Introduction

There are 10 books in the A History of US series, plus a teachers’ resource volume. The books I reviewed were of the third edition. Why did I decide to review this series of books? These reviews arose from a discussion of the possible biases of the author, Joy Hakim, her series having been recommended on a Marxist website, but also having been criticized elsewhere as having too much Christianity. Later, I read a review by The Textbook League that criticized A History of US for teaching that the US Constitution was inspired by the Iroquois League. This question of biases, including possible pro-Marxist/Socialist/Communist or pro-Christian biases, will be touched on in several of these reviews. These reviews also attempt to answer several larger, more important questions. What are these books? How well or poorly are they done? Are they usable in a homeschooling or after-schooling context? Would I consider these books for use in our homeschool? The latter question is necessarily hypothetical, since two of our children have graduated from high school, and our youngest will do so soon.

The first things that caught my attention were the apparent intended audience, the presentation of each page, and the style of Joy Hakim’s prose. Though the promotional line on the back of cover references "ages 9 to 99", this is sales talk. A more realistic audience age range would be about ages 9-15, not that older students and adults couldn’t appreciate the books. Many US school students study US History twice during the grades that correspond to those ages. Virtually every page has pictures, maps, topical side-bar sections and/or definitions of important words or phrases. Though I became accustomed to it, initially I found this cluttered and distracting. The intent is to fit as much valuable, interesting stuff as possible on each page, but some students may find it distracting or visually intimidating. The books are written as if Joy Hakim is a storyteller, addressing readers as familiarly as if they were sitting gathered around her. Many students of the age range noted above are likely to find this style engaging, which is a plus. To a significant degree, the intended age range and storytelling style determine how the book is constructed. The books are episodic and topical in presentation, rather like a series of detailed photographs with connecting narrative. Book 2, for example, has 42 brief chapters. Thus, the level of detail varies considerably, and users may want to supplement the coverage of some themes. The pun in the title of the series is not accidental, as is made apparent in many of the books. A major theme throughout is that the history and development of the United States is the coming together and inclusion in society and governance of many peoples and both sexes.

The First Americans Prehistory - 1600 (Book 1)

In several ways, The First Americans is one of the more interesting volumes in the A History of US set. It covers Native American cultures in greater detail than typically was done in textbooks several decades ago (when I was a student). In so doing, Joy Hakim draws from archaeological information, Native American traditions, and contemporary accounts. The First Americans starts, purportedly, with the first human migrations to the Americas, surveys several regional Native American cultures, and covers European exploration and colonization efforts up to 1600.

With a very few exceptions, written accounts of peoples and events in the Americas start with those of the European explorers, from 1492 onward. Thus, the section on human migrations to the Americas is based entirely on paleontology, archaeology, and currently popular theory. For the most part, it is theory woven around a very few artifacts. Some might view this as meaning that almost nothing is truly known about this period, and that the current state of theory is so speculative it might be almost entirely overthrown by some future discovery. Others might view it as a fascinating Sherlock Holmes like investigation, where clues are rare, and every new find refines the theory. And some might credulously accept the current theory without being troubled by its scant evidentiary base. I’m closest to the first viewpoint, as might be guessed. All the same, I do believe that students (and Americans generally) need to be aware of current theories of human migrations to the Americas. Parents with Christian and similar religious beliefs should keep in mind:

* The First Americans assumes that macro evolution is fact;

* The First Americans assumes that the Earth is billions of years in age;

* The First Americans contradicts the LDS belief that Native Americans are descendants of Israel.

Since chapters 2-4, almost 10% of the book, are given to this topic, parents need to decide in advance whether and how they will present these chapters, and be ready to explain their approach to their children.

Chapters 5-13, which surveys regional Native American cultures, are, necessarily, based on archaeology, Native American traditions, and, after 1492, on accounts from European explorers and settlers. As a whole, this section is very interesting, helping students see how different Native American groups adapted their ways of life and cultures to the environment in which they lived. Since these chapters rely so heavily on archaeology and tradition, it would have been helpful to students and teachers alike had Joy Hakim indicated what information in her accounts was based on what sources. This would help students and teachers understand how tenuous some of our "knowledge" is, and strengthen their appreciation of the work done by archaeologists and anthropologists.

It is in the section about European exploration and colonization that I ask Oliver Twist’s question: "Please, Joy Hakim, may I have some more?" It isn’t an imbalance in the coverage of topics, so much as knowing that students will have questions that The First Americans leaves unanswered:

* Why were so many explorers and settlers motivated by greed?

* How were the non-greedy ones different from those who were greedy?

* Why did the Spanish, French, and English approach colonization so differently (landed nobility vs. traders vs. large and small farmers, tradesmen, and merchants)?

* Why were Native Americans unable to recognize and take advantage of the superiority in use of their weapons over 16th and 17th Century guns (see sidebar, page 158; bows and arrows had better accuracy, better rate of fire, were silent, and there was no smoke to reveal the warrior’s location).

I think greater emphasis was needed on the Native American allies of Hernando Cortes, as they were critical to the conquest of the Aztecs (Cortes didn’t overcome the 250,000-man army of the Aztecs with just a few hundred men, guns, horses and a few cannon). That I wished for more, however, doesn’t mean that I thought the coverage of this period deficient. Actually, the section provides students with a fairly good picture of the Europeans’ exploration and settlement of the Americas.

On pages 67-69, The First Americans repeats the hoary myth that the thousand years between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance were Dark Ages in Europe. "Do you think you’d be doing much reading if you lived before Gutenberg and his printing press? Of course not. Chances are no one would teach you to read. It wouldn’t be worth it. Unless you were very rich or very lucky, you might live a full life and never see a book." "For most people, before the 15th Century, Europe was a place of superstition and poverty. For most it was a place of war and disease."

To be sure, western Europe experienced multiple waves of invasion from Eastern Europe, North Africa, Scandinavia, and Asia Minor throughout those centuries. Conquerors overthrew existing governmental structures and brought waves of new peoples and cultures into Europe. In the 14th Century, bubonic plague wiped out about a third of Europe’s population. In the 14th and 15th Centuries, the Hundred Years’ War ravaged, albeit fitfully, France. That is a lot of chaos.

However, from the ruins and the destruction brought by invasions, a new civilization rose. The nomadic conquerors and the conquered assimilated, and settled into towns and cities. In the countryside, agriculture rose above subsistence; crafts and trades built the infrastructures of towns, cities, and a way of life. In monasteries, monks preserved much of the Greek and Roman literary heritage and provided scribes and teachers who hand-copied books and preserved literacy in Europe. Priests, monks, and well-to-do laity created schools in towns and cities and universities that have lasted for centuries. Some universities were founded in the 12th and 13th Centuries, indicating a certain degree of literacy during that time period. Great cathedrals were built, masterpieces of architecture and art; some of the breath-taking stained glass windows in the cathedral at Augsburg, Germany were made in the late 13th Century. This was all accomplished before the Renaissance. The Dark Ages myth pictures the Renaissance as rising from the ashes of the Dark Ages. In truth, Medieval Civilization rebuilt the ashes of Rome while assimilating new peoples into a critical mass that launched and propelled the Renaissance. Contemning Medieval Civilization was a creature of the "Enlightenment", a vehicle that anti-Christian philosophers used to obscure an accomplishment, albeit incomplete and imperfect, of Christianity. Invaders conquered western European land, but Christianity conquered and slowly transformed their hearts. I’m not ignoring the Crusades or the 100 Years’ War, just giving the fuller context.

Pages 97-98 have a couple of mistaken statements. "The Aztec Indians killed tens of thousands of people who held (religious) beliefs different from theirs." This somewhat understates the number so slaughtered, estimated as having been about 20,000 victims a year, but more significantly, the victims actually were tribute from conquered peoples, whose religion was similar to that of the Aztecs. "There were 95 things in the Catholic Church that Luther thought should be changed." Martin Luther’s famous "95 Theses" were statements (theses) for a proposed debate having to do with one issue Luther had with the Catholic Church - a single pebble (rather than 95) that started an avalanche. A map and its associated caption, on page 145, associate the pirate Blackbeard with the piracy of the late 16th and early 17th Centuries. This is an anachronism, as Blackbeard’s "career" was during the early 18th Century (over a hundred years later), and after the English had replaced the French and the Spanish in the Carolinas and Georgia.

As I said at the start of the review, The First Americans is a very interesting book, and a very good one as well. In all probability, most of any supplementation that will be desirable will arise from students’ interests. One possibility for further study would be to have your students research the Native American tribe(s) who lived in your area - where they lived, their foods, their type of dwelling, their crafts and utensils. Another possibility, for some, would be to research early European exploration and settlement in your area. All in all, The First Americans would be very usable to homeschoolers, and I would (hypothetically) consider it for use in our homeschool.

Making Thirteen Colonies 1600 - 1740 (Book 2)

Making Thirteen Colonies covers the history of each of the thirteen colonies and some of the history of the colonies. The reader is given some understanding of the ways of life and cultures of the colonists. Making Thirteen Colonies also includes some English history, as this influenced that of the colonies. The reader is introduced to several individuals who figured prominently in the American Revolution and the founding of the US.

There is much in this book that will be likable and uncomfortable to people of various viewpoints. Illustrative examples can be found in the treatment of the Pilgrims and Puritans. Joy Hakim tries to present their beliefs and behavior in a balanced way, the "good" with the "bad". They are taken to task for religious intolerance - persecuting other Christians and their belief that they were right about God - and the Salem Witch Trials. Her apparent belief is that there is no one right religion. This all would be standard fare, except that she also tries to help the reader understand the Pilgrims’ and Puritans’ perspectives and to show that they were people who strove to be good, but were human and sometimes gave way to their faults and fears. The book also mentions the ways in which the Pilgrims and Puritans tried to be fair and helpful to neighboring Native Americans, which isn’t exactly standard fare. In other words, the Pilgrims and Puritans are shown as real people, neither plaster saints nor genocidal, intolerant demons.

Making Thirteen Colonies is not without quirks. The speculation on pg. 39 about trying to hunt in full armor in Virginia (discomfort due to heat, noise scaring prey) is an amusing word picture, but probably not very realistic. Also, the sidebar on pg. 84 indulges excessively in the noble savage myth with regard to Native Americans. This myth is popular in current public education, but is over-simplified and unbalanced. The chapter on the Native Americans’ revolt in New Mexico is out of place. The preceding and subsequent historical context of that revolt is lacking. The revolt is used as part of a theme in the book, but it actually is unconnected to any other events in the book.

An extensive sidebar section on pg. 62 includes this comment relative to Marxism/Socialism/Communism:

"Jamestown tried a kind of communist system, and so did Plymouth. Both colonies found that people work harder when they know they can own land or a business. (In the 20th century, Russia and most of Eastern Europe tried and rejected communism.) People often need to be forced to be communists."

While the sidebar points out that problems can happen in capitalism, this comment amounts to an indictment of Marxism/Socialism/Communism: it doesn’t work and must be imposed by force.

Would this book be useful to homeschoolers? Definitely, using the same care, in my opinion, homeschooling parents should use with any good American History textbook or series. In my view, there can be no absolutely accurate, complete, and balanced History textbook, nor any teacher with the knowledge to recognize perfection - authors and teachers are human beings. Thus homeschooling parents should be hands-on or supervising closely in teaching history - adding perspective, balance, and supplemental information where they believe it is needed. As a whole, Making Thirteen Colonies presents an impressive amount of historic information, tries to be balanced, and does so in a way that many students will find engaging. If I had a 10- or 11-year-old child, would I use this book for US History? It is very likely that I would.

From Colonies to Country 1735 - 1791 (Book 3)

From Colonies to Country is simultaneously a frustrating and a very good book. Before getting into what I found frustrating, I want to start with what was very good. The author, Joy Hakim, does very well in helping students understand what led to the American Revolution. Along with the usual information - the tyrannic ambition of King George III, the various taxes, Parliamentary Acts, and actions that sparked the Revolution, and significant American leaders - From Colonies to Country makes clear that the colonists’ growing frustration with how England treated them was rooted in their expectation that they shared in the rights English citizens enjoyed (e.g. the Petition of Right and the English Bill of Rights), and these were being trampled. The section about the French and Indian War is uneven, through focusing too narrowly on events in North America. While the coverage of North American events is very good, the larger context of the series of wars in Europe that spilled into North America is missing, as is the post-war feeling in England that England had defended the colonies, and that the colonies should pay for that defense. This is what led to the taxes that the colonists found objectionable. Students are given a very good picture, however, of how the War progressed, including the parts played by Native American allies of both the French and the English. From Colonies to Country also covers very well the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, providing explanations of the import and content of both documents. Joy Hakim correctly points to (then) recent and ancient European and Middle Eastern history as the roots of the United States Constitution. The texts of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution are appended at the back of the book.

There are several things that combine to make the coverage of the Revolutionary War at once confusing, cluttered, and abbreviated. The almost chapter-length sidebar on pages 114-115 (about Spanish exploration of what became the Southwest US) is superfluous to the topics covered by From Colonies to Country. For a book of this size, the chapters covering the War devote too much space to people and events (usually involving women, blacks, and Native Americans) not vitally related to the course of the War. Besides taking up space, forcing the abbreviation of the account of the War, this also breaks up and confuses the flow of the narrative. Joy Hakim’s topical storytelling style is not well suited to a protracted event, such as the Revolutionary War. The coverage of the writing of the Declaration of Independence also suffers from this, though to a lesser degree. Since, in the past, textbooks’ coverage of women and ethnic minorities was deficient, showing how women and ethnic minorities were involved in history is a needed and welcome improvement. From Colonies to Country goes too far, however, reiterating ideas to the point of preachiness and including material of marginal importance. Joy Hakim, at the start of chapter 30, hints at the problem this caused, ironically, just before an irrelevant digression about the Russian settlement at Fort Ross in northern California. Despite the irrelevant and marginal material (to which I will return shortly) and the sometimes broken narrative, From Colonies to Country presents a decent account of the Revolutionary War. Teaching parents should be able to re-weave this section so that there is better continuity, while selectively using the sidebar material as part of whatever supplementation is chosen. The formative experience of the winter in Valley Forge is covered particularly well. On the other hand, the account of the progress of the War in the southern colonies, which led to the decisive Battle of Yorktown, needs supplementation. The story of Benedict Arnold, whose bitter pride turned a great leader into a betrayer, is all but missing. The account of Nathan Hale is in need of supplementation as well.

No doubt, some readers of this review may be wondering, as I did, why From Colonies to Country is so burdened with extraneous and marginal material. I cannot speak with absolute certainty, but I believe that the explanation lies in the fact (which I learned recently) that the A History of US series is approved for use in California’s (and possibly other states’) public schools. While Diane Ravitch’s book, The Language Police gives a fuller explanation of the textbook approval process, I’ll try to summarize it. Textbook approval in California (and other states) is a committee process, in which proposed textbooks are reviewed by educators, concerned citizens, and issue-oriented groups. Reviewers’ concerns are considered by the committee and fed back to the textbook publishers as things that must be changed for the textbook or series to be approved. This sounds reasonable, except that issue-oriented groups aggressively exert pressure to impose their viewpoints (usually ethnic or gender) on public school textbooks. That this imposition might distort a textbook doesn’t concern them. While the approval committee should, theoretically, filter those pressures, the committee is subject to pressures from government officials and courts. Textbook publishers face a stark choice: change their books or be unable to sell them. Since developing a textbook series can cost millions of dollars, a few choices not to change textbooks would lead to the publisher going out of business. In this way a process intended to assure quality - accuracy, completeness, and balance - is hijacked by issue-oriented pressure groups to mold textbooks (and, they hope, students) to their satisfaction.

It is my belief that several of the books in the A History of US series exhibit evidence of having been altered to satisfy issue-oriented pressure groups. One example, in Making Thirteen Colonies, was the irrelevant chapter about a Native American uprising in New Mexico. The chapter is just thrown in with no connection to the rest of the book, like grafting a branch from a peach tree into a tomato vine. The sections about the Spanish exploration of Utah and the Russian settlement in California in From Colonies to Country have the same grafted in flavor - unconnected, irrelevant. As I noted in the review of War, Peace, and All that Jazz, I felt that book’s coverage of the all-white baseball leagues, the Negro Leagues, of Jazz, and of American art was excessive for the length of that book. In From Colonies to Country, the preachiness and the featuring of, relative to the topics, scope, and length of the book, minor events involving women, Native Americans, and/or blacks also stuck out like a sore thumb. It was considering all these things together that led me to the opinion they were artifacts of pressure-group-imposed editing.

In writing this, I’m not, and would never, arguing for the omission of the contributions of women, Native Americans, Hispanics, and blacks to America’s history and culture. It’s sad that stating this fact as being my view in order to deflect accusations of racism is necessary. I’m just pointing out that exaggeration is as problematic as omission. It is entirely possible, of course, that my attributing what I perceive as including irrelevancies and information of minor importance to the textbook approval process is entirely incorrect. Personally, however, I think that Joy Hakim demonstrates that she is a better author than to burden her work in this manner. On the other hand, if my surmise is correct, I will have to leave to readers of this review to answer whether they believe Joy Hakim and her publisher were correct in accommodating the pressure groups, and whether textbooks that have undergone revision for public school textbook approval are suitable for their homeschools.

A review by The Textbook League of Making Thirteen Colonies, http://www.textbookleague.org/121hakm.htm, states, "(Joy Hakim) does this so that she can endorse the notion that the United States was modeled after "Indian republics" rather than European polities." This statement is false: Making Thirteen Colonies doesn’t teach this "notion"; From Colonies to Country doesn’t teach this "notion". The following sentences from page 160 of From Colonies to Country show what Joy Hakim evidently considers to have been the primary influences on the US Constitution, through James Madison:

"Madison was a scholar. He read all he could find about governments all over the world and throughout history. Long before the Convention got started, he wrote to his friend Thomas Jefferson and asked for help. Jefferson had taken Franklin’s place as America’s minister to France. Jefferson sent Madison books - hundreds of books - and he sent his ideas.

"Madison read about the governments of ancient Greece and Rome and of other places and times. Then he took the best ideas he found and wrote them into notebooks that he brought with him to the Convention."

Why the Textbook League’s review criticizes A History of US for teaching what she clearly does not is unknown to me. Whatever the reason, this false criticism reflects poorly on The Textbook League.

Is From Colonies to Country usable for homeschoolers? My opinion is that it is. Some supplementation is in order, but many homeschooling parents would do this anyway. Would I consider From Colonies to Country for our homeschool (if our children were the appropriate age)? Yes.

The New Nation 1789 - 1850 (Book 4)

The New Nation begins with the Presidency of George Washington and the practical work of building the government prescribed by the US Constitution. While the book has a chapter that briefly talks about Presidents Martin Van Buren through James Buchanan, 1837 - 1861, realistically, the book ends in the first half of the 1830s, during the Presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829 - 1837). This means that, despite the date given on the cover of the book, several major events that happened before 1850, including the Second Great Awakening, the Texas War of Independence, the Mexican-American War, and the California Gold Rush are not covered in The New Nation. Not covered, though alluded to indirectly, is the demise of the Federalist Party and the ascendancy of the Jeffersonian Democrats. This is probably at the root of this incorrect statement on page 101: "Jackson formed a new political party: the Democratic Party". The comment on page 164, "(Martin Van Buren) helped turn the old Democratic-Republican Party into the modern Democratic Party," is correct. Another topic that is omitted is Andrew Jackson’s successful fight in 1832 to prevent the renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States. There is one more volume in this series, Liberty for All, before the volume about the Civil War (War, Terrible War), so some of these topics might be covered in it.

As with From Colonies to Country, The New Nation is a very good book that is burdened with disproportionate coverage of some topics, with other topics getting scant mention. On top of obviously necessary coverage of slavery, Abolitionism, and the mistreatment of Native Americans, the contradiction between the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the institution of slavery is repeated - this contradiction was covered thoroughly in From Colonies to Country. Also, persons are discussed at some length (usually blacks or Native Americans) who should be covered in books of greater length and detail, but whose influence on this period of US history wasn’t great enough to warrant inclusion in a book of The New Nation‘s length and scope. More than 20% of the text is devoted to slavery and Native Americans, which is excessive. As a consequence of this (apparently), the War of 1812 receives very incomplete coverage, both the course of the War and its context in the European and Native American wars. This is unfortunate, as the War of 1812 forced Britain and other European countries to take US independence seriously (a fact Joy Hakim mentions), and gave credibility to the later pronounced Monroe Doctrine. Some of the omitted events noted above may also have been crowded out by the repetitions and excesses.

A comment on page 143, "He became a deist (as did Jefferson, Washington, and Adams." is incorrect. Jefferson, Washington, and Adams were not Deists. From Colonies to Country, page 56, tells, correctly, what Deists believed: "A deist (DEE-ist) believes in God as the creator of the universe. Deists reject the idea of an active God who directs worldly events." The ideas expressed by Jefferson, Washington, and Adams assume God’s participation in the world, thus showing that they were not Deists. Thomas Jefferson was the closest to Deists philosophically, but his comment, quoted on page 149 of The New Nation, shows that Jefferson was not a Deist: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

My review of From Colonies to Country includes my speculation as to the reason for the excesses noted above - I believe that ethnic pressure groups forced the editing of A History of US (through the public school textbook approval process), to reflect their particular perspectives. In addition to distorting the content of the books, I’m concerned that students will perceive the preachy repetitiveness and the excessive coverage of minor events and personages as insults to their intelligence, resulting in resentment and being "turned off" to History.

The New Nation provides students with a very good picture of the challenges, national and international, faced during the administrations of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. Joy Hakim also gives very good portrayals of the personalities of many early US leaders, including some of their interpersonal conflicts. Nestled in the clutter of less important people and events in the coverage of conflicts over slavery and Native Americans is some very good information about important people, important ideas, and important cultural and economic trends that were significant to these conflicts.

I believe that The New Nation would be useful to homeschoolers, and I would (hypothetically, given my children’s ages) consider it for use in our family’s homeschool. As with From Colonies to Country and War, Peace, and All that Jazz, supplementation is advisable, and teaching parents need to be sensitive to their children’s understanding and interest level with respect to assigning the more repetitive sections of The New Nation.

Liberty for All? 1820 - 1860 (Book 5)

Liberty for All? covers the years 1820-1860: some events in the book occurred as early as Thomas Jefferson’s Presidency; the book ends with the election of Abraham Lincoln and the gathering clouds of the Civil War. Liberty for All?, as are the other books in the A History of US series, is organized topically. The book covers: explorers and mountain men; westward migration and life on the trail; settlement in California and the gold rush; the Texas War for Independence; the Mexican-American War; innovations and developments in travel and communication; industrialization; whaling; the beginnings of the Women’s Rights movement; development of American literature and art; abolition, the Underground Railway, and slavery becoming a crisis.

Many of these topics are covered very well in Liberty for All?. Biographical information is used very effectively in the section about explorers and mountain men. Information and quotes from the diaries of westward travelers will help students picture life on the trail. The sections on the beginnings of the Women’s Rights movement and on the slavery issue coming to crisis are very extensive. Since slavery - its injustice, the political disputes, abolition - is covered at length in three of the A History of US books, the cumulative effect is repetitious and preachy. The coverage of improvements in east-west travel and communication is very good, but the inventions (other than the telegraph) that began changing people’s ways of life and work get only brief mention. The sections on American literature and art, while definitely interesting, are excessive for a book of this scope and length.

The sections that cover California, the Texas War for Independence, the annexation of Texas, and the Mexican-American War have problems. The first problem, the least subject to perspective and interpretation, is the non-chronological presentation of inter-related events:

Joy Hakim’s topical, storytelling style necessitates a certain amount of chronological overlap as the events related to the topics overlap in time, however the chapter on the Texas War for Independence is clearly out of place chronologically, and also topically, as it grew out of westward migration, covered in chapters 3-7. Joy Hakim, however, has represented westward exploration and migration, Texas Independence, John C. Fremont’s explorations (the 60-man protective escort in his 1845 expedition is called a "fighting force" - 60 men against hundreds or thousands of Mexican soldiers?), California Independence, and the Mexican-American War as an expansionist quasi-conspiracy. The anachronistic placement of the section on the Texas War for Independence appears to have been done to enhance that perspective.

In Joy Hakim’s perspective, power hungry, greedy US politicians, speculators, and merchants fed US expansion, conspiring to grab land at the expense of Mexico and Native Americans. James K. Polk is cast in a central, dark, role in this tale of greed and ambition (all this melodrama lacks is a piano player). Facts are omitted or obscured that don’t support this scenario. A sidebar on page 48, for example, states, "But the coming of the United States meant worse times for (California Indians). By the year 1900, more than 80% of the tribes had vanished." However, a sidebar on page 52 puts a different light on the 1900 statistic: "Historians estimate that there were 300,000 to 1 million Native Americans in California before contact with Europeans ... by 1849, disease and war with settlers left the Indian population at about 150,000." Since California declared independence from Mexico in 1846 and became part of the US in 1846 and 1847 (as the war came to California), this means that a 50% to 85% loss in the California Native American population happened during Spanish and Mexican rule. Much as Joy Hakim (JH) portrays the events of the 1830s and 1840s as products of US expansionist ambition and aggression, reality in what became the southwest US was more complex and less conspiratorial.

In Texas, as in California, the Spanish missions brought, unintentionally, diseases that devastated Native American populations. To populate Texas, Spain and Mexico encouraged US citizens to settle, provided they changed citizenship (including converting to Catholicism, as JH notes). With Mexican independence, these US-born Texans joined in state and national (Mexican) affairs. As JH states, Mexico’s governance became chaotic. Lopez de Santa Ana, a military leader, grabbed power and set aside the Mexican constitution - he saw himself as the "Napoleon of the West", an emperor who would impose order on his empire. In addition to his tyranny (taking and exercising power contrary to existing laws) and ambition, Santa Ana distrusted the US and people from the US. He viewed all Texans who had come from the US, including those who had been Mexican citizens for several years, as threats to his power, agents of a US plot. Santa Ana sent troops to seize power and suppress these imagined conspirators. In so doing, he sparked a rebellion that had the effect he feared. Liberty for All? omits much of this.

After being captured at the Battle of San Jacinto, Santa Ana signed the Treaties of Velasco to obtain his release. Besides making Texas effectively independent (which JH mentions), the treaties set the border of Texas at the Rio Grande and required Mexico to pay for damage done in attacking Texas (provisions JH didn’t mention). A link to the Treaties of Velasco and relevant quotes therefrom are appended at the end of this review. Santa Ana and the government of Mexico abrogated the treaties, and Santa Ana pledged to restore Texas as part of Mexico (JH omits this). What followed, though, was a time of disruption in Mexico’s government. Sometimes Santa Ana held power, sometimes a faction that was willing to recognize Texas’s independence, but not the border the treaty specified. For some eight years Texas was an independent country, though they wanted to become part of the US. Though US relations with Mexico were a concern, Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren also didn’t want to stir up the slavery debate by Texas entering the US as a slave state. Around this same time, claims by US citizens against Mexico for losses suffered due to Mexico’s revolutions were adjudicated in England, the judgement being against Mexico, for some $3 million (J. H. omits this). With the election of James K. Polk in 1844, the US Congress voted to annex Texas, making the Texas border and debts issues between the US and Mexico. Liberty for All? mentions these issues, but as questionable, not giving students the information necessary to form their own opinion. President Polk sent John Slidell to negotiate all these issues with the government of Mexico; Polk also gave Slidell authority to offer to purchase "California" (modern CA, AZ, NM, UT, and parts of several states), an offer to which Liberty for All? alludes. When Slidell left the US, the faction willing to accept Texas’s independence was in power, but when he arrived in Mexico, a revolution was in progress. Santa Ana’s faction wouldn’t negotiate the details of what it refused to recognize; the other faction wouldn’t negotiate for fear of seeming to compromise with the US, and losing supporters. Slidell left, and Santa Ana came into power. None of this is mentioned in Liberty for All?. When President Polk sent US Army forces to the north side of the Rio Grande, he did so to defend Texas and the border set by the Treaties of Velasco against a Mexican government whose announced intention was to reconquer Texas. Liberty for All? gives students the false impression that Polk’s stationing of troops at the Rio Grande was an act of aggression. When Congress and Polk declared war, the attack by Mexican troops on a US patrol on US soil was the spark that lit the fuse of war, not the sole, weak, pretext for war. Meanwhile in California, Californians, acting on their own, declared their independence from Mexico before they knew of the Mexican-American War. The actual progress of the Mexican-American War gets little coverage in Liberty for All?.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War, is similarly misrepresented by omitting mention of several of its clauses (a link to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and relevant quotes therefrom are appended at the end of this review):

Joy Hakim takes pains to quote many notable people who opposed the Mexican-American War. The war was controversial at the time. Little attention is paid in Liberty for All? to those who supported the war. Nor does JH suggest alternative solutions to the problem of ongoing border strife with a country with an unstable government or even acknowledge the problem. I have no problem with Joy Hakim having a perspective on the Mexican-American War, or with including that perspective in her textbook. But by omitting and obscuring information to support that perspective, Liberty for All? devolves from history into indoctrination:

Were I reviewing Liberty for All? as a stand-alone book, I might give it a very qualified positive recommendation. The problems highlighted above are found in 4 or 5 of the 38 chapters. Because this is the 10th of the 11 reviews I will be doing on the books of the A History of US series, I already have seen these kinds of one-sided, tendentious, omissions before. I recommended against using All the People; my recommendation is that teaching parents not use Liberty for All?, or if they do, to teach about the Texas War for Independence, the annexation of Texas, California, and the Mexican-American War separately, using other materials. Since this is a greater burden of supplementation than I would impose on my wife or me, and because I find the bias and omissions so objectionable, we would not use Liberty for All? in our family’s homeschool.

http://www.lsjunction.com/docs/velasco.htm

From Article 3: "The Mexican troops will evacuate the Territory of Texas, passing to the other side of the Rio Grande del Norte."

From Article 4: "The Mexican Army in its retreat shall not take the property of any person without his consent and just indemnification ..."

From Article 5: "That all private property ... that may have been captured by any portion of the mexican army or may have taken refuge in the said army since the commencement of the late invasion, shall be restored to the Commander of the Texian army, or to such other persons as may be appointed by the Government of Texas to receive them."

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/mexico/guadhida.htm

Article XII: "In consideration of the extension acquired by the boundaries of the United States, as defined in the fifth article of the present treaty, the Government of the United States engages to pay to that of the Mexican Republic the sum of fifteen millions of dollars.

Immediately after the treaty shall have been duly ratified by the Government of the Mexican Republic, the sum of three millions of dollars shall be paid to the said Government by that of the United States, at the city of Mexico, in the gold or silver coin of Mexico The remaining twelve millions of dollars shall be paid at the same place, and in the same coin, in annual installments of three millions of dollars each, together with interest on the same at the rate of six per centum per annum. This interest shall begin to run upon the whole sum of twelve millions from the day of the ratification of the present treaty by--the Mexican Government, and the first of the installments shall be paid-at the expiration of one year from the same day. Together with each annual installment, as it falls due, the whole interest accruing on such installment from the beginning shall also be paid."

Articles XIII, XIV, and XV: "The United States engage, moreover, to assume and pay to the claimants all the amounts now due them, and those hereafter to become due, by reason of the claims already liquidated and decided against the Mexican Republic, under the conventions between the two republics severally concluded on the eleventh day of April, eighteen hundred and thirty-nine, and on the thirtieth day of January, eighteen hundred and forty-three; so that the Mexican Republic shall be absolutely exempt, for the future, from all expense whatever on account of the said claims."

"The United States do furthermore discharge the Mexican Republic from all claims of citizens of the United States, not heretofore decided against the Mexican Government, which may have arisen previously to the date of the signature of this treaty; which discharge shall be final and perpetual, whether the said claims be rejected or be allowed by the board of commissioners provided for in the following article, and whatever shall be the total amount of those allowed."

"The United States, exonerating Mexico from all demands on account of the claims of their citizens mentioned in the preceding article, and considering them entirely and forever canceled, whatever their amount may be, undertake to make satisfaction for the same, to an amount not exceeding three and one-quarter millions of dollars."

War, Terrible War 1855 - 1865 (Book 6)

Once again, Joy Hakim has painted, sometimes with broad strokes, sometimes in fine detail, a picture of a critical period in US history. As in her book on the Colonial period, she has made a serious, in my opinion largely successful, attempt to draw readers into the lives and minds of protagonists, "small" and "great". There are many rocks on which an account of this time period and its events could crash: demonizing slave owners and the South as a class; white-washing slavery; canonizing Abraham Lincoln; minimizing what Lincoln accomplished; writing from a purely sectional - North or South - viewpoint. While War, Terrible War is not neutral, I believe it successfully navigates these rocks. While Joy Hakim clearly believes that the North was basically correct - not permitting secession and ending slavery - she is careful to explain the motives and concerns of Southerners, and touches on the disunity among Northerners. Abraham Lincoln is idealized to some degree, but he is shown as a man who was human, complex, and grew while in office.

War, Terrible War begins by summarizing the history of the legal and political conflicts over slavery in the US that led up to the crisis of the American Civil War. The literary influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown’s uprising are covered. Joy Hakim includes considerable biographical information about Abraham Lincoln and covers the Presidential campaign of 1860. War, Terrible War provides a fairly detailed account of the progress of the Civil War, especially in view of the apparent intended audience age range of this series. The coverage of efforts west of the Appalachians is incomplete. The strategic importance of controlling the Mississippi River is not made clear, and the campaign in Tennessee is scarcely mentioned. These omissions obscure Ulysses S. Grant’s rise to command and "Sherman’s March to the Sea", events that proved significant in the North’s victory. While War, Terrible War is not gruesome, neither does it sugar-coat the Civil War. Teaching parents may find that they need to be attentive to their children’s maturity and attention spans in using this book. On the whole, War, Terrible War is a very readable, interesting treatment of a difficult and critical period in US history. It presents for students’ contemplation many of the ideas, issues, and difficulties through which the people of the US, North and South, lived.

Reconstructing America 1865 - 1890 (Book 7)

Reconstructing America covers the years often called the Reconstruction Era. Along with Reconstruction, covered topics include: the impeachment of Andrew Johnson; cowboys and cattle drives; the transcontinental railway; the final defeats of Native Americans; immigration; progress towards women’s suffrage; the 1876 Centennial; inventors (e.g. Thomas A. Edison and Cyrus McCormick) and other cultural figures (e.g. Thomas Nast and Mark Twain); the Jim Crow laws and some notable black leaders. Joy Hakim uses her storytelling style to good effect in Reconstructing America, covering topics in turn without jumping around, and using the experiences of the people who lived the events to engage students’ interest.

Most of the book is very well done, and continues Joy Hakim’s theme that the history of the US is one of progress toward free and complete political, social, and economic participation by all of its people. Besides a larger issue that will follow shortly, there are some annoyances worth noting. A sidebar on page 9 gives a definition of abortion that even some pro-abortion people might find overly euphemistic (emphasis in the original): "Abortion is the expulsion of a fetus (an unborn child) from a pregnant woman’s womb before the fetus is ready to live outside." Besides the falseness of, "... before the fetus is ready to live outside," - partial birth abortion kills many viable babies - "expulsion" is a soft, misleading term for a process that tears babies apart limb by limb, or chemically burns them to death, or sucks out babies’ brains and crushes their skulls. The captions of two photos, pages 66 and 148, are each missing the last line. In the description of anti-immigration agitation given in Chapter 23, pages 119-122, one agitation source not mentioned was labor unions, not a surprising omission, given Joy Hakim’s biases.

The chapters in Reconstructing America I found disturbing, were those about Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois. Two things will be very clear to students using this textbook: Joy Hakim has unqualified admiration for DuBois; Joy Hakim believes Washington’s accomplishments, were largely negated by compromise with Jim Crow. While Joy Hakim informs students that DuBois and Washington disagreed with each other in life, she understates the bitterness of that disagreement and does not inform students that she has presented, unbalanced, DuBois’s opinions.

Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois had very different upbringings. Washington was born a slave, had to help support his family (while still growing up) after they were freed, had to labor to afford every bit of education he received, and was focused on the problems and education of southern blacks. DuBois’s family lived in the North and had been free for two or more generations; educational paths were fairly open to him, and he walked them so well that he studied in Europe and eventually became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. DuBois also spent several years in the South as a teacher, encountering prejudice and discrimination far worse than he had previously experienced. Washington set up his Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, and persuaded many whites in the North, the South, and in Tuskegee itself to help build and grow his educational institution for blacks. Given their very different experiences, views, and personalities, it was probably inevitable that they would conflict.

From Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. DuBois, published in 1903, Chapter 3 http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DubSoul.html:

"Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things, --

"First, political power,

"Second, insistence on civil rights,

"Third, higher education of Negro youth, --

"and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. ... As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:

"1. The disfranchisement of the Negro.

"2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.

"3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.

"These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington's teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment."

Compare with Reconstructing America, page 178:

"During the years that Washington was the leading American black, Jim Crow grew mightier and mightier."

"Why do some historians think Booker T. Washington may have held his people back? What did he do wrong?

"He compromised. Sometimes compromise is the best thing to do. Booker T. Washington thought he was doing right, and maybe he was. What do you think?

"Remember, he lived in the days of Jim Crow. He lived in the days when two or three blacks were lynched - murdered - each week. What did he do about that? Almost nothing.

"Washington compromised with the whites who were in power. He told the white leaders that blacks wanted jobs, that all they wanted was a chance to earn money. He believed that if blacks had economic opportunities, other opportunities would follow. ... But he also told white audiences that if blacks could have jobs and economic opportunities they wouldn’t demand social equality. They would live with Jim Crow."

Joy Hakim, in the chapter about Booker T. Washington quotes from his autobiography, Up From Slavery, (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/WASHINGTON/toc.html). In it, he makes his message clear, and contradicts W. E. B. DuBois’s and Joy Hakim’s claims about it (emphasis added, page numbers are from the Airmont paperback edition):

From Chapter 13 (pg. 125), referring to a speech before the National Education Association: "I further contended that, in relation to his vote, the Negro should more and more consider the interests of the community in which he lived ...."

From Chapter 13 (pg. 128), referring to a speech before Congress, Spring 1895: "I tried to emphasize the fact that while the Negro should not be deprived by unfair means of the franchise, political agitation alone would not save him, and that back of the ballot he must have property, industry, skill, economy, intelligence, and character, ..."

From Chapter 14 (pg. 137), from his speech at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, September 18, 1895: "The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. ... It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges."

Where is the compromise, the promise to "live with Jim Crow" (Reconstructing America, page 178) in "the Negro should not be deprived by unfair means of the franchise"? In "It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours"? Why, how, when Joy Hakim had these statements literally in front of her in Up From Slavery, did she misrepresent and even invert Washington’s message?!

Booker T. Washington wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly (November, 1899), "The Case of the Negro", http://www.colorado.edu/English/engl4652/btw.case.html. Here are some relevant quotes, emphasis added:

"In doing this, I would not have the Negro deprived of any privilege guaranteed to him by the Constitution of the United States. It is not best for the Negro that he relinquish any of his constitutional rights; it is not best for the Southern white man that he should ..."

"But I may be asked, Would you confine the Negro to agriculture, mechanic, the domestic arts, etc.? Not at all; but just now and for a number of years the stress should be laid along the lines that I have mentioned. We shall need and must have many teachers and ministers, some doctors and lawyers and statesmen, but these professional men will have a constituency or a foundation from which to draw support just in proportion as the race prospers along the economic lines that I have pointed out."

This article was written some three years before W. E. B. DuBois wrote Souls of Black Folk. It clearly contradicts, in detail, the message DuBois and Joy Hakim attribute to Booker T. Washington.

Here is the comment that aroused W. E. B. DuBois’s ire:

From Chapter 14 (pg. 136), from his speech at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, September 18, 1895: "... interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."

Any Jim Crow racist who found comfort in, "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers," missed the previous sentence, "interlacing our ... civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one." When "civil and religious li(ves)" are "interlaced" to that degree, the phrase "purely social" is empty. The racist would also have had to miss, "It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours." This speech, dubbed by DuBois the "Atlanta Compromise" has no compromise with Jim Crow. Booker T. Washington’s message was that blacks would become such a force in Southern society that Jim Crow would die of ridiculosity.

In fairness to W. E. B. DuBois, the comment on page 178 of Reconstructing America, "Remember, he lived in the days of Jim Crow. He lived in the days when two or three blacks were lynched - murdered - each week. What did he do about that? Almost nothing.", is contradicted by DuBois (not a friendly witness) in Souls of Black Folk:

"It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to acknowledge that in several instances he has opposed movements in the South which were unjust to the Negro; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabama constitutional conventions, he has spoken against lynching, and in other ways has openly or silently set his influence against sinister schemes and unfortunate happenings."

Joy Hakim’s comment is outrageously unjust and false.

Joy Hakim’s sympathy for W. E. B. DuBois’s emphasis on political and government action isn’t surprising. Her stark bias and misrepresentation of someone with whom she partially disagrees is unworthy of someone styling herself an historian. Students deserve better! They need the relevant information - both sides, balanced - to form their own ideas. Students and their parents trust textbook writers to do that. Joy Hakim failed that trust regarding Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois.

Summing up this review isn’t easy. The two chapters discussed above are a small portion of the book’s 37 chapters. Much in the other chapters is very good. In my opinion, however, the bias, omissions of relevant information, and misrepresentations seriously mar Reconstructing America, and do not belong in any school.

An Age of Extremes 1880 - 1917 (Book 8)

Of the six volumes in this series I’ve read so far, An Age of Extremes is probably the one I’ve enjoyed the most. I do think, though, that a title such as "An Age of Great Change" be more appropriate, given the era. The developments within this time period - great (in size) industries, labor unions, immigration, Populism, Conservationists, muckrakers - fit well with the topical storytelling style Joy Hakim uses, and there is no single, major, protracted event whose coverage would be disrupted thereby. While Joy Hakim’s political perspectives are as clearly seen in An Age of Extremes as they were in War, Peace, and All that Jazz, parents with differing views will find supplementing to provide any balance they feel is needed with relative ease.

As noted in my review of War, Peace, and All that Jazz, Joy Hakim is politically liberal, though not of the more radical modern (post Vietnam War) vintage. Her handling of the Populist Party and the Progressives, which is very good, suggest to me that she is very comfortable with their ideas. The Populists and the Progressives proposed and implemented many reforms that we now regard as normal, though they seemed almost revolutionary at the time. I would have enjoyed reading more about the later years and thinking of the Populists, when she states that some of their leaders turned racist, but that probably would not have fit in this relatively brief book. The information about the life of Theodore Roosevelt is very good, and is interesting. Given her political perspectives, Joy Hakim finds it easy to criticize the hard-headedness and excesses of many industrial tycoons. She does avoid making them into caricatured monsters, however, by showing their philanthropic activities. She is a little less balanced in her coverage of unions and leaders such as Mother Jones. While detailing the very real needs and problems unions attempted to address, she seldom mentions the underlying Socialist philosophy that motivated many union leaders and activists - including Eugene V. Debs, Upton Sinclair, Mother Jones, and other leaders of the IWW (Wobblies). The sidebar on pg. 32, which tries to show a distinction between Communism and Socialism is misleading. European Social Democracy, which she uses to exemplify Socialism, was developed half a century later, and is not representative of the Socialist ideas of many late 19th Century and early 20th Century union leaders. They saw union organizing and actions as steps toward a more or less violent revolution that would usher in Socialism (as Karl Marx envisioned). In reading the section about the muckrakers (investigative journalists and writers whose works exposed injustice and corruption and advocated reform), I got the impression that Joy Hakim may wish she had been among their number. The section on the Spanish-American War and expansionism is in need of some balance. While there were advocates of American imperialism (as mentioned in the book), this view did not prevail. While the US acquired Cuba from Spain, it became independent in 1902, four years after the war. In the Philippines, also acquired from Spain, self-governance began in 1902; in 1935, 1946 was chosen as the date for full independence. Puerto Rico still remains a territory of the US, however Puerto Ricans have voted heavily against independence on three occasions. Other than noting the admissions of several Western states and the Klondike Gold Rush, An Age of Extremes touches on very little that happened West of the Missouri River and east of the Pacific Coast.

While reading several of the books in the A History of US series, I’ve noticed, here and there, words located in the middle of sentences that are divided by hyphens. Evidently, in previous revisions, these words were at the end of lines of text, and had been hyphenated. The proofreaders of this, the third edition, must have missed these words that no longer required hyphens. I wouldn’t have mentioned this, except for having found two other, slightly more serious, editing errors. Page 66 is the end of a chapter, however, the last sentence is left incomplete; a line of text is missing. Also, there is a typo in the caption of a photo on page 140 ("1980s" instead of "1890s").

I would definitely recommend An Age of Extremes for use by homeschoolers either as the primary textbook for this time period or as a supplement for another text. And I would consider it for use in our homeschool if our children were of the relevant ages.

War, Peace, and All that Jazz 1918 - 1945 (Book 9)

Of the three books I sampled of the A History of US series, this was the only one with which I was disappointed. One example is her lengthy treatments of baseball (the "Major" and "Negro" Leagues), jazz, and American art. While her purposes, looking at American culture and exploring the ills of racism, are appropriate, the coverage is disproportionate to a book of this size and the momentous events of this period. The section on World War 2 appears to have suffered from abbreviation. The topics should be covered, but either the coverage should be more brief or the book lengthened. My vote, emphatically, would be for a longer book.

The treatment of the Great Depression is fairly standard, which to me means that it is deficient. While the over-heated, risky securities problem is correctly identified as a cause of the Great Depression, Joy Hakim fails to mention two government actions which exacerbated it: the Federal Reserve tightening the money supply when liquidity was a problem; the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which led to retaliatory tariffs, effectively closing foreign markets to US businesses .

War, Peace, and All that Jazz’s account of World War 2 is often in error, incomplete, or confusing, possibly due to inadequate space. The caption of a photograph, pg. 144, showing the USS Lexington sinking at the battle of the Coral Sea is in error in stating that Japan lost two aircraft carriers at Coral Sea. Japan actually lost one light carrier; the Lexington was a full-sized carrier. A "bullet point" on pg. 158 wrongly states that the locations of individual German U-Boats couldn’t be learned until 1943, when the German naval code was cracked. Actually, High Frequency Direction Finding, in use from near the beginning of the war, enabled the locating of U-Boats every time they used their radio transmitters, which they did frequently. Breaking the Germans’ naval code allowed the Allies to anticipate U-Boat movements by reading their orders. The account of the invasion and capture of Guadalcanal, pgs. 153-157, is confusing. It mentions the fact that the invasion transports left without unloading all the men’s supplies; later the book mentions the US defeat in the naval battle of Savo Island. War, Peace, and All that Jazz fails to mention that this defeat was the reason the transports left without unloading the supplies. The account of the invasion of North Africa, Operation Torch, (pgs. 159-160) is written as if the prior two years of fighting in North Africa hadn’t occurred. The invasion of Italy is all but omitted from pgs. 160-161. All in all, the account of World War 2 in War, Peace, and All that Jazz, events so instrumental in the decades that followed, is disappointing.

War, Peace, and All that Jazz shows, in several ways, that Joy Hakim is politically liberal in the tradition of FDR, Truman, and JFK (in contrast to more radical modern liberalism). The disappointment she expresses that the US didn’t join the League of Nations, pgs. 18-20, illustrates this. Joy Hakim failed to provide adequate perspective to the "Red Scare" of 1920, pgs. 34-36. A mention of the tens of thousands of innocents slaughtered by the Russian Communists would have helped students understand what Attorney General Mitchell Palmer and the Wilson administration were concerned about. Following "common wisdom" Joy Hakim credits FDR’s New Deal programs with lifting the US out of the Great Depression, without explaining how. In reality, the US didn’t emerge from the Great Depression until the US began to prepare for World War 2 - under FDR’s leadership - jump-starting US industry.

Folks who dislike FDR may be unappreciative of the extensive biographical information regarding FDR and Eleanor. While FDR isn’t my favorite President of the US, in my opinion, his 12 years of office and the leadership he provided in two crucial periods of US history easily justify including this information.

Devotees of Marxism/Socialism/Communism will not find sympathetic treatment in War, Peace, and All that Jazz.

From pg. 34: "Under communism, most property and goods belong to the state. People are expected to share. That sounds noble; it just never seems to work unless forced upon people. Communist nations have never been free nations."

"Things had been bad in Russia when the tsar was ruler. They got much worse under Lenin and the ruler who followed, Joseph Stalin. Lenin and Stalin brought totalitarianism to Russia. They brought repression, murder, state control, and misery. They brought an economic system called communism."

From pg. 115: "Russia’s dictator, Joseph Stalin, killed millions of his own people - anyone who he believed might threaten his rule. His kind of government, he said, would soon conquer the world."

"In Russia, the forces of evil took charge in the name of communism."

"Communism is an economic system, and as such it is not evil. It just doesn’t seem to work efficiently. When combined with a harsh political system, as it was in Soviet Russia, it was evil."

From pg. 138: "But Russia under Soviet communism was a dreadful place. Stalin was a vicious dictator."

I haven’t made this the longest review of the three because I enjoy being critical. Rather, since I have been critical, I wanted to provide readers with examples so they can understand what kinds of things I regarded as matters for concern and gain some idea of my biases.

With all these concerns, how useful do I think War, Peace, and All that Jazz, and would I consider using it? Some of the material is quite good: the description of the post-World-War-1 world situation; the chapter about women’s suffrage; the account of the over-heated business climate before the Great Depression; the material on popular culture and racism; the chapter about Jewish refugees. The inadequate, confusing, coverage of the Great Depression and World War 2, however is a significant flaw. While I might (hypothetically) consider using this book as a supplement to another textbook or program, or as a part of a user-designed eclectic program, I believe War, Peace, and All that Jazz isn’t suitable as the primary text for this time period. Much supplementation would be required - considerable work for parents and potentially confusing to students.

All the People 1945 - 2001 (Book 10)

All the People is the book in the A History of US series to which I’ve looked forward with mixed feelings. I’m writing this paragraph while near the beginning of reading the book. All the People covers the time period most immediately formative for the society in which students using the book live. My life span, except for the years after 2001, has been entirely within this era, and this is probably the case, or nearly so, for Joy Hakim. Thus, she brings her life experiences to All the People; I bring my life experiences to this review. She brings perspectives that were, to at least some degree, engaged in the events of this book; and I bring engaged perspectives to this review. Just as Joy Hakim should have been careful not to allow her perspectives - personal beliefs, political views, personal heroes - to make this book biased, I will have to be careful not to allow my own perspectives to make this review unfair and uninformative. In the introductory chapter of The First Americans (and thus introductory to the whole A History of US series), Joy Hakim included several quotes from historic persons concerning the value of studying history and the responsibilities of an historian. Two are relevant as prefaces to this review:

"The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. - Cicero Ancient Roman historian"

"... whereas the historian must describe (events), not as they ought to have been, but as they were, without exaggerating or hiding the truth in any way. - Miguel de Cervantes from his novel Don Quixote"

These are high standards, challenging to historians and to this reviewer, whose space is very limited, and who is, by definition, expressing opinions. All the same, I will endeavor to be honest and fair, and to make this review useful to readers.

All the People covers the 56 years of US history from the Presidency of Harry S. Truman into the first year of the Presidency of George W. Bush. A large part of the book tells of the conflict over civil rights and the Vietnam War, events and issues that dominated much of the 20 years from 1955 to 1975. The book is disappointing on a a number of levels. While it starts out well, Joy Hakim’s topical storytelling style and the many themes contained in the 50s and 60s combine to make All the People confusingly disjointed. Rather than cover an entire topic in a single section, topics are split into multiple sections and then interspersed among the multiple sections about other topics. Since Joy Hakim provides relatively few dates, students who didn’t live through the era may become confused as to events’ sequence and context. Though I’ve described this problem briefly, it pervades All the People and significantly affects the usability of the book.

Secondly, in All the People political perspective became bias. Joy Hakim is nowhere near sympathetic to Marxism, Socialism, or Communism, as the comment on page 12, the brief history of Russia on pages 23-26, and the comment on page 194 makes clear. Joy Hakim’s perspective is that of a 50s or 60s liberal, with a hint of more recent radicalism. Her unbalanced presentation of several topics (see below) transcribes perspective into bias. While expression of a viewpoint in recounting history is understandable and arguably appropriate at times (I revisit this idea in the Afterword to these reviews), omission of facts that contradict one’s viewpoint is not. A point Cicero and Cervantes both made. I’ll give the third problem I have with All the People near the end of this review

Joy Hakim leaves as scattered, unconnected dots, the formation of the Soviet empire and the USSR’s attempts throughout the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s to gain dependent satellites and surrogates on every inhabited continent. Not connecting the dots - perhaps not recognizing them - permeates and colors Joy Hakim’s coverage of the Cold War, McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, and Ronald Reagan’s Presidency.

The Vietnam War is presented as an unwinnable war. Omitted is the opinion of many leaders who fought there, believe otherwise, and point to interference by political leaders in Washington, DC as the primary cause of defeat. Students should have been informed of this different opinion and allowed to form their own views. Ho Chi Minh is portrayed as a folk hero, a national liberator, without mentioning that he and his successors were ruthless murderers. Joy Hakim presents the atrocities of My Lai and My Khe (pages 130 and 136) in a way that tars all Vietnam veterans with the brush of atrocity. The caption to the famous picture of the girl fleeing a napalm attack, page 132, incorrectly states that it was an American raid. The attack was made by the South Vietnamese Air Force, operating under the control of South Vietnamese officers, in an area where North Vietnamese regulars mingled with civilians. Joy Hakim is incorrect about how the Vietnam War ended, too: "But, after Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, fell to northern forces, we finally withdrew completely." Actually, US forces had withdrawn from South Vietnam a year or more before the fall of Saigon. Joy Hakim doesn’t mention, even when she covers the flight of the "boat people", the horrors of the Vietnamese Gulags that followed the North’s conquest of the South, which the "boat people" were fleeing.

In presenting, and even being an advocate for, the Great Society programs, Joy Hakim emphasizes hopelessness and helplessness, describing the poor as "trapped". Personal initiative and responsibility - getting an education, not committing crimes, lifestyle choices (e.g. drugs, sexual promiscuity, instant material gratification) - is seldom mentioned. Students aren’t asked to consider the morality and legality of the government taking money, through higher tax rates, from people arbitrarily designated "rich", and giving that money to people arbitrarily designated "poor". Students who use All the People aren’t likely to look past the compassionate sound of, "We (are) a rich nation. ... We (can) afford the Great Society. (Page 118)", and recognize the idea implicit in those sentences that the government can take anything people earn, but lets them keep some of it. The 75% "overhead" (the money consumed in administrative costs) of welfare and assistance programs isn’t mentioned.

Feminism is represented as all good. The hatred of some feminists for men is basically dismissed. Phyllis Schlafly is caricatured and written off. Only pro-abortion ideas are treated seriously in the coverage of Roe vs. Wade. The effects of easy divorce and daycare (instead of parent care) on children isn’t considered.

Cesar Chavez is all but canonized, and the farmers-bad-workers-good paradigm misrepresents many on both sides of the conflict. Joy Hakim denies the all too real violence and intimidation committed by the union, some of it against workers. She also doesn’t mention that the celebrated grape boycott, by picketing grocery stores (which weren’t parties to the strike), was illegal.

Joy Hakim’s pro-gun control section, pages 209 and 210, is so one-sided as to be a political editorial. A balanced presentation - all pros and cons considered fairly - of such issues has a legitimate place in a US Government textbook for high school. The presentation in All the People, is so unbalanced that it approaches indoctrination.

From the sidebar, page 219: "In the year 2000 (title) In China, American and Chinese paleontologists discovered a 130-million-year-old duck-like creature with feathers and a reptile’s tail. They said it was a link between dinosaurs and birds." National Geographic announced this, with great fanfare, in late 2000. National Geographic revealed it to be a fraud in early 2001, which is within the time span covered by All the People.

The coverage of the past nine Presidents almost reads like Democrat Party campaign literature. The chapters on John F. Kennedy include a large dose of Camelot. Lyndon Johnson is presented more realistically, if you accept Joy Hakim’s view of the Vietnam War. Richard Nixon is criticized as having escalated the Vietnam War, but doesn’t mention that Nixon’s administration negotiated the treaty that ended the War (for the US) and withdrew US troops. Nixon is credited with having normalized relations with China. Watergate, which obviously should be covered, is overdone to the point of preachiness. Gerald Ford appears briefly in two pages, though his Presidency was almost as long as Kennedy’s. Jimmy Carter is portrayed as a victim of bad luck (the energy crisis is anachronistically described only in connection with his administration) and the selfishness of the American people:

"He tried to solve the problems of national debt and energy conservation by asking people to make sacrifices. Maybe he didn’t know how to ask - or maybe Americans weren’t ready to make sacrifices. When Carter ran for reelection, he was defeated." (Page 181)

Joy Hakim’s Ronald Reagan favored the wealthy and big business; homelessness and crumbling infrastructure suddenly appeared in Reagan’s administration, with no prior history thereof. To her credit, Joy Hakim does recognize the key role Reagan played in ending the Cold War. President George H. W. Bush’s four years gets scant mention in just three pages. President Clinton is two chapters of Camelot Could-Have-Been. The Whitewater investigation is written off, "When Whitewater didn’t produce any evidence of wrongdoing ...", while the many trials and convictions that resulted from the investigation receive no mention. Waco, the Travel Office scandal, the use of the IRS to harass perceived enemies, the campaign finance scandal, and Elian Gonzales are omitted. The impeachment of Bill Clinton is represented as being about personal issues: the perjury, for which he was actually impeached and later disbarred from legal practice in Arkansas and before the US Supreme Court, isn’t mentioned. George W. Bush is portrayed as affable, but not very bright; the stolen election myth is alluded to, without mention that the various pieces of the myth are known to be false (confusing ballot, votes not being counted, blacks prevented from voting).

From the sidebar, page 237: "Christian Fundamentalists have gunned down doctors and nurses at abortion clinics in the United States; ...". I have intentionally placed this paragraph near the end of the review, hoping that will make it more memorable to readers. Attributing these murders and attempted murders to "Christian Fundamentalists" is ludicrous, false, and bigoted. The term "Fundamentalist" is used very loosely and very broadly in the US. It is commonly applied to a very diverse assortment of people who claim to be Christians, including: Baptists, Nazarenes, Pentecostals, Churches of God, Charismatics, many Lutherans, many Episcopalians, many Presbyterians, many Catholics, Jehovah’s witnesses, Mormons, and even historic independent Fundamentalists. In using such a broad term, Joy Hakim broom-paints millions of Christians, including me, with the actions of a very few individuals, actions that have been universally condemned by "Christian Fundamentalist" groups and organizations. Not only has Joy Hakim tarred millions of Christians with the crimes of a very few, but she has done so falsely, either in ignorance or in dishonesty. Needless to say I am outraged that this would be published by someone styling herself as an historian, and appalled that this book, with this statement in it, is used in public schools.

I could write much more, but I trust the above sufficiently expresses my concerns and, for those who are concerned about it, my own perspectives and biases. All in all, I do not recommend All the People for use by homeschoolers. Even for those whose views are similar to Joy Hakim’s will find the coverage of these years confusing and difficult to present to students. Between reweaving the disjointed coverage of topics and the substantial supplementation necessary to give students balance, All the People will impose a heavy time burden on teaching parents. The anti-Christian bigotry discussed above makes All the People unacceptable for use in schools, public or private.

Personal Note. The title of this book is All the People. Strangely, I found that many people are missing from that "All" - the kind of people with whom I grew up in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. All the People presents racism as pervading US society. In and around the small California city where I grew up (Joy Hakim tends to have an east of the Mississippi focus), I didn’t encounter such racism. I grew up, went to school, and played with people of all races. Business and work relationships were based on ability, and thus ended up being multi-racial. When I did hear of racism, on TV, I thought it weird and stupid. I also grew up around guns - my father and uncles owned guns and hunted, as did the parents of many of the children with whom I grew up. As we grew, we learned to use and properly handle BB guns, air rifles, .22-caliber rifles, and shotguns.. Somehow, despite our easy access to those guns, we didn’t kill each other or ourselves. Either people’s morals have changed since then, so that some misuse guns, or our news media focuses so tightly on tragedies that the larger, more peaceful picture is lost and seems not to exist. I suspect the matter is a mixture of both. I don’t think our city was particularly unique with respect to either issue. We were the kind of ordinary, peaceful, people who don’t make headlines. When such people are missing from history books, that omission makes history a caricature.

Sourcebook and Index (Book 11)

The Sourcebook and Index contains 94 documents, entire or excerpted, by persons important to US history. It has a list of the Presidents of the US, and also a master index of the A History of US series. The master index, which gives the book number and page number(s) for the topic being sought, will save users time when they aren’t sure in which volume to look, or when a topic appears in more than one volume, by having all that index information in one place.

Much of our country’s history is threaded in and through documents, public and private. Some documents influenced or were landmarks in our history; some encapsulate the state of our nation and society of a particular era or point in time. The Sourcebook and Index has a collection of many such documents, with explanatory introductions. In the margins are word definitions to help students with unfamiliar words, and each document is cross-referenced to the book number(s) and chapter(s) in the A History of US series to which the document relates. Since the historical context of the documents is thus cross-referenced, the introductions are brief. Teaching parents and students who are using the regular A History of US textbooks, as most homeschoolers probably would, will need to cross-compare the Sourcebook and Index with each textbook as they read it for documents that pertain to their reading. Oxford University Press does publish teacher’s guides for the books, but I haven’t seen any, and don’t know whether they cross-reference the textbooks to the documents in Sourcebook and Index. The introduction explains how many of the included documents were chosen: "This book contains excerpts from many of the documents recommended on state frameworks and that support the National History Standards." The book doesn’t indicate which documents were chosen due to "recommendations" in the state frameworks, and which may have been included at the compiler’s initiative.

As a start toward reviewing the documents section, I made a quick "list" of my own - not exhaustive, but all significant. As it should, the list in Sourcebook and Index dwarfed mine (my memory, surprise!, isn’t perfect), and included most of it. At any rate, I found nothing to criticize or quibble among the documents Byron Hollinshead, the compiler, chose, though there are some that I think should have been included but were not. I will include hyperlinks for as many omitted documents as I can find online. Also, http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/index.htm has a great many documents, more than what the Sourcebook and Index includes.

The Ten Commandments should have been included. Doing so might upset the ACLU, but the Ten Commandments underlie the laws of most or all European and American countries, including the US. The omission of the Petition of Right, which ranks among the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights in having influenced the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, is odd. The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut should have been included as a companion to the Mayflower Compact. I would add the Paris Peace Treaty of 1783, since it ended the Revolutionary War. Excerpts from the Webster - Hayne Debate and from Uncle Tom’s Cabin would have been valuable, as they were prefatory to the Civil War. Some of the Southern states, in declaring their secession, wrote documents modeled after the Declaration of Independence. Having part or all of at least one these would have informed students as to how Southerners understood their own actions. The Constitution of the Confederate States of America should have been included. The excerpt from the dissent to Plessy vs. Ferguson should have been preceded by samples of Jim Crow laws and an excerpt from the opinion itself. The Sherman Antitrust Act is noticeably missing. One of FDR’s Fireside Chats should have been included, as these greatly influenced the mood of the nation across many years. Excerpts from a speech by Joseph McCarthy and from Winston Churchill’s speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri would have been helpful in understanding the national tone in the early Cold War era. The omission of an excerpt from the Brown vs. Board of Education decision is very odd, considering its importance. Excerpts from several court cases that shaped American society - the Miranda case, Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s school prayer case, and Roe vs. Wade - are a strange omission. Since this book was updated, at least to some degree, for the 2003 third edition, one of President Bush’s speeches about 9/11, 2001 should have been included. Taken as a whole, however, the documents sampled in this volume are a valuable resource in teaching US History.

"6. From Roger Williams, ‘Letter to Providence’ (1655)" pages 19-20

The Letter is introduced with a sketch regarding the importance of Roger Williams. Williams is described, page 19, as "... one of the strongest supporters of the separation of church and state." As is clear from the letter, Williams actually was an advocate of the free exercise of religion (i.e. freedom from government interference) and freedom from compulsion (no forced support of, or participation in, a state religion). What differentiates Williams from the modern "separation of church and state" concept is that, in the metaphor Williams used of a ship, its leaders, and its inhabitants, Williams envisioned the ship’s leaders (i.e. a community’s leaders) being equally free to participate in and organize religious observations, private and public.

"26. From George Washington, ‘Farewell Address’ (1796)" pages 94-97

The introduction sets the historical stage for the Address, which has been excerpted. While the introduction scarcely does the Address justice, the probable intent is to permit Washington’s wise and foreseeing eloquence to speak for itself.

"69. William McKinley, ‘War Message’ (1898)" pages 196-198

This Message is introduced, accurately, as William McKinley’s reluctant, careful, justification for going to war with Spain in 1898. In setting forth this justification, the Message helps students understand the thinking of a President as the US was just beginning to emerge as a significant player on the world stage.

"87. From Dwight D. Eisenhower, ‘Farewell Address to the American People’ (1961)" pages 245-248

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Address is introduced as continuing a Presidential tradition - a departing President speaking to challenges facing the people of the US. As with George Washington, Eisenhower was prescient; his Address has wisdom to offer today and for the future.

Many of these speeches and documents have phrases or portions that, through usage and repetition, have become commonplaces in political pop culture. If these documents and speeches are used in a way that only repeats the familiar, it will do great disservice to students and these great people of history. Their thoughts transcend the boundaries of political pop culture, and often, if the context of the familiar phrases is restored, political pop culture is turned on its head. The Sourcebook and Index places students in direct contact with the men and women who shaped the students’ "now". I very much recommend the Sourcebook and Index, either in the context of using the A History of US set, or as a separate purchase.

Petition of Right - http://www.constitution.org/eng/petright.htm

Fundamental Orders of Connecticut - http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1601-1650/connecticut/orders.htm

Paris Peace Treaty of 1783 - http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1776-1800/war/peace.htm

Webster - Hayne Debate - http://www.constitution.org/hwdebate/hwdebate.htm

Uncle Tom’s Cabin - http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/uncletom/uthp.html

Confederate States’ Ordinances of Secession - http://members.aol.com/jfepperson/ordnces.html

Constitution of the Confederate States of America - http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1851-1875/constitution/ccs.htm

Plessy vs. Ferguson - http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1876-1900/plessy/plessy.htm

Sherman Antitrust Act - http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1876-1900/reform/antitrust_act.htm

FDR’s First Fireside Chat (text and mp3) - http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrfirstfiresidechat.html

Joseph McCarthy’s Wheeling, West Virginia speech - http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst203/documents/mccarthy.html

Winston Churchill’s "Iron Curtain" speech at Westminster College - http://www.hpol.org/churchill/

Brown vs. Board of Education - http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1951-1975/integration/brown.htm

Miranda vs. Arizona - http://www.quoteworld.org/docs/scmir716.php

Murray v. Curlett -

Roe vs. Wade - http://www.tourolaw.edu/patch/Roe/

President Bush’s speech on 9/11 - http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html

President Bush’s speech on 9/20 - http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html

Initially it was the contradictory criticisms of A History of US - that it might be sympathetic to Marxism/Socialism/Communism and that it has too much Christianity in it - that caught my curiosity. The two criticisms are almost mutually exclusive. The quotes I provided in the reviews of Making Thirteen Colonies and War, Peace, and All that Jazz show, conclusively in my opinion, that A History of US is very unsympathetic to Marxism/Socialism/Communism. As to the other criticism, Christianity is mentioned very frequently in Making Thirteen Colonies, and often in several other volumes. Given who the movers and shakers were in much of US history and what motivated both them and ordinary people - Christianity - to omit or minimize mention of Christianity would be to falsify history. I think the criticism that A History of US has too much Christianity in it may be born of some critics’ bias (or even bigotry) - they would prefer to have Christianity omitted, minimized, or shown entirely negatively, even at the cost of falsifying history.

Each review of the books in the A History of US series has my recommendation with respect to that particular book. My reluctant recommendation for the series as a whole is that homeschoolers not use it. The amount of reweaving and supplementation necessary to cover and correct what A History of US presents confusingly, inadequately, with bias, and with omissions is greater than what I think teaching parents should have to do. I also find the bias that pervades at least four of the eleven volumes so objectionable that our family would not use the series. In regard to bias, one might think it would be an ideal that history be presented without bias. Every human being, however, has biases and perspectives that inform what they do or write. Any time some action or event in history is said to be right or wrong, pleasant or unpleasant, a perspective is being expressed. Thus, it is unlikely that any historical account or history textbook will be without some bias, express or implied. For that matter, would anyone want a history text that is neutral or vague about war, slavery, racism, or murderous monsters such as Hitler and Stalin? More practical questions for teaching parents are what biases does a textbook author have, and how do those biases affect their textbooks. Do those biases lead to inaccuracies and significant omissions? Or does the author present accurate, relevant facts, including those unsupportive of their perspective? It is my opinion that A History of US fails the test of these questions in three of its books: Liberty for All?, Reconstructing America, and All the People. An Age of Extremes is a close call.

I’ve made no attempt to conceal my perspectives from readers of these reviews. My intent has been to inform the readers, not to encourage or discourage the sale of books. It is entirely possible that some who read these reviews will view what I pointed out as concerns to be features or strengths of the A History of US series, reasons to buy and use the series. If so, these reviews still have fulfilled my intent.

For those who share my concerns but decide to use the series, there are a couple of options. Some may choose not to purchase the whole set of A History of US, which means that suitable alternatives to the books not purchased would need to be found. Doing this may affect the ease with which the books may be resold (homeschoolers buying used textbooks tend to prefer buying sets). Others may choose to use the whole set, supplementing and skipping as needed. If one’s approach to teaching history already includes significant supplementation this might not be a huge change. Parents who are in the habit of supplementing any program they use, are already designing their own program, are supplementing another history textbook, or are looking for interesting books for unschooling will find much of value in individual volumes in the A History of US series.