Larry Schweikart - A Patriots History of the United States: From Columbuss Great Discovery to the War on Terror

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A PATRIOTS HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

Larry Schweikart is a professor of history at the University of Dayton. He has written more than twenty books on banking and financial history, business history, and national defense, including The Entrepreneurial Adventure (2000) and Americas Victories (2006), 48 Liberal Lies About American History (2008), Seven Events that Made America America (2010), and, with Dave Dougherty, the two- volume series A Patriots History of the Modern World (20122013). He lives in Centerville, Ohio, with his wife, Dee.

Michael Allen was born and raised in Ellensburg, Washington, and served as a Marine Corps artilleryman in Vietnam. He is a professor of history at the University of Washington, Tacoma, is the author of the prizewinning Western Rivermen, 17631861 (1990) and Rodeo Cowboys in the North American Imagination (1998), as well as several other books on American history and the American West. He lives in Tacoma and Ellensburg and has three children, Jim, Davy, and Caroline.

A Patriots History of the United States

FROM COLUMBUSS GREAT DISCOVERY TO AMERICAS AGE OF ENTITLEMENT

Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen

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Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in the United States of America by Sentinel, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2004

Sentinel paperback edition published 2007

This revised and updated paperback edition published 2014

Copyright 2004, 2014 by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen

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ISBN: 978-0-698-17363-7

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To Dee and Adam

Larry Schweikart

For my mom

Michael Allen

L arry Schweikart would like to thank Jesse McIntyre and Aaron Sorrentino for their contribution to charts and graphs; and Julia Cupples, Brian Rogan, Andrew Gough, and Danielle Elam for research. Cynthia King performed heroic typing work on crash schedules. The University of Dayton, particularly Deans Paul Morman and Paul Benson, supported this work through a number of grants.

Michael Allen would like to thank his mentor, Dr. W. J. Rorabaugh of the University of Washington, Seattle, and Dr. Bill Richardson, Director of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Tacoma, for their friendship and collegial support for over a decade.

We would both like to thank Mark Smith, David Beito, Brad Birzer, Robert Loewenberg, Jeff Hanichen, David Horowitz, Jonathan Bean, Constantine Gutzman, Burton Folsom Jr., Julius Amin, and Michael Etchison for comments on the manuscript. Ed Knappman and the staff at New England Publishing Associates believed in this book from the beginning and have our undying gratitude. Roger Williams, our agent since Eds death, has continued to be a major advocate not only for the book but for the series. Our special thanks to Bernadette Malone, whose efforts made this possible; to Megan Casey, Brooke Carey, and Natalie Horbachevsky for helping in subsequent editions; and to David Freddoso for his ruthless, but much needed, pen. We are especially grateful to Clayton Cramer for a thorough reading of early printings that helped us correct important errors.

Above all, we owe Dave Dougherty our thanks. We met Dave after he posted a review of our book on Amazon. The review was positive, but he noted flaws in the book. We wished to ensure that every conceivable error was removed or corrected, and so we partnered with Dave, who agreed to do a full-scale review of the book. Larry and Mike owe Dave a great debt of gratitude for not only making this book better but for going on to work with us on the Patriots History Reader and then coauthoring, with Larry Schweikart, the two-volume Patriots History of the Modern World series.

I t seems like only yesterday Mike Allen and I were lamenting the state of U.S. history textbooks and concluding that the solution to the lack of an accurate treatment was to write one ourselves. We began work in the late 1990s, and as we neared completion we knew that our product had little of the look or feel of traditional college or high school textbooks. It wasnt glossy and it had no photos (or even a map), study guides, or review questions. Moreover, with what we knew was a conservative bentalthough we thought it merely traditionalit would have a difficult time getting through college textbook committees.

From our earliest discussions, it was clear that A Patriots History of the United States would have to make an end run around college committees and textbook publishersthat, like so many successful products in American history, we would have to go directly to the consumers. In this case, that was both parents and students, for we knew many students of American history felt the same way we did about the slant of existing books about the American past. We had even resigned ourselves to the likelihood that wed have to self-publish the book.

But our agent, Ed Knappman, received two offers, one of which was from Sentinel, a new imprint of Penguin USA. We began our working relationship with Adrian Zackheim and our editor at the time, Bernadette Malone, and after much cutting arrived at the final version, a book of over 900 pages. It says something of Sentinels early faith in the book that our publisher backed it enthusiastically.

Initially, we had a good rollout with reviews in major newspapers and media outlets, and radio host Rush Limbaugh picked up the book and interviewed Larry Schweikart for his Limbaugh Letter in 2004. Slowly, however, a new dynamic took over: homeschoolers began to use the book, then high school and college teachers who were permitted flexibility to select their own books began to adopt it. We would learn about this only through letters or e-mails requesting access to the www.patriotshistoryusa.com website, where we began to offer limited classroom support. Since that time, Mike Allen has handled all of the educational side, corresponding with teachers and parents, and working with educators who developed sample study guides and even an entire test bank for the material. It was a remarkable testament to the free market and bottom up processes.