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ISBN 13 : 9781331090601
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (96 download)
Book Synopsis History of the United States by :
Download or read book History of the United States written by and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-10 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from History of the United States: From the Discovery of America Until the Present Time; With a Pocket Atlas of the World; Containing Colored Maps of Each State and Territory in the United States, With Statistics Showing Products and Resources of the Various States; Also, Maps of Every Cou For centuries there have been legends of prehistoric communication between America and the Eastern hemisphere, which research has not been able to verify nor quite to overturn. It is not until near the close of the tenth century that we find a positive record of voyages to this continent. An Icelandic sea-rover of that date, driven out of his course by storms, reached Greenland, which must then have enjoyed a far more genial climate than it has now; and his report of the country led other Norsemen to visit it, and to plant settlements, whence expeditions coasted along the shores of New England, giving the name of Vinland to the country about Narragansett Bay, and probably reaching even the Bay of New York. These voyages, however, had no practical resuWhen Christopher Columbus, therefore, formed his project of a western voyage of discovery, the existence of unknown lands beyond the Atlantic was unsuspected. The latter part of the fifteenth century was a period of extraordinary enterprise and restlessness among the chief nations of Europe. Men were fascinated especially by maritime adventure, learning for the first time something of the true shape of the earth, dispelling the fables that had covered the distant seas with impenetrable darkness and encircled the tropics with a zone of fire, and searching out convenient routes to the Indies, a region of romance and mystery which, in the popular imagination, offered inexhaustible wealth of gold, jewels, silks, spices, and all else that was rarest, most precious, and most beautiful. Columbus, who was a Genoese sea captain, had been a careful student of geography, correcting the scanty knowledge of the time by whatever he could learn from the reports of the most adventurous sailors. If any vague rumor of islands in the West reached him he seems to have put no faith in it. Satisfied that the earth was round, but greatly misconceiving its size, he believed that could reach the Indies by sailing due west from Europe a distance of not more than 2,400 miles; and the fantastic dangers with which scholars and navigators argued that such a route into the void must he beset he knew had no existence. His theory, there fore, embraced an error of no great consequence, with a truth of the first value to civilization. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
