The American Pageant

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The American Pageant, Seventh Edition (Brief), by Thomas Bailey and David Kennedy.

The American Pageant, written by the late Thomas A. Bailey, is an American high school history textbook often used for AP United States History courses. Since Bailey's death in 1983, the book has been updated by historians David M. Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, and it is now in its thirteenth edition.

1 Structure
- 1.1 Twelfth Edition
- 1.2 Thirteenth Edition (complete edition)
2 Criticism
- 2.1 Fourth Edition (complete edition)
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Structure

[edit] Twelfth Edition

The American Pageant, Twelfth Edition, by David Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and Thomas Bailey.

While there are four different editions of this book, the contents of the Complete Edition (ISBN 0-618-10349-X) are divided into six parts, from "Founding the New Nation" (with an initial chapter on prehistory, natives, and European exploration) through "Making Modern America". The six parts are subdivided into a total of 42 chapters, spanning a total of 1034 pages. The book's chronology ends in the year 2001.

Two other editions split the book into two separate volumes. Volume I (ISBN 0-618-10353-8) covers until 1877 and Volume II (ISBN 0-618-10354-6) covers the time period since 1865.

The book pictured is the edition "For Advanced High School Courses" published by Houghton Mifflin (ISBN 0-618-24732-7) and is comparable to that of the Complete Edition.

[edit] Thirteenth Edition (complete edition)

The American Pageant, Thirteenth Edition, by Thomas Bailey and David Kennedy

In the new thirteenth edition released in 2006, the book contains 42 chapters each divided into six sections,

Founding the New Nation, c.33,000 B.C.-A.D. 1783
Building the New Nation, 1776-1860
Testing the New Nation, 1820-1877
Forging an Industrial Society, 1865-1900
Struggling for Justice at Home and Abroad, 1901-1945
Creating Modern America, 1945-present

The chapters are:

New World Beginnings: 33,000 B.C.-A.D. 1769
The Planting of English America: 1500-1733
Settling the Northern Colonies: 1619-1700
American Life in the Seventeenth Century 1607-1692
Colonial Society on the Eve of Independence: 1700-1775
The Duel for North America: 1608-1763
The Road to Revolution: 1763-1775
Exodus from the Empire: 1775-1783
The Confederation and the Constitution: 1776-1790
Launching the New Ship of State: 1789-1800
The Triumphs and Travails of the Jeffersonian Republic: 1800-1812
The Second War for Independence and the Upsurge of Nationalism: 1800-1824*
The Rise of a Mass Democracy: 1824-1840
Forging the National Economy: 1790 -1860
The Ferment of Reform and Culture: 1790-1860
The South and Slavery Controversy: 1793-1860
Manifest Destiny and Its Legacy: 1841-1848
Renewing the Sectional Struggle: 1848-1854
Drifting Towards Disunion: 1854-1861
Girding for War: The North v. The South: 1861-1865
The Furnace of the Civil War: 1861-1865
The Ordeal of Reconstruction: 1865-1877
Political Paralysis in the Gilded Age: 1869-1896
Industry Comes of Age: 1865-1900
America Moves to the City: 1865-1900
The Great West and the Agricultural Revolution: 1865-1896
Empire and Expansion: 1890-1909
Progressivism and the Republican Roosevelt: 1901-1912
Wilsonian Progressivism at Home and Abroad: 1912-1916
The War to End War: 1917-1918
American Life and the Roaring Twenties: 1919-1929
The Politics of Boom and Bust: 1920-1932
The Great Depression and the New Deal: 1933-1939
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Shadow of War: 1933-1941
America in World War II: 1941-1945
The Cold War Begins: 1945-1952
The Eisenhower Era: 1952-1960
The Stormy Sixties: 1960-1968
The Stalemated Seventies: 1968-1980
The Resurgence of Conservatism: 1980-1992
America Confronts the Post-Cold War World: 1992-2004
The American People Face a New Century

[edit] Criticism

It has been criticized in Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen as a mix of blandness and misinformation.

[edit] Fourth Edition (complete edition)

Published in 1971, this edition had many inaccuracies.

Regarding the rape and genocide of Native Americans:

The American continents were slow to yield their virginity (2).
...the conquerors left little behind- except a half-caste brood of misbegotten offspring. There can be no doubt that the Spanish invader killed thousands of natives, and exploited the rest, but he intermarried with them as well (9).
It [the American republic] started from scratch on a vast and virgin continent, which was so sparsely peopled by Indians that they could be eliminated or pushed aside (2). However, the textbook later admits a large number. The bare statistics of Spain's colonial empire are alone impressive... A total of 160,000 Spanish inhabitants, mostly men, had subjugated some 5,000,000 Indians (9).

Regarding the Dutch's dealings with the Native Americans:

The [Dutch West India] company's most brilliant stroke was to buy Manhattan Island from the Indians (who did not actually "own" it) for trinkets worth about $24... (38).

Regarding the ideation of Native Americans and Muslims:

Christian crusaders must take high rank among the indirect discoverers of America. Tens of thousands of these European warriors, clad in shining armor, invaded Palestine from the 11th to the 14th centuries. Whatever their true motives, they avowedly were attempting to wrest the Holy Land from the polluting hand of the Moslem infidel (3).
A new world thus swam within the vision of civilized man.... He [Columbus] called the near-naked natives "Indians" (6).

Regarding slavery:

Slavery inevitably made for loose morals, sexual and otherwise (389).
But savage beatings were normally not administered without some reason or provocation... (389)
The white race inevitably became interbred with the black on a scandalous scale (389).

Regarding feminism:

Yet American women, though legally regarded as perpetual minors, were relatively well off. They were probably better treated than in any country of Europe... Few American men were brutes; and the softer sex had quiet ways of protecting itself (366).
While suffragists are referred to as a belligerent bevy of female agitators, the same paragraph refers to the men who threw eggs and vulgarities as merely, disapproving males (366).

Regarding Reconstruction:

They stole food in their hunger, and got drunk on pilfered liquor, as did shiftless whites.... No doubt the luckless Negro was also in some ways a menace to himself (389). Luckless Negro is a phrase repeated in the book's conclusion; The Republican Party, with its luckless Negro recruits... (509).
The first sentence of the section about the KKK refers to white supremacists as deeply embittered, otherwise decent Southern whites (505).