Abstract

History Through Biography

This article focuses on various books related to history. The books "Raleigh and the British Empire," by D.B. Quinn and "Warren Hastings and British India," by Penderel Moon are competently written by excellent scholars, but the effect is spoiled and the reading dulled by intruding paragraphs on important Indian and American affairs. In the book "Abraham Lincoln and the United States," by K.C. Weare, despite Weare's adequate account of former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln's life, his treatment of American history from 1809-1854 is necessarily meager. Weare succumbs to the lure of heroic history and, impressed by the will power and insight of a great man, tends to minimize those social and economic forces that establish historical direction.