USA

The Search for Uncle Sam

New Hampshire meat-packer to national symbol - Alton Ketchum recounts the rise and rise of Uncle Sam Wilson.

Liverpool and the American Civil War

Sentiment, profit and commercial laissez-faire bound the merchants of England's busiest port ever closer to the rebel confederacy across the Atlantic after 1861. John D. Pelzer explains how and why.

Showdown at the Rouge

Solidarity forever? Not by 1951, Robert Zieger argues, when the visit of one of American labour's great heroes to a celebratory rally at a Ford Motors complex near Detroit revealed just how deep the split between old- and new-style unionism had become.

The American Revolution: A War of Religion?

Jonathan Clark probes the anti-Catholic actions and millenarian rhetoric of 18th-century America, challenging the assumption that 1776 was solely a product of secular and constitutional impulses.

Enterprise and Meaning: Sponsored Film, 1939-1949

William Bird looks at how American business and commerce turned to the techniques of advertising and Hollywood to extol the merits of capitalism and free enterprise in response to the anti-corporate liberalism of the New Deal.

Harry Truman, Small-Town American

'Am I just a crook to compromise in order to get the job done? You judge it, I can't'. Alonzo Hamby traces the web of influences from his boyhood in a Mid-West town that shaped the character of America's 33rd president.

George Washington's New Clothes

200 years on, the 'inferior endorsements' that Washington brought to the first Presidential inauguration can be seen, Esmond Wright argues, as extraordinarily successful in setting constitutional precedents that have endured in the United States.