students, American history is not simple. The hostile camps of Puritans
and Church of England men, the Dutch of New Amsterdam and the Catholics
of Maryland, could hardly be expected to merge into a single state
without violent struggle. Nor could the hundreds of thousands of Scotch
Calvinists, militant enemies of England and all her ways, who seized and
held the fertile highlands of the Middle and Southern colonies, submit
quietly to any program not of their own making. And again, in the
thirties and fifties of the nineteenth century, millions of people
speaking a strange tongue sought asylum in the Mississippi Valley--an
isolated region whose early inhabitants, of whatsoever national strain,
were strongly inclined to secession or revolt against the older Eastern
communities. Never was a nation composed of more diverse ethnic groups
and elements.

And the geographical environments of these groups and segments of older
civilizations were quite as dissimilar as those among which the nations
of Europe developed. The cold and bleak hills of New England no more
resemble the rich river bottoms of the South than the sand dunes of
Prussia resemble the fertile plains of Andalusia. Geographical
differences tend to produce economic differences. If to these be added
inherited antagonisms like those of Puritan and Cavalier, one wonders
how the East and the South of the United States ever became integral
parts of one great social unit. Adding to this apparent impossibility
the new antagonism of the West toward the East as a whole, the historian
wonders at the statecraft that could hold the diverse elements together
till certain economic and social factors became powerful enough to
conquer in a long and bloody war. Or was it the influence of new
inventions, railways, and the tightening bonds of commerce that did the
work?

Leaving the reader to answer this question for himself, it remains for
the Editor to set forth in as few words as possible the method, the
emphasis, and the interpretations of the authors of these volumes.

Professor Becker approaches his work, the discovery of the New World,
the rise of the plantations, the slow growth of an American culture, and
finally the Revolution of 1776, from the standpoint of a student of
modern European history. The infant colonies are to him disjected
particles of ancient Europe. Their changes under the new environment,
their tendency to isolation and petty quarrels during the sevente