In this new, enlarged and up-to-date work, we have the greatest book that Dr. van Loon has yet written, greater than The Story of Mankind because its subject did not require the compression that the first book did; no less incisive yet more mellow, in that the years have tempered van Loon's tendency to iconoclasm, more thrilling in that there is a more unified story to tell. The numerous illustrations are as fine, as imaginative and as distinctive as anything he has heretofore drawn and the reception accorded The Story of Mankind, which headed the list of best sellers for years on end. As a thrilling, magnificent story of the backgrounds of our country, of those rough pioneers who build that we might live, of the struggle to preserve our unity and our happiness, and of those modern circumstances that shape our present lives this chronicle is unequaled.