American Tales

THE HERITAGE OF AMERICA--Henry Steele Commager & Allan Nevlns--Little, Brown--.($4).

Mark Twain once took the trouble to dig out and proclaim at length (in Life on the Mississippi) some comparative figures on America's age. Without whooping it up as Mark did, Historians Commager & Nevins are equally concerned to demonstrate the long, rich past which Americans seldom realize. Collected in this book are about 1,130 pages of documents, from the Journal of Christopher Columbus to Charles Lindbergh's We, which make up a history told by the historical. Samples:

P:After a transcontinental train trip in 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson (his fellow travelers called him "Shakespeare") tells what it was like to sleep on a board stretched between two seats, to wash in a tin dish on the car's windy platform.

P:Editor Frank Cobb of the old New York World tells what Woodrow Wilson told him the night before Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany: would mean that we should lose our heads along with the rest and stop weighing right and wrong . . . that a majority of people in this hemisphere would go war-mad, quit thinking, and devote their energies to destruction. . . ."

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