Colonial and Revolutionary Documents.
Out of 187 documents, 32 are devoted to the colonial period down to 1764; about 22 deal with the revolutionary period from 1765 to 1789; and the remaining 133 numbers are concerned with the national period. For the colonial period, there are charters of eleven of the thirteen colonies; there are documents illustrative of popular government, such as the Mayflower Compact, the ordinance establishing representative government in Virginia, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, and of New Haven. The relation of the colonies to England is shown by the Navigation Acts, the Molasses Act, the Sugar Act, and the royal proclamation of 1763. The relation to other countries is shown by extracts from the treaty of Utrecht and the treaty of Paris in 1763. No person who is teaching the colonial period even to elementary students should be without the fresh contact with the documents which these extracts make possible.
On the Revolutionary epoch, Professor MacDonald gives us the Stamp Act, the Intolerable Acts, the Massachusetts Circular Letter of 1768, the resolves of the Stamp Act Congress, the Association and resolves of the Continental Congress, the principal acts of Parliament for the prosecution of the American war, and, of course, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Ordinance of 1787, and the Constitution.