A Source Book in American History to 1787

COLLECTED AND EDITED
WILLIS MASON WEST
SOMETIME PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
ALLYN AND BACON
Boston New York Chicago

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY WILLIS MASON WEST.
Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

Early American history is especially suited for source work in secondary schools and undergraduate college classes. After the year 1800, there are too many documents and many of them are too long. The student can get no systematic survey nor any sense of continuity; and source work is therefore merely illustrative of particular incidents. But, for the early period, it is possible, by careful selection and exclusion, to lay a basis for a fairly connected study.
To do this, it is necessary to combine in one volume selections which are usually grouped separately, as Documents and as Readings, —such, for instance, as the Massachusetts charter, on the one hand, and Winthrop's letters to his wife, on the other. Rigid scholarship may object to the inclusion of such different sorts of sources between the same covers. But students cannot be expected to own or use more than one volume of sources in American history; and the practical educational advantages of the combination seem to me to outweigh all possible objections—besides which, something might be said for the arrangement in itself, for young students, on the side of interest and convenience.