Слике страница
PDF
ePub

Guhl and Koner, Life of the Greeks and Romans, 360, 362. Johnston, Private Life of the Romans, 119, 120, 121, 122, 127, 136.

Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Vol. I, 681.

Wilkins, Roman Antiquities, 17, 19.

MODERN HISTORY.

FIELD PLAN OF A MANOR.

Harding, New Medieval and Modern History, 171. Howe, Essentials in Early European History, 216. Larned, History of England, 71.

Myers, Medieval and Modern History (Rev.), 84. Shepherd, Historical Atlas, 104.

West, Modern History, 42.

West, Modern World, 118.

DIAGRAM ILLUSTRATING FEUDAL RELATIONS BETWEEN LORD AND VASSAL.

Davis, Medieval and Modern Europe, 68.

Harding, New Medieval and Modern History, 59.
Robinson, History of Western Europe, 115.

GROUND PLAN OF MEDIEVAL CASTLE.

Howe, Essentials in Early European History, 229. LaCroix, Manners, Customs and Dress During the Middle Ages, 10.

Munro and Whitcomb, Middle Ages and Modern Europe, 136.

Tappan, When Knights Were Bold, 57.

GROUND PLAN OF A CATHEDRAL.

Gwilt, Encylopædia of Architecture, 116.
Hamlin, History of Architecture, 173.

Howe, Essentials in Early European History, 233.
LaCroix, The Arts in the Middle Ages, 377.
Lubke, Ecclesiastical Art in Germany, 48, 85.
Scott, Medieval Architecture, Vol. II, 110.
Tucker, Short History of Architecture, 128.
Universal Cyclopædia and Atlas, Vol. I, 297.

UNITED STATES HISTORY.

BOSTON AND VICINITY, 1775.
Cambridge, Modern History Atlas, Vol. XIV, Map No. 70.
Fite, History of United States, 130.

Hart, Essentials in American History, 150.
Howard, Preliminaries of the Revolution, 310.
James and Sanford, American History, 155.
Labberton, New Historical Atlas, 172.
McLaughlin, History of the American Nation, 156.
Muzzey, American History, 124.
Sheldon, American History, 153.

Thwaites and Kendall, History of United States, 151.

SIEGE OF YORKTOWN.

Elson, History of United States, 311.

Harper, Encyclopædia of United States History, Vol. X, "Yorktown."

James and Sanford, American History, 178.
Labberton, New Historical Atlas, 172.

Montgomery, American History, 209.
Muzzey, American History, 144.

Ridpath, Popular History of United States of America,

353.

Sheldon, American History, 187.

[blocks in formation]

These drawings can be put upon the board by some pupil. It is better to have pupils do this work as much as possible since it arouses more interest and makes the work seem like their own. This is the proper and real dynamic kind of teaching. Pupils as a rule are very willing to do this work and become more interested in their history as a result. The teacher should consult the references listed before referring the pupils to the books. Some of the references listed have better or simpler plans than others and the teacher after examination can advise the pupils which to choose. It is not necessary that the teacher suggest one book only. A better plan is to give the pupil two or three of the best references available and leave the pupil make the final choice.

The explanation of the drawing should be done by the pupil who made the drawing, or by any pupil in the class and if the latter makes any mistakes let the original person who made the drawing correct and give additional remarks. The pupil giving the original explanation of the drawing should make a previous study of the subject for discussion. Another good plan would be to give several pupils references in addition to the one who is to do the drawing. This group might read upon the subject and be ready for additional remarks at the time of the explanation of the blackboard work. Or if enough books are available the complete list of references might be given to the whole class, and then all pupils be held ready to contribute their share in explaining the blackboard diagram. This is the best plan since it keeps all pupils busy and also makes it easier for them to understand the drawing. The teacher can round out the recitation by material gained by additional reading.

The results of this kind of a recitation will be lasting. Impressions received by the pupils will be vivid, clear, and will make the work more interesting. It will be just one more way of arousing interest, and the more methods the teacher has at hand the better and more effective will be the results accomplished.

Timely Suggestions for Secondary School History

PREPARED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF FOUR COMMITTEES OF HISTORIANS IN CO-OPERATION WITH THE NATIONAL BOARD FOR HISTORICAL SERVICE.

I. Old and New in the Near East

BY PROFESSOR A. T. OLMSTEAD, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS.

The history of the ancient Near-East has long since come into its own. The romance of its wondrous resurrection, the lure of its strange pictorial or wedgeshape characters, has attracted the seeker after the unusual. Scholars have appreciated its importance as the foundation of that Græco-Roman civilization which in turn forms the foundation of the modern world. All who read have perused in childhood the pages of the Sacred Book and doubtless have determined when of age to see for themselves the monuments it declares to be "there unto this day." With maturity this familiarity has changed to a strange combination of the well known and the far distant. In memories of the past, "And it came to pass that David" has taken its place with "Once upon a time there lived a handsome young prince," and the whole has merged into a sort of fairy land. With the chosen people, the others mentioned on the sacred page, Assyrians and Babylonians, Egyptians and Hittites and Philistines, have taken unto themselves something of this glamor. Always there have been serious students and intelligent readers to examine the history of the ancient Near-East for the light it casts on the origin of our most cherished religious conceptions.

Far distant as measured by miles, so absorbed in developing our own civilization at home that we have cared little for foreign trade, Americans have rarely appreciated our vast missionary interests in this region and we have never realized that hundreds of thousands of our newest citizens call this their homeland. Now we have suddenly had forced upon us the fact that a battle in Palestine or in Babylonia may in the ultimate analysis have much to do with "making the world safe for democracy." We are beginning to suspect that when the war is ended and our envoys take their place around the inevitable council board, the fate of the Near-East will be decided. Our envoys must be supported by an intelligent public opinion, and yet our citizenship, as a whole, knows nothing of what lies back of the NearEastern question. Formerly we in America studied the modern Near-East for the light thrown on the sacred past. Now it is the present that needs the light of the past.

There is no need to develop interest, the interest is there. Regret it as we may, all humanity loves a fight; and when lands hitherto in the realm of the fairy tale suddenly become the scene of very real fighting, carried on by our Allies and for the cause to which we have devoted ourselves, interest need not be manufactured. The boy finds that Sunday School

lessons may have a point; the business man excavates his dust-covered Bible to read for himself the Samson story connected with Gaza and to discover whether it was a King of Babylon who ate grass. The teacher should not consider the work done when the student has been properly edified. His parents may be interested as well, and in the immediate future their influence counts for more.

Material for the vivification of this history may be found everywhere. The newspapers and magazines are filled with photographs of the Near-East and sites of interest to the antiquary are side by side with railway stations and marching armies. Nearly all illustrate some point in geography; likenesses and differences in terrain, in soil, in products, can be impressed, never to be forgotten. The Near-East is a perfect museum of ethnic types, and modern photographs may be used to illustrate manners and customs we had thought confined to the Bible narratives. Germans drilling Turkish troops at the boom town of Beersheba see the wandering Arabs watering their flocks in true Biblical fashion at the same wells used by the patriarchs.

The country has always remained the same, the people have changed but little. The campaigns of Napoleon in Syria have been used to good effect to explain the Biblical narrative. No better account of the change" from the desert to the sown" can be found, for ancient and modern times alike, than the curt announcement of the gradual advance of the British from Egypt into. Palestine. The story of the ancient Near-East has in its turn much to contribute to present-day action. Had allied statesmen realized the meaning of the Battle of Issus, for example, the fiasco in Babylonia might have been a brilliant thrust forward from Alexandretta until the whole of Arabic-speaking Turkey had been severed from that part of the empire which recognized the dominance of the ruling race.

The history of the Near-East has always been that of her roads, and much of interest can be given along this line. The world has of late learned that, even with the modern development of sea traffic, the greatest route of the ancient Near-East-that from Egypt through Syria, with its branches to Asia Minor and to Babylonia-is still of high strategic importance; Egyptians and Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, Arabs and Crusaders, have their successors in the British and Turkish soldiers fighting on the southwest corner of Palestine for the control of the great highway. The Bagdad Railroad in large part parallels the Royal Road of Persian times, and that

[merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small]

The years between the Norman Conquest and the Tudors are the greatest formative period in the history of English, and therefore of our own, political institutions. In the field of religion at this time English institutions show a similarity to those of the Continent rather than the distinctive marks so clearly seen in the centuries following. Our wonderful language, though it is during those years acquiring the varied elements which make it so rich, is only in the next age fashioned into the perfection of the Authorized Version of the Bible. But in the domain which we call political, in the development of law, both public and private, England is absolutely unique, and probably more markedly so during the later Middle Ages than in any subsequent period.

It is true, many of the elements which have united to form our own distinctive political heritage are to be seen elsewhere in Europe at this time, but only in England did these elements remain to be fused into a constitution truly popular. There, and there alone, can we see such an evolution, such a gradual "broadening down from precedent to precedent," that by the end of our period a contemporary could truly compare the dominium politicum et regale or limited monarchy of England, with the dominium regale, or absolute monarchy across the Channel.

The end of this evolution was a Commonwealth far enough removed as yet, at the end of the Middle Ages, from the ideals of our modern democracy; but one, nevertheless, that contained popular elements unknown elsewhere, the germs of the democracy which we now rightly regard as our heritage. These institutions are to use a phrase of Mr. Balfour's-a part of our "intellectual climate." They have come to us as naturally as the air we breathe, and often, it is to be feared, as unnoticed, while some other people have had to reach them by the harder way of revolution. But whether the result of inheritance or acquisition, of growth or of strife, as a force now actually moulding the modern world, and, as we believe, destined in the future to mould it far more even than now, these institutions in their development are to be traced, in the main, back to an English origin; and of that development itself, the later Middle Ages are by no means the least important part.

The first impetus to this development in our period came from the strong government of William the Conqueror. And possibly the most significant thing about this government is the fact that, from policy or necessity, or both, William chose to preserve and strengthen, rather than to overturn or weaken, the English law and the existing machinery for its local administration, particularly the shire and hundred courts. This not only connects the institutional history of our period with the age preceding, but it also in fact determined the whole trend of the development of the institutions which we still enjoy to-day. It has been said that the Conqueror strengthened these old institutions which he found in England. This was chiefly due to the stronger central government of the Norman conqueror and to the centralizing and unifying of the local administrative machinery and its procedure resulting therefrom. The old courts of the hundred and the shire, though they never ceased to be such, now became the king's courts as well. The king became "the fountain of justice," and as he did so that justice itself became uniform through a uniform administration.

This was accomplished at first through the practice of issuing writs or orders by the king and his council, which were often identical for all the counties and addressed to all the sheriffs. Later, as this means alone proved inadequate, the sending of periodic commissions, the justices itinerant, throughout the counties, gradually grew into a regular system which, in a specialized form, persists among us yet. Thus a uniform administration was secured, and from it a unification of the law itself. The result was the English common law, the system which still in large measure determines our every-day acts and relations one with another. It is to the Norman and early Angevin centralization of administrative machinery that the fact is mainly due that the law we enjoy to-day is not at bottom that of the Province of Quebec. That strong administration gave us a law that is an outgrowth of English local custom, and it gave the world a new, independent, and indigenous legal system, the only one in fact which ever has successfully contested or apparently ever can contest the supremacy of the law of Rome in the world of Western civilization.

[ocr errors]

But the courts which enforced this law under Henry I or Henry II were no mere law courts" in the narrow meaning of our day. They were meetings for the transaction of governmental business of all kinds, and in its transaction the "good men" of the districts had their part, for these men really constituted the court." Their activity, under the Normans and early Angevins, more and more took the form, under royal guidance, of the sworn inquest. In this way local customs were determined, rates were assessed, judicial verdicts were rendered; any facts, in short, could be brought to the notice of the king's officers as a basis for governmental action.

The growth of our jury from these inquests is a fact well known, but more important even was the political education gained by the "good men" of the hundreds and counties from this participation in government. For as Stubbs says, behind the first participation of the knights of the shire in a national parliament, lies a century and a half of preparation and political education in this participation in the local business of the shire and hundred courts. Thus the development of representative government as it exists in the world of to-day is largely the result of the administrative reforms of the Norman and Angevin periods, working upon older English materials.

As a system of government it undoubtedly owed much to royal initiative, and even to the king's need of increased revenues; but it was also a system which made royal action depend upon the voice of the communities, given by men selected from those communities themselves. Before the end of our period the free election of these men by the community itself and the instruction of these representatives by their constituents have become a matter of fact of which the writs of summons to Parliament take official notice.

66

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

Thus the communities obtained a voice in government, and when the feudal estates" from which these representatives were drawn began to give way before the rising idea of a National Commonwealth, the house of communes became the House of Commons, and it could be said as early as the reign of Edward III-centuries before the same was true elsewhere that everyone was bound by an Act of Parlia

ment because everyone was presumed to be there either in person or through a representative.

This participation of the representatives of the people, though royal in origin, became in time a check upon arbitrary action on the part of the Crown, from which arose what Professor Dicey has called the rule of law, and also that unique contribution of England to the science and practice of politics, the modern limited monarchy.

It is impossible here to trace in detail the results of these developments, but any student can see their enormous influence upon our subsequent history and upon the growth of our political ideals. To give only one example in lieu of many, we have the doctrine, accepted unwillingly by the king as early as the reign of Edward I, that parliamentary grants are a voluntary contribution of the people. This, like so many other of our free institutions, was sometimes forgotten and often had to be fought for, but what a part it has played in the history of liberty! Even those who emphasize our grievances in the American Revolution would do well to consider that American opposition grew in large part out of English ideals; and to remember, for example, that the cry No taxation without representation" could hardly have arisen in any but an English country, while Chatham's opposition to the taxation of Americans was based in part on this theory of the medieval English constitution.

66

Equally important is the long history of freedom of debate or of impeachment of royal officials, but these and many others I must perforce omit, together with the whole of local government and its organs, such as the parish and its machinery, or the justices of the peace, both of which have so greatly influenced our life.

These, then, are but a few of the instances of our indebtedness to medieval England, but a mere passing glance at them will serve to show to anyone acquainted with our own political institutions, that whatever our actual ancestry, we are the heirs and successors of a great political race; and the more careful the study of our institutional history becomes, the greater is likely to be our feeling of gratitude to the framers of the English Constitution.

III. Ethnographical Conditions in Central Europe

BY THE COMMITTEE ON EUROPEAN HISTORY.

If we look at a racial map of Central Europe to-day the first sensation which it inspires is hopeless confusion. Every color and hue known seems to have been pressed into service, and each one of them represents a nationality feeling itself distinct from the others, having its own distinct history and usages. But is the problem as hopeless as it appears, and is there a possibility of simplification?

The term "Central Europe" covers the present countries of Germany and Austria - Hungary. The Balkan States, or Southeastern Europe, have much the same problems intensified, but space forbids more

than a slight reference to the region below the Save. The various races inhabiting this section can for all practical purposes be separated into two main divisions. On the one hand the various Latin, Teutonic and Slavic nations and the Greeks, in fact, the dominant race in nearly every European country (Hungary and Turkey being the great exceptions); on the other hand the Magyars, Turks, and probably the original Roumans and Bulgars. But this brings us to a fact of great significance, that it is the idea which each nationality holds as to its origin that is of primary importance. The Rouman may be at bottom

ancient Thracian or Bulgar-Avar of Asiatic stock, but he insists upon thinking of himself politically as Latin and European.

It is nearly of equal necessity for us to note that religion separates nationalities of the same race from each other and may divide a nationality against itself. The Poles and Russians are both Slavs, but the Pole is Roman Catholic, while the Russians adopted the Greek faith. The Croat and the Serbian are both Serbs, whatever the mixture of their blood; the Serb is Greek Catholic, the Croat preponderantly Roman.

Now if we consider the races within this Central European territory we find that they fall, in the broadest sense of the term, into three classes. First is the German, forming about nine-tenths of the population of Germany, about a third of that of Austria, and about a tenth of that of Hungary. Next is the Slav, forming a small fraction of the population of Germany, but preponderant in Austria, where they number over two-thirds of the population and a large minority—about two-fifths of that of Hungary. Lastly there are various non-Aryan nationalities of Asiatic origin and probably related to the Chinese. These are the Hungarians (Magyars), who make up one-half the population-and the ruling half-in Hungary and the Roumanians, who form fifteen per cent. of the Hungarian population. Add to this a sprinkling of Italians, gypsies and the ever-present Jew, and you have a fairly correct analysis of the races of Central Europe.

Generally speaking, racial complications become worse in passing from north to south and from west to east in Central Europe. In the German Empire the great mass of the population is German, with fringes of other nationalities, such as Danes, Poles, and Lithuanians. In both Austria and Hungary this central mass of Germans in the one and Magyars in the other is outnumbered by the ring of Slavs, Italians and Roumanians. In western Hungary, German, Magyar, Slav and Roumanian are tangled together in almost hopeless confusion.

What are the general characteristics of these races, and what part have they played in history? To this question space forbids a detailed answer, and will only allow of some suggestions for further study. Take the Germans first. Their general characteristics today are well known, but how different they are from the free, individualistic, liberty loving Germans of the days of Tacitus! Do we pay enough attention to the introduction into Germany of the Roman law and the Roman methods of government, in which the State was all, the individual nothing and the will of the Emperor had the force of law? Do we trace this influence clearly through the benevolent despotisms of South Germany to its introduction into Brandenburg Prussia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, where it took such strong root? Or in estimating the qualities of the Prussian do we stop to remember that he is the descendant of immigrants who went into the territories of modern Brandenburg and Prussia much as our ancestors went into the Far

West, and that these immigrants were then, as they almost always are, the pick of the people-the hardest, the most self-reliant, the most adventurous. Germans give great space to this colonization movement, but it is hardly mentioned in our text-books. Do we remember that they found there the Slavs, who had filtered in to this territory when it had been left vacant after the migrations; an unwarlike and weaker race whom the Germans subdued, but only after a long warfare that laid the foundations of Prussian militarism? This story of Germany's "Great West" of the Middle Ages had almost as much importance as our western expansion; it was, in a way, Germany's first colony, her first "place in the sun;" and yet how many of us know of it? Or how many know colony," planted in Western Hungary, to hold back the Slav and Roumanian in the Middle Ages, and to save German Kultur" on the upper Danube? Here they still remain, a little island of Teutonism in the surrounding sea of Magyar, Slav and Roumanian civilization.

of that other German

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

Or read the brilliant account of the early Slavs in Mr. Barley's "The Slavs of the War Zone." Does it not suggest that the fundamental points of Slav character have not greatly changed in the last thousand years.1

In our historical studies these Slavs first appear as a race making up the population of the Russian Empire over which Peter the Great ruled, and on whom he tried to force the alien western civilization. From that time we study Russian history as a sort of appendix to the history of Western Europe. But this treatment gives us little knowledge of the foundations of Russian history, and as to the non-Russian Slav it gives us no knowledge whatsoever. And yet this Slav race has a great future, and understand it we must.2

Finally we have various peoples of non-Aryan origin-Hungarians and Roumanians. These races show their nomadic, Asiatic origin in their individualism, their quickness to adapt themselves to outsde civilization together with their inability to create for themselves. They have had many able men as leaders whom they have alternately lauded and crucified. Extremely likeable and extremely unreliable—they are in a way the spoilt children of Europe. It was the Magyar who by his race policy in Hungary contributed so greatly to the world war. Less numerous and less powerful than the other two races, these peoples cannot have, in the future, the place they have held in the past.

Such then is the race problem of Central Europe. There are other nationalities, such as the Italian, to add to the difficulty, but in the main it is a struggle between the three races or sets of people mentioned. For each of them has his own "kultur," each

1 An article on the Slavs will be published in this MAGA

ZINE.

2 An article on the Russian Revolution will be published in this MAGAZINE.

« ПретходнаНастави »