USA

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.

Gifted, energetic, passionate, unruly, Hamilton was perhaps the most creative figure thrown up by the American Revolution, argues Esmond Wright.

Even by the standards of the eighteenth century — a period when it was still possible to be the master of more arts than one — Richard Price was conspicuous for the vast variety of his interests. Nicholas Lane describes how they embraced divinity, philosophy, mathematics, life assurance, the problems of population, the cause of the American Colonists and the revolutionary movement in France.

Once Lewis and Clark had blazed the trail to the West, writes Gerald Rawling, traders and trappers began to follow in their footsteps, as they did so opening up vast new tracts of the “Great American Desert.”

Most famous of the three chief routes that led to the promised lands of the Far West was the so-called Oregon Trail. By the middle forties, writes Gerald Rawling, the popular American interest in Oregon had become a fever.

Like other Indian nations before them, the Sioux in 1876 took up arms to defend their traditional way of life and “sold their land dearly.” During this hopeless conflict, a gallant but showy American cavalry officer fought his last battle.

George Washington had warned the American people against “the insidious wiles of foreign influence.” President Monroe, writes Arnold Whitridge, further developed “the thesis of non-entanglement.”

Arnold Whitridge offers his survey of American relations with Cuba from the intervention of 1898 down to Castro’s Revolution.

When Mark Twain said of the Mormons, 'Their religion is singular but their wives are plural' he expressed the sum of what is generally known about them. Yet the Mormon story deserves to be better known. It illuminates one side of the development of a pioneer society, and forms a commentary upon many of the main themes of American history.