CHAPTER I

EUROPEAN BEGINNINGS IN AMERICA

Our History.-Three hundred years ago Englishmen planted the civilization of the Old World upon the eastern border

The log cabin of the early settlers, below it the frame house of colonial days. In the upper right hand corner a Southern mansion of civil war days, and below it a modern home of the colonial type of architecture.

of the United States. Ever since that time hardy frontiers- How we men have been pushing steadily westward across the continent. grew These pioneers first occupied the Atlantic seaboard, then made their way through the gaps of the Alleghanies and overran the broad valley of the Mississippi; and later followed the long trails across the plains and mountains until they reached the shores of the Pacific. Through all these years the American people the sons of the early colonists constantly reënforced by newcomers from Europe-have been busily at work devel

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oping the rich resources of their country, clearing away its forests, cultivating its fields, opening its mines, and building its mills and railroads. At the same time they have been founding new homes, establishing schools, and developing the government under which we now live. The marvelous story of how all these things were done is the history of the United States.

The United States is our country. It matters not whether we live in the crowded cities of the East or upon the vast Our country plains of Kansas or Oklahoma, among the cotton fields of the South or upon the wheat lands of the Dakotas, in Chicago by Lake Michigan or in San Francisco by the western sea, everywhere it is our country. It is our country, too, no matter who we are. We may trace our descent from the earliest colonists or we may be the children of immigrants who arrived only yesterday, but if we all love and serve the America in which we live, we all may proudly say, "This is our country." We are going to study this book in order to learn how this country of ours grew from the simplest beginnings to be the great democratic nation it is to-day.

Our debt to the Old World

The European Background of Our History.-We cannot

Greek Soldiers

It was such soldiers as these who saved freedom by defeating the Persians.

fully understand and appreciate our own history without knowing something of what our people have inherited from the Old World. The ancient Hebrews gave us our religion and many of our moral standards; the Greeks taught us to love the beautiful in art and literature; the Romans originated many of our ideas about law and government. All these peoples lived a long time before the disCovery of America.

In the earliest centuries of the Christian era all the country bordering on the The Roman Mediterranean Sea was governed from Rome, and so this region Empire was called the Roman Empire. Nearly all the civilized people in the world lived in this empire. By civilized people we mean people who have written laws and a government that enforces obedience to these laws; who cultivate the soil; who carry on commerce; who have good houses and roads and ships;

who have schools and books and pictures and music-in a word, we mean people who live much as we do now.

Beyond the frontier of the Roman Empire the people were barbarians; that is, they had not yet learned to

work steadily, they wandered about in

tribes with very little government, they loved war and plunder, and they had no comfortable houses, no schools, and no written language. The barbarians who lived north of the Roman Empire, beyond the Rhine and the Danube, were

the Teutonic race.

Though fierce and It was in such ships as this that the Romans reached warlike, the Teu- all the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

tons possessed many virtues which the older Romans had lost. They were valiant and liberty loving, and many of our social ideas, with some of our forms of government, originated with them. The Teutonic tribes were attracted by the wealth of the Romans and attempted to win it for themselves. For a time the Romans kept them out, but at last they could do so no longer, and the Teutons overran the southern and western parts of Europe. Here they settled, and, mingling with the surviving Romans, became the ancestors of the European peoples of to-day. This fall of the Roman Empire happened in the fifth century of the Christian era.

Our

Teutonic ancestors

The Teutonic tribes lived in their new homes in their simple, barbarian manner, and much of the civilization of the ancient world disappeared. The period during which this state of The Dark affairs lasted is sometimes called the Dark Age because the Age people were so ignorant. But not all the civilized Romans had disappeared. Some of them were left, and little by little they taught their Teutonic conquerors to put away their old

habits and thoughts, and to adopt the civilized ways of living of the Romans. During this time the Teutonic peoples became Christian.

In the course of time these new peoples so far outgrew their old barbarian manners and customs and learned so much about The new the civilized ways of the Romans, that they came to love these peoples ways and to have an intense desire to imitate them and even to improve them. This new longing led them to do many important things. During the long period we have been talking about they had been slowly forming new nations-the France,

Spain, Italy, and England of to-day. Now they began to make their governments very much stronger, to establish schools, to write books, to paint pictures, to make inventions like gunpowder and printing, to trade with other countries, and to look about them for new things and strange adventures. These desires to increase their commerce and to see the world led directly to the discovery of America.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries great military expeditions called crusades were undertaken by the people of The western Europe for the purpose of rescuing the Holy Land Crusades from the hands of the Mohammedans. The crusades brought and their the warlike men of western Europe in contact with the more highly civilized Greeks and Arabs of the East. The crusaders saw many new things which they wanted, and gradually a rich commerce grew up between Europe and Asia. Ships

results

laden with the woods and metals of Europe sailed from Venice, Genoa, and other Italian cities, to Alexandria, Antioch, and the Black Sea region, where their cargoes were exchanged for the cottons, silks, and spices of the Far East. Adventurous European travelers, of whom the most noteworthy was Marco Polo, visited eastern Asia, or Cathay, as they called it, and brought back fabulous stories of its wealth and even hearsay knowledge of rich islands lying in the ocean beyond Cathay.

trade routes to the East

Some time before the discovery of America this rich eastern trade suffered a great reverse. The Turks, a wandering race of barbarians who were moving westward, overran Asia The Turks Minor and, in 1453, captured Constantinople, which thus block the became the capital of their empire. This cut off the trade of the Black Sea region, and as the Turks extended their conquests toward the south, the other European trade routes to the East were in grave danger. All this was a fearful blow to the people of southern Europe who had grown rich by trading with Asia. Their geographers and sailors began to plan how they could find a new and safer way of going to Cathay or the Indies. The Portuguese began the search. A member of their royal family, who was called Prince Henry the Navigator