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Summary: chesapeake bay region
Review: describe the simelar economic characteristics of the massachusetts bay and middle colonial regions
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Summary: A bastion of liberal propaganda
Review: I'm a high school junior in NJ, and I have to say that I have never met a single balanced history textbook throughout my education. "From the back cover: Emphasizing social history, especially as it applies to discussions of race, class, and gender..." And you wonder why all teenagers nowadays are all liberal Bush-haters, when they've been brainwashed by such biased history. Oh, conservatives are bad, right-wings are evil, this book preaches. And let's spend 10 chapters on Native Americans, 10 chapters on women, 10 chapters on slaves. Unbelievable.
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Summary: A bastion of liberal propaganda
Review: I'm a high school junior in NJ, and I have to say that I have never met a single balanced history textbook throughout my education. "From the back cover: Emphasizing social history, especially as it applies to discussions of race, class, and gender..." And you wonder why all teenagers nowadays are all liberal Bush-haters, when they've been brainwashed by such biased history. Oh, conservatives are bad, right-wings are evil, this book preaches. And let's spend 10 chapters on Native Americans, 10 chapters on women, 10 chapters on slaves. Unbelievable.
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Summary: Do your own research
Review: It's amazing to me to read reviews of people who tout this book as "liberal propaganda" when it merely tells the truth about history. If you wanted the whitewashed version of history we were taught in high school, where Christopher Columbus had pure motives in the new world and didn't rape or enslave the native population, where the Native Americans were savages who were domesticated by the pilgrims who so graciously shared a Thanksgiving feast with them, where Woodrow Wilson's racism and hatred of women isn't mentioned...why did you bother taking a college history course, or bother going to college for that matter, at all? Pull your heads out of the sand! If you truly believe this book is socialist propaganda, I recommend you start doing your own research of America's past without using any high school or college textbook as a source of information - you'll find that this particular textbook has one of the truest pictures of American history available.
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Summary: Do your own research
Review: It's amazing to me to read reviews of people who tout this book as "liberal propaganda" when it merely tells the truth about history. If you wanted the whitewashed version of history we were taught in high school, where Christopher Columbus had pure motives in the new world and didn't rape or enslave the native population, where the Native Americans were savages who were domesticated by the pilgrims who so graciously shared a Thanksgiving feast with them, where Woodrow Wilson's racism and hatred of women isn't mentioned...why did you bother taking a college history course, or bother going to college for that matter, at all? Pull your heads out of the sand! If you truly believe this book is socialist propaganda, I recommend you start doing your own research of America's past without using any high school or college textbook as a source of information - you'll find that this particular textbook has one of the truest pictures of American history available.
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Summary: Finally, a balanced history text
Review: Some of the reviews posted here are just bizarre - did they read the book? Yes, the book writes minority groups and women into the story - where they belong (gay Americans are not mentioned at all in the pre-Civil War volume; in the full edition they are not mentioned until the 1970s gay rights movement!). The book discusses farmers, urban artisans, and everybody else in early America. It also does NOT ignore the traditional subjects of history - politics, leaders, diplomacy, economic development. Events and dates? of course, with timelines at the end of each chapter. Good maps. The only flaw is that it tries to work too much material in, gets too dense. Recommended.
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Summary: So, this was history?
Review: This book provides a balanced overview of U.S. History up to 1877. The treatment of social and cultural history is particularly stong. The prose is, for the most part, quite lively.
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Summary: A first-rate textbook
Review: This book provides a balanced overview of U.S. History up to 1877. The treatment of social and cultural history is particularly stong. The prose is, for the most part, quite lively.
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Summary: Terrible History Book
Review: This book tries to teach history without actually including any concrete information. It outlines general trends without emphasizing the historical facts on which the trends are based. While it's certainly important to recognize progressions in history, it's extremely difficult to learn about them based only on the text's vague, 50-page summaries, all of which fail to mention any form of historical evidence. As a student, I found this book's approach to teaching history disastrous and mildly insulting. First of all, it fails to convey even the most cursory knowledge of history by shunning, at all costs, cruel Old Regime teaching methods that might require DATE memorization or familiarity with historical FACTS. With nothing to "Lock On" to, it's very hard to retain anything. Even worse, however, are the implications of the book's approach. I like History because I enjoy being able to look at a set of evidence and trying to figure out, based on otherwise stale information, what *actually* happened, what life was like. Somehow, I got the sense that by describing outright "what life was like," the book implies that to force students to learn INFORMATION is useless, that students are unable to think for themselves and interpret historical information with any accuracy. I think I should comment, also, on one reviewer's dismissal of this book as "Nouveau History." I come close to BEING one of the "Tenured Radicals" this reviewer had so much disdain for, and I still hated this book. I would hate it if I were communist. There's so much wrong with it that to criticize it for its left-wing perspective is plain silly. I would recommend "The American Promise," by James L. Rourke, Micheal P. Johnson, and a few others instead.
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Summary: So, this was history?
Review: This book was horrible. I was forced to use it in a mandatory brainwash...er, history course for school. The book essentially goes like this: We settled Massachusetts, and the indians, blacks, gays and women were persecuted. Then, we started a westward expansion which led to persecution for indians, blacks, gays, and women. During the revolutionary war some white guys fought or something, but it is important to note that the indians, blacks, gays... This book is a proselyting tool, a transparent piece of propaganda. I didn't convert.
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