THE RECALL OF COLUMBUS (From the painting in the Capitol at Washington by Augustus George Heaton)

AMERICA

Great Crises In Our HistoryTold by Its Makers A LIBRARY OF ORIGINAL SOURCES Volume I Discovery and Exploration 1000-1562 I ISSUED BY

AMERICANIZATION DEPARTMENT VETERANS OF FOREIGN WARS OF THE

UNITED STATES CHICAGO, U. S. A.

INTRODUCTION

SIR ROBERT WALPOLE was one of England's great prime ministers. During his long administration his life was the history of England. Yet this maker of history, in his declining years, when asked by one of his secretaries what he would like to have read to him, replied "Not history, for that I know to be false!"

When Sir Robert made this response he did not have in mind the actual documents upon which history is based. He was thinking of the work of those historians who write romances about historical events.

History aims to be the true story of what has happened. But historians have not always succeeded in telling the truth. Often the personal desire of the historian to have his readers share his point of view, has led him to color his narrative. And frequently he has lacked data.

Historians who have made a serious attempt to consult original documents are compelled to spend years in research. In the case of Bancroft, forty years elapsed between the appearance of the first volume of his "History of the United States" and the last. Those years were filled with the laborious pursuit and critical study of documents. Parkman made seven trips to Europe and spent a lifetime in searching out original documents for his studies of pioneer days.

Such a multitude of things have been uncovered since then letters, diaries, secret reports, suppressed minutes, and so forth, that the volume of American historical material is now bewildering. Much of this newly discovered matter is tremendously interesting. No one can fail to be thrilled by first-hand accounts of the great crises in our country's history.

When it comes to the actual telling of the story, who could tell the Voyage of Discovery as Columbus told it himself in his letter to his friend Santangel? In all the histories of Virginia that have been written who has improved upon Captain John Smith's original story of his adventures in the wilds of Virginia, his meeting with Pocahontas and his encounter with her father, Powhatan?

Historians all go back to Governor Bradford's History of the Plymouth Plantation. At sixteen years of age, Bradford became a guiding spirit among the Pilgrims, fled with them to Holland, and served as their Governor almost continuously from 1621 until his death in 1657. His account of the first voyage of the Mayflower has never been surpassed. It would be hard to find anything even in fiction, that is more fascinating than the intimate personal letters of John Adams, the politician, telling how he maneuvered to get Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence. And what could surpass Jefferson's own story of his writing of the Declaration? Finally, to mention only one event of more recent date, namely, the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, you have General Grant's own report of that memorable meeting of April 9, 1865.