The Project Gutenberg EBook of History of the United States
by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

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Title: History of the United States

Author: Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

Release Date: October 28, 2005 [EBook #16960]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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HISTORY

OF THE

UNITED STATES

BY

CHARLES A. BEARD

AND

MARY R. BEARD

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1921

_All rights reserved_

COPYRIGHT, 1921,

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1921.

Norwood Press

J.S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.

NORWOOD, MASS., U.S.A.

PREFACE

As things now stand, the course of instruction in American history in
our public schools embraces three distinct treatments of the subject.
Three separate books are used. First, there is the primary book, which
is usually a very condensed narrative with emphasis on biographies and
anecdotes. Second, there is the advanced text for the seventh or eighth
grade, generally speaking, an expansion of the elementary book by the
addition of forty or fifty thousand words. Finally, there is the high
school manual. This, too, ordinarily follows the beaten path, giving
fuller accounts of the same events and characters. To put it bluntly, we
do not assume that our children obtain permanent possessions from their
study of history in the lower grades. If mathematicians followed the
same method, high school texts on algebra and geometry would include the
multiplication table and fractions.

There is, of course, a ready answer to the criticism advanced above. It
is that teachers have learned from bitter experience how little history
their pupils retain as they pass along the regular route. No teacher of
history will deny this. Still it is a standing challenge to existing
methods of historical instruction. If the study of history cannot be
made truly progressive like the study of mathematics, science, and
languages, then the historians assume a grave respo