The making of our country, a topical history of the American people

Front matter

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THE MAKING OF OUR COUNTRY

Preface

Three hundred years ago our ancestors planted the civilization of the Old World upon the shores of America. The good seed then sown has had a marvelous growth in the New World. The toil of many generations of pioneers has cleared the land of forests and clothed it with gardens, orchards, and fields of wheat, corn, and cotton. The cattle and sheep upon a thousand hills are ours. The mountains have given us their coal and iron and copper. Inventions ahiiost without number have lightened our labor and enormously increased our wealth. Hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad bind our country together and carry our people and our products from place to place. Our land is filled with fertile farms and with busy and prosperous towns, while scattered here and there are scores of great cities, the homes of mighty industries and of a rich commerce.

Our colonial forefathers declared their independence of Great Britain and won it in a long and trying war. They set up free governments in the states and in the nation that have endured for more than a century. By purchase and conquest our people have vastly increased the extent of their territory. By four years of heroic fighting in a great civil war they saved the life of the nation and freed it from human slavery. The half century since that great struggle has seen wonderful progress in national growth. Today North and South are united in the spirit that makes the United States the greatest democratic nation in the world. Only yesterday our country played the deciding part in a World War which broke the power of autocracy in all lands and made the world safer for democracy.

The story of the growth of our country through the three centuries since the first European settlers landed upon its shores is told in this book. In telling this story the author has purposely omitted many unimportant names and facts in order to make it possible to give more attention to the men antl the events that have played a vital part in the making of the American nation. These men and events have been presented in logical groups rather than in chronological order,

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because the fundamental ideas of growth and progress can be more closely portrayed by this method of treatment.

In the belief that history deals with past life in all of its phases the industrial, social, political, and intellectual sides of that life have each received due attention. It has also been remembered that all sections of the land, the older East and the newest West, the wheat fields of the North and the cotton fields of the South, the populous cities and the sparsely settled plains, are parts of our country and that the story of the development of each of them is a part of our history. A special effort has been made to treat adequately the last fifty years of American Hfe, the most important period in our history and yet the one most neglected. The important pai't which the physical features of each section have played in determining the nature of its growth has not been overlooked. The winning of a vast untamed continent for civilization, the most important and at the same time the most dramatic movement in our past, and the growth and meaning of democracy, the most momentous question affecting the present and the future of our country, are the main themes of this book.

Smith Burnham.

Kalamazoo, IMichigan, June 6, 1921.

Table Of Contents

CHAPTEK PAGE

I. European Beginnings in Amekica 1

Our History 1

Contents

VPTEK PAGE

The Quarrel Over the Tea Tax 119

Parliament Punishes Boston and Massachusetts 121