Front Matter

Editorial Note

I am indebted as follows for copyrighted material appearing in this book: To the George W. Jacobs Company for the extract from Historic Inventions by Rupert S. Holland; to Doubleday Page and Company for A Slave Among Slaves from Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington. The White Man's Foot is used by permission of and special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company. Mrs. Mary Stuart Cutting has given permission to republish in this connection her poem The Town Called After Him.

Preface

I have written this book because I believe that the story of the American people as it is embodied in the history of our United States supplies the most important material for character building in the entire field of elementary education, and should be offered to children in a new, humanitarian way as a means of helping them to understand the present.

The plan of the book is to present the development of our nation, not as a sumnaary of unrelated facts and a confusion of dates, but as one of the most vivid panoramas the world has ever known, its first scene laid on Plymouth Rock and its last the flight of an American aviator winging his way over a battlefield in Europe. The historical episodes that make this panorama are selected and presented in such a way as to show boys and girls that our present position as a great people is the result of following the road of freedom we have been building steadily ever since the landing of the Pilgrims, and that real democracy can be really efficient, not only in the case of our own nation, but in our relations to the other peoples of the world.

My method of presenting these historical epochs is different from the average story in American history in that it makes a direct appeal to conduct and to life.

Each story has a central character from history as its hero who played a part, beginning often with youth, in our development as a free country. The children who read the stories will feel and understand our history as the men who made it did. Through this appeal to the imagination, boys and girls of today are inspired to follow lines of right conduct and to achieve as our ancestors did. They are helped to understand the drama of present national events in terms of our valiant historical past. They feel an urge to be, themselves, a part of our history tomorrow.

The stories embody only those fundamental facts and dates which have a direct bearing upon our present position as a great, free, nation, and some of these facts include the stories of far-seeing inventors whose mechanical achievements not only bettered our own industrial organization, but strengthened our bonds with the outside world. Each story emphasizes the social and ethical features of the period it represents; home life, schooling, food, agriculture, travel, transportation, typical customs, business, discovery, everyday work, longing for expansion, and self sacrifice are used to create an atmosphere of reality about each story, and to make it a record of men, rather than of names, battles, and statistics.

Quite as important as this social appeal is the appeal that the book makes to children's powers of reasoning and judgment. By its very definition, history is a study in cause and effect; because some individual or group dared something the inevitable happened. So the Pilgrims dreamed of and won their fight for opportunity in the New World. A bit of parchment that Governor Winthrop refused to give up began our government by the people. A New Amsterdam trapper following a beaver's trail along the Hudson marked our first business street. A king of the House of Hanover discovered the stuff of which the English people were made when he had to recognize our Independence. An American boy experimenting with a paddle wheel and fishing boat gave the steamboat to commerce and travel, and a wilderness road opened for us the development and wealth of the west. They were all adventures and combine to interpret for children the recent great adventure of the Araerican people, the finding of a new democracy for ourselves, no longer cut off from the world, but one with the nations of the Old World in kindness and co-operation, pity, unselfishness, help, and love of noble things.