Excerpt from The Enchanted Past: True Stories of the Lands Where Civilization Began Opening to them a world with which they are too unfamiliar. What took place in America twenty-five years ago is not of so much historical import to an American child, does not so vitally affect him, as what happened in Asia twenty-five hundred years ago in the struggle for supremacy of the great branches of the indo-european and Semitic races, or in the refusal of the yellow race to attempt to spread itself over the earth. Nor is there any reason why the story of a remote epoch cannot be made as interesting to an intelligent child as the history of our own country a quarter-century ago. When in April, 1917, America came upon the stage in the great world tragedy, it was the dramatic end of our national isolation. Provincialism became obsolete. We had learned at last that neither America, nor America plus Europe, constituted the world. Among the millions of heroic men who entered the gigantic struggle to save justice and liberty from perishing from the earth, many of those who made the supreme sacrifice have found graves in the Far East. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.