American writers of history who flourished in the more than two and a half centuries between the earliest colonial settlements and the end of the Civil War cover ...a vast and irregular territory, according to volume editor Clyde N. Wilson. The 46 writers in this DLB volume include the chroniclers and polemicists of the colonial, revolutionary, and early national eras; the literary, narrative historians of the 19th century; as well as biographers, collectors, editors, state and local chroniclers and popular and specialized historians who wrote during this period. Together they display the multitude of ways in which early generations of Americans sought to discover, record, disperse, commemorate, illustrate, understand and interpret the past.

46 entries include: George Bancroft, William Bradford, John W. Draper, Elizabeth F. Ellet, Richard Hildreth, Thomas Hutchinson, Washington Irving, John Lothrop Motley, Francis Parkman, William Hickling Prescott, John Smith, Jared Sparks, George Tucker, Mason Locke Weems and John Winthrop.