“‘The use of travelling,’ Doctor Johnson wrote Mrs. Thrale ‘is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking about how things may be, to see them as they are.’ Johnson spoke for the age in this desire to see things as they are and to avoid the dangerous imaginings of how they may be.” This is a large catch-all history of the English colonies and eventually the United States from 1763-89 (from the end of the French and Indian War to the ratification of […]