If one were asked to name a scholar who, above all others, stimulated the development of ancient historical studies in the United States during the earlier part of the twentieth century, that honor would have to fall to the colossal figure of James Henry Breasted. For nearly thirty years, until his death in 1935, he was generally acknowledged as America's leading Orientalist. Holding the first professorship in Egyptology at an American university, he became known initially as the author of a pioneering modern history of ancient Egypt and later for his widely read popular surveys of the ancient Mediterranean world. His contributions as a historian and in ancillary disciplines of Oriental studies were outstanding; but it is as a promoter of the study of the ancient past, and particularly the ancient Near East, that he made his most enduring mark. He presented what he called the "New Past" with...