brings the narrative down
to the spring months of the year 1920. The author has entirely recast
that part of the book following the Spanish war and has made
considerable changes in the preceding chapters to emphasize the social
and economic factors in our history. Some illustrative material has
been added, the maps have been improved and the bibliographical
references brought down to date.

This book follows the line of the most recent writers of American
history in giving less attention to the problems of the early periods
to treat somewhat in detail movements culminating in our day. It does
not contain so much about the discovery and exploration of the new
world and gives only limited space to colonial history. The treatment
of the birth of the nation, the development of the Constitution and
the rise of political parties, is more interesting. The author is more
elaborate in his discussion of the sectional struggle between the
North and South, the crisis of disunion and the Civil War. The drama
of reconstruction, however, is decidedly neglected; but the problems
confronting the people thereafter are more extensively treated.

When a reader in quest of the truth has read this text-book of
American History, however, he will be compelled to ask the question as
to why there appears throughout this volume references to the
achievements of all groups influencing the history of this country,
and there is no mention whatever of what the Negroes, constituting a
tenth of the population of the United States, have thought and felt
and done. It is unreasonable to think that such a large element of the
nation could be so closely connected with it without having decidedly
influenced the shaping of its destiny, and history shows that the
record of the Negro race in the western hemisphere is so creditable
and far-reaching that it is impossible to write the history of the
United States and omit the achievements of this group. Professor
Muzzey's _American History_, therefore, is not a balanced and
unprejudiced account of the rise and progress of the United States,
but such a treatise as he believes that the American mind will absorb,
and such a story as conforms with the biased minds of pseudo-American
historians who do not desire to publish to posterity the achievements
of all the people of this country.

* * * * *

_The Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the
Year 1918