about two-thirds of one year's work be devoted to this preliminary
matter, and that the remainder of the year be given to the period of
discovery and exploration.

The plan of the Committee of Eight emphasizes three or four lines of
development in the world's history leading up to American
history proper.

First, there was a movement of conquest or colonization by which the
ancient civilized world, originally made up of communities like the
Greeks and Phoenicians in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean Seas,
spread to southern Italy and adjacent lands. The Roman conquest of Italy
and of the barbarian tribes of western Europe expanded the civilized
world to the shores of the Atlantic. Within this greater Roman world new
nations grew up. The migration of Europeans to the American continent
was the final step.

Second, accompanying the growth of the civilized world in extent was a
growth of knowledge of the shape of the earth, or of what we call
geography. Columbus was a geographer as well as the herald of an
expanding world.

A third process was the creation and transmission of all that we mean by
civilization. Here, as the Committee remark, the effort should be to
"show, in a very simple way, the civilization which formed the heritage
of those who were to go to America, that is, to explain what America
started with."

The Committee also suggest that it is necessary "to associate the three
or four peoples of Europe which were to have a share in American