Like other unusual “ New Englanders ” of the post-Civil-War era — Henry James, George Santayana, W. E. B. DuBois — Henry Adams needed to cross his native with an alien culture before he could flourish. The fusion was made possible by the stroke of fortune which in 1861 sent his father as American Minister, accompanied by Henry as his private secretary, to England.

The American West has traditionally held a special appeal for the imagination of the citizens of the United States because it has come to represent so much for them. Not only has the vast expanse of land lying roughly to the west of the Mississippi River been the home of a number of America's most celebrated figures — Buffalo Bill and Billy the Kid, Sitting Bull and General Custer — and many of the country's national symbols — the six-gun and the Stetson hat, the homesteader and the pioneer, the cowboy and the Indian — but the “ western experience ” itself has also been looked upon as a basic theme in American life. From Frederick Jackson Turner's now-famous essay of 1893, which served to move discussions of Western America into academic circles, to Henry Nash Smith's analysis of 1950, which examined the mythical and symbolic dimensions of America's “ virgin land,” the story of the West has been viewed as one of the most enduring organizing concepts for understanding America's development and the characteristics of its people. While much of this matter is well-known today and common to the study of the United States, it is but little known that the cluster of ideas associated with the American West has also had implications for what might seem, at first mention, a somewhat unlikely place: Africa.

Traditionally, colonial scholars have focussed their attention on the North American continent, where dramatic conflicts with Britain culminated in Revolution. No major article or book has yet dealt with British West Indians as active participants in the pre-Revolutionary struggle. This study attempts to correct that situation. Focussing on the Stamp Act crisis, it seeks to clarify the role of island colonists during the pre-war period and argues for a comprehensive appraisal of that role.

As the principal materials for a study of values, The Ugly American (1958) and Fail-Safe (1962) fit well together. Though each was written by two authors, they have one author in common, the late Eugene Burdick. Both were best-selling novels and made into movies. Both were political cautionary tales, seeking to present dire realities in fictional form. The Ugly American, making the case for a more adept social and economic war on communism in South-east Asia, prompted a Congressional investigation of foreign aid and formed part of the climate which later produced the “ low-technology ” Peace Corps and the Kennedy interest in sophisticated-seeming counter-insurgency. Fail-Safe, attacking the beautiful but dangerous, “ high-technology ” nuclear weapons systems of the Cold War, was written in part as a deliberate campaign for arms control and caused a secret Pentagon review of safeguards against accidental war. Both books attracted attention at the Kennedy White House, and in keeping with New Frontier images, both featured the tough but humane professional, socially sensitive but highly controlled. Self-reliant and resourceful individualists, the heroes of these books are, nevertheless, geared to draw on highly-tuned supporting organizations as well as intensive training or experience.

For American trade unions and labour organizations, immigration was a constant source of concern and anxiety during the second half of the nineteenth century. In their attempts to eliminate the more harmful consequences to their members of this flood of foreigners, they adopted and promoted a series of remedial measures, ranging from informal co-operation with the First International in the late 1860s, to attempts to strengthen the immigration law in the 1880s and early 1890s. None proved satisfactory. Pressure for further restriction built up and in 1897 the American Federation of Labor, to which most trade unions were affiliated, approved by a massive five-to-one majority a relatively new restrictive measure, the literacy test. This test was the central feature of an immigration bill sponsored by Senator Lodge, which had been approved by both houses of Congress in 1896 but vetoed by President Cleveland. The test was intended to discriminate against immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe where levels of literacy were low. For Lodge, who had opposed a general head tax because it was insufficiently discriminatory, the literacy test “ would tell exclusively on the most undesirable portions of immigration.”

Deliverance does not at first sight appear a poet's novel. The style is colloquial, low-key, middle-class Atlanta; there is no abundance of metaphor; the clearly indicated beginning, middle and end of the action appear in that order; and no one in it seems immediately to be overburdened in the way of sensibility. Images, when they occur, are sharply delineated but not apparently freighted with hidden significance, vide: