New World, Old World: The Historical Antithesis
Richard Rose, an American political scientist at Strathclyde University in Scotland, organized a conference in 1973 to consider the relevance of American experience in various fields for European circumstances. Professor Rose took as epigraph some lines from Philip James Bailey Festus.
America, thou half-brother of the world; With something good and bad of every land.
Mine was one of the conference papers. It has been slightly shortened and amended for this reprinting.
The history of the United States obviously can not be discussed from exactly the same position as that of the history of Western Europe. America has undergone experiences actually and figuratively remote from the preoccupations of Europe. If the American time-dimension has been smaller, the space-dimension has been larger. American attitudes to their national past sometimes appear "un- European" in a paradoxical way. The New World, that is, is apt to fall back upon historical precedent in a search for solutions to controversies of the moment -- mingling past and present with a readiness that can puzzle observers from the Old World. Long before the United States became an independent nation,