Occasionally, even the student of American culture grown accustomed to its odd couples — Thomas Morton and lasses in beaver coats, Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mark Twain and the Reverend Joseph Twichell — is brought up short. One does not, after all, expect to encounter the language and cadences of Jonathan Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in a Walt Disney production of Pollyanna, a film in which the heroine's gladness has come to fulfill roughly the function of divine grace. And it is only slighdy less improbable to encounter in the New Yorker for 31 July 1978 the disembodied, dialectical voices of Donald Barthelme's The Leap, agreeing to postpone the leap of faitli to another day, setting aside their awareness that “We hang by a slender thread. — The fire boils below us — the pit. Crawling with roaches and other tilings. — Torture unimaginable.”

The use and misuse of Jonathan Edwards, or less moralistically, the observable process of advocacy, condemnation, adaptation, and creative redefinition focussed on his life and work, has a long and instructive history. In October of 1903 an important stage in that process had been reached when bicentennial celebrations of Edwards' birth resulted in a flourishing of tributes to die Edwards legacy and assessments of the permanent and the passing in his diought, as one writer put it. We may now, three quarters of a century later, have reached a stage of comparable significance, with a potential both for summing up and for speculating on what lies ahead.

It is a pleasure to have been asked to write a brief introduction to this Jubilee edition of the Journal of American Studies, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the formation of the British Association for American Studies, whose first Chairman and prime mover was the seminal scholar and teacher, Frank Thistlethwaite, my present Vice-Chancellor and old friend. The edition takes the interesting form of seven academic autobiographies written by distinguished European Americanist scholars, telling us in effect how they became involved in American Studies.

The fairly restricted number of first-generation European Americanists in the post World War II era (which is in fact almost to say simply the first generation) is shown by die circumstance that, with the exception of Nikolai Bolkhovitinov, I know them all and most of diem very well. I am perhaps favourably, because centrally, placed to introduce them since three are my seniors and four my juniors. Of my seniors all three had set out on the path that was to lead them to the study of the United States before the war began, but all three, I think it fair to say, even including much the most senior of us, Dietrich Gerhard, only decisively became Americanists as a result of die war itself.

This corresponds with my own experience, though I suspect that I might have become one in any case: I was perhaps die only member of the pre-war generation among die contributors to have made a serious undergraduate study of die United States (in that splendid special subject at Oxford, The American Revolution and, I think it is accurate to add, the Maying of the Constitution, which Herbert Nicholas describes) under the magic yet far from invisible hand of Denis Brogan, the father or grandfather of us all in Britain and elsewhere.

It is now clear that the 1970s were pivotal years for the balance between major regions of the United States. Recent developments in patterns of population movement and economic growth have been altering historically-established spatial relationships and hierarchies and contributing to a transformation in the status of American regions that, in one assessment, “has quite simply shifted the balance of power in America away from the Northeast and toward the Southern Rim.” This paper examines that shift insofar as it affects “North” and “South.” Recent events have served to sharpen the rivalry and deepen the suspicions that have long existed between these regions. Within both there has been an increase of regional consciousness and a growing awareness of common problems and needs which have been reflected politically in the formation of new coalitions to identify and protect regional interests. More popularly, there has been open discussion of the economic struggle as a “second war between the states.”

It is important at the outset to emphasize that there has been no sudden reversal in the 1970s of pre-existing patterns and trends.

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.

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.

The America of my infancy was, perhaps to a great degree than would now apply, the America of classic juvenile fiction – the West of R. M. Ballantyne and Fenimore Cooper, the South of Uncle Remus and Uncle Tom's Cabin and, a little later, the Gothic of Edgar Allen Poe and the Mississippi Valley of Mark Twain — a country that had about as close a relationship to one's direct experience as the Spanish Main or the African jungle or the Scotland of Bonnie Prince Charlie. The real America of Coolidge and Hoover offered little to attract and hold attention – apart from gangsters and G-Men (about which I recall writing and acting in a school play Dull Days in Chicago). As appetites grew a little more discriminating the realism of Sinclair Lewis and the satire of John P. Marquand took over from the Hollywood America of thrills and comedy. Even so, America was, in every sense, a far-away country, full of portent and significance of course, but not exciting and relevant, still less attractive.

The coming of Roosevelt and the New Deal should have changed all that, of course. Honesty obliges me to admit that for a third year undergraduate at Oxford, absorbed in Greats, the American re-birth was infinitely less real and challenging than the Nazi eruption in Europe. There is a memory of a dapper, bouncy little figure lecturing to avid audiences in the North School in 1934. But to me Felix Frankfurter, then the visiting George Eastman Professor, was just another American whose lectures on the New Deal and the Constitution held one up en route to Henry Price's expositions of the Theory of Knowledge.

Hegel, in the posthumously published Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837), saw America as “the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.” Such enthusiasm was reciprocated in a curious and revealing manner both by American philosophers and by the representatives of other American social institutions, as I hope to show in this article. American neo-Hegelianism was, like its British counterpart, belated but significant in its influence on academic or “professional” philosophy. However, in contrast to the story of Anglo-Hegelianism as we know it through the lives and work of such figures as Benjamin Jowett, T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, F. H. Bradley and their followers, academic influence in America was short-lived, while its general cultural significance, as measured through the history of institutions other than the university, was much more profound.

In the bulk of this article I shall try to support these contentions as follows. First, I shall offer a definition of the philosophical position adopted by neo-Hegelian groups in Great Britain and the United States, beginning in the 1860s. Secondly, I shall give an outline of the career of Absolute Idealism (and Hegelianism in particular) in America up to the First World War.

Over the past two decades Jacksonian historiography has been enriched by the publication of a large number of scholarly articles and monographs. Legislative voting in the states and in Congress has been analysed, the social composition of the two major parties has been studied, the mechanics of the political system have been scrutinized and political ideas have been reexamined. The present article will be concerned with ideology, the belief system of the Jacksonian Democratic party. It will deal specifically with the Jacksonian conception of equality. Surprisingly, this is a facet of Democratic ideology to which relatively little attention has been paid.

In The American Political Tradition, published in 1948, Richard Hofstadter presented what is perhaps the standard view of Jacksonian equality. He cited Andrew Jackson's Bank Veto Message of 1832. Jackson here affirmed that

Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law.

Hofstadter concluded that this was “certainly … not the philosophy of a radical leveling movement that proposes to uproot property or to reconstruct society along drastically different lines.”

To become an historian was already my aim in the last forms of the gymnasium, prior to 1914, though I hardly knew anything about the profession. My father, an attorney, had been thinking of me as of his successor, yet tolerance was one of his outstanding traits. He was willing to wait until the full development of my capacities, the more so since history had always been one of his major interests. My gymnasium — perhaps even more than other Berlin gymnasia — stressed German and especially Prussian history. Even teachers with a wider horizon, such as Wilhelm Pfeifer who had been one of the last amanuenses of Ranke, were obliged to emphasise Prussian history. I remember that one whole semester was given over to the campaigns of Frederick the Great. Pfeifer was a thoughtful and independent teacher, well above the level of his colleagues. I stayed in contact with him until I left Germany in 1935. Later my American students thought that, by way of Pfeifer, Ranke's blessing had been bestowed on me — a kind of successio apostolorum.

In the year prior to my graduation from the gymnasium I learnt that recently a book of a new type of history had appeared in the form of Friedrich Meinecke's Weltbuergertum und Nationalstaat. I read it, and it was this book which led to my decision to study history. By showing the influence of cosmopolitan concepts on the emergence of the German national idea Meinecke's book opened up a new historical dimension, the history of ideas — not without objection from other historians that he neglected “real” history.

Much has been written about community in Yoknapatawpha; a great deal of it reads like an apology for Arcadia. Cleanth Brooks is a persistent offender:

The little town is old-fashioned and backward looking. It is suspicious of any outsiders who would disturb its life, and when it cannot expel the alien, it tries to wall him off in a kind of cultural cyst as bees enclose with waxen walls a beetle or wasp that has got inside the hive.

The activities of Jefferson, Miss., in Light in August strike me as being less benevolent than the activities of bees. However, my point is more general: even in “old fashioned” communities people do not “Know who they are and where they belong” (xviii) as of a timeless right. They know because they engage in social exchanges which substantiate or qualify their belonging.

Recently Myra Jehlen has undertaken a class-based analysis of such exchanges. In Class and Character in Faulkner's South she discovers “the living pulse” of Yoknapatawpha in its “tangled social context.” As a result, she pleads with some justification for a shift of interest towards class in Faulkner scholarship:

William Faulkner was obsessed by history … [and] he drew characters whose inner lives are essentially linings for selves tailored to unalterable social patterns.… His people's tragedy is that their interior world has been co-opted by an external world they never made and apparently no one can ever unmake, (p. 1)

“A pedigree bloodhound for scenting out Negroana” was what I was called twenty years ago by Cedric Dover, a Eurasian writer unduly neglected today. I am content to accept his verdict on my pursuit of Afro-American and African studies, aldiough there is, perhaps, a little too much of Harriet Beecher Stowe's running dogs in the imagery for my liking and his statement seems to imply that I have spent all of my academic life tracking down disappearing black men and women in the dismal swamp of the past. It is true that I am never happier than when I have brought to light a forgotten figure with African ancestry. But my interests in Africa and America have ramified into other areas, especially into Scotland, at home and abroad; and I have spent some of my researches following Scottish themes. Yet, even here, continental and inter-cultural connections multiply, as the letter from Cedric Dover which I have quoted indicates. We were in correspondence about Robert Duncanson (1817–1872), a pioneer of Afro-American art: “a Scots Canadian mulatto born in New York State,” most of whose later life was spent in Europe, “where classical tradition took him to Italy and paternal tradition to Scotland,” whose “feeling of superiority … caused him to reject the Negro people and identify himself” with his father's country.

When the “hard-boiled” private eye of American detective fiction hit the streets in the late 1920s it was not altogether surprising that he should take his complicated path down Californian streets. Not because they were notably meaner than those of big-city crime in New York or Chicago but rather because his essentially private quest for the unravelling of an individual's tortuous truth would find more quarry in the Southern Californian mixingbowl. Each fresh start or re-made life came trailing the spoor of the past. The private eye became expert at detecting the tarnished metal beneath the glittering paint, at offering a wry sympathy to those cheated at the edge of the last frontier. However this “new” society was no more detached from a past that shaped its public form than were its denizens free to make themselves anew. In the hands of one or two writers the mystery was then deepened in ways that replaced the discovery of facts by the probing of relationships between the fixed individual and his forming society. The private eye then required a writer with a public gaze to give him vision.

In 1888 an Irish-American boy of Quaker parentage was born in Chicago. After boyhood summers in sleepy Plattsmouth, Nebraska, and the tortured adolescence of a public-school education in Edwardian England the twentyfour-year-old Raymond Chandler, trekking slowly through the Mid-West, arrived in Los Angeles.

Following the example of Steven Marcus, we may point to a number of features or incidents in Dashiell Hammett's novels which seem to break sharply with previous conventions of the detective story. I do not refer to the important changes of direction brought about by the “hard-boiled” school and instanced by such matters as the professional detective, organized crime, dark urban streets and a spare, colloquial, “tough” style. Rather, I wish to concentrate on features which are unexpected even in the context of “toughguy” writing and which occur unexpectedly in order deliberately and provocatively to remind the reader, in the midst of an easily-identifiable style, of other styles and methods of enquiry into human behaviour and, ultimately, of another and very different world-view which must be placed against the world-view of the rest of the novel. By adopting this technique, Hammett succeeds in drawing attention not only to the limitations of his particular kind of popular fiction but also to ways in which these very limitations can be used. The aspects of Hammett's novels to which I began by referring are not separated stylistically from the rest of the novel. But they nonetheless suggest to the reader that the first-person narrator might have to be viewed in a context other than that in which he normally presents himself for the reader's judgement (and, frequently, approval).

If, according to Henry James, “it's a complex fate, being an American,” it is a no less complex fate being an Americanist, especially when you were born in Europe, in a non-English speaking country. Unlike poets (as well as kings and dalai-lamas and humorists too probably), Americanists are not born, but made. For my part, at least, I was made one by very slow stages, and my education, like that of Henry Adams, began quite early. For, though I didn't go to America until I was nearly thirty, America came to me when I was still a very small child. This occurred during World War I, the Great War, as it was called then. I was living at my great-grand-parents' in a village in Berry, while my father was at the front and my mother worked in the post-office at Orléans (my birth-place). Suddenly — it must have been in 1917 or 1918, I was about three at the time-our village was invaded by a troop of Sammies. I was thrilled. I can still see diem very vividly. They looked so smart and martial in their khaki uniforms and broad-brimmed hats or saucy helmets. They were so different from the jaded French soldiers in faded grey-blue uniforms I saw from time to time, and, above all they spoke a language which no one understood. I gaped at them for hours, while they drilled on the village square or played football, occasionally breaking window-panes, but always paying for the damages right away. They broke one at my great-grand-parents, while we were having lunch, and my great-grand-mother was very angry, but they soon pacified her. They were very generous indeed, especially with children. I loved them. They carried me in their arms, took me on walks, gave me large slices of bread and salt butter, a rare delicacy, and even small coins, nickels and pennies with buffaloes and Indian heads, which I still have.

My first steady job, if one leaves out four years of wartime soldiering, began at Manchester University in 1949. It was a lectureship in American Studies and followed a two-year Commonwealth (Harkness) fellowship at Yale, also in American Studies, under the benevolent guidance of Ralph Gabriel. I have been in the same line ever since. The invitation to review what has happened to me and other Americanists in Britain during that long span carries the risk of self-regarding anecdotage. To reach the point of looking forward mainly to looking backward would be dismal. Yet Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was an exercise not in nostalgia but in prophecy; and while much of this essay takes the form of reminiscence I hope it may seem relevant to colleagues younger than myself.

One rainy day in the autumn of 1978, when I returned to Moscow from my leave, the Institute's executive secretary for international ties called me to her office and handed me a letter with the invitation for me to write an autobiographical article for the silver jubilee issue of the Journal of American Studies and to tell how I came to be a historian and a specialist on the United States.

At first the invitation puzzled me. To be honest, I have never written anything personal and, certainly, nothing autobiographical (except for the formal “autobiography” required in the USSR for official documents). Secondly, my official status and my place in the academic hierarchy could hardly justify my taking up the genre of autobiography. True, addressing their letters to the Institute, foreign correspondents often called me “professor” and even “academician,” but I naturally saw diis just as a polite form of address or as ignorance of our scientific hierarchy. The fact of the matter is that I have never been a professor (there is no such official post at the research institutes in the Soviet Union). As far as the title of “academician” is concerned, the difference between a senior research member of an academic institute and an actual member of the USSr Academy of Sciences (Academician) is the same as between the English “Dear Sir” and the French “Sire.”