Each book in this award-winning series is accurate and reliable history written in the tradition of great storytelling. The narrative and informal text includes off-beat, little-known events and singular personalities that make the traditional meat-and-potatoes of American history anything butboring. Read any selection aloud to your students and you will soon understand why kids and teachers across the country are raving about these books.
Joy Hakim quotes extensively from primary documents, explaining who wrote them, when, and under what circumstances, so that the reader is implicitly encouraged to assess their accuracy or probable bias. She describes the historical context of each piece of evidence, so that students can build anaccurate (and carefully guided) picture of that world for themselves. Ms. Hakim writes like an historian, and she offers her readers the chance to begin to do history and understand the process for themselves. Although her language is carefully chosen to be accessible even to fairly inexperienced readers, her respect for their intelligence and their ability to feeland think deeply about complicated and sometimes painful problems is evident.
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