CHARLES HILL: The American Character. “National character was once recognized as elemental. Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War turns on the differing Athenian and Spartan characters. Now, however, national character as a topic hides somewhere between the distastefully insensitive and the arrogantly impermissible. But for early Americans in the New World, defining and describing it was imperative, and was luminously achieved in the literature of the colonial, early republic, and ‘American Renaissance’ periods.”