Early American history is especially suited for "source work" in secondary schools and undergraduate college classes. After the year 1800, there are too many documents and many of them are too long. The student can get no systematic survey nor any sense of continuity; and source work is therefore merely illustrative of particular incidents. But, for the early period, it is possible, by careful selection and exclusion, to lay a basis for a fairly connected study.

To do this, it is necessary to combine in one volume selections which are usually grouped separately, as "Documents" and as "Readings,"—such, for instance, as the Massachusetts charter, on the one hand, and Winthrop's letters to his wife, on the other. Rigid scholarship may object to the inclusion of such different sorts of sources between the same covers. But students cannot be expected to own or use more than one volume of sources in American history; and the practical educational advantages of the combination seem to me to outweigh all possible objections—besides which, something might be said for the arrangement in itself, for young students, on the side of interest and convenience.

A number of admirable collections of sources for schools are already in use. And yet, in preparing my American History and Government,[1] I found no single volume which contained the different kinds of source material desirable for illustration, while much of the most valuable material was still inaccessible in any collection. Some two-thirds of the selections in the present volume, I believe, have not previously appeared in Source Books; and, for many of the customary documents, I have found it desirable to print parts not usually given. Thus, for Gorges' Patent for Maine, instead of reproducing the territorial grant (which is all that is given in the only Source Book which touches on that document), I have chosen rather to give the portion authorizing a degree of popular self-government (the reference to the "parliament in New England").

In a few cases, documents which might have been expected are not given, because extracts from them are used freely in the American History and Government, to which this is a companion volume. The most important cases of this character are noted at appropriate points. In general, in the selection and arrangement of documents, special emphasis has been given to the following topics: (1) the idealistic motives back of American colonization in Virginia as well as in Puritan New England; (2) the evolution of political institutions in Virginia and in typical Northern colonies,—especially of representative government and of the town meeting, and of such details as the use of the ballot; (3) the very imperfect nature of democracy, political and social, in colonial America,—so that the student may better appreciate our later growth; (4) social conditions,—necessarily a rather fragmentary treatment; (5) the evolution of commonwealths out of colonies in the Revolution; and (6) the breakdown of the Confederation and the making of the Constitution.

Many typical documents are given entire. Other selections are excerpted carefully. In such cases, omissions are indicated, of course, and the substance of the omitted matter is usually indicated in brackets. In the case of a few selections, like those from Winthrop's History, the original document has already been published in standard editions with modernized spelling. Such editions have been followed. The text of all other documents has been reproduced faithfully, except for such departures as are authorized in the American Historical Association's Suggestions for the Printing of Documents; i.e., regarding the spelling out of abbreviations, and the modern usage for the consonantal i and u, and the modernizing of punctuation when absolutely needful to prevent ambiguity. Some students may find a slight difficulty at first in the vagaries of seventeenth century orthography. But this difficulty is quickly surmounted; and, apart from the added flavor that comes from the quaintness of the original, and from the consciousness that the copy has been strictly adhered to, there is often a distinct historical advantage in the practice. The falling away in book-culture in the second generation of New England colonization can hardly be suggested so forcibly in any other way as by following the degeneration of spelling by town officials—as in the Watertown records in Number 83. The peculiarities of type in printed documents have been preserved so far as possible, but here I have taken a greater liberty than in any other matter of this kind. Italics and black-faced type have been introduced freely, to call attention to matter of special importance for instruction. Sometimes this practice has been noted in the respective introductions; and in other cases there will be little difficulty in deciding which passages owe their prominence of this sort to the editor.

I have tried also to add to the teaching value of the book by a free use of introductions to the various extracts, and by footnotes and addenda, with occasional "Hints for Study."

WILLIS MASON WEST.

Windago Farm,
November, 1913.