ABSTRACT
The distinctive cultural development of the New World made history, one of the early forms of American literature, and shaped the guiding assumptions in terms of which people wrote and read about their past. Americans always had to explain who they were in a sense rarely compelling to other men who took for granted a connection that ran to a time out of mind, between a specific place and themselves and their families. The concepts of providence and mission persisted, although in a secular form. John Adams' Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, for instance, showed a clear relationship to seventeenth-century beliefs and rhetoric in its interpretation of European history. The American Revolution provided the decisive evidence. In Europe as in America, liberty became the secular equivalent of Providence. The lack of schools of the European sort was in part the result of the vast scale and the heterogeneity of American higher education.
