Four Phases Of American Development

by John Bassett Moore

Excerpt from Four Phases of American Development: Federalism Democracy Imperialism Expansion
The four lectures embraced in the present volume were delivered at the Johns Hopkins University, in April last, on the foundation established there by James Schouler, lawyer and historian, for lectures in history and political science. Their object is to give, not a chronological detail of related or unrelated incidents, but rather a general survey of important movements, explained in the light of the causative facts, whether these be particular acts, or human traits and tendencies disclosed by men acting in the mass or individually. This is, in the writer's opinion, the historian's primary task. To frame indictments, to condemn and exculpate, to distribute censures and pronounce encomiums, on the strength of preconceptions as to what ought to have taken place, belongs to the historical moralist, the nobility of whose aims is supposed to justify him in exacting from the past, as the price of its exoneration, an anticipatory conformity to his own views. The function of the historian, if apparently less exalted, is more truthful.

218 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1912

About the author

John Bassett Moore was an American lawyer and authority on international law. Moore was a State Department official, a professor at Columbia University, and a judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice from 1921 to 1938, the first American judge to sit on that judicial body.
(Source: en.wikipedia.org)