Historians have undertaken a number of specific investigations concerning the social, economic and geographic backgrounds, as well as their motives for emigrating, of those men and women who emigrated from England to Massachusetts, Virginia and Barbados during the course of the seventeenth century. While they have discussed the origins of the South Carolina charter, described the social and political status of the eight proprietors, dissected the Fundamental Constitutions, and examined the means by which the successful settlement of 1670 was organized, historians have neglected to explore the social backgrounds of those men who emigrated directly from England to South Carolina during the colony's initial decades of settlement. In contrast, not only the political but also the social and economic backgrounds of the Barbadian planters who colonized South Carolina have been the subject of a number of historical studies.

The South was an important partner in the electoral coalition which kept the Democratic Party in power throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but it was rarely a satisfied one. Rumblings of discontent at the allegedly radical New Deal emanated from the region from the earliest days of Roosevelt's Presidency and by 1937 political commentators were talking of a ‘ conservative coalition ’ of Southern Democrats and Republicans challenging New Deal measures in Congress. North Carolina provided a good measure of support for this coalition, especially in the person of Senator Josiah W. Bailey, and it continued to do so when the coalition became more effective than ever during Truman's Presidency. Yet a study of the state in Truman's early years reveals the solid strength which the National Democratic Party still possessed there in 1948. To some extent this strength was unique but some conclusions are valid for much of the South.

The Warren Court induces schizophrenia. On the one hand it is difficult for anybody with a civilized political sensibility not to admire the policy content of the Supreme Court's judgments during Earl Warren's Chief Justiceship. If the three areas of decision-making with which this paper is concerned — segregation, reapportionment, and the rights of the criminal suspect — are examined, the Supreme Court clearly was on the side of the angels. It declared segregation to be unconstitutional. In a series of decisions the Court ended the gross malapportionment of legislative districting both at state and federal levels. Finally, the Warren Court attempted to change the balance between the criminal suspect and the police, by substantially increasing the restrictions on the latter's freedom of action. And yet, despite one's approval for the policy embodied in these decisions, there is something curiously disconcerting about the Court's judgments. One has a very strong sense that something has gone awry. This sense arises from the manner and mode in which the opinions of the Court are constructed. All the judgments under consideration in this paper — Brown v. Board of Education, Baker v. Carr, Reynolds v. Sims, and Miranda v. Arizona — share a common characteristic, a curious lack of substance, a lack of historical, constitutional, and legal substance. In other words, there is an absence of the kind of argument in the Supreme Court's opinions in these cases, which distinguishes a judicial decision from any other sort of decision.

In two influential books written some years ago William S. White and Donald R. Matthews suggested that the distribution of power within the United States Senate was, to a large extent, governed by certain informal rules of behaviour. Conformity to these norms or ‘ folkways ’, it was argued, was the key to success and influence in the Senate.

The phenomenon of the precipitate decline in popular and critical favour of writers immensely successful in their own day is a familiar one. In due course, however, it often happens that decline is halted, and replaced by some degree of renewed interest. Nowhere has this pattern been more clearly revealed than in the case of the eminent Victorians: and Macaulay is an obvious example. In the present flourishing state of Victorian studies it is hardly surprising that the great liberal historian should be once again receiving at least some fraction of the attention he was accorded in his nineteenth-century heyday. Two book-length studies have recently appeared: Jane Millgate's Macaulay (1973), in the Routledge Author Guides series, mainly concerned with Macaulay's status as a literary artist, and John Clive's highly praised biographical study, Thomas Babington Macaulay: the Shaping of the Historian (1973). Somewhat earlier, George Levine's The Boundaries of Fiction (1968) had included extended treatment of Macaulay along with Carlyle and Newman, and the early volumes of Thomas Pinney's collected edition of Macaulay's letters were published in 1974. It is perhaps surprising that more attention has not been paid to the evidence for Macaulay's widely-acknowledged, extraordinary American vogue and to the reasons for it.

Every historian addressing himself to the study of American slavery immediately confronts the paucity of sources. Significant documents written by slaves or former slaves are sufficiently scarce and difficult to work with that the slaves' view of slavery, in spite of recent publications, is still an underdeveloped area. In the almost fifteen years since Stanley Elkins stirred up swells of controversy by contending that slaves were characterized by a docile, childlike, ‘ Sambo ’ personality, historians have begun to employ concepts developed by psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists and to examine previously neglected sources such as slave autobiographies and recollections. But even these attempts stop far short of a radical departure from approaches traditionally employed by American historians. Although slave songs have been of interest for decades, with some recent exceptions, they have yielded few significant or surprising insights.