Henry W. Bragdon

A United States history textbook emphasizing such characteristics of the American way of life as educational and economic opportunity, political participation, and toleration of differences

It includes the Declaration of Independence, the Northwest Ordinance, the Constitution of the United States, and other landmark documents.

The American Experiment What you have inherited from your fathers, earn again for yourselves, or it will not be yours. —JOHANN WOLFGANG von GOETHE In terms of size and natural resources, the United States is one of the great nations of the world. It covers 3,000,000 squares miles from sea to sea, plus Alaska and Hawaii. Immense productive capacity has given its people a very high standard of living. But the true greatness of a nation may have relatively little to do with its size or its ability to produce goods. We can talk of the greatness of the city-state of Athens in the fifth century before Christ, even though its area was smaller than Rhode Island and its population one-thirtieth that of modern New York City. The glory of Athens lay in the fact that it produced people whose ideas and actions have affected the world ever since. The lasting greatness of the United States must rest on something more than material things. What ideals has this country preached and tried to practice? What in American life, in addition to mere abundance, has made this country a desirable place to live? Outstanding characteristics of "Americanism" have varied from period to period and section to section, but the following can be traced from colonial times to the present. (...)

Woodrow Wilson--scholar, reformer, orator, warrior, and peacemaker--was a visionary whose successes place him among the great presidents, and whose failures leave questions that still haunt the late twentieth century. A vigorous, attractive leader in his time, he has come down to posterity as a grim figure, yet he brought a fresh spirit to American politics as he took our nation irrevocably into the arena of international leadership. This is the first biography based on the full corpus of Wilson papers and letters, and covers his public and private life as well as portraying the politicians, statesmen and world leaders among whom he moved.--From publisher description.