The Republican loss of majority status in the U.S. Senate following the mid-term elections of 1986, and the disclosure of the Reagan Administration's secret arms sales to Iran and diversion of funds to the Nicaraguan Contras, effectively brought to an end six years of senatorial deference to presidential foreign policy-making. From 1981 to 1986 the Republican-controlled Senate had generally afforded President Reagan a degree of latitude in the making of foreign policy which not only contrasted markedly with that of hisimmediate predecessors, but also prepared the atmosphere for the type of adventures pursued by Colonel Oliver North. Whereas the foreign policy initiatives of Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter had been subject to considerable scrutiny by senators, thereby forcing a detailed examination of their consequences, the forbearance shown to the Reagan Administration by the Senate encouraged a much less diligent approach to policy-making.

Few figures are more rapidly forgotten than dead journalists, except perhaps dead cartoonists. Yet the graphic work of Sir David Low (1891–1963) has not entirely slipped from memory. He is recalled as the inventor of the contradictory certainties of Colonel Blimp and as a scourge of appeasement. Particularly in the years immediately before, during and after the Second World War he achieved an international reputation. He was not perceived, and did not see himself, as a “funny man” but as a commentator on and analyst of international politics. His cartooning he presented as a form of argument to educate opinion in defence of liberal values and democratic institutions and in favour of rational conduct in international affairs. For these reasons his graphic and print journalism are revealing about the strengths and limitations of the outlook which might be termed “liberal internationalism.” Precisely because of this ideological content the United States became crucial in Low's thought at a time when liberal values and democratic institutions seemed under imminent threat and American capacity to accede to or refuse the role of “successor to John Bull” more apparent.

Richard Hakluyt, writing in 1588, was referring to the Elizabethan poor whose ranks were newly enlarged by the economic and social upheavals of the sixteenth century. His rationale for government-sponsored colonization has hardly been improved upon in the subsequent four hundred years and examples of its application can be found over much of the globe, from Acadians in Louisiana to convicts in Australia. Two hundred and forty years after Hakluyt, the American Colonization Society was founded in Washington, D.C., to encourage the emigration of American free blacks to Africa.

During the first half of the nineteenth century many Americans began to promote the visual arts as a means of defining and fostering national identity. One highly significant consequence of this new aesthetic was the rise of a native genre art which depicted uniquely “American” customs and characters. Focussing upon and interpreting the daily world of average citizens in an emphatically optimistic and ideal manner, these works of art celebrated the virtue, vigor, simplicity, resourcefulness and republicanism of American society. They tended chiefly to represent rural American activities – maple sugaring, quilting frolics, scenes of harvest and the like – and to rely upon a standard cast of characters – the farmer, the housewife, the peddler, the trapper, for example – each of whom exemplified a particular trait or traits that seemed distinctly “American.”