Other historians there are who have done good service to American letters and whose work is outranked only by the men we have already mentioned--John Bach McMaster, whose "History of the People of the United States" is still uncompleted; James Ford Rhodes, who has portrayed the Civil War period with admirable exhaustiveness and accuracy; Justin Winsor, Woodrow Wilson, William M. Sloane, and John Fiske. John Fiske's work, which deals wholly with the different periods of American history, is especially suited to young people because of its simplicity and directness, and because, while accurate, it is not overburdened with detail. We have said that, during the Colonial period of American history, most of the New England divines devoted a certain amount of attention to the composition of creaking verse. More than that, they composed histories, biographies and numberless works of a theological character, which probably constitute the dullest mass of reading ever produced upon this earth. The Revolution stopped this flood--if anything so dry can be called a flood--and when the Revolution ended, public thought was for many years occupied with the formation of the new nation. But in the second quarter of the nineteenth century there arose in New England a group of writers who are known as Transcendentalists, and who produced one of the most important sections of American literature. Transcendentalism is a long word, and it is rather difficult to define, but, to put it as briefly as possible, it was a protest against narrowness in intellectual life, a movement for broader culture and for a freer spiritual life. It took a tremendous grip on New England, beginning about 1830, and kept it for nearly forty years; for New England has always been more or less provincial--provincialism being the habit of measuring everything by one inadequate standard. The high priest of the Transcendental movement was Amos Bronson Alcott, born on a Connecticut farm in 1799, successively in youth a clockmaker, peddler and book-agent, and finally driven by dire necessity to teaching school. But there could be no success at school-teaching for a man the most eccentric of his day--a mystic, a follower of Oriental philosophy, a non-resistant, an advocate of woman suffrage, an abolitionist, a vegetarian, and heaven knows what besides. So in the end, he was sold out, and removed with his family to Concord, where he developed into a sort of impractical idealist, holding Orphic conversations and writing scraps of speculation and criticism, and living in the clouds generally.