I applaud the way the Louisiana Purchase is covered here, especially its connection to L’Overture’s revolt.  But is there not a missing paragraph here?  Shouldn’t there be at least some mention of the Lewis and Clark Expedition?  I see not a word regarding it . . . how is this possible in an American history textbook?  Maybe I’m missing something.

You cannot just dive into Shays’s Rebellion.  There is an entire section omitted here, one covering the Articles of Confederation.  Just mentioning it in a couple of paragraphs is insufficient.  You need to cover its positives and negatives, and you need to at least mention some of the successes.  The Land Ordinances of 1784, 1785 and 1787 are nowhere to be found.  The Northwest Ordinance HAS to be discussed.  As I noted in the previous chapter, the Treaty of Paris of 1783 is pretty much ignored, so it logically follows that the Articles, and the Land Ordinances, would get short shrift.  This really needs to be corrected.

The Treaty of Paris is not covered satisfactorily.  What about the details?  The acquisition of land east of the Mississippi, for example?  There is a lot of detail at the end of this chapter, and mention of a lot of minor historical figures.  Doesn’t the Treaty deserve, at the very least, a paragraph of its own?  I assumed this might be covered in the next chapter, but it is not.

Would this not be a logical place to introduce the term, “Loyalist,” or “Tory”?

There were five “Intolerable Acts,” not four.  The Quebec Act has been omitted here.

Shame on the conservative “author” of this segment for putting the Boston Massacre in quotation marks — five people were killed, for Christ’s sake.  And referring to Crispus Attucks as a “ringleader” is pure bullshit, bordering on racism.  Who wrote this crap?  George Will?  What’s the agenda here?  Is there any editing or oversight to this slapdash hodgepodge you call a “textbook”?  And at least be consistent — in the first sentence of section IV the quotation marks are suddenly gone.  Textbooks by committee are always bad; this one is the worst ever.

There is simply too much repetition and overlap all throughout this textbook, both in the pre-1877 portion and the pos-1877 part.  The Great Awakening is just one prime example.  It was covered in the previous chapter.  I wondered, as I read about it there, why there was no mention of the Enlightenment, since the general interpretation is that the Great Awakening was a reaction to the Enlightenment.  So now, here, in the following chapter, the Enlightenment is discussed, and the Great Awakening material on Whitefield is thrown in once again, as if it had never been covered before.  Is there any communication between the various authors?  Is there any editing done?  The entire textbook needs a review and a good editing.

“Benefited,” not “benefitted.”

“Whilst”?  Give me a break!  Use of this word is an annoying trend, generally associated with conspiracy web sites and low brow folks trying to appear intelligent.

Change “women” to “woman” in the reference to Geraldine Ferraro