Colonial Folkways

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt addressed the American Historical Association to call for American history to be written as compelling stories of literary quality. Editor Allen Johnson of Yale University responded by publishing the Chronicles of America series: 50 succinct volumes on regional and thematic American history. These books, intended for secondary schools and college students, are expository works of American history composed by competent historians in the 1920's, well before the special pleading and upending of social norms typical of histories after 1970. This series is focused on the mainstream of American political life and leadership from its initial volumes on Native Americans and European colonists to its final volumes on Woodrow Wilson, Canada, and the Hispanic Republics to our South.

Folkways consist of food, architecture, dress, religion, literature, and the elements of culture that Eliot said "make life worth living." These essential features, rooted in the ethnogensis of peoples is fundamentally connected to the early settlement of the later United States. This study was pioneered by Charles Andrews (1863-1943): the preeminent authority on the field in his day. Andrews was a prolific academic, winner of the Pulitzer for his multivolume work on colonial America, president of the American Historical Society, and professor of history at Yale.

This work has been formatted and reprinted for Tall Men Books. It is not a facsimile reprint.