This work is a labor of love. When I was a
little boy, my parents and elder sisters taught me a great deal of Greek,
Roman, and English history, but America did not come into it. At Stonyhurst, my
school, I was given a magnificent grounding in English constitutional history,
but again the name of America scarcely intruded. At Oxford, in the late 1940s,
the School of Modern History was at the height of its glory, dominated by such
paladins as A. J. P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor—Roper, Sir Maurice Powicke, K. B.
McFarlane, and Sir Richard Southern, two of whom I was fortunate to have as
tutors and all of whose lectures I attended. But nothing was said of America,
except in so far as it lay at the margin of English history. I do not recall
any course of lectures on American history as such. A. J. P. Taylor, at the
conclusion of a tutorial, in which the name of America had cropped up, said
grimly: `You can study American history when you have graduated, if you can
bear it.’ His only other observation on the subject was: `One of the penalties
of being President of the United States is that you must subsist for four years
without drinking anything except Californian wine.’ American history was
nothing but a black hole in the Oxford curriculum. Of course things have now
changed completely, but I am talking of the Oxford academic world of half a
century ago. Oxford was not alone in treating American history as a
non—subject. Reading the memoirs of that outstanding American journalist
Stewart Alsop, I was intrigued to discover that, when he was a boy at Groton in
the 1930s, he was taught only Greek, Roman, and English history.
As a result of this lacuna in my education, I
eventually came to American history completely fresh, with no schoolboy or
student prejudices or antipathies. Indeed my first contacts with American
history were entirely non—academic: I discussed it with officers of the US
Sixth Fleet when I was an officer in the Garrison at Gibraltar, during my
military service, and later in the 1950s when I was working as a journalist in
Paris and had the chance to meet such formidable figures as John Foster Dulles,
then Secretary of State, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and his successor at
SHAPE Headquarters, General Matthew Ridgeway. From the late 1950s I began
visiting the United States regularly, three or four times a year, traveling all
over the country and meeting men and women who were shaping its continuing
history. Over forty years I have grown to know and admire the United States and
its people, making innumerable friends and acquaintances, reading its splendid
literature, visiting many of its universities to give lectures and participate
in debates, and attending scores of conferences held by American businesses and
other institutions.
In short, I entered the study of American
history through the back door. But I also got to know about it directly during
the research for a number of books I wrote in these years: A History of
Christianity, A History o f the Jews, Modern Times: the World from the Twenties
to the Nineties, and The Birth o f the Modern: World Society, 1815—1830. Some
of the material acquired in preparing these books I have used in the present
one, but updated, revised, corrected, expanded, and refined. As I worked on the
study of the past, and learned about the present by traveling all over the
world—but especially in the United States—my desire to discover more about that
extraordinary country, its origins and its evolution, grew and grew, so that I
determined in the end to write a history of it, knowing from experience that to
produce a book is the only way to study a subject systematically, purposefully,
and retentively. My editor in New York, Cass
Canfield Jr of HarperCollins, encouraged me
warmly. So this project was born, out of enthusiasm and excitement, and now, after
many years, it is complete.
Writing a history of the American people,
covering over 400 years, from the late 16th century to the end of the 20th, and
dealing with the physical background and development of an immense tract of
diverse territory, is a herculean task. It can be accomplished only by the
ruthless selection and rejection of material, and made readable only by moving
in close to certain aspects, and dealing with them in fascinating detail, at
the price of merely summarizing others. That has been my method, as in earlier
books covering immense subjects, though my aim nonetheless has been to produce
a comprehensive account, full of facts and dates and figures, which can be used
with confidence by students who wish to acquire a general grasp of American
history. The book has new and often trenchant things to say about every aspect
and period of America’s past, and I do not seek, as some historians do, to
conceal my opinions. They are there for all to see, and take account of or
discount. But I have endeavored, at all stages, to present the facts fully,
squarely, honestly, and objectively, and to select the material as
untendentiously as I know how. Such a fact—filled and lengthy volume as this is
bound to contain errors. If readers spot any, I would be grateful if they would
write to me at my private address: 29 Newton Road, London W25JR; so that they
may be corrected; and if they find any expressions of mine or opinions
insupportable, they are welcome to give me their comments so that I may weigh them.
The notes at the end of the book serve a
variety of purposes: to give the sources of facts, figures, quotations, and
assertions; to acknowledge my indebtedness to other scholars; to serve as a
guide to further reading; and to indicate where scholarly opinion differs,
directing the reader to works which challenge the views I have formed. I have
not bowed to current academic nostrums about nomenclature or accepted the
flyblown philacteries of Political Correctness. So I do not acknowledge the
existence of hyphenated Americans, or Native Americans or any other qualified
kind. They are all Americans to me: black, white, red, brown, yellow, thrown
together by fate in that swirling maelstrom of history which has produced the
most remarkable people the world has ever seen. I love them and salute them,
and this is their story.