186 HISTORY OF AMERICA 



was the most favorable field on the globe for the spread of a society 

 so large, uniform, and isolated as to answer the purposes of science." 



It is safe to say that the problems most important for considera- 

 tion by historians of America are not those of the narrative of 

 events or of the personality of leaders, but, rather, those which 

 arise when American history is viewed as the record of the develop- 

 ment of society in a wilderness environment; of the transformation 

 of this society as it arose to higher cultural stages; of the spreading 

 of it into new wildernesses by extension across the continent. In 

 other words, we have to deal with the formation and expansion 

 of the American people, the composition of the population, their 

 institutions, their economic life, and their fundamental assumptions 

 what we may call the American spirit and the relation of these 

 to the different periods and conditions of American history. 



If, then, the all-embracing problem in our history is the descrip- 

 tion and explanation of the progress of this society, at once develop- 

 ing and expanding, we shall find that within it are contained a 

 multitude of subordinate problems. First, let us consider the phe- 

 nomenon of our expanding society in reference to the fact that the 

 vast spaces over which this forming people have spread are them- 

 selves a complex of physiographic sections. American sectionalism 

 has been very inadequately dealt with by our historians. Impressed 

 by the artificial political boundary lines of states, they have almost 

 entirely given their attention either to national or to state history, 

 or to the broad division of North and South, overlooking the fact that 

 there are several natural, economic, and social sections that are 

 fundamental in American historical development. As population 

 extended itself, it flowed into various physiographic provinces, 

 some of them comparable in size and resources, not only to the 

 greater nations of Europe, but even to some of the great empires 

 that have from time to time been formed by combinations of these 

 nations. The American physical map may be regarded as a map of 

 potential nations and empires, each to be conquered and colon- 

 ized, each to rise through stages of development, each to achieve a 

 certain social and industrial unity, each to possess certain funda- 

 mental assumptions, certain psychological traits, and each to interact 

 with the others, and in combination to form that United States, 

 the explanation of the development of which is the task of the his- 

 torian. 



The physiographers have recognized the existence of natural 

 provinces and have mapped them under such names as the New 

 England Plateaus, the Piedmont Plains, the Lake and Prairie 

 Plains, the Gulf Plains, the Great Plains, etc. The Census Bureau has 

 likewise attempted sectional divisions, on the basis of its maps of 

 population, industrial conditions, resources, etc. Railroad managers 



