Don’t Know Much About History: Anything You Need to Know About American History But Never Learned
- June 30th, 2009
- Posted in Books & Fun Games
What do you know about American history? The book “Don’t Know Much About History: Anything You Need to Know About American History But Never Learned,” by Kenneth Davis, is part of the Don’t Know Much About series of books. Kenneth Davis is a popular American historian who lectures at well-known museums like the Smithsonian and The American Museum of Natural History and publishes in the New York Times and other newspapers.
The book tells American history how it really happened. From Columbus to Clinton, the reader will learn about the important historical events, but also read about the myths and misconceptions over the past 500 years of American history.
The book is divided into 9 chapters and various appendices.
The chapters include:
* Brave new world
* Say you want a revolution
* Growth of a nation: From the creation of constitution to manifest destiny
* Apocalypse then: From civil war to reconstruction
* When monopoly wasn’t a game: The growing empire from wild west to WW1
* Boom to bust to big boom: From the jazz age, to the Great Depression to Hiroshima
The Appendices cover:
* The Bill of Rights and other constitutional amendments
* Is the electoral college a party school? A presidential election primer
* US Presidents and their administrations
This is a great guidebook on American history which the whole family will enjoy. It is a well-resourced, quirky and amusing history book that presents American history in all its excitement, not the boring blah, blah, blah we ignored in school!
