The American colonies have not lacked their Boswells. Almost
from the time of their founding, the English settlements in the
New World became the subjects of historical narratives by
promoters, politicians, and clergymen. Some, like John Smith
General History of Virginia, sought to stir interest in New World
colonization. Others, such as Cotton Mather Magnalia Christi
Americana, used New England's past as an object lesson to guide
its next generation. And others still, like William Smith History
of the Province of New-York, aimed at enhancing the colony's
reputation in England by explaining its failures and emphasizing
its accomplishments. All of these early chroniclers had their
shortcomings but no more so than every generation of historians
which essayed the same task thereafter. For it is both the strength
and the challenge of the historical guild that in each age its
practitioners should readdress; themselves to the same subjects of
inquiry as their predecessors. If the past is prologue, it must be
constantly reenacted. The human drama is unchanging, but the
audience is always new: its expectations of the past are different,
its mood uniquely its own.

The tercentenary of John Smith's history is almost cotermi-
nous with the bicentenary of the end of the American colonial
era. It is more than appropriate that the two occasions should be
observed by a fresh retelling of the story of the colonization of
English America not, as in the case of the earliest histories, in
self-justification, national exaltation, or moral purgation but as a
plain effort to reexamine the past through the lenses of the
present.

-xi-