A decent short narrative history of the United States, running from 'the planting of the colonies' to World War II.

It has a few flaws, although its not terrible overall. Its main problems are that the prose is sometimes tinted with a bit of romaticism-- it would have been better if the authors had written slightley more seriously, and not tried to give it the air of an amusing school textbook-- and that the text is sometimes a bit cluttered by relatively unimportant facts-- it may be a short narrative, but it isn't tight....

And of course, it's also pretty old-fashioned, for better or worse. On the whole, not terrible, but certainly not great.

(7/10) ( )

An old-fashioned account of the history of the United States that doesn't cover up America's bad aspects, but it generally treats America as a progressively better nation (for bad or good). It is a sort of 1940s progressive liberal/Whig history of the US. It does lean towards Democrats beginning in the 20th century and needs many more maps, but it is still good.

That is, up until the modern update courtesy of Jeffrey Morris, which might be described as: Democrats good, Republicans bad. Nowhere is this most apparent when he talks about Reagan, who comes across as a genial cipher (the "amiable dunce" myth). And Morris just makes stupid, ahistorical comments, case in point, p. 624: "The President's overarching goal in the area of domestic policy was to reduce the role of the federal government, a policy traditionally associated with the party of Jefferson, not that of Lincoln." REALLY? Maybe the analogy holds true for Jefferson and Lincoln themselves, but not their parties, at least not since the 1890s. Has Morris ever heard of, I don't know, Republicans like Harding and Coolidge who pruned government? or government growers like Wilson, FDR, and LBJ, who created bloated bureaucracies? What party did the last three belong to? Hint, they ain't Republicans. Absolutely and utterly biased against conservatives. ( )