America: The Last Best Hope, Volume I: From the Age of Discovery to a World at War

by William Bennett

Dumbed-down and politically manipulative history, civics and social studies textbooks are leaving millions of our nation's youth ignorant of what makes America great -- and leading many of them to actively despise their own country. National tests repeatedly show that a staggeringly high number of high school and college students know little and care even less about their country's past. Newspaper columns and television reports today are full of cynicism. Many express doubts about American motives on the world stage. Some Americans are all too ready to believe the worst about our leaders and our country -- present and past. The consequences for our future could be very grave. But here at last is an antidote: William J. Bennett's monumental America: The Last Best Hope: Volume I: From the Age of Discovery to a World at War.

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This book is one of the few American histories that give us the opportunity to enjoy the story of our country, and to take pleasure and pride in what we have done and become. Bennett also does something unheard of in today's politically correct American histories: he stresses the obligation of gratitude that every American owes to those who made it possible for us to lead free and happy lives. He details just how much is due to titans such as Lincoln and the Founders before him, and to many others who followed in their footsteps. The obscurity, opprobrium, and oblivion to which PC textbooks have consigned such American heroes, Bennett brilliantly argues here, are just the opposite of what they deserve. He demonstrates how, that time and again, our ancestors and our contemporaries have chosen wisely and have by their demeanors defined us as a people, and over and over again have shown the almost uniquely American capacity for self-renewal.

For well over a century people around the world have regarded America as their best earthly hope. After a generation of Hate-America-First politically incorrect indoctrination, Americans need to recover a sense of why the world has seen our nation for so long as a shining city on a hill -- and this book is a valuable tool to help us do just that. Bennett wrote this book, he says, in order to "encourage a new patriotism -- a new reflective, reasoned form of patriotism," and "to kindle romance, to encourage Americans to fall in love with this country, again, or for the first time. Not unreflectively, not blindly, but with eyes wide open." America: The Last Best Hope will help you find reason to reclaim some of the hope and conviction we have lost -- and to help others do so as well.

• Why the claims that Europeans brought slavery and disease to the New World are absurd

• One thing that Christopher Columbus did not have to contend with: the idea that the earth was flat

• The sixteenth-century Catholic friar who, in arguing that the Indians were full human beings, wrote extensively on human rights and deserves to be ranked as one of the founders of international law

• How the fall of Quebec City to the British in 1759 paved the way for American independence

• George Washington's "policy of compassion" that set the standard for all subsequent American treatment of enemy combatants

• The single thing that George Washington did that made him one of the greatest figures in world history -- and the model for all American presidents

• America's first war against jihad violence: the early nineteenth-century war that President Thomas Jefferson fought against the Muslim hostage-takers and pirates of Tripoli

• How Andrew Jackson courageously and almost single-handedly staved off civil war almost thirty years before it finally broke out

• Why, contrary to accepted belief, Mexico was not blameless in the run-up to the war with the United States that began in 1846

• Why, if the Dred Scott decision of 1857 had been meekly accepted, it would have ultimately spelled the end of American liberty

• How the Civil War not only determined the fate of freedom in the United States, but set the terms of the struggle for freedom around the world for years to come

• The French adventurer who used the Civil War to plot against freedom in the Western hemisphere

• Ulysses S. Grant's behind-the-scenes intervention with President Andrew Johnson to prevent the indictment of his old foe Robert E. Lee for treason

• Why the disputed election of 1876 was such a grave setback for civil rights

• The long struggle for civil rights for black Americans, from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington

• The coming of World War I: "The lights are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime"

  
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   Alan Cooper, Blanco, TX
  I teach in a small private school in rural Texas. When I was asked to take on U.S. History for the high school level students this year, I looked at the text that had been used in the past, saw that it was all "slam America" and told my school head I would not teach using that as a textbook.

  My search for an alternative landed this really fine volume. Bennett's book does not slam America, but neither does it present our nation as faultless. It is the product of top-notch research and balanced presentation. I present it to the students with a set of study guides of my own making, and they read it and actually appreciate the fact that it doesn't denigrate their country. It is well-written, which dovetails nicely with the emphasis on writing well that our school imparts to its students.

  I will recommend this book to any teacher who wants his or her students to have a balanced and respectful view of the United States. I hope the second volume is out by late February, 2007, and if it is, it will be my source for the last 90 or so years of our history.

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  I have read several different series of American history books, but this is a cut above the rest.

  Most history books center on the plight of the Natives (Indians, Native Americans), the bigger wars that America has fought, and show a lot more things that Americans did wrong than things that they did right.

  While this book doesn't gloss over America's less honorable moments, it also talks about the things that Americans did right.

  Also, this book goes through the history of the United States of America president by president: telling the story of each presidency along with all the major events and characters that shaped it.