USA

Patrick Renshaw introduces an archetypal twentieth century figure: the American Trade Unionist who fled to Russia and who Comintern believed they could use to lead an American Bolshevik revolution.

Arnold Whitridge explains how a group of instinctively conservative, wealthy gentlemen led the American people to an unlikely victory in war and a miraculous nationhood.

Louis C. Kleber writes how Florida was ceded to Britain in 1763; retroceded to Spain after the American Revolution, and acquired by the United States in 1819.

The Civil War coincided with an era in naval technology that was revolutionizing sea warfare.” Could the Confederate government build a fleet of “ironclad blockade breakers” in the shipyards of neutral Great Britain? By Frank J. Merli and Thomas W. Green.

Arnold Whitridge introduces two powerful newspaper editors, who greatly exacerbated public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic during the American Civil War.

Unlike everybody else in his generation, writes Arnold Whitridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson understood, loved and castigated the two different, but closely related, strains in American life and represented the national conscience.

The exile of the Loyalists, writes Wallace Brown, represented the removal of the crust of increasing aristocratic pretensions that was forming on Colonial society.

On April 19th, 1775, the fatal clash took place, on the Common of a small Massachusetts town, between British troops and local militia. From this village battle the American War of Independence took its start. John A. Barton queries whether the clash was deliberately organized by “Patriot” leaders in order to provoke an incident, after which there could be no retreat?

Both Lafayette’s career and the legend bound up with it have had important effects on either side of the Atlantic Ocean.

“What is the American, this new man?,” Franklin seemed to provide the answer to this question first asked in 1784.