The American Story: 100 True Tales from American History (review)

From the contentious founding of St. Augustine in 1565 through the contentious presidential election of 2000, these chronologically arranged stories hit many high points of American history and culture. Selection of episodes seems more closely aligned to Armstrong's interests than the middle-grades social-studies curriculum, which can be variously regarded as a boon (inclusion of such interesting figures as Asser Levy, the first American Jew to struggle for and win several disputed civil rights) or a bust (1929 is evidently more notable for the St. Valentine's Day Massacre than the stock market crash). Armstrong embellishes her brief tales with some old-fashioned embroidery ("The land teemed with deer and bear, the waters flashed with the fins of many fishes, and mussels and oysters were as numerous as grains of sand"), and Roth's generous line-and-watercolor illustrations take a comical turn, no matter the gravity of the subject. The most valuable feature of this volume is not the storytelling itself but the indexing of the tales for access to both specific information and general themes. Besides a standard index of events, names, and places, Armstrong also identifies "story arcs," thematic headings under which several episodes are grouped. Again, these arcs seem to reflect not only the useful and expected (religion, communications) but also the eccentric and serendipitous (cattle and bananas). This may well generate more interest as a research sourcebook or a teacher's handy stash of three- to five-page readalouds than as a child's choice for independent reading, but isn't practicality, after all, a quintessential American trait?