Don't Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never...

Don't Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't ... | Kenneth C. Davis | Great Read

books:

Don't Know Much Ab...

	Don't Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't ... Kenneth C. Davis HarperCollins, 2004 - 678 pages average customer review:based on 160 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

Never knew history could be so interesting.

I barely finished reading this book and I must say the book is a must read for anyone remotely interested in American History. I found the book unputdownable like a Dan Brown's thriller. This book does a wonderful job of going through most events of any significance in American History since 1492 with a reasonable level of detail. Unlike what other people have mentioned in their reviews I found the book as nonjudgemental and neutral as it is humanly possible.

Great Read

I'm a pretty good student but I've always struggled with history. This book helped me get out of taking a history class in college with AP credit. It helps you tie things together and remember some important details.

for more information click here

Loewen's Should-Have-Been

This is the book that Loewen's "Lies My Teacher Told Me" should have been, which is to say, talking about the little-known, glossed-over, or erroneous facts that are in our history textbooks. Loewen, however, wrote a book that was simply a defense of Revisionism, and focused very little on the actual history.

I like this book. The history is a bit too basic, and stays to a rather low level of knowledge (Lewis and Clark did such and such, Washington did this-and-that) without talking about the greater context or meaning -- ironically enough, the crticisms that Loewen lays on textbooks -- but does a good job covering the entire scope of American history in a very readable fashion.

While Davis tries to make the claim in the newly revised introduction that his book was not written to be liberal or conservative, but solely to find the truth, he's, well, not quite telling the truth. For example, he makes the claim that Washington rather cautiously put forward the idea that people could be moral without religion, in his farewell address. Quite to the contrary -- what he actually said was that we should regard that belief *with caution*, and "...reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."

He makes similar deceptive claims throughout the book, but his bias is relatively mild, compared with Loewen's explicit Marxism and dislike for the United States. It is my hope that the critical reader of his book will be able to identify the errors Davis makes, and be able to think for themselves.

-----

Update:
After being most of the way through it, I've found myself gritting my teeth a lot recently. While it was refreshing to actually listen to history after Loewen's meta-historical criticisms, I found that not only is the book at a very, very basic level of understanding (not even at AP US History level... closer to a middle school class on US History), but it omits points which are often the most critical to understanding something, and is often factually wrong, repeating a commonly believed lie. Which, ironically, is one of the main criticisms Loewen had of textbooks -- they repeat each others' erroneous oversimplifications. Worse, he can't draw cause and effect in historical context, instead relying on "historical inevitability" to explain away why events happened, as if it were a real historical cause. Why are we going to war? Historical inevitability! Why are we having a great depression? Historical inevitability! He actually uses it to explain every major event studied so far. It's terrible. As Lee Simonson once said, "Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian." In truth, this is actually the sign of an incompetent historian -- one who doesn't actually understand the causes of an event, and so hand-waves the actual causes away.

Some examples of bad history in the last couple chapters:
He talks about Margaret Sanger in quite a lot of detail, including quoting a primary work by her -- but never mentions her beliefs on eugenics, which are *central* to understanding her beliefs on birth control. His portrayal of her is thus biased, heroic, and incomplete. This is the person who wrote, "The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics." Her socialism and belief in eugenics must be stated in any work on Sanger, or a reader is left with a dangerously biased view.

In talking about the Yalta Conference, he states that the Kuomingtang (KMT) was already losing China at the end of WWII. However, it was not until Chaing Kai-Shek's disarmament agreement with Mao after the war (brokered by General Marshall, of the Marshall Plan fame) that the KMT was significantly weakened in comparison with Mao's army, and not until 1949 was mainland China lost to the KMT. Up until the disarmament agreement, the KMT held the upper hand.

There's plenty more problems in the book, but making an exhaustive list of his omissions and errors would be tedious, here. I dropped my review from 4 to 2 stars, as his history is just too bad to recommend to others.

for more information click here

You can tell how the author votes!

I enjoyed this book as an outline of US history. You can definitely tell how the author votes and what political beliefs he subscribes to. No question that he has never voted Republican. Other than that...nice book.

Husband really likes it

My husband is English, and he's been in the States for several years now. Although he's read "Alistair Cooke's America", he wanted to brush up on American history for his citizenship test. He left his first copy of this book on a plane and ordered a second copy so he could finish it.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, page 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

products you might be interested in