Don't Know Much About History--Updated and Revised Edition: Everything You Need to Know about American History But Never Learned

Don't Know Much About

by Kenneth C. Davis, Jeff Woodman (Narrator), Jonathan Davis (Narrator)

A new, completely revised, expanded and updated edition of the million-selling New York Times bestseller that launched the entire Don’t Know Much About series.

When Don't Know Much About History first appeared, it created a sensation. With humor, great stories, and a trademark conversational style, the book brought Americans a fresh new take on history. Davis proved Americans don't hate history–they just hate the dull version they were force-fed in school.

In his irreverent and popular question-and-answer style, Davis now returns with a completely revised edition that brings history right up to the moment–covering such topics as the end of the Cold War, Clinton's impeachment, the bizarre election of 2000, and the events that led to September 11.

Incorporation new research and discoveries, Davis also updates and expands on such long-standing American controversies as the Hiss trial, and he includes an expanded "civics-lesson" that examines some of America's hottest social and political issues, such as the death penalty and school prayer.

For history buffs and history-phobes alike, Davis proves once more why People magazine said that listening to him "is like returning to the classroom of the best teacher you ever had."

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Reference, Audiobook, Historical, Politics

Audio

First published June 10, 1990

About the author

Kenneth C. Davis is the New York Times bestselling author of the Don't Know Much About® series of books and audios for adults and children. Don't Know Much About® History, the first title in the series, became a New York Times bestseller in 1991 and remained on the paperback list for 35 consecutive weeks. It has since been revised several times and now has more than 1.6 million copies in print. The 30th anniversary edition of the book was published with a new preface, "From an Era of Broken Trust to an Era of Broken Democracy."

Davis is, according to Publishers Weekly, "a go-to guy for historical insight and analysis."

AMERICA'S HIDDEN HISTORY also became a New York Times bestseller. A NATION RISING also uses dramatic narratives to tell the "stories your textbooks left out." His book, THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF AMERICA AT WAR (May 5, 2015) was called "searing" analysis by Publishers Weekly.

Kenneth C. Davis’s success aptly makes the case that Americans don’t hate history, just the dull version they slept through in class. Davis’s approach is to refresh us on the subjects we should have learned in school. He does it by busting myths, setting the record straight, and always remembering that fun is not a four-word letter word.

His IN THE SHADOW OF LIBERTY: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF SLAVERY, FOUR PRESIDENTS, AND FIVE BLACK LIVES looks at the lives of five people enslaved by four of America's most famous Presidents and the role of slavery in American history and the presidency. In May 2018, MORE DEADLY THAN WAR: The Hidden History of the Spanish Flu and the First World War was published.

STRONGMAN: The Rise of Five Dictators and the Fall of Democracy was published by Holt. It was named among the best books of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews and the Washington Post.

In November 2022 GREAT SHORT BOOKS: A Year of Reading--Briefly was published by SCribner. A compendium of 58 great short works Davis read during the pandemic lock down, it is a joyous celebration of reading.

Coming in October 2024 is THE WORLD IN BOOKS: 52 WORKS OF GREAT SHORT NONFICTION. It is an accessible and comprehensive guide to some of the most influential and important works of nonfiction, from the earliest days of writing to contemporary times. Each entry includes information about the writers behind these consequential books and the time in which they lived.

Reviews

[Sabrina Moser · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is infinitely easier to critize a book like this one than it is to write one. Succint, interesting summaries of sweeping historical eras are almost always doomed to failure on some level, and I suppose, in the grand scheme of things, Davis does an Ok job. It's just that his writing is so bad. His prose is littered with pronouns lacking clear antecedents and most irklingly, he constantly repeats proper nouns making for some seriously bumpy, seriously irritating reading:

"Almost from the moment Israel was born in 1948 out of their war of independence, Israel occupied a singular, untouchable position in American foreign policy." (pg. 506)

What were his editors thinking? How could they let such carelessness get by?? Especially as this is a revised edition??? But maybe lousy writing is what one should learn to expect from New York Times bestsellers????

Then there is his obvious political bias. Ok, so US history is full of dark and horrible moments which need to be brought to light. I think we are all pretty much clear on that point. But Davis goes one step too far with this negativity by taking a cynical view of every single aspect of the nation's history. Surely some events were positive, hopeful or inspirational along the way? Certainly not according to Davis who takes a sick pleasure in highlighting moments of corruption, infamy, crime, power struggles and slaughter while flat-out ignoring brighter moments of the past. It makes for a very one-sided and depressing portrait of a nation which I would not recomend to anyone.

[Burt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Currently rereading, actually. I taught advanced US History I from this book, nearly twenty years ago. Davis has this new addition and my old one got "loaned out", so I bought new to find out what had been added.

OK, book read. Just as entertaining, witty, and iconoclastic as the original edition. I am very glad this book is back on my shelves.

[Shy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book as a refresher on American History with a view to sitting a specific exam. In that respect, I suppose the book was successful in achieving my objective. However, I would generally not recommend this book for anything other than as a springboard into further study and thankfully for this purpose Davis provides a very detailed list of further readings for each section.

It is a good succinct summary of American history. A distillation, if you will, of a large amount of research and reading. However, I have some serious issues with the book.


Firstly, I found the writing style to be poor at times. It is overly journalistic, which I guess does make it more accessible and less dry. However, it is poorly edited, with several instances of vague pronouns or references which Davis does not clarify. Toward the end of the book the author loses his control over adjectives as they get sweepingly over-dramatic with wild metaphors and similies that I would expect to see in a ranting editorial rather than a text book.

Secondly, I was constantly shocked by the jagged transitions in the book. While I understand and have no issue with the particular question-and-answer style chosen by Davis, from the middle of the book onward I kept encountering the end of a section followed by an unrelated insertion of an "American Voice" with a line or a paragraph explaining the significance of the excerpt. Then he would launch into a new section once again unrelated to the "American Voice". It felt like the book was once a bigger manuscript which the editor then slashed without going back to smooth over the new transitions.

Finally, I would advise that anyone reading this book should be clearly aware of the author's goal, which is to correct the problem of the way American history is taught in schools - poorly, with little critical thinking and often teaching apocryphal stories as facts and with frequent glossing over of the darker aspects. As a result, the overall tone of this book rather negative. Davis starts out with a fairly balanced approach to the founding fathers, describing their intellectual genius as well as their prejudices. He also leaves Teddy Roosevelt and FDR more or less unscathed and the Civil Rights movement is described favourably. But for nearly every other aspect of American history he concentrates on the negative is his attempt to redress US history whitewash taught in the classroom.

Ultimately, I have to go back to my comment about treating this as only a springboard into further study or to brush off the cobwebs of earlier education. If I were a teacher I would mark down any essay which relied on this book for research instead of going to the original materials or the more thorough research Davis himself relies on and lists in his "Further Reading" appendix.

[Christopher Carbone · Rating 2 out of 5]

The real problem with “Don’t Know Much About History” is that it prescribes to the Modern School of History, namely: anything white males did in the last 3,000 years is criminal, all of white men’s successes are on the backs of other people, and white men are very lucky.

This is not to say DKMAH is a bad book or even bad history; its not. The book is, though, pedestrian in the info contained and in the events covered. However, what it lacks in material, it makes up for in righteous indignation.

The book covers all the basic tenants of American history- from the discovery of America (which the book is quick to point out was already inhabited); the book then pokes fun at Columbus for naming the natives “Indians” because Columbus thought he was in India (this is actually disputed among historians; its widely speculated that Columbus’ name for the Natives was “in diego” which means in Spanish “with God”; no surprise, the author does not mention this), to Americas wars (always dressed in the garb of Imperialism, sans Darth Vader) and this nations really sad record on civil rights. In other words, DKMAH takes relish in pointing out what a nasty country you live in. And mutes the good stuff.

I will give the book credit: it shines a spotlight at the areas of American History that may not have been covered by the history books, most notably, the destruction of the Native peoples, the full encompassment of the slave trade, etc. However, the tone set by the book is that everything we all have is as a result of past generations awfulness.

The book also has a peculiar double standard. Most notable:

-Complete absence of Indian slaughters of settlers in colonial times;

-Peculiar word usage. As an example, when whites abduct Native children, its called “kidnapping”; when Natives did it to whites its called “adoption.”

-In later years, there is blatant over-exaggeration of the American’s racism against the Empire of Japan in WWII; historical records show that the US thought the Japanese a potent enemy after Pearl Harbor; conversely, there is zero mention in the book of the blatant Japanese racism against the Americans even AFTER Midway.

The book also has a really weird need to be overly offended and almost indulges in a “race to be the most outrageous.” The white settlements of Native lands are called ”genocide” and openly compared to Nazi Germany; a riot in Tulsa Oklahoma is referred to as “Ethnic Cleansing.”

The last half of the book is solid; it clearly details Vietnam’s disaster and the problems of Watergate, which most modern history classes completely overlook. However, while the book is quick to talk about every single civil rights setback, the book spends no time (ZERO) explaining the technological advancements of the nation after the Civil War and the names “Thomas Edison” and “Alexander Graham Bell” are not even mentioned. By reading this boo, while there is a long diatribe on JFK’s assassination and conspiracy theories (the book begrudgingly admits there was no conspiracy), you would not even know McKinley and Garfield were also assassinated.

The very final part of the book is an essay by the author called “American Terror” which was written by the author in the wake of the September 11 tragedy. I have to say that while I was mildly irked by the author’s attitude up to this point, this next part blew my mind. The author openly compares the terrorists’ attacks of Sept 11 to the Little Rock standoff (where nobody died, but where black people were tormented by white people), along with MLK’s assassination (the author comes dangerously close to saying the FBI did it), and several relatively mild acts, but then deftly talks about John Brown. Basically, every single bad thing Americans did thorough their history is analogous to the terrorist attacks (including building the atomic bomb to use against an enemy that openly attacked us).

I really was fed up with the book by the end.

However, take my review in stride. If you have always wanted to learn more about American history, add 2 stars to my review. If you are looking for deep nuggets of info that you missed, this book will prove woefully inadequate. While there were times I found myself saying, “I didn’t know that”, they were few and far between. I was relatively unimpressed with this very mediocre look at our history.

[Lost Planet Airman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly, the book’s popularity almost speaks in place of a review. It’s 518 years of the better bits of American History packed into 628 pages of writing. From my layman’s perspective, he seems to have done a decent job highlighting the causes of the fumbles that American’s have made, the effects of the big moves, and canceling out some of the falsehoods that get passed down through the ages.

Includes a simple but balanced review of what the electoral college has meant to politics, a short review of the Bill of Rights, and a pretty amazing bibliography, in addition to yeah, about a thousand things I never learned or promptly forgot on the way out of adolescence.

Going to keep this on my bookshelf until some kid or grand-kid needs it more than me.

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A shallow popular history of the United States.

I suppose one could learn something is one is wholly ignorant of the subject, but the book is so shallow, that anyone with actual knowledge won't get much of anything.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good overview of American history. The more I read about history, especially American history, the more appalled and the more hopeful I become. Appalled, because humanity keeps making the same mistakes fueled by greed, apathy, and ignorance. Hopeful, because eventually a movement starts that achieves real change for the better and because we as a species have proven our resilience over and over.

Every single one of our founding fathers and all the men and women we consider great in the history of our nation were flawed. Many were self-serving, petty, ignorant, many were what we would call overtly sexist or racist, many of our captains of industry viewed the impoverished masses as a caste that existed solely for their own personal enrichment (creating a monopoly and gouging your workers while paying off the political machine to ensure that laws are enacted to your benefit is not creating a free market, by the way), some of them had extramarital affairs or rose to prominence via complicated (or sometimes simple, overt, and corrupt) political deals. Yet at the same time many of these deeply, deeply flawed individuals did something incredible (though the means to that end were quite often indefensibly atrocious). I'm still glad to be living in the US, though a lot of our history makes me angry and/or sad. As 'great' as we are as a nation, history reminds us that we still have the opportunity to be good.

Anyway, good refresher on American history. I'd be willing to read the other books in this series.

[Alison · Rating 1 out of 5]

Its always disconcerting when the first few lines of a book try to turn George Washington's prayer at Valley Forge into a farce made up by hyper religious people. Right then I knew I was reading a book written by a liberal. But I continued. He spent the first chapter cutting down Columbus and his greediness in order to explain that he wasn't the first person to discover American land (duh!) and then never answered who really did (Amerigo Vespucci). I thought his history way too basic at this point but I continued. I went on to read how the Pilgrims were another way too religious sect and I had enough. You better know your real history before you read these "facts".

[Drake · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a TV documentary called, America the Story of Us on the history channel that only gave the good things about American History. This book was nothing like that. It gave everything, the good and the bad, and this author must have read a freakish amount of books to know that much. I learned so much and it proves that America wasn't just made up of perfect people who did perfect things. The only reason it isn't 5 stars is that it doesn't describe the weakness of the Articles of Confederation in detail like it does everything else.

[Barb · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoroughly readable history of the U.S., warts and all, excellent for the history-challenged like myself and those who need a quick brush-up. I'm clearing a spot on my reference shelf for Don't know Much About History, Every thing you need to Know About American history But Never Learned, by Kenneth C. Davis. This edition covers through the year 2010.

[Andrew Breslin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every American should be lashed to a chair and forced to read this book. That's the sort of thought that pops into my head every now and then when I get in touch with my inner-despotic dictator. A benevolent despot, I hasten to add, because it truly would do all my fellow citizens a world of good. Americans are frighteningly ignorant about many things, especially their own history.

Eventually my inner-freedom-fighters overthrow my inner-despot, and re-establish the right of all Americans to be ignorant, misinformed, uneducated, and stupid. That's the American way!

On a positive note: Americans are no more ignorant and misinformed today than they have been throughout our history. Listening to the unbelievably stupid things coming out of talk radio and the internet (and occasionally from the mouths of vice-presidential candidates), one can easily despair that the end of our country cannot be far off. But one of the points that this book makes, and which, ironically, I take some comfort in, is that we've been a nation of idiots all along.

The founding fathers were themselves benevolent despots. They recognized way back then that pure "democracies" were simply opportunities for powerful and wealthy demagogues to manipulate stupid people to their advantage. That's why we have a democratic republic, and not a pure democracy. That's why we have an electoral college. Because, as the founding fathers recognized, many if not most people in this country are woefully ignorant and could be used like tools by rich evil bastards. The checks and balances they established over 200 years ago were put in place largely as a defense against "mob rule," to prevent silver-tongued puppeteers from taking complete control by lying to the uneducated masses, who have not, for example, ever read a history book.

Thanks to the vision of those founding fathers, our republic has survived for over two centuries. It's survived wars, revolutions and depressions. Time will tell whether or not it will survive Fox "news."

[Donal Keady · Rating 4 out of 5]

History books, by their nature, are never "definitive" no matter what the title at the front or the blurb at the back may state. However, a good history book will give the reader some sort of springboard from which to launch into the lifetime's pursuit that is history. This book's accessible, often witty style will inform, but more importantly will stimulate the thirst for knowledge, which is as it should be. I don't think the author seeks to offend, but some formerly sacred and venerated historical figures are presented in an altogether more human form here. Every country and culture in the world has its share of historical baggage, and the first step towards a more thorough understanding of ourselves is to recall and accept the rights and wrongs of the past, learn from these, and move on in a better way.

[David Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classic book that makes it easy to learn American history (at least up to 1990). A must read for everyone.

[James Meinke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started this book in Sep. of 2022 and kept coming back to it chapter by chapter in between reading other books. This was my first big dive into American History. I’ve become more interested the last couple of years in learning more about the history of America. Especially the true history. Not the stuff that gets taught in school. This was a perfect starting point.

I love how it broke down the history of America chronologically and discussed even the dark side of American history. The author did a great job citing their sources which gives a lot of credit to this piece of literature. This also gives you suggestions on more American literature to read. I highly recommend this book if you are just trying to get basic yet accurate knowledge on American history.

[maddiemyrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This felt a bit long after I was half way through it. Still a great American history refresher. I loved the way the author structured both the timeline and each chapter with a list of question.

[Amal Omer · Rating 4 out of 5]

learned some things :) made me thankful to my apush teacher for teaching us pretty real + critical us history instead of bullshit

[Brandon Washington · Rating 4 out of 5]

Its not a bad book at all but for a history buff like myself i didnt really learn anything but i mean the book is literally called dont know much about american history lol

[Alicia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've decided to rate conservatively and round down. On the whole, I found the claim "everything you need to know about American history but never learned" quite false. The book skims too much material instead of delving, and covers American history at a shallower level than my high school AP history class (and I would hope, most high school history classes). This book is neither a substitute (covers too little), nor a supplement (doesn't delve deeply enough) to any actual serious study of history.

Before I begin, I should note that I only read the chapters through the Pilgrims before I started skimming, then skipped to read the final chapters from Desert Storm onwards.

My first issue with it is that it's called "Don't Know Much About History." I picked it up erroneously believing it was going to be about world history, a huge subject about which I know little. Imagine my disappointment when I started reading and found the usual blah blah starting with Columbus and continuing on to Jamestown and the Pilgrims. This ~500 year bit of human history focused on half of a continent has been done to death in 12 years of unnecessary American history classes that rarely taught me anything useful or interesting. That this book mostly reiterated and reinforced all the useless and boring things that I learned in history was an utter disappointment to me. False advertising!

My next issue is with how shallow the treatment of history is here. Big events are summed up in a paragraph, wars in a list of dates and events. Instead of choosing new and interesting historical events to highlight, this book covers the same old irrelevant highlights that our history books do, only stopping occasionally to debunk some of the myths, usually the less relevant ones (like the Pilgrims carving 1620 on the actual Plymouth Rock upon landing).

If you really want an interesting book that might fill in some of the holes in your history education, you should check out Lies My Teacher Told Me Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. When I picked up this book, I was hoping for more of that. Take as an example their treatments of the incident of Manhattan being sold for $24:

Don't Know Much About History:
" [Peter Minuit] quickly met with the local Indian chiefs. Before them he set a sales agreement for all of Manhattan Island and two boxes of trade goods worth sixty Dutch guilders. At the time, that equaled 2,400 English cents, which has come down in history as the famous $24 figure."
Davis goes on to make some unrelated statements about how Dutch New Amsterdam was rowdier and less pious than Puritan New England.

Lies My Teacher Told Me:
"When students are informed that the Dutch bought Manhattan for $24 worth of trade goods, presumably they are meant to smile indulgently....What foolish Indians, not to recognize the potential of the island! Not one book points out that the Dutch paid the wrong tribe for Manhattan. Doubtless the Canarsees, native to Brooklyn, were quite pleased with the deal. The Weckquaesgeeks , who lived on Manhattan and really owned the land, weren't so happy. For years afterward, they warred sporadically with the Dutch." Loewen goes on to tie this error into a trend of white settlers bungling or maliciously lying about land trades with the natives.

Way to take a great chance to really dispel some historical myth and piss it away, Davis.

[Dina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kenneth C. Davis has a really terrific knack for making history interesting, exciting and most importantly personable. I had first picked up his Don't Know Much About the Civil War book and was amazed that for the first time, I was enjoying learning about battles, generals and strategic movements - it was more like story-telling than fact reciting. I feel that this is what history should be; important events told with all the care that a well crafted work of fiction holds, so that places and ideology are every bit as much characters as our protagonists. For much of Don't Know Much About History, this is exactly what we are given. Our founding fathers are not idols, but men, flawed and influenced by the ideals of their time and their fellow leaders, making the best of what they are given. Abraham Lincoln is as confused as the rest of the country, making sure-handed moves that are considerably less sure in spirit. The Great Depression and Dust Bowl come in a clip afterwards, forcing you to think about those unfortunate few who lived through some of the most precarious times in American history.

I found, however, that as we neared the present (this book ends at the terrorist attacks of 9/11) Davis' great story-telling abilities fall to the way-side and we're once again given more dates, more time lines and more Proper Nouns without fully understanding why those nouns are important. We are left with familiar parallels: Middle East = oil, Russia = Communism, etc. without given insight into their ideologies and how exactly they conflict with our own. I understand that this is an American history book and perhaps Davis didn't feel it necessary to delve into the workings of other countries, but I feel as though doing so might have made all of those time lines more meaningful. I also suspect that in America's infancy, being more isolationist made it easier to concentrate on only those domestic affairs as we tried out best to turn our heads away from the rest of the world.

Colonial times, the Civil War, World Wars 1 and 2 have had more time to marinate in the American psyche and as a result have become more romanticized. Perhaps my lack of interest in the 1960's has come from that romanticism being forced on the period prematurely, the lack of space between myself and the 1980s+ the reason those events seems dull to me. The good news is that there's plenty of history to feed my curiosities until these times truly ripen.

[Adrian Buck · Rating 3 out of 5]

More reflections on style in history writing: Davis uses what one reviewer calls the FAQ approach. The effect is to break down the subject to a series of chunks, or essays roughly equivalent in scale to what I was expected to write in my history 'o' level. Given the Amazon reader reviews, one could be cynical and think that this an exam friendly format. I prefer to think that Davis is following current good pedagogical practice and presenting each topic as a problem the student is invited to solve. This idea I garnered from Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom Willingham urges also teachers to present their subject as stories. The problem is there is a obvious conflict between the chunk approach and the story approach, some stories are quite small-scale in their ramifications, and can be told in chunks; others sprawl all over history, and are still live issues. Davis is good at the chunking, not so good at the story. One thing I would like to convey to my American Civilisation students is the overarching role the constitution has continuely played in American affairs - I fear that because the material is broken down into so many chunks - that big story hasn't been told.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seriously. Every American should be able to tell a foreigner what the original 13 colonies were. Or at least, what was the shot heard round the world. Or what the Quakers had to do with the Prohibition, or what the New Deal was or any number of pieces of our history. My American History knowledge is like swiss cheese. I have huge holes in my timeline of history. I don't know what I was doing when it was being taught to me, but i definitely wasn't listening. Our history is actually really intriguing - it's bloddy and messy and still pockmarked with missing dead bodies, lost confessions, smoking guns, kidnapped babies and scalped indians wrapped up in smallpox blankets. blech! I've been reading this book for over a month now. It's so scratched up and dogeared and scribbled on and underlined. I can't recomend this book enough - the author is a great writer and an easy read, and i've already re-finished my entire elementary school education.

Especially if you're a parent - read this so your kids can ask you questions and you can have answers.

[Kathleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think a better title for this book might have been, "Don't Know ANYTHING about History". I am fearful that those who don't know "anything" will think this is the complete text of American history. Although it is a major feat to write a book containing "all" of American history, this book just falls short. The book is written in a question and answer format, which makes the transition to the next topic flow. However, in some "answer" sections, I thought I was reading those comprehension paragraphs from a standardized test...some sections are just poorly written. The book contains a lot of negative American history. This nation has MANY great accomplishments. The great parts of our history are glossed over, while the negative aspects have extraordinary detail. For instance the story of the American Revolution is told in about the same number of pages as the Watergate break-in. This book has shown me that if I want to know more about American history..I have to read other books.

[melydia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friendly question-and-answer format with entertaining answers about American history from Columbus to Clinton. The post-Watergate coverage is pretty slim, but at that point it could probably be assumed that most readers remembered those years clearly. (There is an updated version, but my copy was printed in 1995.) I learned quite a bit about those bits we skipped in school, like the Vietnam and Korean Wars. Though it could not replace a traditional history course, since there is an assumption that you know enough basic information to ask the questions being answered, it is an excellent refresher for those who have long since forgotten the names and dates they learned in school. Like most good popular history books, it brings out the human side of history, turning the names into people and the dates into actions with consequences.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always enjoyed history, and I like to think that I have a good working knowledge of it. I was relieved to find that I still remembered much of the material covered in this book (then again, I did survive AP history with Mr. Player!). But this was a good review presented in an engaging, easy-to-follow format. I learned a lot and found that the time passed quickly as I listened. There were, of course, sections where I thought Davis spent too much time and others where he didn't spend enough. But I'm sure you could say that about any history book.

I would recommend this book even to people who don't enjoy history simply for the perspective it will give on the events of today. It certainly did that for me. A quote attributed to Pearl Buck sums it up well: "If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday."

[Tyler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Synopsis: Yes, this is a history book. It essentially covers US history from Christopher Columbus and the modern discovery of America up to the first few years of Obama's Presidency. Originally published during Bush I's presidency, it was updated a couple of years ago to include the Clinton years, 9/11 and the Iraq & Afghanistan Wars.

My Review: For me, this was more of a refresher course on American history as I'm fairly familiar with our nation's storied past. However, just as the author claims, this book was written in a much more easy to digest and enjoy fashion than your typically history book. There were times where the writing style grated against me a bit, but there were plenty of other portions of the book that I thoroughly enjoyed.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently decided I wanted to know more about History, but didn't know where to start. I found this book at a used book sale and it was exactly what I was looking for. It hits all the major bullet points in American History, with suggested further reading at the end of the chapters, just in case there is a subject that you wanted to know more about (which I used and promptly added several books to my Goodreads list.) It also lays out important dates in major wars. This book should be added to everyone's bookshelf!

[Jim B · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author makes the point that school history texts kill interest by leaving all the interesting parts out. To make his point, he tells a vulgar story about George Washington. AFter that, the book becomes pretty much the type of history Davis condemns: not that interesting. Occasionally, he gives a new assessment of an incident. The format is question and answer. One third of the content was the past fifty years, right up to September 11, 2001.

[Darlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

very readable. Of course it can't begin to cover everything but many of the paragraphs regarding each decade were fascinating and little known. I learned a great deal and can now see parallels and repeating cycles and the errors and crimes of the greedy and cruel and misguided.

[Yusra · Rating 3 out of 5]

good primer and fast/easy read if you like history books. As with any history book, important to keep in mind that the information is never "neutral" and will be presented with the opinions/perspective of the person presenting it.

[diane · Rating 2 out of 5]

the question-and-answer format is a little annoying to read straight through, but taken in small pieces it is entertaining and informative.