USA

The newly-found voices of the slaves caught up in the American Civil War, and heard through letters to their families, are a testimony to their tenacity and unity in the struggle for emancipation.

The symbols, slogans, ideas and architecture of the Founding Fathers were saturated in the world of Ancient Greece and Rome.

The dilemmas of allegiance posed for Americans by the outbreak of war with the British crown led Benedict Arnold, 'the most brilliant soldier of the Continental Army’, into the Loyalist camp.

'In the beginning, America was in the way'. Only slowly did 16th-century Englishmen turn from the chimera of a short-cut to Asia's riches to the vision of precious metals to be mined and colonies planted in the New World.

Caroline Bingham tells the tale of how two self-made businessmen in their seventies became the unlikely progenitors of pioneering womens' colleges in Victorian England and America.

How an all-American celebration evolved from the pre-Lent carnivals of the Old World.

At the Boston Tea Party the Americans not only flouted the unpopular tax laws on tea imposed on the colony, they also retrieved the image of the Mohawk from the hands of British cartoonists and reinstated him as the symbol of American liberty.

by D. Cameron Watt

'America has not come to terms with its own history ... and regards Latin American nationalism as a conspiracy against its inevitable and popular domination of the western hemisphere.