The New World I. [antikvár]

A heroic segment of time all men find comfort and reassurance in knowing how their civilization developed A and where in the grand arrangement of events it stands at the moment. But we Americans at this juncture in the 20th Century have a particular need to take our historical bearings. Prodigious changes have set their seal upon our generation. The convulsions of two World Wars cracked and finally shattered the wall of isolation behind which our countrymen had taken shelter for so long. For the first time since the 18th Century, we are again face-to-face with the rest of the world. We see now what was for so long hidden from view: we are permanently entangled with the family of man. Acknowledging this to ourselves once more—a process paradoxical- ly difficult for a nation of immigrants—has given us a chance to place our history in a fresh perspective. America's position among nations has been special from the very beginning. Sepa- rated from Europe by 3,000 miles of ocean, our shores were at first merely a westward projection of the European powers—a plaything of kings and queens. But legions of ordinary people, most of them forever nameless in the pages of history, swarmed across the Atlantic and—out of disparate elements—molded on this continent a lux- uriant and unique culture. To be sure, the men and women who came from the other side of the ocean were not consciously the harbingers of a better life for mankind. But they were forced by the demands of a strange and awesome setting to become experimenters, con- stantly reworking the old and the familiar into New World styles. Their failures were often gargantuan and their successes sometimes only fitfully held, but from the start they seemed to make progress: tomorrow would be not only different from today, it would be better. Because American history seems to fall naturally into six eras, it is so divided in this work. The culmination of the first era, which begins in the mists of prehistory, was the achievement of national independence and the writing of the Constitution, a twin climax, as we see it now, to 180 years of preparation. These events are recount- ed in Volumes 1 and 2. The decades comprising the second period-treated in Volumes 3 and 4-tested keenly the political and social institutions we had brought into being, for they now served a country which dwarfed in grandeur even the fondest dreams of the Found- ing * athers. 1 he conquest of the American West, furthermore, presented a resplend- en proving ground for the nation's mettle, intellectual as well as physical. Like ail high drama, however, ours contained a tragic element, and the entire world watched to see the outcome. By the middle of the 19th Century the incubus of slavery had fastened itself tightly on the country, and signs were unmistakable that it would not vanish on its own-that it would have to be torn out root and branch. The Civil war-the core ol the third major period, which is treated in Volumes 5 and 6-may