The authors have thrown to the winds the recommendations of the Committee of Seven, and do not try to make their book fit into any four years’ course as now outlined for high schools. The first volume begins with the reign of Louis XIV; and from that moment the reader’s eye is constantly directed forward to the present moment, so that he can read intelligently the dispatches from Europe in his morning newspaper. Much of the traditional matter is omitted in order to give fuller treatment to those subjects which are most important for an understanding of the present. This leads to an arrangement and a placing of emphasis which often seems arbitrary and unhistorical,—as, for instance, the scant half dozen pages given to the whole reign of Napoleon III, or the insertion in each volume of a score of pages on natural science. It is, of course, desirable to have the pupil have some knowledge of the development and influence of such fundamental subjects as evolution, bacteriology and the atomic theory; but it is unwise to put these things in a text-book of history. Few teachers at present could teach these pages properly; and efficiency of instruction is likely to be weakened in any institution where instructors trespass on each others’ fields. This criticism, however, does not apply to the remarkable chapter on the Industrial Revolution and to the excellent pages on socialism, colonial expansion, Russo-Japanese relations and other timely topics of present-day interest; all of these may properly be taught by the teacher of history.
The authors have made a text-book which is accurate, lucid, packed with information, and, at the same time, extremely readable. It has already been used in some college courses, and evokes real enthusiasm from the students. They feel they are learning things which are of practical value and are up to date.
Probably this text-book, at present at any rate, is better adapted for college than for high school use. But schools of business or commerce could very profitably use it. Ordinary high schools should have it in the school library for collateral reading, but could not adopt it as a text-book until they are ready to readjust their history curriculum so as to give much more time than at present to Modern European History. Perhaps that time is not far distant.
[“The Development of Modern Europe.” By James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard. Two volumes; pp. xi, 362; vii, 448. Boston, 1908: Ginn & Co.]
American History in the Secondary School
ARTHUR M. WOLFSON, PH.D., Editor.
THE INFLUENCE OF OLIVER CROMWELL AND WILLIAM III ON AMERICAN HISTORY.
In teaching the history of Europe from the Treaty of Westphalia to the beginning of the French Revolution, no mistake is commoner than the one of regarding the almost continuous series of wars between the European States as a purposeless struggle for territorial aggrandizement. Equally in American history, the teacher is prone to allow his interest in the growth of social and political institutions to obscure the fact that the North American continent was, for nearly a century, merely a distant battleground on which Holland, England and France were struggling for commercial supremacy. “Unity is given to the history of England in the eighteenth century,” says Seeley (“Expansion of England,” p. 77), “if you remark the single fact that Greater Britain during that period was establishing itself in opposition to Greater France.... You will, I think, find it very helpful in studying the history of those two countries always to bear in mind that throughout most of that period the five States of Western Europe all alike are not properly European States but world States, and that they debate continually among themselves a mighty question, which is not European at all and which the student with his eye fixed on Europe is too apt to disregard, namely, the question of the possession of the New World.” In the same way, the student of American history must be continually reminded that he is studying not the history of half a dozen or more isolated communities, but a phase of a great European struggle for world power.