A Short History of the United States
From the Arrival of Native American Tribes to the Obama Presidency
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3.7 • 15 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In A Short History of the United States, National Book Award winner Robert V. Remini offers a much-needed, concise history of our country. This accessible and lively volume contains the essential facts about the discovery, settlement, growth, and development of the American nation and its institutions, including the arrival and migration of Native Americans, the founding of a republic under the Constitution, the emergence of the United States as a world power, the outbreak of terrorism here and abroad, the Obama presidency, and everything in between.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
To write a thorough, balanced history of the United States in under 400 pages is no mean feat. Remini, professor of history emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a National Book Award winner for his work on Andrew Jackson, deftly wraps his expertise and deep knowledge of his subject in stripped-down prose that provides everything a casual (or bewildered) reader needs to know about the United States from the first English colonists until the beginning of 2008. Remini's final chapters are slightly rushed and his judgments too general to be useful, but these flaws are easily overshadowed by his masterful middle sections focusing on the 19th century (his scholarly specialty). In contrast to some surveys of American history, like Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States or William Bennett's America: The Last Best Hope, Remini delivers an objective narrative of this nation's history that readers of all political stripes will appreciate. 16 pages of b&w illus., 14 maps.
Customer Reviews
A short history of the United States
I bought this audiobook thinking it would be a good refresher course written by an "esteemed American intellectual and historian." What a waste! Totally a liberal point of view to the point where you know it is not even accurate. Here is one simple example, the author says that the energy policies of the George W. Bush administration "caused" the Enron scandal. Wait a minute, the Enron scandal, which had been brewing for decades, broke in October 2001, barely 10 months after GW Bush was sworn in. It was hardly his energy policies that caused the problem. If the writer can't get recent history correct, how useful is the rest of his writing? My answer, not very. You can probably get a better history of the US by reading Wikipedia.