In many previous volumes of the series, the region beyond the
Alleghenies has been recognized as an influence and a potentiality
in American history. Thwaites, in his "France in America," shows how
the French opened up the country and prepared the way; the Tennessee
and Kentucky settlements are described in Howard's "Preliminaries of
the Revolution"; Van Tyne's "American Revolution" goes into the
earliest western governments; McLaughlin's "Confederation and
Constitution" deals with the organization of the new communities by
Congress; Bassett's "Federalist System" and Channing's "Jeffersonian
System" show how the diplomacy and politics of the country were
affected by the appearance of a new group of equal states; while
Babcock's "Rise of American Nationality" carries the influence of
those states into a broader national life. Professor Turner takes up
the west as an integral part of the Union, with a self-consciousness
as lively as that of the east or south, with its own aims and
prejudices, but a partner in the councils and the benefits of the
national government which, as a whole, it is the aim of this volume
to describe.

In a way the west is simply a broader east, for up to the end of the
period covered by this volume most of the grown men and women in the
west came across the mountains to found new homes--the New-Englander
in western New York; the Pennsylvanian diverging westward and
southwestward; the Virginian in Kentucky; the North-Carolinian in
Tennessee and Missouri and, along with the South-Carolinian and
Georgian, in the new southwestern states; while north of the Ohio
River the principal element up to 1830 was southern.

To describe such a movement and its effects, Professor Turner has