Until I went there I was not aware how very much this means.
I do not know who wrote the school history I studied as a boy, but I do know now that it was written by a lopsided historian, and that his "lop," like that of many another of his kind, led him to enlarge upon American naval and military victories, to minimize American defeats, to give an impression that the all-important early colonies were those of New England, and that the all-important one of them was Massachusetts.
From this bias I judge that the historian was a Boston man.

It takes a Bostonian to think in that way.

They do it still.
From my school history I gathered the idea that although Sir Walter Raleigh and Captain John Smith were so foolish as to dally more or less in the remote fastnesses of Virginia, and although there was a little ineffectual settlement at Jamestown, all the important colonizing of this country occurred in New England.

I read about Peregrine White, but not about Virginia Dare; I read much of Miles Standish, but nothing of Christopher Newport; I read a great deal of the _Mayflower_, but not a word of the _Susan Constant_.
Yet Virginia Dare, if she lived, must have been nearing young ladyhood when Peregrine White was born; Captain Christopher Newport passed the Virginia capes when Miles Standish was hardly more than a youth, in Lancashire; and the _Susan Constant_ landed the Jamestown settlers more than a dozen years before the _Mayflower_ landed her shipload of eminent furniture owners at Plymouth.

Even Plymouth itself had been visited years before by John Smith, and it was he, not the Pilgrims, who named the place.
I find that some boys, to-day, know these things.