Books: Scholar in America

THE COLONIAL AGENTS—Dr. Ellla Lonn—University of North Carolina Press ($5).

Twenty years ago, when Ella Lonn's career as a scholar had barely begun, she lived in a boardinghouse in Bloomsbury, lunched on is. 6d. a day, spent most of her waking hours in the vast files of the Public Records Office in London. As in most of her work since then, she was traveling paths of history no one had traversed before.

Before the American Revolution, the colonies sent agents to England. Benjamin Franklin was one, but the rest are largely forgotten. What Dr....