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ALBUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, COLONIAL PERIOD--James Truslow Adams--Scribner ($7.50).

"How did our forefathers dress?" asks Historian James Truslow Adams. "What sort of tools or utensils did they use. in what kinds of occupations; what did their houses look like, inside and out; in a word, if we could suddenly step into their world, what would we see?"

The answer is: plenty. The Album of American History is an eyeful of the artifacts which early Americans shaped and used and which (to the degree that things shape people) shaped the early Americans. The book contains 411 pages of houses, ancestors, Indian scalps, weathervanes, mousetraps, cannon, dolls, ships, skillets, forts, bells, barn locks, cradles, fans, whaleboats, powder horns, figureheads, quadrants, wigs, sugar tongs, smokehouses, privies, churches, fire engines, nursing bottles, grease buckets, saltcellars, muskets, paper money, tombstones, waterwheels, spurs, scissors,jugs, bookplates, teapots and a thousand other objects from buggies to tavern signs. It is a big book with white stars against a blue background on the inside cover and a title page in orange and black as handsome as the reproductions of colonial printers' masterpieces it contains. Between its red, 'white & blue covers it contains approximately 1,500 illustrations. Sometimes it seems as jumbled as a mail-order catalogue, and as absorbing. Here is the great tradition cheek by jowl with some of the curiosa of U.S. colonial history--pirates and Quakers, a print of a sea serpent ingesting a naked Indian and a meticulous working drawing of the mechanism of a waterwheel, a picture (done with Audubon violence) of a skunk killing a rooster and views of gracious colonial staircases, the tower of St. Botolph's, Boston, England where John Cotton was vicar and the rather grotesque animal drawings from Brickell's The Natural History of North Carolina. The book is divided into ten chapters, the first covering the years between Columbus' first voyage and the founding of Jamestown, and the last, the American Revolution.

Grave, Good Faces. Never again in our history did material and spiritual things fuse so completely to form a civilization. The dominant impression that the Album of American History conveys is that the foundations of the country were so solidly laid down that nothing can shake them. These ancestors lived well. Their plain, unlined faces, shown in the book's 150 portraits, were good. They were grave and unaffected, erring, if in any way, on the side of gentleness. Their children were full of grace. The young women were fragile, and the young men were self-satisfied without being either complacent or smug. Their elders were benign, mellowed, trustworthy. They dressed comfortably (there are some 50 pictures of their Sunday and everyday costumes in the book). They built good houses, good ships, strong forts, sturdy barns. They drew good plans for them. They carried muskets so formidable that many a contemporary householder may envy them. They worshiped in churches that were the best work their architects and craftsmen could produce. Their faces that look out from hunting scenes, building scenes, christenings, battles, countinghouses, pulpits are serene and strong, with the quality, at once active, firm and reposed, that Americans think of as typically American.

Epical and Epoch-Making. The Album contains almost no text. Prolific Historian Adams, author of The Epic of America, Empire on the Seven Seas and more than 20 other volumes, limits himself to brief captions. Typical example is his comment on Boughton's painting of the Pilgrims going to church: "This painting is enshrined in the hearts of Americans, and it seems fitting to reproduce it. The men carried their muskets to church, placing them on a gunrack. In the center of the picture is seen the preacher with his Bible. The costume is correct for the period."

Yet the few lines tell much about Author Adams and his view of history and much about the U.S. A businessman turned author, a historian who lives with the consciousness (which he has never quite been able to communicate as intensely as he feels it) that American history is epical and epochmaking, James Truslow Adams has held up against his naturally hopeful outlook the insistent forebodings of the U.S. future that his knowledge gave him. In 1934 he wrote: "We are all of us caught, the selfish and the unselfish alike, in the complexities of the modern order. . . . No previous problem has ever made such demands on the highest qualities of both mind and character. It is possible that the world may prove lacking in one or both. . . ." By 1937 his fears had grown more specific: "There may well. lie ahead of us somewhere, like a fog back on the horizon, a period of drabness, sameness, loss of personal liberty and low standard of living. . . ." And he voiced the menace as abiding as the danger of Indian attacks at night in the colonial days he had studied: "What can we say of the remainder of this century in which we and our children and grandchildren shall have to live?"

Time of Danger. The Album provides an answer. Among the knickknacks and decorations of life, the pots and kettles and meat barrels, there were the objects which testified to the sense of constant danger and the sense of constant strangeness under which the hard-working colonials lived. The barrel of pitch on Beacon Hill in Boston, to be lighted in case of attack, was a far more meaningful landmark than the fire-alarm boxes on contemporary corners--though the menace it was intended to warn against may have been less than city dwellers face today. The animals were strange and exotic, the trees and plants were rare, the hazards of the quixotic weather were untested, and the Indians, savage as the Japanese, were at once converts, enemies, neighbors, field workers, barbarians, trail blazers, and victims. From the first days when the Caribbean shores were peopled with cannibals and with imaginary monsters as fierce as crocodiles, the American imagination grew with the realization that the simplest actions of everyday life were hazardous. It flagged when it assumed itself, and the country, safe.

The best recommendation of the Album of American History is that it is the sort of book children may study, with profit, by the hour, brooding over the diminutive figures in the crowd scenes, wondering at the pictures of surgical instruments and Indian massacres and delighting in the pictures of carpentering, whalefishing, rice planting. It may even lead their elders to look around them and wonder at the objects and the faces of their own time of danger.

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