Everyone agrees that the American Loyalists had a hard time of it. Not only were they on the losing side in a long and cruel war — in their case rendered particularly bitter by virtue of being a civil war — but when hostilities ended they found themselves deprived of possessions, forced into exile, severed from relations and friends, and obliged to adapt to unfamiliar customs and surroundings. For those who took refuge in what remained of British North America, as approximately half of them did — some 40,000 in all — starting over again involved special difficulties. Winters there were long and cold, and the territories in which they found themselves were mostly still in a state of nature, uncultivated, unmapped, and in some cases virtually unexplored. Indeed, how suitable these lands were for settlement was at first by no means clear. “ Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Canada,” observed William Cobbett, who visited the Maritimes shortly after the arrival of the first exiles, “ are the horns, the head, the neck, the shins and the hoof of the ox, and the United States are the ribs, the sirloin, the kidneys, and the rest of the body.” This was not entirely true, but it was a notion which must have crossed the minds of many of the refugees themselves as, wintering in their camps, they contemplated the wilderness around them.

Hemingway's convictions and beliefs about the larger scheme of the world are generally informed by the tendency to see human action and the human predicament in terms of a circle, a convenient way of affirming his persistent conviction that one cannot consciously order or direct one's life in a chosen manner, chiefly because of the ironic and virtually constant discrepancy between one's expectations and accomplishments. This helpless plight is accurately described by Robert Jordan as a forced ride on an unusual merry-go-round:

It is a vast wheel set at an angle, and each time it goes around and then is back where it starts. One side is higher than the other and the sweep it makes lifts you back and down to where you started. There are no prizes either, he thought, and no one would choose to ride this wheel. You ride it each time and make the turn with no intention ever to have mounted. There is only one turn; one large, elliptical rising and falling turn and you are back where you have started. We are back again now, he thought, and nothing is settled.

The rider has no choice in making this circular trip; neither does he accomplish anything worthwhile. There is no aim, no purpose, and no meaning discernible in this whirl. This image of the wheel seems to be central to Hemingway's view of man's place in the world as it is revealed in his fiction and non-fiction.

In 1785 physician-politician David Ramsay of Charleston published The History of the Revolution of South Carolina. Contemporaries praised it highly. Four years later Ramsay produced a more ambitious work, The History of the American Revolution. It established his reputation both in America and abroad as the new nation's leading historian. Thus in a few short years Ramsay went from a locally prominent physician and State legislator to an important national cultural and literary figure. The American reading public found his approach to history to its tastes. He expressed a set of ideas about American history in general and the Revolution in particular that were common currency in the United States. But he expressed them for the first time in well-reasoned and documented historical narrative: in volumes that were suitably pro-American, yet judicious in their treatment of Britain, that made a strong case for American uniqueness while maintaining the ideal of the United States as a model for the world.

Ramsay's histories alone would attract our interest as the first and most influential historical analysis of the American Revolution and the ratification of the Federal Constitution. But Ramsay's writings and his career as physician and politician are also significant because they launch us upon a journey into the mind of one of the new nation's most articulate spokesmen on historical, political, and medical issues. There is, to be sure, little in the general pattern of his life to distinguish him from a number of his contemporaries among the professions and political figures of second rank. Ramsay seldom formulated original ideas. His importance was not simply, or even primarily, that of a political or historical philosopher or medical innovator.

Andrew Carnegie, as he never tired of informing his readers and audiences, was an avowed and fervent admirer of the British railway engineer turned evolutionary cosmic philosopher, Herbert Spencer. Carnegie frequently addressed Spencer as “ My Dear Master,” entitled one chapter of his Autobiography “ Herbert Spencer and His Disciple,” and liked to say that Spencer had had an even greater influence on him than either Burns or Shakespeare. Certainly in Carnegie, Spencer had one of his warmest American friends and a generous admirer, and the two men remained in close contact from the time of their first meeting sometime during the early 1880s until Spencer's death in 1903. An examination of their friendship yields some valuable insights into the reception of Spencer's ideas by the outstanding — if atypical — spokesman of the American business class during the Gilded Age. It reveals Carnegie's much-vaunted evolutionism to have been instinctive rather than intellectual, derived not from study and uncertainty but from innate optimism and heuristic observation. Again, despite Spencer's promotion by some historians as the patron saint of industrial capitalism, his writings and his relationship with Carnegie indicate that Spencer was highly critical of American competitive mores, monopolistic practices and pervasive materialism.

Perhaps the greatest irony in the formative period of the Cold War is that the United States had to resign itself to the Soviets' domination of the very area in which it had at first chosen to challenge them, namely Eastern Europe. Yet America's ultimate acceptance of a Soviet hegemony in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary did not mean, as some histories of the Cold War imply in their omissions, that the status of these countries no longer concerned Washington. In the three years following World War II, American policy makers recognized that while they could not secure democracy or the “ open door ” in Eastern Europe, they could still develop policies for the area that could prove challenging to the Soviet hegemony. Their assumptions and expectations will be the subject of this article. It will show that the Truman administration believed that on developments in Eastern Europe depended the ultimate stability of the Soviet State itself. If the United States could arrest the growth of communism in the Soviet satellites, it could test the insistency of Moscow's power.

The black population of an American city is usually thought of as concentrated in the inner city, close to downtown, in areas characterized by ageing housing, high population density and slum conditions. General treatments of black residential areas in American cities tend to make little distinction between conditions in different parts of the country. But although it is true that the black ghetto is a ubiquitous and surprisingly similar feature of Northern and Western cities, there are good grounds for regarding the experience of Southern cities as significantly different. This distinction has been noted by the Taeubers and by Rose, but has not yet been developed in detail.

The main objective of this paper is to develop an alternative model of the spatial pattern of residential segregation appropriate to Southern cities, and to describe its applicability to Memphis, Tennessee. First the standard model of ghetto development will be outlined, and some reasons suggested why it may not be applicable in the South. After developing a model applicable to Southern cities, some of its practical consequences for ghetto residents will be indicated. Then Memphis will be examined to see how far the suggested model reflects experience there. In addition to a discussion of the spatial form of black residential areas in Memphis, some of the historical and contemporary processes controlling their development will be outlined.