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Title: The American Pageant by Thomas A. Bailey, Stephen B. Oates ISBN: 0-618-10288-4 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin College Pub. Date: June, 1998 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $80.76

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Average Customer Rating: 3.47 (49 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: Beats the heck out of Howard Zinn
Comment: This book handles its subject very well. It was the basic text for my 11th Grade history course, where it provided a good balance of mildly amusing wit and genuinely useful information.

The main advantage of "The American Pageant" is that the author is not trying to push a major political agenda. It lacks the patriotic drivel for which "traditional" history texts are often denounced. However, it also lacks the negative, depressing Socialist philosophy which makes Zinn's "People's History of the United States" so difficult to read.

The end result is a history text which does a history text's job: telling what happened. The book covers politics, economics, and major events in a style which is sometimes amusing and usually informative. Although not overly political, it also pays due attention to such important issues as race and gender.

Not a particularly "specialized" book, but an excellent survey text.

Rating: 5
Summary: An excellent introductory history text
Comment: All too often, students of history, and even history instructors, dismiss the study of history as a boring and irrelevant procession of endless names and statistics. Some history books, indeed, are rather dry and boring to read. This one is not. The authors here present a fresh, vibrant take on the oft-told tale of American history; it succeeds in re-invigorating the often stale story with new life. It accomplishes this by being written in a way that is not only informative, but also thoroughly enjoyable. Beefing up the standard information and statistics with frequently amusing and interesting anecdotes and multitude of charts, graphs, pictures, and relevant contemporary quotations, the book brings history to life. Written in this style, the book reads more like a novel than your standard dry history text. The style is unconventional, witty, and even quite often amusing. It also avoids falling into the trap of the ultra-patriotic, non-objective, trumpet-blowing agenda of many other textbooks -- while also managing to avoid boiling over with authorial opinion and negative presentations. The length of chapters is just about right as well, neither too short nor overlong. The book is rounded out with a nice appendix, which consists of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and a wide array of charts and graphs, as well as an index, though a fully-fledged glossary is missed. All in all, this is a great introductory text for those wishing to know more about American history, useful to both the student and the individual reader.

Rating: 2
Summary: unbiased? i think not...
Comment: i had this book for my 11 grade ap us history class and i didn't start learning us history until i stoped reading this book and picked up another one. while it does have "wit" and metaphors up to here (*motions to the forehead*), it lacks key words in bold or a glossary. granted, i used an older edition and maybe this one has updated its ways, and maybe some scholars hate key words in bold, but it was essential. when scanning the text for important information that you KNOW you read somewhere in the text, you cannot find it. that is infuriating and frustrating beyond compare. you might be trying to prove something and you don't have any bold words as guides. you can't find it and your argument is left unsupported.

it has wit (and contrived, forced wit at that). and it has endless metaphors that bog down the reading of history. and it has not much else.