United States Books

A DECLARATION. When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel... more...

CHAPTER I. REVOLUTIONARY TRADITIONS. Middle Georgia—Colonel David Love—His Widow—Governor Dunmore— Colonel Tarleton—Bill Cunningham—Colonel Fannin—My Grandmother's Bible—Solomon's Maxim Applied—Robertus Love—The Indian Warrior— Dragon Canoe—A Buxom Lass—General Gates—Marion—Mason L. Weems— Washington—"Billy Crafford." My earliest memories are... more...

The Plains Country. Seventy years ago, when some of the events here recounted took place, Indians were Indians, and the plains were the plains indeed. Those plains stretched out in limitless rolling swells of prairie until they met the blue sky that on every hand bent down to touch them. In spring brightly green, and spangled with wild flowers, by midsummer this prairie had grown sere and yellow.... more...

SPEECH. Mr. Cushing said: I hold in my hand several Petitions on the subject of the slave interest in the District of Columbia. One of them, I now present to the House. Upon it, I make the preliminary motion, understood to be necessary in such cases, that it be received; and, in reference to this question, I have some few remarks to submit to the consideration of the House. This Petition prays for the... more...

PREFACE It has not been the purpose of the author to write a history of the University of Michigan. Several predecessors in this field have done their work so well that another book entirely historical in character might seem superfluous. Rather it is the aim of this volume to furnish a survey—sketching broadly the development of the University, and dwelling upon incidents and personalities that... more...

I. THE ICE FOLK AND THE EARTH FOLK. The first Ohio stories are part of the common story of the wonderful Ice Age, when a frozen deluge pushed down from the north, and covered a vast part of the earth's surface with slowly moving glaciers. The traces that this age left in Ohio are much the same as it left elsewhere, and the signs that there were people here ten thousand years ago, when the glaciers... more...

INTRODUCTION In the year 1864 Mr. Henry C. Murphy, then corresponding secretary of the Long Island Historical Society, had the good fortune to find in an old book-store in Amsterdam a manuscript whose bearings upon the history of the middle group of American colonies made it, when translated and made accessible as a publication in the Memoirs of the Long Island Historical Society, an historical... more...

Chapter I. Farewell to the Old Southern Home. I have often wondered, when viewing a modern passenger coach, with its palace cars, its sleeping and dining cars, if those who cross the "Great American Desert," from the Mississippi to the Pacific in four days, realize the hardships, dangers and privations of the Argonauts of fifty-eight years ago. The "Plains" were then an unbroken... more...

"The Sovereign Remedy" Tobacco was probably first brought to the shores of England from Florida by Sir John Hawkins in 1565. Englishmen were growing it by the 1570's, and after the return of the daring Sir Francis Drake to England with a large quantity of tobacco captured in the West Indies in 1586, the use of tobacco in England was increased substantially. By 1604 its consumption had... more...

A few months ago, as I was leaving Baltimore for a summer sojourn on the coast of Maine, two old soldiers of the war between the States took their seats immediately behind me in the car, and began a lively conversation about the various battles in which they had faced each other more than a quarter of a century ago, when a trip to New England would have been no holiday jaunt for one of their... more...