Use as a reference, The paperback is heavy. They should have put in two volumes. Becareful lifing if you have tendonitis or carpal tunnel syndrome.:) Very readable size print though, smaller margins for personal annotating. ( )

A very useful reference. ( )

Have you ever felt the need for a handy desk reference that could give you a quick snippet about Shay's Rebellion, the income tax, or Lincoln's Second Inaugural. This is it. Authoritative, cross-referenced, no home should be without one. ( )

I fancy that dead journalists lay on their backs in their graves and scribble on the lids of their coffins. Then one day -- night? -- it comes to them that nothing they write matters anymore and they finally give up scribbling.

People still on top of the ground, however, have to make a living. Problem is that most of them are lazy. So what they do is scrounge up a whole lot of stuff that the dead people wrote before they became dead people. Then the live people make new books that were written by the old, dead scribblers.

When that's done, they call it "history". They call it "History" with a capital H so readers understand that "History" is important stuff. People who don't read "History," it is said, are ignorant asses who should never be elected to positions in government. Ask George W. Bush or Donald J. Trump if I'm lying.

Stuff that dead people wrote is thus recycled. If it's fiction, people called "editors" put the old writing in a new book and call it "classic". So it is that a person called "an author" never sold a book in his/her life and was said to be a jerk and a failure. But now that (s)he's dead and put in a grave, living people proclaim that author a genius whose books sell for 35 or 50 dollars apiece.

That's why I'm an author who doesn't write anything. Ain't no lazy-arsed, sneak-thief dirtbag gonna steal what I wrote before I died. You hear me Eric Foner?! You hear me, John A. Garraty?! You hear me, all you wanna-be "Historians"? ( )

2/20/23