ABSTRACT
History enables bewildered bodies of human beings to grasp their relationship with their past, and helps them chart on general lines their immediate forward course. Democratic peoples of wide popular education, where the feeling of progress toward some goal is strong, inevitably display an specially keen interest in history as an illuminant of present and future. The literate generation contemporaneous with the American and French Revolutions in Western Europe and the United States steeped itself in history. The strongest element in the creation of any human organization of complex character and enduring strength is the establishment of a common tradition by the narration of its history. Indeed, literary history used for inspiration as well as instruction and entertainment once became a great popular possession in the United States, as in other lands. The reinterpretation of history meanwhile introduced by Soviet Russia proved equally sweeping and much more complex.
