Beginnings of the American People . [The Riverside History of  the United States, I. William E. Dodd, Editor.] By  Carl Lotus Becker , Professor of European History in the  University of Kansas. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.  [1915.] Pp. 279, xviii. $1.25 net.)

It has long been a matter for wonder that so little of the most important results of recent and contemporary research in American colonial history has found its way into the text-books, even the latest on that period. Professor Becker is practically the first text-book writer to make appreciative use of this material. He approaches his subject from the broad point of view of one who regards the young colonies as “disjected particles of ancient Europe,” and who, in following their development, never loses sight of the fact that they were but parts of a great English imperial system.

The volume is a bit of real literature, a brilliant and charming piece of historical writing. Nowhere can there be found in small compass a more vivid and telling description of the European background of the discovery of the New World than is in the first thirty pages of this little volume. Equally successful are the accounts of the social development and intellectual life of the colonies, especially in the eighteenth century. It is in these aspects of the period that Professor Becker seems most interested, but as already indicated he is careful to explain England's commercial and colonial policies, and the tendencies of American industrial and political life, all of which of course determined the political and administrative relations between the mother country and her offspring. And here one criticism may be offered. Too little attention is given to the evolution of those colonial political institutions, particularly the assemblies, by means of which the colonists were able to gain control of their own local affairs and to strike at the imperial system which bound them, and in defense of which they finally broke with the empire and sought independence.

As to the Revolution itself, our author's point of view is again illustrated by the fact that more than twice as much space is given to the preliminary quarrels than to the war itself. The volume goes no further than the treaty of peace, 1783.

While Professor Becker's book will be a genuine pleasure both to the general reader and the student, it is not likely to be wholly successful as a text-book because it is frequently lacking in that definite concrete information which is an essential prerequisite to the formation of generalizations of any value and which therefore must form the basis of any successful college course.

Chas. W. Ramsdell .

How to cite:
Ramsdell, Charles W., "Beginnings of the American People", Volume 019, Number 3, Southwestern Historical Quarterly Online, Page 313 - 314. http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/publications/journals/shq/online/v019/n3/review_30.html
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