Following its foundation in 1955, the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) quickly recognized the need for its own publication in which “scholarly articles and relevant news” might appear. A need was also felt for a publication which would bind together “the various disciplines sharing an interest in American Studies.” Limited financial resources made the publication of a regular journal impossible at that time, but the association's secretary, Marcus Cunliffe, agreed to edit an inexpensive mimeographed bulletin which would appear at intervals and contain information on “members' needs and interests, news of visiting American scholars in the field of American Studies, fellowships which might be available to members and their students and bibliographical checklists.”Footnote ¹ The first issue of the Bulletin, consisting of ten foolscap pages, appeared in April 1956, and conformed to Marcus Cunliffe's intentions, being very much a newsletter for the fledgling association rather than an academic journal. Appearing biannually, the Bulletin did excellent work in promoting the association and making a growing membership aware of the work being undertaken in the field of American studies throughout the United Kingdom and abroad. The early Bulletins are an important source for the history of the BAAS, but this paper focuses on its importance as a reflection of the professional interests of British students of American culture during the 1950s and 1960s. These interests first found expression in the fifth issue in September 1957, when the Bulletin acquired a new editor, the historian George Shepperson of the University of Edinburgh, who immediately introduced additional features. While continuing to function as a newsletter, the Bulletin, now averaging forty pages, began to publish reviews and short articles by BAAS members. One aim of these articles was to correct the impression that British interest in American studies had begun during the Second World War and matured rapidly after 1945.Footnote ² A “Revaluation” series focussing on pioneering British works on American subjects was introduced with a view to stimulating British students “to explore the traditions within which they are working … and draw attention to neglected but significant British writings on American themes”. The first “Revaluation” was of D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, appropriately by Dennis Welland of the University of Nottingham.Footnote ³ Other “Revaluations” followed, on Bryce's The American Commonwealth and the works of Thorstein Veblen. The editor's choice of H. A. L. Fisher's Our New Religion on Christian Science for revaluation was part of an issue which focussed on Anglo-American religious relations, but his acceptance of Peter Marshal's essay on F. S. Oliver's Alexander Hamilton seems curiously idiosyncratic.Footnote ⁴ Editing a fledgling publication which still uneasily combined newsletter with academic journal, however, George Shepperson was even more dependent than most editors on what the growing, but still small, membership of the BAAS might offer for his consideration.Footnote ⁵

What the “Revaluation” series did indicate, however, was that the Bulletin was anxious to reflect the wide range of subjects contained within America studies. Literature, history, religion, politics, sociology and economics were all covered in these short essays. In practice, this range was always difficult to sustain, and the early issues of the Bulletin show a distinct bias towards history, with literature as the second major theme. Other subjects were always sparsely represented, though politics and geography received some coverage. American popular culture received no attention, though at the Nottingham Conference in 1957 Denis Brogan stepped in for Dwight MacDonald, and gave a “witty and fluent” lecture on “A Mass Theory of Culture”, which reassured his audience that there was “no need to fear the collapse of Third Programme culture in the face of rock n' roll and the comic book.”Footnote ⁶

During the early years, much space was also devoted to articles outlining the teaching of American subjects in British universities, at a time when provision was both uneven and limited. Some of the early members of the BAAS had only a marginal professional interest in the United States, and some British americanists, anxious to develop more specialist teaching and research in their own fields, felt isolated. There were as yet no single-honours degree programmes in American Studies, and only the University of Manchester had an American Studies Department.Footnote ⁷ The Bulletin also played an important role in promoting teaching and research by reporting on the progress of library and archive surveys of sources for American studies in the United Kingdom. The most important work of this kind was undertaken by Bernard Crick and his associates with the support of many members of the BAAS. It resulted in a major publication, Guide to Manuscripts Relating to America in Great Britain and Ireland, plus many supplements.Footnote ⁸ Crick and Anne Daltrop also compiled a List of American Newspapers up to 1940, Held by Libraries in Great Britain and Ireland, which was issued as a supplement to No. 7 of the Bulletin in 1958. A “revised and modified” version of this pioneer List was published by David Adams in 1974.Footnote ⁹ The Bulletin played a similar promotional role with regard to British Records Relating to America in Microfilm edited by Walter Minchinton, which appeared intermittently for decades.Footnote ¹⁰

As editor, George Shepperson was much concerned with the theme of “British influences on the United States,” of which the impact of United Kingdom emigrants on American society was the subject most fully explored in the early Bulletins.Footnote ¹¹ In spite of appeals, Shepperson was unable to solicit a paper on “specifically English influences on America,” and the impact of Scots was outlined in a three-page biographical note written by the editor himself.Footnote ¹² The Cornish, Welsh and Irish, however, were the subjects of more substantial papers by scholars undertaking important research in their fields. John Rowe's overview of the Cornish in America ranged from the colonial period to the late nineteenth century. It explored motives for emigration as well as American experiences, and was most successful in its treatment of miners, who made up the majority of Cornish emigrants. Rowe's paper was based on a slim secondary literature and emigrant letters printed in the Cornish press. Here, Rowe seemed unaware of the limitations of printed letters as a source for the social and economic history of migrants, which was already being raised by more critical scholars.Footnote ¹³ The same criticism could be levelled against Alan Conway's essay on the Welsh in America, which drew on some hundreds of letters printed in the nineteenth-century Welsh press, and written from many regions of the United States. Conway later published many of these letters in a book, which like his article still has value on its subject.Footnote ¹⁴ Now more dated is E. R. R. Green's essay on the Irish. Though Green, an Ulsterman, was to publish valuable work on the Scotch-Irish, this paper on the Irish experience in America down to the First World War was inevitably very general, and suffered from a reliance on limited and dated sources.Footnote ¹⁵ These essays, however, gave early notice of the importance of emigration studies among British americanists during the next two decades, an importance reflected in many later issues of the Bulletin. Among these British scholars was Philip Taylor, whose first appearance in the Bulletin was in 1959. His essay on “Recent Writings on Utah and the Mormons” provided an excellent overview of its subject and reflected Philip's long-standing interest in the emigration of Mormon converts from Britain to the United States in the context of more general patterns of migration.Footnote ¹⁶

Philip Taylor's work on the Mormons was important not only in the context of emigration, but also as showing an early awareness of the contribution of America to British religious culture. In a pioneering article in the Bulletin, the Scottish Presbyterian minister Johnston McKay identified the impact of American sects and popular revivalism as an important but “neglected chapter” in British social history. McKay concentrated on the British career of the American revivalist Charles Finney, using as his sources Finney's Autobiography and the British denominational press. Although this field never enjoyed the popularity of emigration studies, excellent work was later undertaken by British scholars on transatlantic revivalism and the history of American sects in Britain.Footnote ¹⁷ Another popular subject among British historians of the United States as reflected in the early Bulletins was the impact of the American Civil War on British society at local, regional and national levels. The attraction of this field in the early days of the BAAS was both its intrinsic importance and the availability of sources on this side of the Atlantic, at a time when funding for research in the United States was still very limited. Important theses, books and articles were to appear, and the Bulletin gave notice of this trend in an article and short notes on Confederate sympathizers among the British working class.Footnote ¹⁸

George Shepperson himself was a noted scholar of African as well as American history and was especially interested in the impact of African American culture on Africa. In 1958 Shepperson published with Thomas Price a study of John Chilembwe and the Nyasaland rising of 1915 against British colonial rule. Chilembwe and his mentor, the missionary Joseph Booth, both studied for some years in the United States, and on their return to Africa received support from African American Baptists in the development of religious and educational institutions which did much to inspire the 1915 rising. The book was reviewed in the Bulletin by John Hope Franklin, who recognized its importance as a contribution to “American Negro” as well as African history. Franklin was already a major authority on African American history, and Shepperson publicized Franklin's work to promote greater British interest in “Negro” culture.Footnote ¹⁹

Other American scholars, many of whom had held visiting professorships at British universities, also published short articles and reviews in the Bulletin.Footnote ²⁰ In addition, George Shepperson encouraged BAAS members teaching in secondary and further education to submit articles and reports on their professional interests, and although the response was disappointing, a few papers and reviews written by teachers did appear in the early Bulletins. These were most often concerned with the development of syllabuses on American subjects, and pioneering projects in Anglo-American educational understanding. At a later date, the BAAS and the Bulletin also became involved in a larger project studying bias in British and American history textbooks.Footnote ²¹

The comparative absence of papers on American literature in the early Bulletin was a reflection not of the bias of the editor, but rather of the fact that there were very few specialist teachers of the subject at university level compared with historians. American literature also seemed to face more opposition than history in its introduction into already overcrowded degree programmes. The situation was very clearly summed up in the Bulletin in an article on “American Literature in British Universities” by Robert Spiller of the University of Pennsylvania, then a Fulbright scholar based in London. Spiller reminded his readers that as recently as 1920 honours courses in English language and literature largely concentrated on the period up to Shakespeare, were heavily focussed on philology and rarely taught any literature later than the Romantics. Since the 1920s the situation had changed somewhat, with a gradual de-emphasizing of philology and the introduction of more modern literature. Change had been slow, however, and Spiller noted that in the University of London, which not only taught its own students but also provided external degrees for a large group of “provincial” universities, the emphasis was still on traditional linguistic studies. Modern English and American literatures were allowed as special fields in one out of nine papers. Spiller also noted that great controversy surrounded not only what was taught, but how it was taught. The violent reaction against all historical study of literature in favour of a new critical approach based on the close study of modern texts might seem to favour the introduction of more American literature, but Spiller had his reservations:

Spiller's paper differed in tone and point of view from an earlier, more polemical article on “The Teaching of American Literature in Britain” by Geoffrey Moore, then of the University of Manchester. Moore had dogmatic views on the existence of an American literary tradition quite distinct from that of England, and was quite willing to identify the key figures in its premier league as well as players in its lower divisions. He also came down heavily in favour of the New Criticism and was quite happy to teach American texts in an ahistorical context. Moore was certainly opposed to teaching American literature as part of American intellectual history or associating it too closely with “projects in American civilization.” Moore was always confident in his ability to distinguish the good from the bad in American literature, and was quite content to leave the bad to the sociologist and the historian.Footnote ²³ George Shepperson, as a historian, took a more eclectic view. Only two American writers were the subject of separate articles in the early issues of the Bulletin. One was, perhaps predictably, Henry James, but James had been preceded by James Branch Cabell, an author who does not even feature in Moore's minor league.Footnote ²⁴

By 1959 a separate Newsletter was being published, and the BAAS began to consider a new format for the Bulletin. Without the support of some outside body, printing was seen as too expensive. It was therefore decided to explore the possibility of producing the Bulletin by the photo-offset process, though doubts remained even about the more modest costs which this process entailed. Dennis Welland was ultimately responsible for negotiating with the photographic unit at the University of Nottingham to produce the Bulletin in this format, and the first number of a new series appeared in September 1960 with George Shepperson continuing as editor.Footnote ²⁵ The new series was approximately the same size and half the length of the current Journal of American Studies, and it retained that format down to the final issue in 1966. Each issue contained three or four articles plus reviews, short notices and a list of contributors. Throughout its existence, the Bulletin, unlike the later Journal, never had an editorial board, and responsibility for each issue rested entirely with the editor.Footnote ²⁶ Handwritten papers were still received, but the editor regularly encouraged contributors to submit typed copy.Footnote ²⁷

George Shepperson edited the first three issues of the new series, in which more articles and reviews on American literature appeared, although the balance was still in favour of history and politics. Many articles were by young scholars who had recently completed dissertations and were often holding their first posts in American history or literature. Reviewers included established scholars such as H. G. Nicholas, the second chairman of the BAAS, or younger men, many of whom were to hold chairs and did much to pioneer the development of American studies programmes in British universities. Although many books by American scholars were reviewed, special attention was paid to the works of British scholars working on American topics. Although most of these reviews involved scholars writing about fellow BAAS members, the tone was always critical. The limitations as well as the strengths of the works under review were brought out, a not inconsiderable achievement in the then small world of American studies.Footnote ²⁸ Although James, Cooper, Hawthorne, Twain and other male stars of the standard nineteenth-century literary canon were the most frequent subjects for literary studies, the first issue of the new series contained a paper on the differences in the critical responses to Lolita in England and America.Footnote ²⁹

In history, more articles were published on the Revolutionary era and the early nineteenth century than would be likely in the current Journal, and the established theme of Anglo-American relations remained at the fore, with a particular emphasis on the relations between British and American social reform movements. Clare Taylor, who had recently completed her doctorate at Edinburgh, focussed on “American Negro Reformers in Victorian Britain” and explored the links between the British and American anti-slavery movements. George Shepperson himself had already written important papers on the subject, which was to attract growing interest among scholars during the next two decades. Incidentally, Clare Taylor was the first woman to be published in the Bulletin, and in later work she explored women's roles in the transatlantic anti-slavery movement, which in its more radical manifestations was quickly identified with “women's rights.”Footnote ³⁰

Women's rights were also touched on in Frank Thistlethwaite's The Anglo-American Connection in the Early Nineteenth Century, which was based on a series of public lectures given by Thistlewaite as visiting professor of american civilization at the University of Pennsylvania in 1956. Thistlethwaite was then a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge and the first chair of the BAAS. He went on to be the first vice chancellor of the University of East Anglia, where he did much to encourage American studies. The Anglo-American Connection was reviewed in the Bulletin by Joseph Wall, a former Fulbright professor at Edinburgh, who, as so often with reviewers, wished Thistlethwaite had written a different book. Wall wanted more on transatlantic political and economic connections, and regretted that the book concluded with the Civil War. Wall recognized, however, that Thistlethwaite had broken important new ground in his treatment of the complex interrelationship of British and American reform movements, including temperance, anti-slavery, women's rights and education.Footnote ³¹ Thistlethwaite's short book of less than two hundred pages was widely influential, and became a starting point for many later studies by British scholars. More work was done on abolitionism and women's rights than in other fields, but education, temperance and health reform were not totally neglected.Footnote ³²

The final issue of the Bulletin edited by George Shepperson appeared in December 1961. It continued the theme of Anglo-American relations with a paper on British Whig views of antebellum America based largely on the Edinburgh Review.Footnote ³³ The editor continued to stress the opportunities for research in the field of African-American relations, while many reviews were devoted to recently published British works on American history and literature, largely aimed at students and reflecting the growing number of scholars in the field of American studies. A new development was the publication of an account of five months' imprisonment in a Confederate prison by a Scottish immigrant who had enlisted in the Union army. The document was printed for its intrinsic value, but also to stimulate interest in the recently published Guide to Manuscripts Relating to America in Great Britain and Ireland edited by Crick and Alman. Other documents continued to be published down to the final issue of the Bulletin.Footnote ³⁴

The fourth issue of the Bullletin appeared in August 1962 under the editorship of Dennis Welland, then at the University of Nottingham but soon to move to Manchester. A distinguished critic of British and American literature, Dennis Welland was to remain in post until the demise of the Bulletin, when he reappeared as the first editor of the Journal of American Studies. Under Welland's editorship the policy of the Bulletin did not initially change. The aim continued to be the publication of two issues yearly and the maintenance of a balance “between the different disciplines represented in the Association and their cross-fertilisation whenever it promised to be productive.”Footnote ³⁵ The theme of transatlantic relations continued with articles on European influences on antebellum American science, the impact of the New Deal on British economic and political ideas (which the author, Richard Pear, thought was slight), and Dickens and international copyright. Malcolm Bradbury appears for the first time in this issue as the co-author of a paper on Wallace Stevens's “Bantams in Pine Woods.” Stevens was popular with British critics in the 1960s, and the Bulletin reflected that popularity.Footnote ³⁶ Reviews under Welland's early editorship continued to focus on familiar themes, with historians focussing on political and economic topics. The latter subsumed immigration studies, where Charlotte Erickson and Maldwyn Jones, both future chairs of the BAAS, featured prominently.Footnote ³⁷

Reviewing Dissertations in American Literature to 1961, Dennis Welland noted that “the happiest hunting ground is still the nineteenth century,” though Faulkner and Hemingway had grown in popularity during the 1950s. In all periods, the novel was still the preferred form.Footnote ³⁸ This was also largely the case with articles published in the Bulletin during the early 1960s, though in a long review Eric Mottram speculated on why so many contemporary writers were “Negroes, Jews and Southerners.” In a paper which ranged from Dos Passos and Steinbeck to Mailer, Kerouac and Burroughs, Mottram was one of a number of younger scholars pushing literary studies towards a focus on more contemporary authors.Footnote ³⁹ British historians of the US continued to focus on emigration, transatlantic relations and political and diplomatic history, though the comparative study of frontiers and empires had its exponents. Major figures in these latter fields included Harry Allen and John Hawgood, British pioneers in American history.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the fifth issue much space was devoted to Crick and Altman's Guide to Manuscripts Relating to America, which had been published for the association by Oxford University Press in 1961. The Bulletin was also to become the vehicle for long and detailed supplements, the last appearing in the final issue.Footnote ⁴¹

Founded during the Cold War, there has sometimes been speculation about the early funding of the association. I have no inside knowledge of that tendentious subject, being a student at the time, but the inexpensive format and unpaid labours of the editors hardly suggest American largesse on the scale then enjoyed by Encounter.Footnote ⁴² During its ten-year existence, the Bulletin published only two articles which focussed, at least in part, on contemporary politics. David Adams published a paper comparing the New Deal and the New Frontier, and exploring the changing nature of the Democratic Party. Written before Kennedy's assassination, the paper reveals Professor Adams's positive but not uncritical view of Roosevelt, and more guarded judgements on Kennedy, who had not yet completed his first term. The new Civil Rights Bill was welcomed as indicating that “legally if not emotionally the Negro is nearing equal citizenship.”Footnote ⁴³ David Adams's colleague at Keele, John Lees, was the author of the only other paper on a contemporary political issue, the implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Writing one year after its passage, Lees welcomed the Act and assessed its implementation in many fields, but especially education. Lees concluded with a positive endorsement of the Act:

Some might question Lees's judgement but his sentiment seems unexceptionable then and now.

In the issue of December 1962, the economic historian A. W. Coats did use a review article on American educational history to attack the British educational hierarchy and welcome its democratization, though he acknowledged that the process still had a long way to go.Footnote ⁴⁵ Marcus Cunliffe also employed a review to make a more subtle comment about some American historians and their financial backers. Cunliffe was reviewing volumes of the Franklin papers, one of those huge multi-volume series then so popular in the United States, and which were often reviewed in the Bulletin. While welcoming such series as making available to British scholars “full and reliable collections of American source-materials,” Cunliffe could not resist quoting Leo Marx's waspish comment on the publication of such series in “affluent, conservative and nationalistic times,” when famous institutions competed to corner particular figures and obtain funding from patriotic sources. The process represented piety rather than scholarship.Footnote ⁴⁶

By 1963 the Bulletin had established a definite pattern in its range and contents, which remained up to its demise. History and literature predominated, with politics, geography and other subjects receiving less and less coverage. American foreign policy remained a popular field, but less so than social and economic history, with immigration studies still well to the fore. George Shepperson continued to advance the cause of African American history. In a paper on “The American Negro and Africa,” which is still well worth reading, Shepperson ranged from the Revolutionary era to civil rights, taking in the Black and White Minstrel Show, pan-Africanism, black Muslims and much else besides. Professor Shepperson pointed out myriad opportunities for research in African American history, much of which has since been undertaken, though some fields remain neglected.Footnote ⁴⁷ Attention was also drawn to American authors beyond the familiar nineteenth-century “greats,” with Fitzgerald and Stephen Crane attracting critical attention. Andrew Hook of the University of Edinburgh did much to pioneer the field of Scottish-American cultural relations. In a still important article, which reflected something of the cross-fertilization of disciplines which Dennis Welland had called for, Hook examined the career of John Nichol, first professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, and author of the pioneering American Literature: An Historical Sketch, published in 1882. Hook was informative about Nichol, a moderate radical and admirer of the American tradition of liberty and democracy, and the paper is very much in the Bulletin's tradition of exploring Anglo-American relations. More might have been said about Nichol's stepmother, Elizabeth Pease-Nichol, an advocate of anti-slavery and women's rights with an extensive network of American contacts and correspondents, which opened many doors for Nichol when he visited the United States in 1865. For Nichol it was New England which impressed – Boston was a superior Edinburgh. “Everyone I meet in society is sympathetic, literary or metaphysical, refined beyond the refinement of Englishmen, not to say of Scotchmen.” Nichol thought America's greatest literary achievements lay in the future, and that future lay in the hands of the exponents of the New England genteel tradition. He had little time for Melville, James or Howells, and even less for Mark Twain, “who has done perhaps more than any other living writer to lower the literary tone of English speaking people.” As Hook rightly suggests, Nichol's America was a liberal dream, which had come to reality among the New England intelligentsia, but in 1865 theirs was a culture which had already been overtaken by history.Footnote ⁴⁸

The death of Perry Miller, professor of American literature at Harvard, produced an evaluation of his work on Puritanism by an American scholar, Richard Reinitz. Reinitz saw Miller, who was then a towering figure in the field of Puritan studies, as rejecting Progressive, determinist and consensus views in his attempt to re-create “the Puritan Mind.” Like other scholars in the early 1960s, however, Reinitz was critical of Miller's preoccupation with Puritanism as intellectual history to the neglect of its social context, a neglect which was already being addressed by younger scholars.Footnote ⁴⁹ Tony Tanner, a regular contributor to the Bulletin, went further than Miller, to engage with “the American mind” in a short paper of six pages. Tanner's paper ranged from Margaret Fuller, Emerson and Thoreau to Sherwoood Anderson, Hemingway and Salinger, and came to the conclusion that too many American novelists engaged in bad philosophizing.Footnote ⁵⁰ Other papers on literature reflected the growing number of authors who were entering the American studies canon. Some, like Emily Dickinson and Saul Bellow, certainly remain, but does James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy still feature on many current reading lists?Footnote ⁵¹ Incidentally, Christine Avery's paper on “Science, Technology, and Emily Dickinson” was one of only three papers by women published in the Bulletin and the only one on literature. This situation was not uncommon in other journals covering similar fields at this time, and very much reflected the gender composition of the early American studies community.

Through no fault of the editor, by 1965 the Bulletin was running into production difficulties. The issue for June 1964 did not appear until November, and in order to avoid future slippage the format was slightly changed and the reviews and the Shorter Notices section were omitted. With these changes, Dennis Welland hoped to get the Bulletin up to date by December 1965. He recognized, however, that the Bulletin's circulation had reached a size “where an alternative form of production may soon prove both necessary and practicable.” He called for more contributions, and comments and suggestions on policy with a view to publishing in a new format.Footnote ⁵² That new format did not materialize until 1967, and in the meantime three more issues of the Bulletin were to appear. They generally maintained the balance between history and literature, and continued to include the printing of primary sources.

The growing strength of American studies in the United Kingdom was reflected in the number of monographs on American subjects by British authors which the Bulletin reviewed. Less was now heard of the difficulties of acquiring standard American texts for teaching and research which had characterized the early days.Footnote ⁵³ Much remained the same, however, with articles and reviews in both literature and history generally covering familiar ground. Literature remained focussed on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mainstream, with Wallace Stevens, Jewish fiction and Edith Wharton receiving attention. Cooper was treated seriously, and an article on Joel Barlow's The Hasty Pudding is a reminder that many pioneering British programmes in American literature treated the eighteenth century with great seriousness. At the University of Hull, for example, it was a compulsory subject for all American studies students.Footnote ⁵⁴

At Hull, and elsewhere, early American history was also compulsory, and the Bulletin continued to publish many articles in that field. Even a paper by Charles Loch Mowat on “The Study of Bias in British and American History Textbooks” referred to earlier works, largely focussed on the Revolutionary era, where bias in texts published on both sides of the Atlantic was easy to find. The War of 1812 proved more problematic. American textbooks took it very seriously; British textbooks seemed unaware that it had occurred. Fresh ground was broken in a review article by Professor S. B. Saul on the “New Economic History” which addressed the possibilities and pitfalls of quantification as recently employed by American scholars. The paper was fitting, given the important role played by economic historians in the Bulletin and the early history of the association, but many of them went their separate ways as their discipline became more technical and specialized.Footnote ⁵⁵

Volume 12 of the Bulletin, which in fact incorporated issues 12 and 13, is dated 1966, but was only published after the appearance of the Journal of American Studies in April 1967. Dennis Welland, as editor of both publications, offered his apologies, and made clear the reasons: “For full-time academics to produce one journal as a side-line is difficult enough: to bring out two simultaneously has proved well nigh impossible.” Professor Welland went on to thank his predecessors as editors and the Photographic Unit at the University of Nottingham, which had been responsible for the production of the Bulletin. He welcomed the fact that the new Journal would have an editorial board to support the editor, thus relieving him of the necessity of imposing on “the good nature of friends and colleagues” for support and advice which had been generously given. The new Journal would provide an improved format, wider circulation and the provision of offprints. While welcoming the new, the editor underlined the relationship between the Bulletin and its successor: “That the Journal should have seemed a viable proposition to a University Publisher is a tribute to the quality of the contributions which the Bulletin has been able to publish.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Throughout its history, the Bulletin very much reflected the early membership of the association. History, literary criticism and, to a lesser extent, politics were their predominant interests, though the separate concerns of teachers in secondary and further education were not ignored. A few of the contributors were already well-established scholars, while many more were younger men, often in their first academic posts, who went on to hold chairs in American history and literature, both within the growing number of American studies departments and outside them. Many became chairs of the BAAS later in their careers. Many contributors had had the opportunity to study in the United States, where they had completed postgraduate degrees. Others had recently completed higher degrees in Britain, and their articles in the Bulletin were often the first fruits of their studies.Footnote ⁵⁷ Of course, some major scholars associated with American studies did not publish in the Bulletin, but their work, whether monographs or textbooks, was generally reviewed.Footnote ⁵⁸

In the “Revaluation” series the Bulletin tried to legitimize American studies by showing that it had a history which pre-dated the Second World War, while the continuous emphasis on guides to source materials for the study of the United States on this side of the Atlantic underlined the need and opportunities for research by British scholars. Historical research, as reflected in the Bulletin, focussed mainly on the Revolutionary era and the nineteenth century. Then and later, the colonial period attracted limited attention, in spite of easily accessible sources. Emigration studies, the connections between British and American religious and reform movements, and Anglo-American politics, including the impact of the Civil War on Britain, were popular subjects for research. George Shepperson did much to promote the study of African American culture, and drew attention to the important work of John Hope Franklin and other American scholars. Few results of Sheppperson's enthusiasm, however, were evident in the Bulletin, and abolitionism was the only field which received serious attention, though the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s did produce one of the very few papers on contemporary issues.

Black literature received even less attention than African American history, and, in general, literary articles and reviews in the Bulletin emphasized a very conventional canon of great, white, male novelists. This is understandable given the times, and the problems of introducing American literature into already overcrowded and very traditional English degrees. Slowly, a much wider range of twentieth-century authors was considered in the Bulletin, and younger scholars welcomed the greater opportunities for serious consideration of contemporary literature offered by new American studies programmes. Even here, however, a traditional, chronological approach was often taken towards literature, with much time devoted to the pre-First World War period. Critical approaches reflected the current “New Criticism,” and very few articles in the Bulletin showed much evidence of that “cross-fertilization” of disciplines which Dennis Welland had called for. There were no early British equivalents of such pioneering American studies classics as Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land or David M. Potter's People of Plenty, though Denis Brogan's American Character had already provided a possible British model.Footnote ⁵⁹ Some interest was always taken in the development of American studies elsewhere in Europe, but the Bulletin never really concerned itself with the debate about “American studies methodologies” which flourished across the Atlantic.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Bulletin provided a valuable platform for many British pioneering students of American history, politics and literature, and laid the ground for a more professional and permanent American studies journal when the field had become well established in this country.