The revolution of 1689 in Massachusetts was an event of some complexity in which various shades of political opinion were united, temporarily and for different reasons, in opposition to Governor Andros and the government of the Dominion of New England. The immediate result of the overthrow of Andros was the formation of an alternative government, a ‘Council for the Safety of the People and the Conservation of the Peace’, which was formally constituted on 20 April 1689, two days after the Boston uprising. It was then agreed that the fifteen signatories of the letter to Andros which had demanded his surrender should be members of this Council ‘together with such other of them of the old Magistrates or such other Gentlemen as they shall Judge meet to Associate to them…’ Twenty-two other men accepted the invitation of the original fifteen to join them.

During the fifteen months from August 1834 to November 1835 nothing caused so much excitement in the American press, both pro-slavery and abolitionist, as the anti-slavery mission of the British reformer George Thompson. In the event, Thompson's visit ended in his escaping from a mob-ridden Boston on the New Brunswick packet. William Lloyd Garrison, no doubt secretly satisfied with the discredit reflected on his opponents by the mobs supporting them in this way, also consoled himself and the readers of the Liberator with the reflection that Thompson, ‘By his presence, and the power of his victorious eloquence, and the resistless energy of his movement…has shaken the land from side to side… At the mention of his name, republican tyrants stand aghast, and their knees smite violently against each other.’ In retrospect he appears wildly optimistic: it took another thirty years to free the Negro from ‘republican tyrants’, and even then the success was incomplete. It was achieved by methods Garrison abhorred, which certainly owed little directly to the efforts of Thompson. If his mission was of any importance it was so in the sense that it polarized opinion on slavery more sharply. He came to provide a useful focal point for the preconceived likes and dislikes of American citizens who could work themselves up to a new enthusiasm over the slavery issue by hating him as a ‘foreign incendiary’, or adulating him as the slaves' Lafayette. On the other hand, Thompson was only one of several possible focal points, and it is likely that even in 1834 it would have been easy to find some other individual to centre controversy around and produce exactly the same polarization effect if he had never set foot on American soil.

The historical debate over the Spanish-American War of 1898 is being reopened on both sides of the Atlantic. Until comparatively recently historians gave confident answers to the questions of the causes and consequences of the war. Moral assumptions about America's true mission were never very far from the surface of the interpretations which had won general acceptance in the United States. America's involvement in world affairs and more especially the acquisition of an empire was viewed as a perversion of her mission. There existed a consensus of opinion among historians that President McKinley and his administration were not in control of policy; that they were swept forward by a tide of public feeling, by political considerations, and by Congressional pressures they found impossible to resist. It was believed that war had been foisted on the American people by those who manipulated public opinion, by mass hysteria cleverly fomented by sectional interests, by the newspapers, by business pressure groups, and by jingo senators. Responsibility for the acquisition of the Philippines was uncritically ascribed to a junior member of the administration, Theodore Roosevelt, who when Assistant Secretary of the Navy, it was alleged, had plotted the whole thing with his friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Rigorous research is challenging every one of these assumptions. The strategic aspects of American foreign policy, and more particularly the influence of naval officers on national policy, have been seriously studied by only a few historians, whose work has as yet little affected the ‘classical’ textbook versions of American policy before the war with Spain.

The acceptance by the United States of responsibilities in the Philippines was regarded with widespread approval in Britain. It was believed that American administration of the archipelago would not only bring benefits otherwise unattainable to the Filipinos, but that it would also be to Britain's advantage. An immediate consequence might be support for British policies in East Asia, reducing the relative power in that area of, especially, Russia and Germany; a longer-term consideration, reflecting a major obsession of the time, was the hope of Anglo-American association in the ‘moral’ enterprise of extending ‘Anglo-Saxon’ civilization and influence. Accordingly, American activities in the Philippines were regarded at the outset with sympathetic interest and given close attention. But during the next decade sympathy diminished and interest declined, and by about 1907 little trace of the initial response remained. The reactions to American policy towards the Philippines among informed and influential people are revealed by a study of journals of opinion.

No recent student of American historiography has failed to acquire a passing acquaintance with some of the historical writing of the American Socialist A. M. Simons. No treatment of economic determinism in American thought omits at least a footnote of credit to Social Forces in American History, published in 1911, in which the irascible radical touched upon ideas and interpretations that Charles Beard and others were to develop with less heat and less haste. Simons's treatment of the American Revolution and the Constitutional Convention, of the Jacksonian era, and of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, sounded themes that became staples of debate within the historical profession. In fact, however, Simons's history has a distinction that goes beyond its role as the first Marxist interpretation of the American past, or as an expression of ‘progressive history’. It is part of a much older, larger and many-sided body of thought that made up an attack upon the genteel tradition in American intellectual and cultural experience. In literature, that attack developed a set of responses that recent scholars have termed the ‘vernacular tradition’. By examining Simons's historical writing in the context of the vernacular tradition, one can see that his history is much more than a Marxist curiosity. His history was shaped both by experience and ideology, and it was intended to be a cultural critique as well as an economic one.

This is a version of a paper read to the conference of the European Association for American Studies at Rome in September 1967. The subject, which was prescribed by the organizers, is clearly too vast to admit of definitive treatment in this space, and the essay should accordingly be regarded as no more than a tentative exploration of the topic in order to stimulate discussion. As my method relies extensively on allusions and short quotations it seemed undesirable to over-burden this printed version with footnotes locating precisely the source of every such reference. I have instead indicated in the text wherever possible the title of the work cited, and it may be helpful to add here that the essays of Emerson on which I have mainly drawn are these: ‘Nature’ (1836), ‘The Transcendentalist’ (1843), and ‘The Poet’ (1844).

In a strong attack on the second, third and fourth books of William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Randall Jarrell expressed chagrin that Book II introduces the themes of credit and usury, ‘those enemies of man, God, and contemporary long poems’. It is true that the economic theories worked into parts of Williams's major work often sound very much like Ezra Pound at his most dispensable. As Vivienne Koch put it: ‘One serious weakness in Book IV, got like a contagion from Pound's Cantos, is the introduction of an explicit pseudo-scientific diagnosis of our present economic ills, relying on the Poundian demonstration of Usura and the Poundian salvation of Social Credit.’ The least impressive passages in Paterson are those (particularly the final six pages of IV. ii) in which the excited promulgation of money theories comes perilously close to being mere harangue. Jarrell was mistaken, however, in going on to assert that the economic anecdotes and political remarks are where they are only ‘because Dr Williams chose—happened to choose—for them to be there’. Williams's ideas on money and credit, as digressive and presumptuous as they often seem to be, are actually tied in with the other major themes in the poem. Furthermore, they represent the culmination of a long and passionate protest against a system that sanctions private use of public money.