Customer Reviews

If You Were There in 1776

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm a mom with a family of boys, and we are planning a trip to historic Boston and Philadelphia for summer 2012. In preparation, I am reading all the children's materials I can find on the Revolutionary time period. Some of the books, I'll have the kids read and make presentations about before the trip. But not this book.

This book is best skipped.

From the title, I thought this book belonged in the "If you sailed on the Mayflower/If you were there when they signed the Constitution/..." series of children's historical books (which are quite good), but this book is not part of the series.

Barbara Brenner relies heavily on sources from "historians" like Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States) and Page Smith (A People's History of the American Revolution). These works have been discredited and repudiated for decades. Barbara Brenner's reliance on those sources for her book throws the whole project into question.

Which is a shame, because the artwork and illustrations used in this book are very high quality and unique. That's the reason I gave the book the second star: the visuals of colonial life in 1776 are quite good. But the class-struggle baloney is out of place in a children's book. There are plenty of better resources on this time period for this age group (4th-6th grade).

I like:

"The Declaration of Independence" by Dennis B. Fradin
The "thirteen colonies" series by Lucent publishers
"Liberty or Death" by Betsy Maestro
"Revolutionary War Days: Activity Book" by Cheryl Kirk Noll

I think this is a good book for children to read. Colonial times has a lot of interesting facts I think this is one of the simplest book to gather your information I think all of the readers out there I encourage you to buy this book!!!!!

I had to read this book in school and I must say, it was a good read, a little long, but still. Even though this book is factual, and obviosly doesn't have a plot, it still felt like it, it made learning about 1776 almost fun, I enjoyed it!