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Thoughts on MP's Concise History of the American Republic?


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I went with Memoria Press this year for several of my son's subjects -- Logic, History, Literature, Geography, and Greek. It's been a great fit for him. He works very well with MP's format and has really progressed as a student this year. I'm thinking ahead to next year and wondering if anyone has thoughts on MP's Concise History of the American Republic for high school US history. I've never seen it discussed anywhere and a search didn't pull up results (but maybe I'm not searching the right terms). The text itself has only a few mixed reviews on Amazon.

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I know that some of the long time MP users don't use that course. I would ask on the MP forums for reviews just to see.

The online academy used a different book for a while, and some MP users used that book. I also think some use Homschool Connections. There is no way I could talk my dd into two years of American history, so I never looked at it very closely.

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I have no opinion on Memoria Press and their guides to this book, but I did do some searching into the book itself. You can look inside of it on Amazon. It was published by Oxford, which is good, which means it's not a typical textbook provider. It has not been updated since 1983, however, and that would make me hesitate to use it. It was originally published in 1930 and retains archaic language that is offensive (at least to me) today. 

The attached clips are from the section on Indian removal. While it does not support Indian removal, I find the language in the narrative troubling such as: "influential half-breeds" and in the other example "it had always been a grievance against the Indians that they would not settle down into civilized ways." Now the second quote could be read as if the author was stating how Americans felt at the time, but he's not clear. 

While the chronology of history may have not changed, the study of history has. The early Republic is widely written on now. I don't have a specific alternate to recommend, but there are plethora of choices in American History. 

For me, I would not choose to use this text for high schooler. The outdated language used for Native Americans is not something I would want my high schooler to learn from. That's just one example I found in five minutes of research. I have no clue but it could be that this work was/is important to American historians (not my field of expertise), but it would be studied in context of more recent scholarship and findings. I would not give to a student for their first round of exposure to early American history. 

concise history 2.JPG

concise history.JPG

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