A warming collection of twenty-some narratives. While many are naive, dated, benighted, bigoted yet the sensitive modern reader can be enlightened in the reading.
Volume Eight of The New Junior Classics is entitled Stories from History. The word "from" is important here, because not all of these stories are strictly historical accounts. There are elements of legend here, which is not a bad thing.
We have stories from ancient Greece, including the tale of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, a story current enough to have been made into a movie recently. We have the story of Joan of Arc. We have a lovely account of a Christmas concert in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. There are stories from the American Revolutionary War and the American Civil War. There are tales of the frontier, including one from the viewpoint of a Sioux Indian. We have a taste of Carl Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln. The volume concludes with a first-person account of being shot down over the trenches of the Western Front in the First World War.
Doubtful though some of the history, these are exciting, and sometimes edifying stories. I thoroughly enjoyed this volume of the series.