The Coming of the White Man Author:Herbert I. Priestley In the broad view of the New World, the history of the United States is only local history. The student who approaches American history without knowing how other human groups have acted in more or less similar circumstances, misses the meaning of what lies before him. It is such standards of comparison that Mr. Priestley provides in this firs... more »t volume of the History of American Life series. Begining with the origins of the European impulse to colonize the West, he traces the Spanish, French, and Dutch settlement of North America and the contributions which the representatives of these transplanted cultures made to American life. For many decades the civilization between the Appalachians and the sea seemed a puny thing beside that of old Mexico, not only in physical wealth but in intellectual effort and achievement. The accounts of seventh century artists, architects, poets, and mathemeticians suggest how New Spain had run through an entire cycle before its northern neighbor has scarcely made a beginning. Instead of a society of simple farmers, with some recourse to the sea, and largely of the same general race character, life in New Spain was a vast and complicated edifice of racial castes developed in sharply differing economic and military areas. In his picturesque descriptions of this and other colonies in the New World, Mr. Priestley lays open a history unfamiliar to most Americans and clarifies the outlines of United States social history.« less