(2 of 2)
Polarizations formed on either side of the grand duality of England vs. America, Old World vs. New. Thus on either side of the Atlantic, political, cultural and religious opposites were, in each of the three wars, slugging it out: "From the seventeenth century, the English-speaking peoples on both continents defined themselves by wars that upheld, at least for a while, a guiding political culture of a Low Church, Calvinistic Protestantism, commercially adept, militantly expansionist, and highly convinced, in Old World, New World, or both, that it represented a chosen people and a manifest destiny. In the full, three-century context, Cavaliers, aristocrats, and bishops pretty much lost and Puritans, Yankees, self-made entrepreneurs, Anglo-Saxon nationalists, and expansionists had the edge, especially in America."
Phillips tells us that what drove him four years ago to this larger historical subject was his disgust with the squalor and venality of American politics. (One wonders what he thinks about re-emerging from his studies at the present moment.) He has returned not only with a handsome thesis but also with a thousand oddments and curios he collected along the way--such as remarks by Charles Kingsley, the Cambridge University historian who served as chaplain to Queen Victoria. Kingsley, visiting Ireland in the 1840s, described the Irish as a biological subspecies: "I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country." It is Phillips' larger thesis that all the English-speaking peoples, including the Kingsleys, have evolved admirably since those times.