America's story is made up of many elements, but through it have coursed two main streams that have nourished and carried a people forward to a destiny that was beyond all imagining when the story began. One of these is an idea that goes back to the rim of recorded time. It was first a dim, gnawing hope that the future lay in a magic land off to the west. Once that land was found, it drew people to it like a magnet. It is easy to say that it was gold or precious stones or land that led them on, for it was all of these. Yet, it was more - and here was the second great stream of American history. There was something that literally drove people westward, goading them across the endless mountains, through steep passes, across searing plains and desert into the face of terrors known and those unguessed. It was vision. It was courage. It was, at times, the sheer joy of overcoming fantastic obstacles. And it was also the conviction that what they were doing was different from anything that had happened before, that nothing would ever be quite the same again, and that the world would be a better place for what they had accomplished. "Eastward I go only by force," Henry David Thoreau said, "but westward I go free." The sleep of 100 centuries was stirred up in that surge toward the sunset, for out of it emerged not only a new people and a new nation but a force that changed the globe.

America's story is made up of many elements, but through it have coursed two main streams that have nourished and carried a people forward to a destiny that was beyond all imagining when the story began. One of these is an idea that goes back to the rim of recorded time. It was first a dim, gnawing hope that the future lay in a magic land off to the west. Once that land was found, it drew people to it like a magnet. It is easy to say that it was gold or precious stones or land that led them on, for it was all of these. Yet, it was more - and here was the second great stream of American history. There was something that literally drove people westward, goading them across the endless mountains, through steep passes, across searing plains and desert into the face of terrors known and those unguessed. It was vision. It was courage. It was, at times, the sheer joy of overcoming fantastic obstacles. And it was also the conviction that what they were doing was different from anything that had happened before, that nothing would ever be quite the same again, and that the world would be a better place for what they had accomplished. "Eastward I go only by force," Henry David Thoreau said, "but westward I go free." The sleep of 100 centuries was stirred up in that surge toward the sunset, for out of it emerged not only a new people and a new nation but a force that changed the globe.

America's story is made up of many elements, but through it have coursed two main streams that have nourished and carried a people forward to a destiny that was beyond all imagining when the story began.One of these is an idea that goes back to the rim of recorded time. It was first a dim, gnawing hope that the future lay in a magic land off to the west. Once that land was found, it drew people to it like a magnet.It is easy to say that it was gold or precious stones or land that led them on, for it was all of these. Yet, it was more - and here was the second great stream of American history. There was something that literally drove people westward, goading them across the endless mountains, through steep passes, across searing plains and desert into the face of terrors known and those unguessed. It was vision. It was courage. It was, at times, the sheer joy of overcoming fantastic obstacles.And it was also the conviction that what they were doing was different from anything that had happened before, that nothing would ever be quite the same again, and that the world would be a better place for what they had accomplished. "Eastward I go only by force," Henry David Thoreau said, "but westward I go free." The sleep of 100 centuries was stirred up in that surge toward the sunset, for out of it emerged not only a new people and a new nation but a force that changed the globe.

Continuing the biographical approach to teaching history found in his Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans, Eggleston draws a more in-depth picture of the development of the United States using the stories of the living and breathing Americans who made it all happen.

Young America is a star-spangled account of the perilous, exuberant, dissension-filled first six decades of the United States. The book opens with George Washington's triumphant journey to New York City for his inauguration as first president of the United States. It ends with Abraham Lincoln's solemn farewell to Springfield as he takes a train to Washington to become the sixteenth - and almost the last - president of a country torn by the secession of seven of its states. In between, historian Francis Russell vividly details the events that first molded the American way of life and gave the young nation the will and ability to survive.