Customer Reviews

This Country of Ours

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

It seems to me that since the other reviewer is so coy about this subject he or she knew so much about, we have to take an anonymous stranger's word for it that an unknown subject had some unknown errors that rendered the entire book unreadable. If we were allowed to know for ourselves what the topic was, then perhaps we could judge for ourselves.

IMO, Mrs. Marshall tells a riveting story of America's history that cannot help but engage the attention and hearts of young readers. Because she wrote a hundred years ago she sometimes uses terms I would not (savages)- I just change the word.

She did her homework well but the best historical research available to her at the time is not always the best historical research available to us at this time- so I explain that. It's a great way to help children learn that perspectives in history change and that point of view influence the retelling.

I have yet to see a history book which does not have a viewpoint or historical information with which I differ. I can fix those things. H.E. Marshall's engaging, delightful, interesting writing style needs no alteration, and I can't fix tepid writing as easily as I can an errant fact.

Her book is available online as an etext, and I suggest those interested look it up and read a few pages and make up their own minds.

This is a great book. I am homeschooling and am using this book for supplemental history for my eight and eleven year old. I love H. Marshall's style and would recommend this book to anyone who is tired of the dry textbook style of historical writings. You will not be disappointed. Beautiful engravings also.

A great book easy for children ages 8 yrs old to adults to read. It presents the facts about history and the lives of the men and women that is often lost in history books in this present day. There are Christian morals and Biblical truths discussed in the lives of our forefathers. I highly recommend this interesting book.

Although Ms. Marshall is clearly a product of her time, I found that in many instances she could have chosen sides, but instead she took a fair position. That said, this edition of the book, should you choose it, is not the best. It does not have the illustrations mentioned in another review, and lacks any dates at all (I'm assuming that's how it was written originally) - making it difficult to build a timeline from it or to get a sense of the passage of time. I prefer to use the version online at Celebration of Women Writers, which has annotations in the margins.

We've been using this book, along with Our Island Story (history of England) by the same author, for about the past 5 months in homeschooling. They have been enjoying it and learning from it, and on the whole I like both books very much. I plan to continue using them because there is nothing comparable out there that tells history in story-fashion in such a way that alot of information is imparted but in a readable, non-textbook format.

However, recently in both books I have discovered some serious anti-Catholic bias. I now know that I cannot simply read along and blindly trust the book, but must research certain topics to either correct or to supplement the biases presented in this book. It's a shame. In this book, this has arisen for the first time in the chapters on founding certain colonies in the United States. Catholic explorers or explorers from Catholic countries are ascribed negative motivations and actions that are not always historically true or unbiased. Given the topics that lie ahead in the book, I expect this slant will arise again.

This book is wonderfully well written, and captivating for children (8-11 yr olds) and adults. There is exactly the perspective one would expect from an author writing in 1917, and I would suggest using additional works to suplement this for elementary history education. For example, when describing how Florida became a state the author writes as though the indigenous Native Americans occupying the land agreed to relocate. The reality is, as with much of our country's history, the Indians were forcibly, and often brutally, removed and displaced from their homeland. The idea that the US Government acted inappropriately is not even hinted at! That being said, we have used this text in homeschooling, and are enthralled with the the storytelling style. It is important to use a variety of sources for a well rounded education--and to take advantage of a more mature and realistic perspective that only hindsight can provide.

This is a good history spine, but I just wanted to offer a review of this publisher. Wilder Publications, while producing texts cheaply and efficiently, has produced this edition (March 09) with MANY typos. There is no table of contents, no chapter numbers, and an average of about five typos per chapter. Not a huge deal if you are reading it to your child, but if you plan to hand this edition over to your child to read alone, it may greatly confuse them. Pay the extra money and buy from a more reputable publisher!

While the content of this book is a very good overview of American history, I do not recommend this particular edition by bnpublishing (ISBN 9561001985) as it is full of typos, misspellings, and misplaced punctuation (or none at all where there should be). I also don't like the page layout: the text is too small and the column is too wide for ease of reading. Better editions are available from Yesterday's Classics or Wilder Publications. (I promise I do not work for either of these companies; I'm just a homeschooling mom trying to help others avoid my purchasing mistake.)

We love all of H.E. Marshall's history books - she makes history engaging and enjoyable. However, some reprints of this book are better than others. I know the Yesterday's Classics edition is reputable, but not all do as thorough a job of proofreading or formatting. Unfortunately, some of the negative ratings for this book are because of poor quality reprints, even when the reviewer loved the book itself. I recommend that you consider the publisher as well as the text of the book itself.

We use The Country of Ours in our homeschool. We haven't gotten past the American Revolution yet in our reading, but I love how she presents Native Americans. Yes, I dislike the terms that she uses (savages, Redmen, Pale-faces), but she shows that they were people who had their own agenda, who were varied in their responses to the Europeans, and who seem like regular people. I love the chapter where the chief of one tribe tries to enlist the naive Europeans into fighting against another tribe because they have a long-standing conflict with that tribe. That sounds just like political wrangling that goes on all over the world. I love that the natives are sometimes friendly and sometimes hostile, and that the people within each tribe have separate responses. They aren't "noble savages" nor are they brutal and wicked for all that she refers to them as "savages." She presents the most well-rounded view of Native Americans that I have ever seen in an elementary or middle school history book, and she also shows that the Europeans were at times friendly with the Native Americans and at times treated them terribly. We discuss why she uses the terms that she does, and I point out passages where she is showing the Native Americans to be kindly and generous but still calling them "savage" so that they can see that she doesn't mean blood-thirsty barbarian when she uses that term. We talk about how unacceptable that term would be today. It's a great book, and we have a great discussion about the changing nature of language because of it. It's not a perfect book, but no book is, and it blends nicely with the rest of our history curriculum which provides differing views.