Four phases of American development; federalism-democracy-imperialism-expansion

Four phases of American development - Lectures printed by John Bassett Moore, an American lawyer and authority on international law, and published in 1912. Each of the four lectures is devoted to a separate phase: the first lecture is devoted to federalism, the second to democracy, the third to imperialism, and the last fourth to expansion. The purpose of these lectures is not to provide chronological details of related or unrelated incidents, but rather a general overview of important movements explained in the light of causal facts, be they specific actions or human traits and tendencies revealed by people acting in mass or individually. This, according to the writer, is the main task of the historian. To form indictments, to condemn and justify, to blame and praise on the basis of preconceptions about what should have happened belongs to the historical moralist, whose nobility of goals should justify his recovery from what should have happened, and the past, as the price of his rehabilitation , proactively matching his own views. The function of the historian, if it seems less sublime, is more truthful. It is also more difficult to execute and requires a wider range of thought, research, and empathy. History is a drama of centuries reduced to writing. The historian, like the playwright, can also be and in a certain sense must necessarily be a moralist, since every picture of life carries a lesson in itself. But his first duty is the exposition, because the historian deals with realities. The main goal of the historian is to recreate the past so that the reader can live in it and, seeing things as they are, understand things as they are.