Excerpt from An Outline of United States History, for Use in the General Course in United States History

American history is the story oi a most dramatic transformation. The curtain is rung up on a continent lying untouched, just as natural forces acting through millions of years of geologic history have chiseled it. It is inhabited by a few tribes of wandering Indians who traveled to it from Asia by way of Alaska no one knows when. The Indians are in the main without civilization. They live in an environment where great areas are as fertile as any in the world, where minerals are to be found in luxuriant abundance and where the climate is nowhere surpassed in stimulating productive effort. Yet the Indians are letting this priceless Opportunity slip. As the play unfolds, the penalty they pay is practical annihilation.

Three thousand miles across the Atlantic in Europe is a climatic area as healthful and as stimulating as that of much of the United States. In fact, northern Europe and the Great Lake basin and northern Missis sippi Valley in America are the two areas in the world where the climate most stimulates productive effort. When the American drama opens, European peoples acting under the stimulus of this climate and utilizing intelligently the rich natural resources of their environment have emerged from barbarism into civilization. They are obviously of racial stock superior to that of the Indians who had opportunities practically as great. It is they, and not the Indians, who are destined to develop the untouched continent. The plot, therefore, is to be the story of the transference of European peoples and civilization to the wild country of America. American civilization is to be based primarily on this. But we see to the west across the vast Pacific three other civilizations, in India, in China and in Japan, older than that of Europe. They seem stagnant; they are not aggressive, yet we cannot help wondering what the plot would be if the Pacific were narrow and the Atlantic broad and if these lethargic Orientals should begin' taking possession of the new continent.

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