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ATHENAUM

"I AM especially impressed with the variety and the liveliness of the selections," writes an experienced teacher of history of

MUZZEY'S

Readings in American History

Boston Atlanta

and that is the predominant feature of these selections: their number, their variety, their wide range of sources, the fact that it is not one but many types of the American mind that are represented, that it is not one but many activities of which these are the expressions. Diaries, letters, memoirs, acts of Congress, executive documents, books of travel, economic reports, all have been culled by the editor in search of material which he believed would aid the student to see all sides of the questions covered.

$1.50

GINN AND COMPANY

New York Dallas

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

An Enlarged Edition of

Green's Short History of

the English People

REVISED AND ENLARGED

By ALICE STOPFORD GREEN

The London Times says of this new edition: "The keenest-eyed literary critic would find it difficult to determine from internal evidence where J. R. Green laid down the pen and Mrs. Green took it up. There is the same picturesque style, the same gift of epigrammatic expression and faculty for seizing the essential detail, the same broad outlook on human affairs. There is no important aspect of history since the battle of Waterloo upon which Mrs. Green has not touched with a deft and sympathetic hand. . . .

'Altogether it is difficult to see how the history of the last century could have been better written.'

AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY Cincinnati

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New York

Chicago

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Introducing a New Series of

European History Maps

By W. &. A. K. Johnston

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facts as taught in American Schools. Lithographed in Europe -possessing the soft delicate colorings that only European map makers seem able to obtain-colorings that give relief to the wording, making it clear and legible across the school

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THE MAGAZINE FOR 1917-1918

With the co-operation of the National Bureau for Historical Service of Washington, D. C., THE HISTORY TEACHER'S MAGAZINE will publish during the period, September, 1917, to June, 1918, a series of about forty articles by well-known scholars.

The purpose of the papers will be to show to what extent, if at all, the teaching of history in American schools should be made to bear upon the present international situation of the United States.

Special Trial Subscription Rate

To introduce the MAGAZINE and this important series of articles to teachers not already subscribers, a special Trial Subscription Rate is offered of FOUR MONTHS FOR FIFTY CENTS

Send remittance direct to the publishers,

MCKINLEY PUBLISHING COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA

The regular subscription rate is Two Dollars a year, except to members of the American Historical Association and members of history teachers' associations, to whom a reduced rate of One Dollar is offered. Such subscriptions can not be received through agencies, but must be sent direct to the publishers or the secretaries of the associations.

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Volume VIII. Number 8.

PHILADELPHIA, OCTOBER, 1917.

$2.00 a year. 20 cents a copy.

American Interest in the West Indies

BY WALDEMAR WESTERGAARD, PH.D., POMONA COLLEGE, CLAREMONT, CAL.

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The "American Mediterranean" has come to receive an increasing attention from historians during the opening years of the present century. It is significant that this deepening interest is synchronous with the successful completion of the Panama Canal project. Historical scholars, both in England and in America, have come to an increasing realization of the importance of the West Indies in colonial history. Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas, in his "Historical Geography of the British West Indies," Dr. C. H. Haring in his Buccaneers in the Seventeenth Century," Mr. A. P. Newton in his Colonizing Activities of the Puritans," and Prof. Stewart L. Mims in his "Colbert's West Indian Policy," are among recent historical writers who represent the newer view. During recent years the attitude of writers towards the history of the English colonies on the mainland has undergone significant changes. The epochThe epochmaking studies of Mr. George Louis Beer, and the admirable work of Professors Charles M. Andrews, of Yale; Herbert L. Osgood, of Columbia, and Edward Channing, of Harvard University, have helped measurably in doing away with the air of provincial insularity that had hitherto surrounded colonial historiography.

"Mention the West Indies of the sixteen hundreds," says a recent writer, "and the mind leaps to a free field of fancy; in the languorous noon of a tropic sea, by the curving strand of some nameless isle, one sees, perhaps, a gaunt and dingy flagless ship, waiting whilst its crew, long-haired and bleared and greasy, divide the plunder of a brass-bound treasure chest a lawless time and place, with bold adventures metely chronicled by the pen of Smollet or Defoe or R. L. S. The gentle reader may remember vaguely that the Caribbean was not filled entirely with galleons and corsairs, that some men actually did build homes and spin out an existence, sometimes profitable enough, in their tobacco fields or sugar mills; but to ask him soberly to think of the Antilles as the residence of honest men in the century when the buccaneers haunted Hispaniola, and Mansfield and Morgan harried up and down the Spanish Main, is quite too much to ask of human nature." 2

So it seems peculiarly appropriate at this time, 1 Read at the November, 1916, meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, held at San Diego, Cal.

when the interest of the United States is drawn towards the Caribbean by the completion of the Panama Canal, and by the purchase of the Danish Islands, to pass in brief review certain cardinal facts in the history of that myth-enshrouded archipelago. For more than a century following the discovery, Spain's political sovereignty in the New World was not seriously questioned. The effectiveness of her commercial monopoly is emphasized rather than weakened by the exploits of such famous interlopers as Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake. It was not until nearly a quarter of a century after the destruction of the Spanish Armada through the efforts of the English and the Dutch, that Spain found herself obliged to share with her Protestant neighbors to the north the ownership of the New World. During this century and part of the following, the Pacific Ocean was, of course a closed sea [Mare clausum], while on the Atlantic side of the New World no Teutonic or nonon-Catholic power had gained a foothold.

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By the opening of the seventeenth century the situation underwent a tremendous change. England and the Protestant Netherlands had both acquired confidence in their ability to meet Spain upon an equal footing both in naval and commercial spheres. In spite of Spanish protests they found themselves able to begin settlements, not only in Virginia and New Netherland, but on the islands that guarded the routes by which the Spanish plate fleets left Vera Cruz and Porto Bello for the Old World.

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The early history of these colonizing efforts exhibits a remarkable uniformity, especially along economic lines. The West Indies offered no highly developed civilization, no advanced state of culture, as did the East Indian lands, which could yield a surplus beyond its needs for purposes of commerce. The early settlers were forced to depend upon such easily raised crops as tobacco or cotton, upon hides and tallow from the wild cattle that roamed over the mountains, upon the dye-woods in the primeval forests that covered the hillsides. It was not until about 1640 that human existence acquired a sort of stability in the lesser islands of the West Indies, through the introduction, by Dutchmen from Brazil, of the sugar

cane.

Against the efforts of Frenchmen and Dutchmen, Englishmen and Courlanders, Danes and Brandenburgers, Spain made a determined but eventually

2 D. R. Dixon, "Foundations of West India Policy" unsuccessful attempt to keep those foreign aggressors ("Political Science Quarterly," Vol. 30, p. 661).

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out of her American preserves. Her Barlovento

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