Early in Freedom of the Will Jonathan Edwards formulates a description of logical necessity that has important implications for the way we understand both his philosophical and theological method. He describes the principal forms of necessary meaning, delineating three modes of necessity: philosophical, moral and natural. Of these, the first is most important, for it indicates that, at the highest level, meaning is determined according to the structure of a proposition. Edwards states that “philosophical necessity is nothing different from certainty,” and the form of certainty, he tells us, “[is] nothing else than the full and fixed connection between the things signified by the subject and predicate of a proposition.”

Racial and religious tension and conflict in New York City have dramatically increased over the past few years. Charges of ‘black anti-Semitism’ and ‘white racism’ abound, while meaningful communication between the races is less than it has ever been. The general context within which the situation has developed has been that of the growth of the Black Power concept and the resulting black challenge to the white economic, political and educational power structures. This challenge, so different from the glorious days of the civil rights decade of the 1950s when blacks and whites marched together in the South, represents a realization among black leaders that the basic problems of jobs, housing and education in the urban ghettos of America have to be solved before there can be any real progress of black Americans as a group. This, however, brings them into conflict with whites with vested interests to protect, and the resulting controversy has been bitter. An example of the break-up of the old civil rights coalition following the presentation of a challenge to white self-interest can be seen in the mobilization of the majority of Reform Democrats of the FDR–Woodrow Wilson Club to defeat plans to pair PS84, a predominantly white elementary school, and a nearby black and Puerto Rican school. David Rogers, in 110 Livingston Street, quotes one disappointed club member saying: ‘All their old liberalism went by the boards. They are liberal in the abstract, and when the problem is far away, say in Selma, Jackson or Birmingham, but not for their children or their schools and neighbourhoods.’ The same, as we shall see, could be said of the ‘liberal’ United Federation of Teachers.

Samuel Eliot Morison died in Boston in May 1976. He had been born there in 1887; he had spent much of his life in the Brimmer Street house his grandfather had built; and he could refer to Francis Parkman as “ my grandfather's friend.” I never met him; I have never discussed him with his colleagues and friends; and I do not propose writing a personal tribute. Rather, having re-read some four-fifths of the books he wrote, and perhaps nine-tenths of the words, I seek to describe his development, to explain why I judge him to be a great historian, and to show what manner of historian he chose to be.

Few critics have attempted to answer the question most often asked by those who grew up to find the revolutionary young poets of the Twenties embalmed as Elder Statesmen of the Fifties. Is Eliot really a great poet? What are the indisputably major poems and how do we read them? Why—a question so far ignored by all Eliot commentators—why has Eliot had so little influence on the younger English poets? This last question is even more relevant now that we can see that 1918–55 produced in England little more than a few good but essentially minor poets. And the fact that the emphasis must now be placed on (for example) Empson, Graves and Betjeman, rather than the fashionables with which we were plagued in our youth, does not render the question any the less relevant. There are certainly points of difficulty in Eliot's technique that make it possible to understand at least some of the resistance to his poetry when it first started to come out. J. C. Squire's review of The Waste Land is well enough known: ‘a grunt would serve equally well’. And, as Mrs Leavis has pointed out, George Gordon's inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford was little more than a series of gibes at Eliot as representative of the ‘moderns’. Still, these men were not fools. Granted that their reaction was a mistaken one, ought we not to enquire how exactly the mistake came about?

After years of comparative neglect John Taylor of Caroline has recently begun to receive again a degree of attention more in keeping with his true importance. That his impact upon both his own generation and upon subsequent generations of historians has always been less than it might have been is due largely to his tortured style of writing and the tortuous thought processes it reflected. John Randolph of Roanoke once commented that Taylor needed only a translator to make an impact, and Thomas Jefferson, replying to a communication from John Adams in 1814, wrote that a book received by Adams must have been Taylor's An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States: “neither the style nor the stuff of the author of Arator can ever be mistaken. [I]n the latter work, as you observe, there are some good things, but so involved in quaint, in far-fetched, affected, mystical conceipts [sic], and flimsy theories, that who can take the trouble of getting at them?” Taylor himself appeared to hold a fluent style in contempt, commenting that “A talent for fine writing is often a great misfortune to politicians.”

Although Taylor's style renders study of his writings far from congenial, the consistency of his purpose and thought make it relatively easy to extract the main thrusts of his arguments. Far from a rigorous theorist he provides a running commentary upon the politics of his times. In that capacity, however, he never felt compelled to define clearly, even to himself perhaps, some of the central premises from which his arguments derived.

Few American wars have been as closely tied to international law as the Anglo-American conflict of 1812. The legality or otherwise of impressment and cargo confiscation, definitions of contraband, blockade and the permissible limits of neutrality have all been endlessly argued. Such questions concern the causes of the war. What has attracted little attention, despite the keen contemporary awareness of the existence of laws on the conduct of nations, is the extent to which legal restrictions were observed in the actual waging of the War of 1812.

The notion that there were any limits at all is against the trend noted by those historians and specialists in military affairs who have observed that “restricted war was one of the loftiest achievements of the eighteenth century,” but that “the doctrines of the French Revolution brought a new intensity to warfare,” that unlimited war was reborn in August 1793, so that “by the beginning of tlie nineteenth century…the limitations on the violence of war that had been imposed by the small-scale eighteenth-century armies had already disappeared.”

However true these generalizations may be for Europe, the idea of limited war still thrived in North America in 1812 and throughout the subsequent war there.

Influential American studies scholars of the mid-twentieth century, such as R. W. B. Lewis, Henry Nash Smith, and Leslie A. Fiedler, focussed attention on a mythic American character, the frontiersman who penetrates the wilderness. These critics provided analyses of figures such as Daniel Boone and his fictional counterpart, Natty Bumppo, and discussed the power the romanticized western frontier had over the American imagination. Their observations were accurate, as far as they went. However, these critics did not acknowledge the many narratives in which a female character conquers the frontier. The assumption seemed to be that the literary female figure belonged in the parlor with her sewing basket and not in the forest with her weapon. Unfortunately, this incomplete assessment of the frontier adventure genre is still in evidence today. In this essay, I work towards the development of a more complete understanding of the American frontier story and point out that, even in the iconic John Filson/John Trumbull Boone tale, we find a mini-narrative involving a female hero who triumphs over the “savage” forces of the wilderness. This female figure became a cultural archetype, and similar versions of her story were repeated in countless captivity and western adventure anthologies, almanacs, and the like for the next seventy years. The popularity of this frontier narrative featuring a strong, violent female figure suggests that readers were accepting of the idea of an active, aggressive woman, at least while she was contending with chaotic forces in the wilderness. The popularity of this kind of narrative also undercuts the traditional gender paradigm (the nurturing passive female versus the active aggressive male) too often imposed by scholars on antebellum American letters and culture.

In the year of Lexington, the irascible Dr Johnson wrote to a correspondent: ‘The Americans, sir, are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.’ Extreme in his Tory views, Johnson nevertheless reflected popular sentiment concerning the American colonies and their pretensions to independence, and his bias was to be reflected in many of the writings of the first historians who attempted to account for the late destruction of the first British empire.

During the middle years of the nineteenth century a significant number of American Negro reformers visited Britain. Their visits have not passed unnoticed. As J. H. Franklin has remarked, “More than a score of black abolitionists went to England, Scotland, France and Germany… Almost everywhere they were received with enthusiasm and were instrumental in linking up the humanitarian movement with various reform movements on both sides of the Atlantic.” Benjamin Quarles, furthermore, has commented on some of their work in Britain.

The inception of American regionalism is routinely identified by scholars in either Robert Beverley or William Byrd II, both native Virginians who wrote intensely local works (The History and Present State of Virginia, 1705 ; The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, Run in the Year of Our Lord 1728) which are amongst the enduring literary products of colonial America. The regional base of both works is immediately apparent in their subjects and setting; but to stop here is to leave critical questions unanswered, questions which have in recent years begun to be addressed by ethnographers and historians such as David Bertelson, Michael Zuckerman and Kenneth Lockridge. In particular, Lockridge's study, meshing biography, history and social psychology, has proposed an illuminating “reconstruction of Byrd's personality” from his writings, an account which stresses Byrd's cultural predicament as a provincial Virginian who strove to be an English gentleman. My purpose in this paper is not to challenge such an interpretation, nor to propose an alternative historical viewpoint, but rather to add the perspective of literary criticism to our reading of Byrd's prose itself. I shall argue that the “ southernness” of Byrd's writing is a characteristic less of his subject matter — his Virginian material — or of his biographical limitations, than of his style, and that the History of the Dividing Line charts enduring preoccupations of Byrd's writing career which reached perfectly self-conscious apotheosis in this, his most carefully composed and corrected work.

Half a century before Jacob Riis and Jane Addams groped for the conscience of the nation with their exposures of urban misery, a few determined citizens were already fighting the long battle to liberate the huddled wretches of the cities. In Boston some of the techniques of the later social agencies were anticipated as early as the 1830s by Joseph Tuckerman's Association of Delegates from the Benevolent Societies, but it was New York City which really pointed the way to the future. In the twenty years before the Civil War a number of bodies were founded in the city which in time became permanent welfare institutions. They were in large part the products of conditions similar to those which produced the scientific philanthropy, Social Gospel, settlement house and other social movements of the late nineteenth century, and, like those movements, they anticipated many of the attitudes of the social workers of the Progressive era. It would be a mistake to press the parallel between ante-bellum reform and social Progressivism too far, but the two phenomena shared some common characteristics. Like many Progressives, the urban reformers of the ante-bellum years tended to come from pious middle-class backgrounds, and a number of them began life as missionaries before being drawn into social work. They were a fact-finding generation, investigating social problems with an unprecedented thoroughness, energetically uncovering evidence and compiling statistics with which to open the eyes of an indifferent public. They were very conscious of the social chasm between the rich and the poor and they did what they could to bridge it.

Commemorations of the burning of Atlanta and Columbia reveal the relationship of form and content in Confederate memory. Atlanta monuments announced civic rejuvenation to national audiences, particularly tourists. Columbia ruins lamented the fracture of local elites' political dominance. The divergent cultures informed Margaret Mitchell's fabrication of Lost Cause myth in Gone with the Wind (1936) and Elizabeth Boatwright Coker's excavation of Lost Cause legend in La Belle (1959). The decline of monuments and ruins contributed to the transformation of the Lost Cause into a different configuration of Confederate memory during the decade of the Civil War centennial.

In an 1856 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine the literary critic and biographer T. A. Richards conducted his readers through a house tour of famous literary residences in the Hudson River Valley. His itinerary and choice of authors were typical of the time. By using the picturesque vocabulary common to antebellum travel literature, Richards offered a vicarious glimpse into the domestic arrangements of successful writers and artists. He painted an edenic picture of gentility in the midst of the Hudson Valley's natural splendor. We read, for example, of the “broad lawns and slopes of Placentia,” the Hyde Park estate of the novelist James Kirke Paulding; and the “mysterious evening shadow” of Susan Warner's home on Constitution Island, just off West Point. “Dearest to us of all,” Richards added, was Sunnyside, Washington Irving's renovated Dutch farmhouse at Tarrytown. These elegant and vaguely romantic properties seemed utterly appropriate for the literary elite of the region. Like Hawthorne's Old Manse, they were architectural spaces indelibly suited to their masters' talents and temperaments.