A New Guide to the Indispensable Sources of Virginia History

cc HE trouble with practical men, Erwin Panofsky once remarked, that they are so impractical. The truth of this impL ish paradox is painfully applicable to us as a nation in our variant attitudes toward history. Only a glance at some of the wreckage along the way is sufficient to show what costly impracticalities we have fathered in the name of the practical. A century ago Secretary of State William L. Marcy could see no utility in Peter Force's heroic plan for a documentary history of the North American colonies, and so stopped the great enterprise dead in its tracks. Nine massive folio volumes of Force's American Archives, covering the years I774-I776, were published before the blow fell, and this great remnant serves as a tantalizing reminder of the riches of American history that the practical-minded Secretary of State struck from our hands. A quarter of a century ago the governing board of The Carnegie -Institution of Washington abandoned its own program for the compilation of guides to archival materials and for the publication of documentary sources, thus terminating under these auspices the farseeing program that J. Franklin Jameson had promoted with such singleminded devotion. The famous Carnegie Guides have led American historians through documentary wildernesses from that day to this, but Jameson's program of which they were a conspicuous part was ended suddenly, and somewhat arbitrarily, by administrators who saw more practical uses for their philanthropic funds. Again, because no counsel of practicality prompts the demand for it, the richest people on earth evidently cannot afford to revive the vast inventory compiled by the Historical Records Survey of state, county, city, and other records of our history that the nation was inspired to undertake when its factories were gathering rust and when nine millions of unemployed sat in idleness. We had the impracticality in those days to pour millions of dollars into this unprecedented exploration of our past, and our dreaming resulted in the publication of some three hundred guides, the discovery and protection of multitudes of historical records

Archaeology · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Archaeology and Natural History · History

• Recent Contributions to American Economic History

  Open Access•Lawrence A Harper•The Journal of Economic History•1959

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