Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/505

 America?! Historical Associalion 495 both in awakening patriotic feeling and in making the course of historic events more intelligible. The General Committee, of which he is chairman, had sent out questionaries and attempted to se- cure a systematic body of information as to what had been done and was being done in this direction. He summarized the re- sults of this inquiry, mentioning, as examples of the work going forward, that of the committee on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Aledford, Massachusetts, that of the Germantown Site and Relic Society, that of the New York History Club, the marking of scenes of the Sioux War by the Minnesota Valley Society, the appropriation of fifteen hundred dollars by the General Assembly of Rhode Island for expenditure of this sort under the direction of the Rhode Island Historical Society, the military parks established by the United States government, and the work of various of the " patriotic-hereditary " societies. Fuller statements, of much interest, were made by Miss Jane Meade Welch of Buffalo on- the work of the Niagara Frontier Landmarks Association, and by Miss Zoe Adams on the marking of the old Santa Fe Trail by the Kansas Daughters of the American Revolution, aided by the state, and on the interesting investigations which were undertaken for determining the route. The sixth and seventh sessions of the Association, those of Friday evening and Saturday morning, December 28 and 29, were devoted to the reading of papers, the business meeting of the As- sociation having been held on Friday afternoon. In the sixth session, devoted to the earlier portions of American history, four papers were read. We speak of three, for the fourth, that of Professor Claude H. Van Tyne of the University of Michigan, on " Sovereignty in the American Revolution ", appears on later pages of the present number of this journal. Miss Susan M. Kingsbury of Simmons College, reader of the first paper, entitled " A Comparison of the A'irginia Company with the other English Trading Companies of the Seventeenth Century", endeavored to lead attention away from the study of the colonial movements associated with the name of the Virginia Company to the consideration of its composition as a trading organization. This was the aspect it chiefly bore to its founders and members. The writer entered upon a comparison of its organization and opera- tions with those of some of the other English trading companies of the time. No less than thirty such were chartered in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but there are hardly more than half a dozen whose records are preserved and accessible in