Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 7.djvu/344

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��Town and City Histories.

��[May,

��a very happy style of writing, have made for him more than a national reputation, from which this sketch will not detract. Originally his work was intended to occupy some ninety pages of the report, but later, unfortunately, it had to be condensed into fifty. Luckily it will not be found necessary to omit a number of interesting maps that accompany it.

Next in value, perhaps from the purely historical point of view the most valuable, or at least the most complete, ■of all, comes the sketch of the early history of St. Louis, by Professor Waterhouse. The author became greatly interested in his task, and spent a vast amount of time in collecting materials for it. From the care be- stowed on the work, it may be taken for granted that this will be as full and accurate an account of the settlement and early history of the " Philadelphia of the West " as can possibly be com- piled. It is expected that it will oc- cupy fifty or sixty pages of the report, and even then it will only bring the history down to 1823, when the first •city government was organized.

The largest of the Eastern cities fur- nish little chance for original work in an historical line, but yet the sketch of New York by Martha J. Lamb, of Philadelphia by Susan wCooldge, and •of Boston by Colonel Waring, will be acceptable additions to the very scanty stock of American historical literature.

The words " very scanty " are used most advisedly, for in very truth the American historian is a rara avis. Of American compilers-of-facts, to be sure, there have been and are very many, but an aggregation of details is not a his- tory, nor can a man who makes a book out of local gossip and the biographies of local heroes and heroines be called

��an historian. The truth of this fact has been most forcibly impressed on the writer in the course of preparing for the Census Bureau historical sketches of many of the leading cities of the country, and he has become thoroughly convinced that of all the vulnerable portions of American literature that which pertains to the history of Amer- ican towns and cities is the most vulnerable.

In the first place, American town and city histories are few. In the second place, the books that pretend to be such are many, and as a rule histori- cally worthless. In the third place, both the real and the sham are intensely dull.

Real histories are few, evidently because there is not demand enough to encourage historians to enter the field, and not because material is lack- ing. With the exception of the Atlantic seaboard, our country has been developed in an age pre-eminent for records and statistics ; and there is scarcely a town or city in the land that has not its records and its public docu- ments, its newspaper files and its Fourth- of- July orations, — all replete with information waiting for the histo- rian. Nearly every State has its Histori- cal Society, and Pioneer Associations are as plenty in our glorious West as was the fever and ague with which their members were baptized. If the golden opportunities of autobiography are lost, the American historian of the future will have to be satisfied, as must be satisfied the New England historian of to-day, with the meagre, lifeless information given by records, and the hyi>erbolical, untrustworthy knowledge to be obtained from local tradition and gossip.

^Q need go no farther to find the

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