ON AMERICAN HISTORY BY HENRY W. ELSON, A.M. LECTURER OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR THE EXTENSION AUTHOR OF "HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHIES FOR CHILDREN" NATIONAL PERIOD BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1899 All rights reserved PREFACE HISTORY can be presented to us only by means of pictures, reproductions of that which we cannot directly witness. If you study a city from photographs, the general bird's-eye view is necessary to give you the relative size and location of things; but such a view is not enough. You must have pictures, on a larger scale, of a busy street, a mammoth office building, a public park, the interior of a workshop, and the like. The ordinary school history furnishes the bird's-eye view of our country's origin and growth; the present volume aims to give a more detailed account a pic ture on a larger scale events in our history. of some of the chief It is intended not to replace the text-book, but to supplement it. The text-book gives the succession of events and, in some measure, their relative importance; but, owing to the multitude of subjects to be V |