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Backward Glances

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Marcus Cunliffe
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Extract

My first steady job, if one leaves out four years of wartime soldiering, began at Manchester University in 1949. It was a lectureship in American Studies and followed a two-year Commonwealth (Harkness) fellowship at Yale, also in American Studies, under the benevolent guidance of Ralph Gabriel. I have been in the same line ever since. The invitation to review what has happened to me and other Americanists in Britain during that long span carries the risk of self-regarding anecdotage. To reach the point of looking forward mainly to looking backward would be dismal. Yet Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was an exercise not in nostalgia but in prophecy; and while much of this essay takes the form of reminiscence I hope it may seem relevant to colleagues younger than myself.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , April 1980, pp. 83 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

Marcus Cunliffe (b. 1922) was at Oriel College, Oxford (1940–42, 1946–47) and served in the British army in NW Europe. He was a Commonwealth (Harkness) fellow at Yale (1947–49) and again (Chicago and Yale) in 1954. From 1949 to 1964 he was successively lecturer, senior lecturer and professor in the Department of American Studies, Manchester University. Since 1965 he has been Professor of American Studies at the University of Sussex. He has been a fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto, California) and at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars (Washington DC), and a visiting professor at Harvard, the University of Michigan and elsewhere. Some of the themes in his essay are exemplified or discussed in various of his publications. Thus, ideas of uniqueness, and of comparability between the United States and Europe, are dealt with in “America at the Great Exhibition of 1851,” American Quarterly 3 (Summer 1951); “American Watersheds,” AQ 13 (Winter 1961); “European Images of America,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Morton White, eds., Paths of American Thought (Houghton Mifflin, 1963); Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775–1865 (Little, Brown, 1968); “American Thought,” in Dennis Welland, ed., The United States: A Companion to American Studies (Methuen, 1974); “New World, Old World: The Historical Antithesis,” in Richard Rose, ed., Essays from America: An Exploration (Macmillan, 1974); “Crevecoeur Revisited,” Journal of American Studies 9 (August 1975); and Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830–1860 (Univ. of Georgia Press, 1979). For a sample contribution to Encounter (May 1955), see “The American Intellectuals.” The status of the American executive branch is dealt with in “The Presidency: A Defective Institution?” Commentary 45 (February 1968; incorporated in American Presidents and the Presidency (McGraw-Hill, 1972; revised edn., 1976). National attitudes are also touched upon in The Literature of the United States (Penguin, 1954, and subsequent revisions).