The International Monthly
by Frederick Albert Richardson (9780217083485)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: POPULAR HISTORIES, THEIR DEFECTS AND POS- SIBILITIES- JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON, Columbia University. N the amplest sense of the term, history is everything true about everything which man ever did, or thought, or hoped, or felt. It is the limitless science of past human affairs, ? a theme immeasurably vast and exceedingly vague. We are within the bounds of history whether we decipher a mortgage on an Assyrian tile, come at the value of the Diamond Necklace, or describe the over-short pastry to which Charles V. was addicted to his undoing. The tragic reflections of Eli's daughter-in-law, when she learned of the discomfiture of her people at Ebenezer, are history; so are the provisions of iMagna Charta, the origin of the doctrine of trans- substantiation, the fall of Santiago, the difference between a black friar and a white friar, and the certified circulation of the New York Journal upon February first of the current year. Each fact has its interest and importance, all have been carefully recorded. Now when a writer opens and begins to peruse the thick, closely written volume of human experience, with a view of making an abstract of it for those who have no time to study the (i) I have in the following pages borrowed somewhat freely from a paper submitted for discussion to the National Herbart Society and printed in its Fifth Year Book. original work, he is immediately forced to ask himself toward what few things he should direct his readers' attention. He finds that the great book upon which he is to base his little one is grotesquely out of perspective, for it was compiled by many different hands, by those widely separated in time and in sentiment, by Herodotus, Machiavelli, Eusebius, St. Simon, Otto of Freis- ing, Pepys, the Duchess of Abrantes, Sallust, Cotton Mathe...

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