ART. 9.-THE NEW AMERICAN HISTORY 1. A History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War. By J. B. McMaster. Eight vols. New York and London: Appleton, 1883- 2. Guide to the Study and Reading of American History. By E. Channing, A. B. Hart, and F. J. Turner. First Edition, 1896. Revised and augmented edition. The Greater Inclination (1899); A Gift from the Grave (1900); Crucial Instances (1901); The Valley of Deci- sion (1902); The Descent of Man (1904); The House of Mirth (1905); Ethan Frome (1911); The Reef 1. Naval Administration. By Admiral Sir R. Vesey 2. Naval Policy, A Plea for the Study of War. By 1. La Neutralité Belge et l'Invasion Allemande. Maxime Lecomte et Col. Camille Lévi. Bruxelles et b THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. No. 442, Part II.-JANUARY, 1915. Art. 9.-THE NEW AMERICAN HISTORY. 1. A History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War. By J. B. McMaster. Eight vols. New York and London: Appleton, 1883-1913. 2. Guide to the Study and Reading of American History. By E. Channing, A. B. Hart, and F. J. Turner. First Edition, 1896. Revised and augmented edition. Boston and New York: Ginn, 1912. 3. Economic Beginnings of the Far West: How We Won the Land beyond the Mississippi. By Katharine Coman. Two vols. New York: Macmillan, 1912. 4. The United States and Mexico, 1821-1848. By G. L. Rives. Two vols. New York: Scribner, 1913. 5. The Development of American Nationality. By C. R. Fish. New York: American Book Co., 1913. 6. From Jefferson to Lincoln. By W. MacDonald. New York: Holt, 1912. WHEN John Bach McMaster brought out the first volume of the History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War,' in 1883, the prevailing historical opinions of his countrymen were based upon books of which few are to-day accepted as reliable, and upon general assumptions that are now questioned or supplanted. He began his studies in a period when the men who had fought the Civil War were still dominating American thought. He has outlived their generation and their epoch, for, as they died, younger historians, trained in Europe and unscarred by the abolition schism, began to rewrite their times. Yet these eight large volumes, to which Prof. McMaster has devoted his life, Vol. 222.-No. 442. M and which are now complete, stretch across this revolution in ideals and understanding, and are a coherent whole, modern in their views to-day. When the first of them appeared there began a new period in historical writing in America. Thirty years ago, the period that lay between the close of the second war with England and the outbreak of the Civil War (1814-1861) was the dark age of American history. No impartial historian had traversed it. The explanations given by politicians on the stump were still accepted as history by their followers. Men of the North, who as schoolboys had declaimed the fervid peroration of Webster's speech for the Union, were in middle life convinced that slavery was closely related to original sin and that the war was only a wicked rebellion. The veterans who had fought with Lee and Jackson, and their children, were hardened in the belief that selfish sectionalism and criminal aggression by the North were the key to all their history. There was no acceptance of fundamental facts in 1883, and no unity in interpretation. School histories were written for the North or the South; none could circulate throughout the nation. And indeed men were only just beginning, in 1883, to speak or to think of the United States as a nation. That he foresaw the drift of American thought, and wrote the first great history that travelled with it, is Prof. McMaster's greatest title to fame. Out of his volumes can be gathered the facts that illustrate the modern view. Other historians have added to his facts, and formulated theories based upon them, but none has greatly changed his drawing of the picture of the halfcentury preceding the Civil War. In that half-century, as we now see it, are to be found the bases for the nationality of the United States, whose existence men disbelieved in 1883. The Peace of Ghent, in 1814, left the United States bankrupt and disunited. Its population, under ten millions, sprawled along the Atlantic seaboard, pushing slightly west of the ridge of the Alleghanies, but it was local in its life and in its views. It had been plunged unprepared into the English war by enthusiasts from the frontier. From the war itself it had gained nothing, |