WITH HIS GENIUS for re-creating the past, Peattie breathes life into the men and the moments that have made us the nation we are. We hear the Liberty Bell ring joyfully for the surrender of Cornwallis, and muffled for the death of Washington. With Tom Paine we peer across the frozen Delaware on the night before Trenton and come better to understand The Rights of Man and the Declaration of Independence. We sit around a table during a hot summer in Philadelphia while a very human group of men (not yet “Founding Fathers") hammer out the Constitution of the United States. We see Washington leave his mother for the wars and later forsake his loved acres to weld together a new nation. We are with Dan’l Boone's daughter when she is captured by the Indians; with rough Jim Bridger and soft-spoken Kit Carson  across the trackless prairies.

In the towns, rather than in the great cities, Peattie seeks the roots of America: old towns as diverse as salty, windswept Marblehead and gentle Harrodsburg.

To Mr. Peattie the past is as alive as the present. America is not an abstract idea; it is a living body of actual experience. More vital than any doctrine is the record of what actually happened, the story of how we be-came what we are.

This special edition of JOURNEY INTO AMERICA has been made available to the Armed Forces of the United States through an arrangement with the original publisher, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.

Editions for the Armed Services, Inc., a non-profit organization established by the Council on Books in Wartime.