A Dusty Tomes Audio Book

In Cooperation with Spoken Realms

Volume 2 of History of the United States of America: From the Discovery of the Continent by George Bancroft. A major US history series in six volumes. “Author’s Last Revision” 1883 by D. Appleton and Company.

Bancroft as US Secretary of the Navy established the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. He was a senior American diplomat in Europe, leading diplomatic missions to Britain and Germany. His comprehensive study of the origins and development of the United States caused him to be referred to as the “Father of American history.”

From the Author’s Preface regarding the Last Revision to the series:

… greater precision has been sought for; the fitter word that offered itself accepted; and, without the surrender of the right of history to pronounce its opinion, care has been taken never unduly to forestall the judgment of the reader, but to leave events as they sweep onward to speak their own condemnation or praise.

From a 2008 Review by Stephen W. Sawyer:

For Bancroft, then, the historian brought the Revolution to life in the present in order that it might circulate within the country and throughout humanity. Bancroft was convinced that a poet-historian could uncover the democratic ideal that was unfolding in the American project.

Dawes and Nichols argued that Bancroft was a sound historian in that he grounded his work in archival material. “George Bancroft was the first American historian who conscientiously endeavored to make no important statement without reference to an original document.”

“The author exercises powers of narration which enable the reader to watch the drama of man’s experience proceed like a splendid and inspiring pageant.” (Dawes and Nichols 280) These remarks still capture an essential element of Bancroft’s project. He saw his writing, literary or poetical as it may have been, as part of the “realization” of man’s experience with democracy. This was the Bancroft that was celebrated in the first half of the nineteenth century, pushed aside in the nationalist consensus of American historical professionalism in the 1890s, and then rediscovered in the inter-war period. He was not describing a democracy that already existed in flowery prose, but employing the poet’s pen to give life to a democratic project which he thought was in the making.

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