The assertion that ‘Equity in the early American colonies is a subject that still awaits complete research’ is more true of some colonies than of others. Because of marked differences in founding and internal growth, the colony-by-colony approach has been conceded to be appropriate; but this piecemeal approach has resulted in the overwriting of Massachusetts's meagre and testy involvement with the chancery style of justice, while Virginia's much richer involvement has received too little treatment.

During the eighteenth century humanitarian sentiment grew in both Britain and Europe and by the end of the century, as Michael Kraus has shown, this benevolent spirit was crossing the Atlantic and was touching many Americans. Humanitarian activities of many kinds were undertaken in the early republic, presaging the great reforming crusades of the mid-nineteenth century, and the centres of these experiments were the large commercial cities of New York, Philadelphia and Boston, which possessed the necessary conditions of a conscientious middle-class, an adequate supply of funds, and social evils in need of attention.

Few scholars would nowadays question the importance of the United States in the world of learning; but the process whereby that nation attained its present eminence still remains obscure. Among the cognoscenti, it is generally acknowledged that American scholarship had come of age by the early 1900s, whereas fifty years earlier there had been only a handful of American scholars and scientists of international repute, and the country's higher education lagged far behind its European counterpart. Yet despite the recent popularity of intellectual history and research in higher education, which has produced a veritable flood of publications touching on various aspects of this theme, the heart of the process—the emergence of the academic profession—is still inadequately documented and imperfectly understood.

We know precisely what Secretary of State John Hay was doing on 7 January 1905, and it had nothing to do with government affairs. Sixtyseven years old, and not in the best of health, Hay had an engagement that took him away from his comfortable Washington mansion on Lafayette Square, across from the White House. His destination was New York—the Italian Renaissance building at 7 West 43rd Street occupied by the Century Club. The New York Tribune duly noted his checking-in at the Wolcott Hotel, but it carried no notice of his mission, which for the moment was secret. Hay had once lived in New York, thirty years before, as an editor of the Tribune, after serving as Lincoln's secretary during the Civil War. While there he had also published his celebrated little book of western dialect poems called Pike County Ballads (1871). He had then gone on, with John Nicolay, to write a scholarly ten-volume History of Abraham Lincoln, and in 1897 had been appointed American minister to England. Now, with neither fanfare nor ambition behind him, he was in his seventh year as Secretary of State and at the apex of his career, having arranged the Open Door to Chinese trade and having negotiated several important Latin American treaties.

Renart the fox, D'Artagnan the musketeer, ambitious young men like Rastignac or Julien Sorel are usually described in France as universal types and yet they strike the foreign observer as typically French. Conversely, who could say that Huck Finn, Sister Carrie, Joe Christmas or Frederick Henry are anything but American, though their stories have been read and made emblematic of the human fate in numerous foreign countries? There seem to exist subliminal signals which give readers at home the shock of recognition, and also denote the foreignness of a character when seen from distant shores.

Vachel Lindsay's description of himself as ‘the “Casey At-the-Bat” of American poetry’ sums up his reputation during his lifetime (1879–1931) and today. Perhaps only half-a-dozen of his poems—‘General William Booth Enters into Heaven’, ‘The Congo’, ‘Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan’, for example—are regularly read; and the rest of his diverse literary output, from 1909 to 1931, of nine collections of poems (and a mid-way Collected Poems), five prose works, numerous short stories, articles and private periodical publications, remains virtually unknown.

Joseph Heller's brilliant first novel, Catch-22, has the power to transform American literature, to re-invigorate a fiction which, since 1955, has tended to work over, with declining vitality, the formulae of earlier years. He combines an experimental attitude towards formal problems with a fully contemporary sense of what it means for a writer to be a radical in the current phase of American culture.