society into which Britain had developed by the 1860s a complex reaction to the immense crisis which struck the United States in that decade, euphemistically described in the British press as ‘the American Difficulty’. The enormous heterogeneity of economic, ideological, political and group interests involved in the English response – together with the spectrum of issues raised by the break-down of the Union – should enforce caution upon the historian who wishes to paint his Civil War scene in bold and simple strokes. During the war itself it was natural that Americans of both sections should make the simple demand of European opinion ‘is it pro-North or pro-South ?’ But the continuation of this tradition by later historians lasted too long, and has ended by befuddling rather than clarifying the situation. The search for partisan alignments too often provides a kind of distorting mirror through which events are viewed, or becomes a Procrustean device by which the data is chopped or stretched into the required form.

It has often been debated whether French opinion and enlightened philosophy could have influenced the Colonies between 1760 and 1773. Many students of eighteenth-century France accept the possibility. Many American historians have denied it, either because of their obsession with the purely economic causes of the Revolution or because of a semi-chauvinistic desire to ascribe the whole credit for the insurrection to the colonists alone. Mercantile dissatisfaction and national merit, though doubtless important as, respectively, a precipitant and a guarantee of ultimate victory, will hardly suffice to explain what was, after all, just as fundamentally a moral phenomenon.

‘The curriculum’, write Richard Hofstadter and C. de Witt Hardy, ‘is a barometer by which we may measure the cultural pressures that operate upon the school.’ These pressures are of many kinds, economic and intellectual, and they make schools and universities social, and even political institutions sensitive to external needs and demands. In the United States, where education has become one of the main secular goals of society, the history of schools and universities deserves to be an integral part of the social history of the country. Lawrence A. Cremin has shown how such an integration can be achieved. And now that ‘B schools’ in the vanguard of Le Défi American are spreading outwards from Manila to Manchester the time is ripe to study a phenomenon which most historians and sociologists, if they have not despised, have preferred to ignore.

If the Civil War had erupted in 1861 because the two sections had failed to produce a formula capable of reconciling their many differences, then it would not be inaccurate to assert that in 1865, four years later, that long-sought basis of settlement was even more remote and unlikely. Yet the search for mutually acceptable terms of agreement continued. As practitioners of the art of negotiation and reconciling differences, Reconstruction politicians on both sides aimed at reunion and talked of compromise. One hundred years later, many revisionist historians also assumed that compromise solutions were available after the war. Somehow both politicians and historians manifested a conventional response in presuming that bargain and negotiation leading to settlement were applicable and meaningful approaches to the problem of reconstruction. Yet perhaps the underlying reality was such that this traditional political approach was likely to be ineffective and quite inappropriate. Perhaps the interests and attitudes of the groups in power within each section were irreconcilable short of the capitulation or extinction of one of them. In that case political realism would have required that attempts to conciliate, moderate or compromise should be rejected, and other methods of achieving political goals tried and experimented with.

With the exception of Sir Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper, no two British and American writers of the nineteenth century are compared as frequently as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Yet, despite the far greater literary importance of Dickens and Twain, we are without a thorough understanding of the parallels in their work. Why does this problem exist? There are two basic reasons. The first lies in the thinness of Twain's comments on Dickens. If, to a modern critic like Ellen Moers, it is clear that Twain resembled Dickens in ‘the theatricality of his prose, the conception of the public as an audience of responsive listeners rather than as solitary readers, the episodic nature of his fiction cut to an oral rather than a literary measure’, to Twain himself it seemed unnecessary to make such an acknowledgement. In his fiction, as well as in his correspondence, Dickens's specific influence is at best marginal, and in his Autobiography he relegates Dickens to the position of the artist-innovator of the public reading.

The first Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts was a congressional leader of the highest calibre. W. Stull Holt has written: ‘no one can read in the Congressional Record during [Lodge's] career without being impressed by his mastery of parliamentary technique, by his adroit maneuvers to extract his party from a tight situation or to entangle his opponents, and by his knowledge of what to do under all circumstances’. Similarly, Denna Frank Fleming has said: ‘in skill of parliamentary maneuver, in ability to manipulate factions against each other and to his own purpose Lodge may never be excelled’. The picture conveyed by these two authorities is one of an extraordinarily talented congressional leader dedicated to the greater glory of the Republican Party. But as Holt and Fleming also recognized, it is not enough to dismiss Lodge as a mere partisan; he was also a devoted son of the Senate, keenly aware of the importance of the separation of powers and particularly sensitive to encroachment on the legislature by the executive. Most of the earlier assessments of Lodge's part in defeating Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations policy were made before the Senator's papers became available, but a re-examination of his role, in the light of his correspondence and other documents, clearly demonstrates his overwhelming concern for the two institutions that he served so long and so well, the Republican Party and the Senate.

From what Henry James writes in the well-known passage on the novelist's ‘need of the individual vision’ (Preface to The Portrait of a Lady), one is surprised to find him attributing absolute objectivity to the central character in another of his novels. A valid subject, he had said, is the result of some direct impression or perception of life; it springs out of the soil of the artist's prime sensibility. To represent adequately what he felt mattered about Isabel Archer, James had decided to place ‘the centre of the subject in the young woman's own consciousness’. He had rejected the easy evasive trick of giving only the general sense of her effect upon the characters surrounding her. To make theirs the predominant point of view would have been an escape from any close account of the subject. What then induced James on a later occasion to reverse this procedure without scruple? One can look first at James's account of the effect which this novel was to produce.

Richard Hofstadter wrote history out of a tense, but reflective, engagement with the world of ideas, politics and people in which he lived. There was no disjunction between his working and social lives; he carried on with his friends and colleagues an almost ceaseless dialogue that was always serious but often delightfully gay. His intellectual energy was relentless; and, towards the end, his work literally helped to keep him alive. Sometimes he described himself as less a historian than a historical critic, a remark that might, from one of the most influential historians of the age, have seemed ironically self-deprecatory, but was meant as a serious comment on his own historical style.

Carvel Collins's collection of Faulkner's Early Prose and Poetry, containing mainly material written between 1919 and 1922, with one or two items from 1925, introduces the reader to a young author who is not only concerned with questions of his craft but also engaged by several of the dominant aesthetic, intellectual and critical arguments of his day. Let me briefly list some of those engagements: Faulkner's review of Conrad Aiken's Turns and Movies and his renderings of Symbolist poetry demonstrate his interest in the proper language of poetry; the essay ‘On Criticism’ presents him sparring with notions of what good criticism could and should achieve; in his piece on Eugene O'Neill he expresses surprise that O'Neill had chosen to write first about the sea rather than about the more familiar land, and of W. A. Percy he says ‘like every man who…ever lived, he is the victim of his age’ (p. 72)—comments which hint at thoughts on the disparity between life and art (a recurrent subject in his poems), which was a chief critical point in the feverish debates of the time between the emerging ‘literary radicals’ like Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks and the ‘new humanists’, such as Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt. Also, in ‘American Drama: Inhibitions’, Faulkner stresses the importance of native subject-matter for the American writer, taking ‘the old Mississippi river days’ and ‘the romantic growth of the railroads’ (44) as examples. In the same essay, like Brooks and H. L. Mencken before him, he points out the comparative richness of the American tongue: thus it is no surprise to learn that Mencken's The American Language (1919) is listed in the Appendix to William Faulkner's Library—A Catalogue as one of the books Phil Stone ordered with his younger friend ‘in mind’.

The crucial issue facing the novelists of the pre-Civil War South was the expression of the Negro in their writings. A fine balance had to be struck between the deliberate attempt to present, as William Taylor suggests in Cavalier and Yankee (Garden City, New York, 1961), a favourable image of the slave-holding society, and the subjective impulse to express the powerful forces of racial destruction that were covert in the ante-bellum South. Such a balance rarely occurred. Rather, as social tensions increased with the approach of the Civil War, the writers retreated from their confrontation with the image of the Negro. Kenneth Lynn, in Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston, 1959), shows a progression which finds the authors using increasingly younger narrators, which Lynn feels absolves them of the responsibility of maturely facing the issues. But the novels of John Pendleton Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms reveal rather different forms of evasion. Kennedy, the more didactic writer, as the war approached, increasingly removed his novels from the present. This simply relieved him of the obligation of expressing concretely documented reality, and allowed a shift into fantasy. The image of the Negro could be safely excluded from such a context. However, fantasy is, if anything, a more congenial environment for the expression of covert social forces. Thus, a curious irony occurs in Kennedy's later novels. The image of the Negro disappears from works such as Rob of the Bowl (1838), but the forces of demonic malevolence with which he is associated are transferred to the figure which replaces him, the indentured Indian. A racial equation emerges, and in this chiaroscuric world of night and fire the Indian offers a glimpse of the malevolence suppressed in the image of the Negro.

Remarkably enough, Austin Warren calls Hawthorne ‘the unallusive Hawthorne’, but a mere four pages later he deduces from ‘The Hall of Fantasy’ in Mosses from an Old Manse that Homer, Aesop, Dante, Ariosto, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and Bunyan were ‘Hawthorne's pantheon of the greatest creators’ and that Fielding, Richardson, Scott, and even poor Charles Brockden Brown were among his favourite novelists. As a matter of fact, to today's casual reader Hawthorne's work appears rather generously sprinkled with allusions to other writers and works. In spite of George Augustus Sala's remark: ‘Nobody ever saw him read…A friend who knew him well told me that on his shelves Hawthorne had not twenty volumes, and that these were of the most ordinary sort’, Warren and others have established without doubt that Hawthorne was a voracious reader all his life. When he was a young man it was said of him, ‘He's read every book in the [Salem] Athenaeum’. Furthermore, when Hawthorne did quote an author or refer to him, he did so from actual knowledge of that author's works. The majority of his quotations and allusions Hawthorne carefully labelled as quotations and allusions; but, occasionally, either consciously or unconsciously, he quoted—or perhaps echoed—without attribution. To point out such a ‘quotation’ is the purpose of this paper.

In our society it is not unusual for a Negro to experience a sensation that he does not exist in the real world at all. He seems rather to exist in the nightmarish fantasy of the white American mind as a phantom that the white mind seeks unceasingly, by means both crude and subtle, to lay.

(Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York, 1964), p. 304)

It is still true, alas, that to be an American Negro male is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol: which means that one pays, in one's own personality, for the sexual insecurity of others.

(James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York, 1961), p. 172)

William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, a fictional account of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt, is, in the author's words, ‘less an “historical novel” in conventional terms than a meditation on history’. It produced an immediate and continuing response from American readers, and was greeted both as ‘superlative history’ and as the distorted creation of a ‘vile racist imagination’. Certainly, no recent American novel has evoked such partisan controversy and made so apparent the already deep but widening emotional and intellectual rift between white liberals and the new generation of black militants in search of a usable past. Nor has any treatment of Negro slavery and the slave personality since the publication of Stanley Elkins's seminal essay been so avidly praised or so bitterly condemned. The question in dispute has been less Styron's treatment of the events of the Turner revolt (Styron incorporates most of Turner's own alleged ‘Confessions’ into the narrative) than the historical accuracy of the author's descriptions of the workings of the slave system, particularly its effects on whites and blacks. A summary of the conflicting responses best indicates the range and impact of Styron's novel and provides also a framework within which to set and evaluate the intentions and achievements of the novelist as historian.

The address which William Faulkner delivered in Stockholm on 10 December 1950, upon being awarded the Nobel Prize, is a challenge to his fellow writers to recall that ‘the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself’ are the true subject of art. The artist who forgets this, Faulkner warned, ‘writes not of love but of lust’ if he does not dedicate himself to ‘the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths’, then his art is ‘ephemeral and doomed’; and the artist himself ‘labors under a curse’.