In preparing this book I have received invaluable aid from a number of colleagues and former teachers. I owe an immense debt to Professor Perry Miller, whose criticism has helped me immeasurably since the time he was my tutor in Harvard College, and whose lectures on Romanticism in American Literature supplied me with essential insights to the period. I am grateful, also, to Professor Oscar Handlin for helpful criticisms, suggestions, and encouragement; and to my colleague Professor Yvor Winters and Professor Kenneth Murdock, both of whom graciously allowed me to audit their lectures on American historians as men of letters. Among other kind friends who read portions of the manuscript, Professors Charles A. Allen, Howard Mumford Jones, Thomas C. Moser, Thomas Pressly, and Henry Nash Smith should recognize their valuable suggestions in the text. I am deeply indebted to the Massachusetts Historical Society for permission to use the papers of George Bancroft, George E. Ellis, Edward Everett, Francis Parkman, and W. H. Prescott; to Mr. Stephen T. Riley, Director of the Society; to the editorial staff of the Stanford University Press; and to Mr. Walter W. Isle, who prepared the Index.
Chapter VII was published in substantially the same form in the Prescott memorial issue of The Hispanic-American Historical Review (February, 1959).