Fatherhood Quote by James H. Breasted

Progress, Breasted suggests, is less a frontier miracle than a hand-me-down. The sentence opens with a power move: "it is obvious". That little authoritarian throat-clear is doing real work, shutting down debate and turning a contested story about American origins into a matter of plain sense. Then comes the choreography of national myth: "our fathers" and "great and prosperous cities" planted along "once lonely trails". The language is pastoral and proprietary, making settlement feel organic, inevitable, even wholesome.

The pivot arrives with "received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage". Breasted, an archaeologist writing in an era intoxicated by grand civilizational narratives, folds America into a lineage that runs through Europe. On one level, it's an argument about transmission: institutions, literacy, law, urban life. On another, it's a boundary-drawing gesture. "Civilization" is treated as a package delivered from European "ancestors", not as something co-produced on this continent. Indigenous societies vanish into the phrase "once lonely", a quiet erasure that turns inhabited land into an empty stage awaiting history.

This is early-20th-century cultural politics in a lab coat. Breasted's professional instinct is to map origins and continuities; his cultural moment pushes that instinct toward a hierarchy that flatters Euro-American inheritance. The subtext is reassurance: American modernity isn't improvisation or rupture, it's legitimacy. You can hear the anxiety underneath the confidence, the need to anchor a young nation to an older pedigree, even as it celebrates itself as new.