Documentation of history is a reflection of the values and morals of the time, compared and contrasted with the issues of the past, by people closely connected to those values and morals. History has been spoken and written down for millennia by both ordinary and extraordinary people. American history is merely an extension of that tradition, with three defined periods of documentation: the Puritans, in the sixteenth century, a closely knit religious sect; the patricians, men educated using what the Puritans would consider pagan texts, defying the Church’s hold upon them; and the professionals, people trained and educated for the process of researching and teaching about history, who used all manner of documents for their scholarly analysis in a way to affect change. The Puritans fled to America to establish their own community, entrusting their clergymen and political leaders, true men of God, with the recording of their history. Their belief that God’s will drove their lives forward – His path for them, His Chosen people – dominated their lives, and as such the books and papers passed down to us for perusal are filled with religious and moral teachings. …show more content…
To the minds of the patrician historians, influenced by the Enlightenment, people determined their own fates by use of reason and logic. The historians entrusted this time with this burgeoning knowledge were of the gentleman class: merchants, landowners, lawyers, and doctors, all of whom were finely educated and possessed resources to encourage thought and debate, all hailing from the thirteen original colonies. The patrician historians were infused with a fevered degree of nationalism after the victorious Revolutionary War, desiring to write their history as a story of