THE LIVING BACKGROUND OF AMERICAN HISTORY AND CIVILIZATION!
This book presents an aspect of America that rarely appears in conventional histories. It contains the personal,
human story of life in America from Colonial times to 1860, as it is preserved in diaries, journals, letters and autobiographies.
Here, in the actual words of the participants, is the experience.of conquering the wilderness, forging new political institutions, fighting for freedom. Here is life in the small Towns of the East and the boom towns of the West. Here is the experience of river-boat life and life in the pre-War South.
Here are American patriots defending their country against the misconceptions of foreigners, trying to capture the beauty of their land, trying to define what it means to be an American. Underlying everything they see and do is the sense of the extraordinary vitality and great enterprise that went into the building of our land.