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.