Jared Lee McHatton

A Promising Series Degenerates

Revisado: 07-18-07

This series of books could fill a needed gap in basic historical literature, and begins in the first and second volumes with some promise. Sadly, it devolves into nothing more than a platform for Carson to vent his prejudices, which turn out to be myriad. You have to go into this with the understanding that Carson is an ultraconservative fundamentalist Christian and writes from that perspective. That comes through loud and clear from the beginning, and is all right in the first 2 volumes, because he still provides a fair narrative of the events occuring in the period covered. That begins to change with the third volume and becomes becomes all consuming by the fifth. He completely forgets history and substitutes ideology. Along the way we are treated to a dose of racism, antisemitism, reactionary economic theory and conservative dogma. All that might have been all right, if he hadn't forgotten the purpose of the books. We learn that slaves didn't have such a bad life, that railroads didn't screw the farmers in the late 19th century, that antitrust laws were an unconscionable imposition on the legitmate accumulation of capital and that FDR was the main cause of the depression. I stopped there, being unable to go any further. I stuck with it until he began to torture fact to bend it to his ideology. I would steer clear of these books.

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