Customer Reviews

The Americans

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My son has the 2006 California Edition, which tags each chapter with the paragraph and section of the specific Grade 11 California Objectives that it addresses. These Objectives focus on the development, in the student, of a sense of history as an ocean of conflicting opinions, some better substantiated than others, and how to begin sorting out distortions and oversimplifications. Although the heavy-handed political correctness we see here and there may be repulsive, and the token emphasis on minorities is silly and at times disturbing, overal the book still makes a serious effort to encourage debate and critical thinking over fact memorization. Of course, at some point, the very process of "critical thinking" can be hijacked to become nothing but lip service to thinking, in which "critique" in itself is an ideology. We pretend to think critically, but we do so in specific ways. Interestingly my son has said that his teacher does not take well to alternate explanations. Yes, McCarthyism was an insane overreaction, but it's not true that there were no Russian agents in the US. The textbook itself does try to be balanced. It could be better, but it sure beats what I had in High School.