Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Harsh as it sounds, I would like to make the argument that no matter how much children enjoy it, this book is still a very bad idea. The biggest problem with it is its overtly racist framework, something that may have seemed perfectly all right when it was first written in the 1920's, but that is quite shocking today. The author is very clear at the outset about who "we" are: white Christians of European descent. And the word he uses - which even the 1947 revision does not cut - is "Aryan", an imaginary racial category that reached its peak of popularity in Nazi Germany. The author carefully explains that there were "just three different white families, and from these families all the white people in the world are descended". Although the book does not explicitly say so, these three families, the Aryans, the Semites, and the Hamites, are presumably descended from the three sons of Noah. (For the discredited 19th-century racist origins of this theory, see [..].) The paragraph that has stayed in my mind since I first found a copy of this book 20 years ago runs: "If your name is Henry or Charles or Wiliam, you are probably an Aryan. "If it is Moses or Solomon, you are probably a Semite. "If it is Shufu or Rameses, you are probably a Hamite." According to Mr. Hillyer, all the major civilizations of the world have been created by white people (the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent are helpfully identified as white). Although Confucius and the Buddha get respectful nods, the civilizations of Asia are not worth mentioning. When Asians do come into the story, they appear as "tribes of yellow people" led by "terrible fighters" like Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan, who wanted to "wipe off the face of the earth all white people and everything that white people had ever built." Russians, indeed, are suspect, because "although they were white people, they were living so close to the yellow people in China that they had become much like them in many of their ways." And astonishingly, for a book that was written in Baltimore in the twentieth century, people of African descent simply do not exist. The author muses that "we don't know how nor when nor where colored people first lived, though it is interesting to guess," and that's the end of it. Racism aside, the other main problem with the book is gross inaccuracy. According to the author, humans did not discover fire until long after they had been hunting with stone spears and painting magnificent pictures on cave walls (with charcoal among other things.) And almost immediately after the discovery of fire, they discovered copper and tin and the Bronze Age began. But only in the Tigris and Euphrates valley and along the Nile (where the white people lived); everyone else was still living in caves. Things get better as the book goes along, but there are still plenty of instances in which myth is presented as historical fact. (I leave out the chapters in which the Old Testament is treated as literal history, since I know that many readers of this review will not share my views on that issue.) People in Columbus' time did not actually believe the world was flat. George Washington did not actually chop down the cherry tree. And printing and gunpowder were not actually invented in Europe, but were known in China hundreds of years earlier. But all of these tales are treated as fact. The chapter on Gutenberg starts out with the sentence, "Up to this time there was not a printed book in the whole world" - although this month's National Geographic contains a picture of a printed Chinese book from the ninth century. In addition, both the Reformation and the American Revolution were apparently due entirely to resentment over taxes. The great ideals of human freedom and equality and democratic self-government - certainly the most inspiring parts of the American story that I told my children - are considered too advanced for the readers of this book. True, children love stories about people, and the stories in this book are charmingly told, if your children don't mind the condescending tone. And true, they stick in your brain. Many years ago I had a children's history book rather similar to this one, and what sticks in my brain about Elizabeth I of England - arguably the greatest ruler in European history - is that she was very vain and had lots of dresses. Hillyer improves on this picture, but only very slightly. His Elizabeth is still vain, and has lots of lovers (!), but she does manage to defeat the Spanish Armada. Hillyer is so impressed by this that he considers her "more man than woman", and jokingly calls her "King Elizabeth." Is there some reason that we are still sending this message to our daughters? I'll grant you that it's a good thing for children to have heard of Pericles, Louis XIV and Peter the Great. The Italian Renaissance gets a chapter, there is commendable attention to the contributions of the Muslim civilization of the Middle Ages, and there is at least one hint that not all the motives of the Crusaders were entirely admirable. But in general, most "world history" happened in Europe, and after the Renaissance it generally involved English-speaking people. Among the missing pieces are the era of European colonization, slavery, the Industrial Revolution, the continent of South America both before and after the Spanish conquest, and the entire history of Native Americans. I would argue that even for small children, a view of "the world" that completely leaves out the voices and experiences of non-white and non-English-speaking people, that in fact treats most of them as if they are either strange "yellow races" or just not worth noticing, is potentially crippling in the twenty-first century. It conditions its readers to see people who are not just like them as alien, incomprehensible, and vaguely frightening - "them" rather than "us". Attention, homeschoolers: your children will be growing up into a world, and a country, full of people not just like them. In order to function in that world they will need some understanding of, and respect for, the different experiences of those people. Third grade is nowhere near too early to start.