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A Pocket History of the United States |
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A Pocket History of the United States
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by Allan Nevins, Henry Steele Commager, and Jeffrey Morris
Sales Rank: 233043
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List Price: $7.99
$2.98
At Amazon
on 6-21-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Mass Market Paperback with 736 pages
Published by: Pocket Books; 9th Revised edition August 1, 1992
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0671790234
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0671790233
Book Dimensions:
6.5 x 4.2 x 1.8 inches
Weighs: 12.8 ounces
Reader Reviews
Being a Canadian not at all versed in the minutea of US History I decided on a solitary visit to the US one summer and, at the Smithsonian, purchased this book. Although my US history is certainly spotty compared to Canadian or British Imperial History I am well used to the "Cook's Tour" narrative style of this type of book; whether it applies to the US, Australia or India, it is impossible to encapsulate all relevant history in one text. How and what one does incorporate is important. To see the text as politically motivated badly misses the point. People with extreme political blinders of the so-called "right" or "left" will always look for, and find, whatever they want to find. When reading history one finds out as much about the American people who consider this to be their history as one learns about the actual events themselves. The FDR Truman New Deal lives on and for people like me who only know FDR as the reformer he apparently was, this book only reinforces that view. The vagaries of the Robber Barons and Teddy Roosevelt's attempts to riegn them in are also wonderfully free of ideology --- old fashioned excesses of greed and lack of any positive government role being explanation enough. On the other side of the coin there is also what an outsider would refer to as the typical "pablum" which every American was raised upon: Americans somehow suffering a great injustice at the hands of the British. An injustice that is really really not that self-evident: the Boston Massacre was not a massacre (the Americans absolved the troops and commander of any blame at the time); the "battles" of Concord and Lexington not being battles but being built into mythic proportions that persist to this day; and why did the Americans really get so rebellious about, of all things, a tax. Still, having said that, compared with comparable flag-waving narrative best-sellers in American history this book does not even rate. The authors even quite correctly describe the sound American drubbing and defeat in the War of 1812. Something that a lot of lesser Americans historians try to obsfucate. No unneccessary flag waving here. The description of the vital American character is also included in the beginning chapters. The founding groups in the nascent colonies were vastly different from those groups who followed and built similar colonies in Australia, New Zealand and nearby Canada. The battle between dogmatic protestant religious offshoots and secular authority was a basic element of American society. Although religious groups remained strong (Commanger & Steel describe the colonial Massachussets theocracy) their potential to deprive people of their liberty has always spawned a strong rational, reasoned opposition which ultimately wrote the constitution and established America as the strong secular nation she is today. I would recommend this book to almost anyone without a narrow old-fashioned ideological axe to grind. The pre-1941 part of the book was originally written by pre-1941 people so necessarily includes their world view; the persistant use of the word, American "Negro" and "savages" reminds me a lot of the imperial literature of Kipling. One does not use such language nowadays and one is not influenced by it, but to try to retrospectively change the terminology is revisionism writ large, and one should always be on guard for such small-minded endevours. The book served its purpose for me and will serve as a jumping off point for further readings in US history supplied by its lengthy list of sources at the back of the book.
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A Pocket History of the United States
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Price: $2.98
Updated on 6-21-2008.
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