In 1959 Herman Feifel edited a volume of interdisciplinary essays titled The Meaning of Death. The collection was a valuable contribution in a neglected area. It also marked an apparent change in national mood. After an extended period, death was once more a respectable academic topic of discussion and consideration. In the decade that followed a considerable amount of work was published in this field, ranging from such scholarly yet compassionate volumes as Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' On Death and Dying to a literature of social criticism epitomized in Jessica Mitford's best-seller, The American Way of Death. By 1970, one scholar would observe, more material had appeared on death, grief, and bereavement in the five years following Feifel's book than had appeared in the previous hundred years.

Like other early nineteenth century religious and social reform movements the anti-slavery societies operated on a trans-Atlantic basis, with a regular exchange of ideas and personnel between Britain and the United States. The process was facilitated by the shared ideology and common background of many abolitionists on both sides of the ocean. This was especially true of the Quakers who had played such a prominent part in the early anti-slavery movement. British Quaker families were intermarried and maintained a network of religious and family contacts throughout the United Kingdom. They also maintained such close contacts with American Friends that historians have talked of a Quaker Atlantic community. That community shared many common social values and suffered similar religious tensions in its contacts with both Unitarianism and the more pervasive Evangelicalism.

Before he took over the management of the Economist in 1860, Walter Bagehot had not had much occasion to notice the United States, at any rate in his published writings. During the 1850s he had been too taken up with banking, and literary criticism, and expounding the value of stupidity in politics. To be sure, in 1859 he decided that the time had come to discredit the American example. The English were becoming disquietingly interested in democracy, a system as to which he had all the usual mid-Victorian doubts and a few extra. So he told the world, through the National Review (which struggling Unitarian quarterly he edited) that the vulgar American voters sent only vulgar men to Congress: “ men of refinement shrink from the House of Representatives as from a parish vestry ”; and that America was too unlike England to be a safe model. Then, just as he became editor of the Economist, the secession crisis and the Civil War erupted. It was incumbent on him to pronounce on these events, and it would have been most uncharacteristic of this sunny, self-confident man to shirk such a responsibility.

Blacks were a significant minority of the Cherokee Nation throughout the nineteenth century, first as slaves and later as freedmen. An 1830s census shows that the Cherokee Nation at that time consisted of: 13,536 Indians; 147 intermarried white males; 73 intermarried white females; and 1,277 slaves. In 1860 there were approximately 23,000 Cherokees and 2,500 blacks in the Cherokee Territory. And according to the United States Census of 1890 the total population of the Cherokee Nation was 56,309, including 5,127 persons of Negro descent.