JOHN BACH McMASTER.
HISTORIAN OF THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES.
OHN BACH McMASTER is one of the few men who excel in widely different fields. To be a teacher of English grammar, a college instructor in civil engineering, to do the work of a specialist in the United States Coast Survey, to write a monumental history and to build up a great department in a leading university, surely this is a sufficiently long catalogue for a man forty-five years old. The father of Prof. McMaster was, at the beginning of the Civil War, a banker and planter at New Orleans. The son, however, grew up in the Northern metropolis, and was graduated at the College of the City of New York at the age of twenty, in 1872. After a year devoted to teaching grammar in that institution he took up the study of civil engineering, and began, in the autumn of 1873, the work of preparing his “History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War.”
He was appointed, in 1877, Instructor in Civil Engineering at Princeton, and became, in 1883, Professor of American History in the University of Pennsylvania. Besides the four volumes of his “History” already published, he has written a “Life of Benjamin Franklin” for the “Men of Letters Series,” and has been a frequent contributor upon historical topics to the leading periodicals. His “History” is not a story of political intrigue, of the petty jealousies of neighboring communities, of our quarrels with each other or with the Indians, but tells in a clear and strikingly pictorial manner the story of the people themselves, of how they lived and dressed, what they ate, what were their pleasures, their social customs, how they worshipped, how they grew to be a mighty nation and became the people that we are. It is a wonderful story, and not only is every page filled with living interest, but any chapter might well be a monument to the painstaking accuracy, the devoted labor, the historical insight, and the literary skill of the author. But if Prof. McMaster has been in love with his work as a historian he has none the less been devoted to his office as an instructor of youth. During the years in which he has filled a chair in the University of Pennsylvania, the department of history of the United States has assumed such proportions that it may fairly claim to outrank any similar department in any other institution in the country. In this way and as a lecturer before bodies of teachers, Prof. McMaster has held a foremost place in the movement which has demanded, and successfully demanded, that in the lower schools greater attention shall be paid to the history and institutions of our own country, and which is bringing about a more intelligent patriotism and a widespread interest in the way in which we govern ourselves. The boy who applies for admission to the University of Pennsylvania, if he imagines that the history of his country consists of a list of dates of explorations, battles, and of presidents, and of the names of generals and politicians, will be astonished when he is asked to draw a map showing how the United States obtained the various portions of its territory, to tell what were the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, and to outline the relations between the President and the two houses of Congress in our government. But the trembling applicant will find his blundering answers leniently judged, and when he looks back from the eminence of his graduation day upon this time of trial, he will agree that the view of history taken by Prof. McMaster is the true one, and that no man has done more than he to bring the intelligent people of our time to that opinion.
THE AMERICAN WORKMAN IN 1784.[¹]
(FROM “A HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES.”)