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.