American classics

"First edition." "Sources": p. 567-571.

At the end of the 19th century, after Americans had endured thirty years of tremendous change due to rapid industrial growth, social upheavals, and the excesses of the Gilded Age, they began to look back with increasing fondness to their own past. The Colonial Revival in architecture was one fruit of this nostalgia; another was the insightful chronicles of social history in earlier days written by this author. Following the success of her book Home Life in Colonial Days, she wrote a detailed and fascinating account of American children and their lives from the very earliest settlers to the first decades of the new republic. Covering everything from dress to toys, schools to play, discipline and religion, she described in highly readable prose a child's life in the days before the railroad and telegraph.

This biography of the Secretary of State under President Grant received the Pulitzer Prize for biography. In the midst of Reconstruction following the Civil War, Fish was a commanding figure who was one of the ablest Cabinet members. His astute and patient diplomacy kept the peace in foreign and domestic affairs.

“Not a condensation of the author’s three volumes on the Civil war in his ‘History of the United States’ but a fresh study which makes use of the large amount of material on that period which has come to light in recent years. Good maps and an index are included with the text.” Book Review Digest “The student of war politics and of midcentury American diplomacy will find much to interest him in several of the chapters, for the volume is not, as its title might imply, a mere narrative of military operations. It is a discussion of national life in all its phases during a great and critical period of American history.” American Political Science Review — Standard Catalog for Public Libraries: History (H.W. Wilson) 1929