PROJECT ASHABI
African Stories. Limitless Worlds.
PROJECT ASHABI
African Stories. Limitless Worlds.
Project Gutenberg Archive
Complete unabridged public-domain literary work from the Project Gutenberg archive.
Project Ashabi is being built as the home of original African comics, webtoons, graphic novels, and fiction.
This third-party Novel / Book title is temporary preview content. Step by step, third-party titles will be phased out and replaced exclusively by Ashabi Originals created by African writers and artists.
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HENRY ELDRIDGE BOURNE AND ELBERT JAY BENTON
PROFESSORS OF HISTORY IN WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
This volume is the introductory part of a course in American history embodying the plan of study recommended by the Committee of Eight of the American Historical Association.[1] The plan calls for a continuous course running through grades six, seven, and eight. The events which have taken place within the limits of what is now the United States must necessarily furnish the most of the content of the lessons. But the Committee urge that enough other matter, of an introductory character, be included to teach boys and girls of from twelve to fourteen years of age that our civilization had its beginnings far back in the history of the Old World. Such introductory study will enable them to think of our country in its true historical setting. The Committee recommend that about two-thirds of one year's work be devoted to this preliminary matter, and that the remainder of the year be given to the period of discovery and exploration.
The plan of the Committee of Eight emphasizes three or four lines of development in the world's history leading up to American history proper.
First, there was a movement of conquest or colonization by which the ancient civilized world, originally made up of communities like the Greeks and Phoenicians in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean Seas, spread to southern Italy and adjacent lands. The Roman conquest of Italy and of the barbarian tribes of western Europe expanded the civilized world to the shores of the Atlantic. Within this greater Roman world new nations grew up. The migration of Europeans to the American continent was the final step.
Second, accompanying the growth of the civilized world in extent was a growth of knowledge of the shape of the earth, or of what we call geography. Columbus was a geographer as well as the herald of an expanding world.
A third process was the creation and transmission of all that we mean by civilization. Here, as the Committee remark, the effort should be to "show, in a very simple way, the civilization which formed the heritage of those who were to go to America, that is, to explain what America started with."
Arthur Conan Doyle
