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.

Lionel Trilling once observed that there are certain individuals who contain the “ yes ” and “ no ” of their culture, whose personal ambivalences become paradigmatic. This would seem to be an apt description of a man whose first novel was published twenty-five years ago, a man whose career has described a neat and telling parabola and whose contradictions go to the heart of an issue which dominated the political and cultural life of mid-century America: James Baldwin. And it is perhaps not inappropriate to seize the occasion of this anniversary and of the publication of his new novel, Just Above My Head, to attempt a summation of a writer, once an articulate spokesman for black revolt, now living an expatriate existence in southern France.

To date, Baldwin has written six novels: Go Tell it on the Mountain (1954), Giovanni's Room (1956), Another Country (1962), Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), Just Above My Head (1979); four books of essays: The Fire Next Time (1963), Nobody Knows My Name (1964), Notes of a Native Son (1964), No Name in the Street (1972); two plays: Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964), Amen Corner (1968); and one book of short stories: Going to Meet the Man (1965). Born in Harlem in 1924, he left in 1948 for France, driven out by despair of the racial situation. He returned in 1957 and in the heady days of the Civil Rights movement found himself a principal spokesman — his polemical essay, The Fire Next Time, appearing at a crucial moment in black/white relations. Outflanked by the events of the late sixties, he retreated again to Europe. His more recent novels have failed to spark the popular or critical interest of his earlier work.

President Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 was quickly followed by a wave of instant history, mainly produced by those who worked closely with him in the White House. Sorensen, Schlesinger and Salinger all published their memoirs in the mid-sixties, while O'Donnell and O'Brien followed suit in the early seventies. It was inevitable that their assessment of the Kennedy Presidency would be a favourable one and it was equally inevitable that it would generate a reaction from those who believed that the Kennedy myth needed to be destroyed. The instant history of the sixties has now given way to the instant revisionism of the seventies and John F. Kennedy is getting a distinctly unfavourable press. Leaving aside foreign affairs, it is Kennedy's handling of civil rights to which the revisionists are most antagonistic. Here the relationship between the President and Congress is brought sharply into focus. It is argued that Kennedy did not put before the legislature the wide-ranging and bold commitments on civil rights made during the election campaign; that his approach to the problem was tailored to suit the sensibilities of the southern Democrats in the House and Senate, and that he studiously avoided offering moral and political leadership to the country at large. Thus Henry Fairlie blames Kennedy for “ procrastination and tokenism”; Lewis Paper argues that Kennedy's handling of civil rights “ did not speak well of his success as a public educator ” and Bruce Miroff, perhaps the most outspoken of all the critics, places Kennedy's performance in the context of “ pragmatic liberalism rooted in elite politics ” — an approach which he unhesitatingly condemns.

In the United States the movement to build public asylums for the insane began in the early nineteenth century. Demographic changes, a growing sensitivity to social and medical problems, a surge of philanthropic giving by elite groups, and knowledge of significant medical and psychiatric developments in France and England all combined to give rise to a movement to establish both general and mental hospitals. Shocked by the conditions of insane persons in family attics, county poorhouses, and local jails, state after state assumed the burden of providing free or low-cost institutionalization for this afflicted class. Expensive large asylums began appearing in the rural heartlands of the more prosperous states before the Civil War, reflecting the popular view that insanity was a disease, requiring segregation from society and long-term medical care. Previously only deviants who had broken criminal or poor laws were likely to be deprived of their liberty. Under the new system the state reached out to a larger, less deviant and non-criminal population, whose boundaries were not well-defined. Given the increasing health and welfare needs of an industrializing society, and the lack of alternative solutions for the mentally disabled, it was inevitable that the asylum populations would continue to expand.

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.

“ Son George,” Sir Henry Colt wrote his progeny in the summer of 1631, “ I have taken pains day and night to collect this journal … because if you will prove a seaman and undertake voyages [to the New World] you may learn how to employ your time at sea, and who to thank for your conservation.” Appended to the diary were “ some rules for diet and health … the way being dangerous because of the change in climates, especially about the tropics.” Among other things, Sir Henry cautioned the younger Colt that he would find the “ torrid zone or middle region temperate enough,” but the most dangerous place would be the “ tropics under which you must pass for pestilent fevers … which have killed many in the hot season of year.” To reduce the possibility of sickness which was likely to occur as a result of travel into warm climates, Colt prescribed some precautionary measures.

Sir Henry Colt lived in an age when such modern terms and concepts as anopheles mosquito, malaria, yellow fever, and immunization zones had little or no meaning. In his day, physicians had not established a connection between anopheles mosquito and malaria, or aedes mosquito and yellow fever. When counseling his son on how to remain healthy in the Americas, Colt had no reason to warn him that anopheles and aedes mosquitoes often served as hosts for parasites which were deadly to human beings, and hence the bites of these insects could be dangerous.

Colt and his contemporaries did, however, hold coherent medical views about disease and its origins which informed their behavior in the New World.

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.

What is the nature and distribution of power in American society? This question, as much as any other single issue, has been the source of wideranging debates among American social scientists throughout the last twenty-five years. The question is tantalizingly simple. In fact, the titles of two notable contributions to the debate, Who Rules America? and Who Governs?, put the issue even more succinctly while losing little of the flavor of the original question. The controversy is more than just a basis for scholarly esoterica politely parried back and forth in the professional literature for a limited audience. Indeed, the debate has been carried on with great passion and commitment because how one answers this question will largely determine one's perceptions about American politics.

For example, if one were to reply by saying that power is basically noncumulative and that it is widely distributed among many groups and individuals, then certain other conclusions would follow: the Constitution is essentially a democratic document which institutionalizes this broad distribution of power; elections are the means by which power is transferred among competing groups; public policy represents an accurate reflection of the general will through this inter-group competition; and the American political system is essentially democratic because opportunities for participation, and thus power, are open to all.

The domestic slave trade has always bulked large in discussions of the character of American ante-bellum slavery. Assumptions and arguments about the nature of master-slave relations, about family separations, and about the slave family have necessarily had much to do with slave sales and with the extent and character of the domestic traffic in slaves. All this has, however, been despite the fact that no satisfactory quantitative estimate of the trade has been available. Indeed, the standard work on the American domestic slave trade, Frederic Bancroft's Slave Trading in the Old South (1931), has recently been challenged in the studies of Calderhead (1972) and of Fogel and Engerman (1974), and those studies have in turn been questioned by, for example, Gutman and Sutch in Reckoning with Slavery (1976).

The present study will seek to offer a more satisfactory estimate of the trade than has so far been available, and will argue that the trade accounted for the substantial majority (somewhere between 56 and 69 per cent) of the more than one million net inter-regional slave movements which took place in the South over the period 1820 to 1860.

In February 1921 Irwin Granich, not yet transformed into “ Michael Gold,” published “ Towards Proletarian Art” in The Liberator. This essay has been described as “ the first significant call in this country [the United States] for the creation of a distinctly and militantly working-class culture.” What Gold meant by “ proletarian art” remains unclear. He uses “ proletarian” interchangeably with “ masses,” and suggests that Walt Whitman was the discoverer, without quite realizing it, of proletarian art in America. The proletariat for Gold were nothing less than heroic possessors of Life — “ The masses know what Life is, and they live on in gusto and joy ” — who have been thwarted by society from the full realization of their artistic and cultural heritage. Gold's thought was dominated by a lyrical and mystical celebration of the modern industrial worker, tinged by frustration at the bitter waste of human potential under capitalism.

This essay has two basic intentions: first, to sketch a biographical portrait of Truman in such a way as to throw light on the methods, values and attitudes that he brought to the Presidency, and, second, to evaluate Truman's enduring contribution, in terms of responsibilities, procedures and organization, to the institution or office of the Presidency. In short, it is concerned to explore both Truman's conception of, and his contribution to, the modern Presidency.

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.

In a democratic political system policymaking takes place as a consequence of the clash of competing interests promoted in part by pressure groups. In the past many pressure groups operated in the shadows between the spotlight of intense publicity and the dark spaces where decision-takers and their advisers are to be found. More recently, especially in the case of the “ cause ” groups that form the subject of this analysis, pressure groups are working more consciously in the public arena both to arouse support and to widen the general understanding of the causes they espouse. Broadly speaking the political function of a pressure group is to recognize and publicize deficiencies in governmental activity; to try to influence in their favour governmental decisions; to provide information about events or problems that otherwise might not be available for decision-takers to consider; and, in some instances, to focus public attention on and increase public understanding of particular issues of wide social and moral significance.

Labour violence is an indication of the nature of any society at a given time, and has been a catalyst of tensions and harbinger of change on many occasions in America since 1865. Furthermore, it has had in that country a braking effect on social reform. These aspects of labour violence have received their fair share of recognition and attention. Their investigation has uncovered a mass of useful evidence. For this reason, it is today possible to view labour violence with better understanding, and to approach directly the problem of its causes.

Although historians have tried to explain labour violence, they have mostly done so obliquely or on the basis of unquestioned assumptions. Recently, for example, Herbert G. Gutman referred to labour violence repeatedly in his collection of essays Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, but focussed on “ patterns ” of disorder rather than on its causes, and belittled even these patterns by stating that they “ deserve brief attention.” Philip Taft, a long-surviving member of the John R. Commons school of labour history, tackled the problem of labour violence in American history because of renewed public interest in the subject occasioned by the race riots of the 1960s, but simply assumed throughout his work that wage-earners resorted to violence in response to oppressive conditions. The same undifferentiated assumption appeared in earlier work on labour violence, most notably in 1931 in Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America by the Jugoslav socialist immigrant, Louis Adamic. Adamic wrote absurdly that the racketeering of the Al Capone era was a “ phase of class conflict.”

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.