DOCUMENTS-Thomas Shepard to Hugh Peter, 1645; The Illinois Indians to Captain Abner Prior, 1794; South Carolina in the Presidential Election of The American Historical Review THE HISTORICAL OPPORTUNITY IN AMERICA THAT HAT the people of the United States are fond of history is shown by their eagerness to make it, rather than by any habit of turning to the past as furnishing precedents for guidance in times of uncertainty or peril. We are at this moment engaged in an exciting episode of a contest already centuries old; we feel the liveliest interest in the details of the historical drama going on before our eyes; and we understand the importance of keeping an accurate record of the deeds of our popular heroes. We not only require detailed information as to what they say and do in moments of crisis and peril, but we insist on exact statements of what they would have done had circumstances been otherwise, what they declined to do, what they eat and drink or refuse to partake of, how they are clad and how they prepare themselves for a plunge into the sea under an enemy's guns. The events now passing are like the meteorological observations of Arctic travellers or the cases before a crowded court; they accumulate faster than we can dispose of them; and it will require a generation of historical writers to sift the crude materials and to work out the story of our own times. Side by side with this fierce interest in the events of the day is a disregard, almost an ignorance, of the past history of America. At the end of a quiet and uneventful decade, the nation has suddenly awakened to the possibility of a new career; but it seems disposed to look on the war, its causes and its results, as sudden and unexpected; as something to be met and settled with due reference to the conditions of the end of the nineteenth century, but with an impatient ignoring of the slow development of a Spanish question in the four hundred years which have rolled away since America was discovered. There has been a passionate appeal to principles of for |