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Lost Men of American History
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Dieser Artikel gilt, aufgrund seiner Grösse, beim Versand als 3 Artikel!
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LOST MEN OF AMERICAN HISTORY BY STEWART H. HOLBROOK With an Introduction By ALLAN NEVINS THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK 1948 Copyright, 1946, by STEWART H. HOLBROOK. All rights reserved no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages iii connection with a review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper. FOURTH PRINTING PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA For HORATIO KANSAS CITY CMO. PUBLIC LIBRARY Introduction MR. HOLBROOK has hit upon a fresh approach to American history. He carries his reader down many a novel byway which somehow turns out to have an interesting relation to the main highroad and he does this by an expedient as simple as it is sound. He has pursued the significant event and the important personality without regard to their celeb rity with an eye rather to the striking figure who has some how missed fame, and the memorable occurrence which has somehow escaped memory. A great part of the real history of the country, as he demonstrates, is summed up in the careers of its secondary and tertiary personages. In a re markable panorama, he shows how fickle and fortuitous is not merely contemporaneous fame, but the kind of fame con ferred by Clio in all her grandeur. It is not hard to say why every schoolboy has heard of Eli Whitney, whose one great and rather elementary invention transformed the industry of a section and gave slavery a new basis. But why has scarce a single schoolboy heard of Elkanah Watson, who not only dreamed of the Erie Canal but promoted the idea, and who performed services of the most solid kind to American agriculture The UndergroundRailroad is picturesquely famous but why then is old Levi Coffin, its most redoubtable conductor, and the author of a stirring book of reminiscences, totally forgotten In the decade before the Civil War, Uncle Toms Cabin stirred the multitude and so did another book called The Impend ing Crisis, which was scattered broadcast by the Republican Party as-a campaign document, and which figured in stormy debates in Congress. Yet for every thousand persons who have heard of Harriet Beecher Stowe, catching up her pen vii Vlll INTRODUCTION in the Maine parsonage, is there one who has heard of Hinton Rowan Helper, the North Carolina spokesman for the poor white sufferers from slavery Most people can name the James B. Eads who bridged the Mississippi and built the jetties that liberated the port of New Orleans. But who can name the builder of the far more influential Soo Canal, an epic feat which furnishes the theme for some of Mr. Hoi brooks best pages This book, with its melange of material old and new, raises some questions which students of history will find worth pondering. There is always danger that the story of the nation, at least in its briefer versions, will become convention alized. We take it up in familiar categories like the winning of independence, the westward movement, and the rise of industry and we humanize it by bringing in a well-canonized set of heroes. Some students will not be willing to accept sill Mr. Holbrooks personages at his estimate of them, but he at least raises the question whether a periodical revision of our calendar of great - men would not be profitable. And he also touches on a deeper question. The United States is a great mass democracy, where equality ofopportunity is empha sized and it was for generations a new country, where fron tier conditions stimulated individual enterprise... |
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i.d.R. innert 7-14 Tagen versandfertig
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