Book Description

Excerpt from A Short History of England, and the British Empire In this volume an attempt has been made to trace the growth of the English nation from its faint and unpromising beginnings in the early middle ages to the opening years of the twentieth century. During this period the little kingdom of the West Saxons has developed into an empire, the most extensive and the most diverse in all history. A subject of such dimensions may be viewed from many different angles; in this case the writer has tried to discuss it from the view point of his American readers. Certain important periods of English history are in a very real sense our own history: the beginnings of the American Republic were also the beginnings of the British Empire; and our country is still a part of the great empire of English culture. That the United States has inherited much of its constitutional system from Great Britain is a fact that needs no emphasis; but even greater is our English inheritance in the fields of literature, religion, ideals, and general culture. In the building of American civilization we have drawn materials from nearly all the cultivated peoples of the world; but the greatest single element in our culture is still the English. With the English language we have inherited the treasures of English thought. The non-conformist churches, for example, had their origin in the storm and stress of the Puritan Revolution, but in no other country have they taken root and developed strength as in the United States. It is therefore believed that a study of English history from a view point that is not too narrowly British cannot fail to give a deeper insight into the development of American life and thought and civilization. At the same time an effort has been made to give prominence to those facts of English history that lie at the root of our own social and political development. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.