American History For (And From) Canadians

Last Saturday afternoon, my friends Nancy and Albert and I were at The Trappist, a haven for Belgian beer lovers in Oakland, CA, when a convoluted chain of comments and references leading me to this post began. Nancy told me about a job interview she'd just had in Charleston, SC. Having just been doing a lot of reading about the Civil War, I made a comment about Fort Sumter. Nancy pointed out that, as a Canadian, she didn't actually know that much about the American Civil War. ("It's not my fault. We had one year of American History1 in 7th grade.") This, of course, made me think of (fellow Canadian) Robin Laws' comments on my friend Ken's The Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated. It also reminded me that I'd read it but not yet talked about it. Which brings us here.

First things first: It's great. Ken manages to pack in a tremendous amount of (sometimes surprising) material into 176 pages, and Shepherd Hendrix does an amazing job of keeping up with the almost-frenetic pace. It's also laugh-out-loud funny; my guffawing and reading of occassional excerpts were enough to convince my friend James to ask to borrow it when I finished.

So here's what jumped out at me:

• Lots of Quotations. Ken is perfectly content to let history speak for itself when appropriate, and that's more often than you might think. Sure, there's a full-page spread of the Gettysburg Address, but you also get H. L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding's prose style: "He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it."
• Jefferson. I don't have the page count at hand, but he might have more appearances than anyone else. (George Washington is the possible exception.) And he's a troublesome figure, given his difficulties in dealing with slavery. Or as he said: "We have the wolf by the ears; and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."
• Chicago. Ken holds that it is the greatest city in the world, and there's more than a little evidence presented here as to why.
• The slavery narrative. In many ways this is the strand that ties the book together. The last section, Tear Down This Wall, is about the Civil Rights movement as much as it about the fall of Communism. Which, I suppose, is only fitting, given where we started and how we got here.

So there you go. Need a crash course in American History and hope to have a good chuckle in the process? I know of no better book.

1 As a bonus feature, the one event in American History that Nancy (along with all other Canadians, apparently) did know a lot about was the War of 1812. She and Albert pointed me to this song by Three Dead Trolls In a Baggie which serves a reminder of the war that, as I told her, "we don't like to talk about."