Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/672

 662 Reviews of Books The Ohio Rkrr: a Course of Empire. By Archer Butler Hul- BERT. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1906. Pp. xiv, 378.) T?iE fresh appreciation of the geographical relationships of Amer- ican history which has been in evidence in recent years has had the inevitable result of accentuating an important type of our current his- torical literature. The memory of man runneth not back to the day when we have not been deluged with local and regional histories, and yet it must be said that, for reasons which are more or less ob- vious, it is just this sort of historical writing which has fallen farthest short of its possibilities in this country. Happily there are at present not a few reasons for believing that we are on the eve of a distinct advance in this particular, marked not by a mere multiplying of books but by more intensive study of social and economic backgrounds in individual localities combined with (and that is the vital thing) a broader sweep and a firmer grasp on the conditions and developments of the country and of the world at large. We have yet hardly got beyond the age of the " popular " local history, but the species is im- proving and, whatever results we may sometime attain in the way of critical local studies, we shall never reach the point, as indeed we ought not, where a really good popular history is not worth while. A book of this kind is Professor Hulbert's The Ohio River, published recently in the Messrs. Putnams' interesting series on the great river- basins of North America. Professor Hulbert's studies of the geograph- ical background of early Western history, particularly the " Historic Highways ", are well known and have equipped him, if not for adding new information, at least for the retelling of old facts from a some- what novel point of view and with a very desirable freshness and vigor. The task undertaken in the present volume has been to de- scribe the Ohio River as an avenue of national expansion — as a " course of empire " — and to sketch with some fullness the peopling of the great area to which the river and its tributaries for many decades afforded the readiest means of access. The project involved the re- hearsal of a large amount of familiar history, but it also gave op- portunity for the emphasizing of some things not so well known and the correcting of a number of erroneous impressions which still linger with regard to the settlement of the Middle West. By far the most valuable portions of the book are those which deal with the distinctly human side of the subject — the conditions of pioneer existence with which the emigrant had to wrestle, the life of flatboatman and trader, the reign of outlaw and rowdy, the intermingling of racial elements, and particularly the jealous contact of Yankee and Virginian on the north and south banks of the river. So far as political history is concerned, the student will find nothing new. But there is a sufficient contribution to our knowledge of the physical and social elements -n the subject to give the book at least a reasonable right to existence.