Almost every twentieth-century discussion of American history, literature, culture or character makes reference to J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, a book first published in 1782. Anthologies usually find space for an excerpt from Crèvecoeur. A particular favourite is the third chapter, ‘ What Is An American? ’ Here is the best-known, the most-quoted, the almost tediously familiar paragraph from that chapter:

What, then, is the American, this new man? He is neither an European nor the descendant of an European … He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the East; they will finish the great circle … The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. This is an American.

Emerson's notation in his journal: ‘ They look well in July. We will see them in December ’ about the prospects for Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands venture reflects a commonplace caution about communal ventures. Namely, that the heat of co-operative passion is often insufficient to sustain a community through later problems of crowded circumstances, changing perspectives and weak natures.

On 22 October 1907, the Knickerbocker Trust Company, the third largest trust company in New York City, closed its door and announced itself bankrupt. Panic rapidly spread. On the New York Stock Exchange chaos reigned as a loss of confidence, fed by insistent rumours of further imminent collapses, led to waves of selling, margin calls, and a rapid lowering of share prices. Heavy pressure developed upon the Trust Company of America and the Lincoln Trust Company: through the timely intervention of J. P. Morgan they survived, but lesser banking institutions throughout America, faced with long lines of depositors anxious to retrieve savings, were less fortunate. The supply of national bank notes proved insufficiently elastic to meet the massive, short-run increase in demand. Many banks, lacking adequate emergency reserves of notes and/or specie, were forced to ignore legal requirements and to suspend payments. It is true that the establishment of a New York trust company emergency fund prevented the chain of banking failures from spiralling disastrously onward, that the panic selling on the Stock Exchange was short-lived, and that the financial crises of late 1907 were confined largely to the cities – hence the manner in which the period has been written into American history as the ‘ rich man's panic ’. It is incorrect, however, to assert that its ‘ effects were not widespread ’.

While the question of geographic mobility has long been a mainstay of American historical writing and American myth-making – as evidenced by Turner and his disciples and the general obsession widi the frontier – until recently most historians have done little systematic investigation into it. Nor, indeed, have they been aware either of the enormous degree of movement within the country, or of the complex issues involved in determining why people have moved as they have. However, with the rise of what generally is termed the ‘ new urban ’ or ‘ new social ’ history, historians have begun to view migration as a question central to their analysis. Social scientists recognized the importance of migratory behaviour for many years and have employed sophisticated analytical techniques in their efforts to explain migration patterns, but recently historians approached the problem from another direction.

‘ Every loyal American who went abroad during the first years of our great war felt bound to make himself some excuse for turning his back on his country in the hour of her trouble ’, wrote W. D. Howells in 1881. It is a striking coincidence in American literary history that four major writers of the late nineteenth century – Howells, Henry James, S. L. Clemens, and Henry Adams – all failed to serve in the Civil War. Whether or not they believed that they had turned their backs on their country, each made some excuse in his published work. The most notorious is Henry James's statement in Notes of a Son and Brother that ‘ a horrid even if an obscure hurt ’ had prevented him from volunteering to fight.

Commonly Ezra Pound's Cantos have been attacked from two main directions. The first claims that the poem is interesting only at the level of technique, the second that the analysis of economics as the poem's thematic basis was either a mistaken choice of material or simply that Pound had inadequate mastery of this material. Both lines of attack agree in identifying a fatal imbalance between form and content which denies die Cantos an acceptable structure, but otherwise diverge: the first placing Pound as an aesthete-hedonist of his own rejected 1920 Mauberley model and the second presenting us with a mid-Western fascist yahoo. Neither proposition stands up to examination. Self-evidently die Cantos are a sensitive record and diagnosis of (and partial programme for) the civilization Pound felt was collapsing around him. The real difficulties confronting the reader lie in die arbitrary resorting to documentation, polyglot quotation and adaptation, the random shifts in time and place controlled by anecdotal maxims and categorizations operating as a formula for die healthy state. As a version of reality the poem does not initially seem to have significant correspondence with our own.