In November 1842, La Roy Sunderland, Orange Scott and Jotham Horton, leading abolitionists and ministers, withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church. The first issue of the True Wesleyan, Scott's anti-slavery newspaper, published an announcement of their withdrawal and their reasons for deciding to do so. They could no longer serve a church that condoned slavery and that scarcely permitted delegates to its conferences to raise the issue there. The three dissenters saw what they regarded as the high-handed tactics of the bishops in preventing conferences from considering anti-slavery resolutions as resting upon ‘the assumptions of Rome’! This act of withdrawal and the formation of the wesleyan Methodist Church die following May came after a six years' struggle between the radical abolitionists within the Church and their more conservative brethren, principally the bishops, who had stifled discussion of the slavery issue in order to preserve the Church as a national entity. This Wesleyan schism is a token of the change that is the subject of this essay.

The genteel and incapable Mugwump reformers received yet another battering in 1968 with the publication of John Sproat's ‘The Best Men’: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age. They are presented as being consumed by their moral imperatives and their hysterical fear of the lower classes, and sinking amid the social turmoil of the 1890s; their label, ‘liberal’, is but a convention for the benefit of their misguided contemporaries, and as we now know what it really means, they should be rejected as unworthy. Like many people, Sproat apparently sees the 1890s as a self-contained decade overwhelmed by the Pullman Strike and Free Silver, with the Klondike and Cuba as a fortunate tailpiece to avert the pending revolution. But amid the turmoil, one era of reform – the era of the ‘Bolt from Blaine’ and of the Civil Service Act – in fact blended into another – the era of Progressivism. The continuing public career of Seth Low, the type of organizations and men who supported him for office, and the principles of municipal reform announced early in his career are some aspects of this blending process. When one considers the diversity of liberal concerns and the regular infusion of new men and aims, then it is high time we modified those explanations of Progressivism based only on an explosion of material self-interest or cravings for lost status after 1900.

Senator Arthur Vandenberg wrote of Pearl Harbor that ‘Isolationism for any realist ended on that day’. For two decades after Pearl Harbor this judgement was generally accepted both by statesmen and by scholars in America. Pre-World War II isolationism, it was felt, had been a policy of blindness which culminated in disaster. In the post-war period, it was generally agreed, America learned from the mistakes of her pre-war isolationism and helped to keep peace and defend her interests by pursuing an internationalist policy of the containment of Communism.

Population growth has been traditionally regarded with some satisfaction in the United States, being associated with economic and social benefits and rising standards of living. Population expansion has, inter alia, provided an increasing labour force, larger and more varied markets and a widening range of opportunity for individuals. By 1967, however, as the U.S. population officially passed the 200 million mark, reactions were becoming decidedly ambivalent. Expressions of pride and pleasure, and the anticipation of further economic growth were somewhat soured by the widely publicized views of conservationists and ‘environmentalists’ (a rather newer breed). The old attitude of mind in fact paid little heed to the problems accompanying large population expansion and rapid changes both in patterns of living and in geographical distribution. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, concern about these matters began to grow, and the assumed arrival of the 200 millionth American heralded a sizeable campaign concerned with the threat, so called, of ‘over-population’. Stewart Udall, then Secretary of the Interior, writing a Foreword to his Department's report ‘The Population Challenge’, stated flatly ‘The greatest threat to quality of living in this country is overpopulation’. He spoke of the challenge of a soaring population; the shrinking amount of space per head; the gathering storm of conflict on space allocation, on resource utilization and on the preservation of the quality of environment. The headings of various sections of that report – ‘A Rationed Tomorrow’; ‘So Much and No More’; ‘Planning for the Pinch’ – all reflect urgent concern about the size and rate of growth of U.S. population with its growing pressure on land and other resources.

‘Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs’ is generally regarded as a lacklustre comparison of poverty in rural America and metropolitan England, with the theme given by the author towards the end of the first episode:

The native American poor never lose their delicacy or pride; hence, though unreduced to the physical degradation of the European pauper, they yet suffer more in mind than the poor of any other people in the world. Those peculiar social sensibilities nourished by our own peculiar political principles, while diey enhance the true dignity of a prosperous American, do but minister to the added wretchedness of the unfortunate; first, by prohibiting their acceptance of what little random relief charity may offer; and, second, by furnishing them with the keenest appreciation of the smarting distinction between their ideal of universal equality and dieir grindstone experience of the practical misery and infamy of poverty – a misery and infamy which is, ever has been, and ever will be, precisely the same in India, England, and America.

A great deal of criticism has celebrated Henry James's historical imagination or his lack of it; very little criticism has explored with any precision the sophisticated grasp of history that James exhibits in his novels and the various uses to which he puts his sense of history. Henry James himself had a passion for history and he sought it everywhere. Early in his writing career, in his biography of Hawthorne, James pointed out that ‘it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature’. Much later in his career, in The American Scene, James described his own ‘Hunger for History’ explaining that ‘history is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of “what happens”, but the much finer complexity of what we read into it and think of in connection with it ’. In its underlying form The American is not the kind of novel to compel one to reflect upon the ethos of a civilization or the social history of a culture, certainly not in the ways that Balzac's La Comédie Humaine or Tolstoy's War and Peace does. Nor is it the kind of novel that calls our attention to large historical trends. Yet to grasp the full stringencies of the story one should possess a strong historical awareness; for this novel provides an interesting example of how well James understood the historical implications of his subject.

It is a commonplace that American western fiction is ‘mythic’ and archetypal. It is also increasingly taken for granted that westerns reflect contemporary political and social issues and that one can learn much about American attitudes from a study of westerns as historical documents. Are these ideas reconcilable? One answer would be that though the book or film may communicate certain contemporary messages to its local audience, it also conveys ‘universal truths’ to a wider public. To see how wrong this happy compromise is, one has only to consider the following typical cases, taken from various stages in the history of American western fiction. Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking stories seem to be set in an impossible never-never land, yet the author occasionally provides ’scholarly‘ footnotes relating the stories’ locales to real places in America. The dime novel Seth Jones, by Edward Ellis (1860), contains elaborate anthropological notes on Indians, but on the page following one of them the hero says, ‘“Howsumever, that don't make no difference, whether it's the Mohawks, Oneidas, or any of them blasted Five Nation niggers, they are all a set of skunks …”’ Emerson Hough pauses in the middle of North of 36 (1923) to provide a bibliography of sources for the facts about cowboy life on which he draws. The film producers D. W. Griffith and James Cruze (The Covered Wagon, 1923, is based on a romance by Hough) spent enormous amounts of money and energy to get costumes, settings and technical details historically accurate, when their plots moved to the old romance rhythms of love affairs and escapes from fates worse than death.