This book provides wonderful sources for the middle school classroom. As an 8th grade social studies teacher I would be lost without this book. It provides a great balance for the textbook, and brings history alive for students. Some sources are advanced, but many can be used in an inclusive classroom setting. A perfect choice for any teacher of early American history.

Bailey and Kennedy's documents collection is now a standard in secondary schools and some colleges, and with good reason. The book is well-organized, contains excerpts short enough that students can read them as complements to a narrative text (or even in class), and the authors generally include multiple perspectives on controversial issues. The section on the Spanish/American/Cuban/Filipino war, for example, provides at least one document from each "side," making this a useful resource for those of us who teach.

Readers should beware, however, that subsequent revisions of the original edition have not kept pace with developments in historical inquiry. The book is very lean on social history, and there are almost no documents on cultural history. Furthermore, the collection is very idiosyncratic in its inclusion of African-Americans and women. For example, the text does not include an excerpt of the Brown v. Board decision of 1954 and omits any mention of second-wave feminism in its collection of documents on "the stormy sixties."

Perhaps the 10th edition will be more inclusive, but for now I'd suggest students -- and teachers -- of American history seeking for a supplementary documents collection keep looking.

As a secondary school social studies teacher I found this book very helpful. There are numerous sources, and each has an informative and interesting introduction. A broad range of sources include everyday people and politicians, cartoons, letters, and speeches. A must have for the social studies classroom!

I thought this was a wonderful collection of primary sources that really encouraged the further learning of History. Bailey does such a nice job with this book.

An outstanding historical overview of American foreign policy and individual Secretaries of State and the presidential policies they worked from (or at cross purposes with). Easy-to-read, it is written for the layman, not the academic.

I learned things I'd never heard of before, such as the fact that the United States has had troops occupying Russia! During the intervention of 1918, Europeans and America went in to support the White Russians and help quell the chaos during the early Russian Revolution.

Also that in early American history our relationship with Canada was anything but friendly. There were shooting incidents between Americans and Canadians partly over border disputes and partly over Canadian fears of American invasion.

I have used this book in college and for preparing high school classes. I find the explanation of historical events to be clear and systematic. The supplemental charts are easy to follow. I recommend this book for finding good explanations for the events that the United States was involved in and about the key players at the time.

Arriving on shelves over twenty years ago, this collaborative work by Paul B. Ryan and Thomas A. Bailey is a comprehensive, in depth reference. Although lean on illustrations, it is full of important information on the many controversies surrounding the loss of the LUSITANIA in 1915. Conspiracy theorists beware: here is undisputable evidence that the sinking of the LUSITANIA was not the result of a setup. For anyone who wants the truth behind the LUSITANIA disaster, here it is - time tested and proven.

This book has good points and bad points. On the good side, it is very tongue in cheek and humorous, if one likes that sort of thing, though some puns were used over and over. I can't count how many times the alliance of countries was likened to a marriage.

On the downside, it was not an ideal textbook. My class is using it for our AP US History class, and it really does not suit the purposes of a high school course. The authors obviously spent so much time attempting to be humorous that they forgot to put facts into the book. The section on the Webster-Hayne debate said absolutely nothing about what the actual subject matter of the debate, only described the orators themselves in great detail and made jokes. It also contains a lot of useless information a high school student would never need to know, such as a physical description of each president and the exact parallel of every territory's boundary.

It probably suits the purposes of someone trying to learn and study American history on their own because it is amusing enough to keep the reader interested. It is not suited to a high school class trying to learn and memorize straight facts.

This book handles its subject very well. It was the basic text for my 11th Grade history course, where it provided a good balance of mildly amusing wit and genuinely useful information.

The main advantage of "The American Pageant" is that the author is not trying to push a major political agenda. It lacks the patriotic drivel for which "traditional" history texts are often denounced. However, it also lacks the negative, depressing Socialist philosophy which makes Zinn's "People's History of the United States" so difficult to read.

The end result is a history text which does a history text's job: telling what happened. The book covers politics, economics, and major events in a style which is sometimes amusing and usually informative. Although not overly political, it also pays due attention to such important issues as race and gender.

Not a particularly "specialized" book, but an excellent survey text.

I can quite clearly remember the amazement with which I first read the opening paragraphs of Bailey's American Pageant six years ago in high school; and even now, after graduating from college in a field completely unrelated to history, I return to this text to read in my spare time just for the sheer enjoyment of it. I hesitate to even call it a text: rather, it is almost a work of art. Personally, I am flabbergasted by some of the negative reviews I've read below. Of course someone will not like this book when they haven't read it all semester, and then they have an approaching final and try to quickly skim the text and learn all the "important facts" of this nation's history. This book isn't written to satisfy the poor study habits of a mediocre, disinterested student who could care less about history; it is written to express history as seen and studied and understood through the eyes of an absolute genius: Thomas Bailey. For those who believe the book is opinionated, I'll agree with that notion. That's what historians are supposed to do -- they shape and mold historical events into tangible, real entities that one can relate to, rather than just relate dry facts and statistics. (That's what an encyclopedia or government records are for.) If I could, I would give this book more than 5 stars -- surely it deserves as much.