TH 1. Educative Value of Sources HE world no longer needs elaborate instruction in the usefulness of the sources of history. Besides calling forth a fusillade of articles and criticisms on this question, it has been the subject of a part or of the whole of two recent educational documents: in the Study of History in Schools, Report of the American Historical Association, may be found (through the index) several discussions of the subject; and the forthcoming Report on the Use of Sources, drawn up by the committee of the New England History Teachers' Association, is really a treatise on the source method. In the Introductions to Volumes I and II of this series may be found the editor's opinions at some length. The most apt parallel for the use of sources in schools is the use of experiments in chemistry and physics and other natural sciences: the object in both cases is the same, to accustom the pupil to the notion that knowledge is ultimately founded on personally recorded observations; and also to train the observing and reasoning powers by the use of a limited amount of select material, as illustrative of great bodies of facts which must be taken on faith without the aid of experiment. The educative value of sources is to arouse, and interest, and make history seem like something that actually happened. While the materials available for this volume have not the same romance as those which dealt with discoverers, explorers, Indians, and Revolutionary heroes, yet many of the extracts deal with frontier incidents and stirring adventures: such, for example, are Judge Cooper's little treatise on colonization (No. 31) and John Pope's experiences on the Mississippi river (No. 34). The pieces relative to the formation of the Constitution are also intended to bring out the real living man-toman personal contest over the new government: as, for instance, the objections of the North Carolina farmers (No. 75), and the more subtle reasoning of Yates (No. 64). Another kind of interest, not less absorbing, is to be found in the extracts in this volume on various phases of slavery. IN 2. How to Find Sources N the earlier period covered by this volume we have still the inestimable guidance of Justin Winsor, in his Narrative and Critical History of America: Volume VII and the appendices to Volume VIII deal especially with the period of constitution-making. We have now also reached the period of the admirable bibliographies prepared by Mr. W. E. Foster in his References to the History of Presidential Administrations, and References to the Constitution of the United States. Mr. Paul Leicester Ford, in his extremely valuable collection of out-of-the-way writings on the Constitution, published under the titles Pamphlets on the Constitution and Essays on the Constitution, adds an elaborate bibliography of materials on that immortal document. In the two histories of the Federal Constitution by George T. Curtis and George Bancroft (the latter's account reprinted with documents as a sixth volume of his History of the United States), we have foot-notes leading direct to the literature. The five volumes of J. B. McMaster, which now reach from 1783 to 1830, have also an array of valuable foot-notes through which out-of-theway sources may be discovered. Specific references both to the secondary works and to sources will be found in Channing and Hart's Guide to the Study of American History, SS 149-193; and the book also contains classified lists of the ultimate authorities. The forthcoming Bibliography of American History, prepared by the coöperative method under the editorship of J. M. Larned, promises, by its critical estimates of books, to be especially serviceable to historical students. For teachers and librarians a helpful list will be |