Young Peoples’ Story of the Modern World
Hillyer and Huey
1966
There are some important pieces of history told in this book, no doubt about it. You can see the subjects it covers in the Table of Contents.
There’s nothing horribly wrong about this book. It just looks old and boring, it smells a little, and it’s a little roughed up with age. It was a lovely public library or school library choice for its day, but can safely be put to rest now. Let’s give kids something fun and exciting to read about history, like DK, Eyewitness, or Usborne titles often do. Even the worst-funded library in America can do better than this old thing. (Link to BBC History for Kids – it’s free!)
-Holly
One thing that always confused me was that “Modern” started with the Renaissance – over 500 years ago!
Bonus if you can identify the plane on the cover!
Umm, it belonged to us, Lurker?
I mean, make and model. Although on closer inspection, it appears to be a missile. I don’t see a cockpit!
Alternately, modern starts a mere 500 years / 10,000 years = 5% of human history ago.
Jared Diamond has ‘Modern’ beginning 5,000 years ago when our ancestors began farming after a mere 100,000 years of hunter-gathering…
Most historians would agree that the 16th Century A.D. is ‘Early Modern’.
That book will be horribly politically-incorrect today. Just the chapter headings are Eurocentric and with a Manifest Destiny (for white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxons) that is definitely NOT acceptable in the 21st Century!
Also, Napoleon wasn’t that little. He was 5 foot 7 inches tall, not bad for the late 18th Century. British propaganda made him ‘little’.
(The aircraft might be a Rocket Assisted Takeoff (RATO) version of the North American X-10 of 1953, which was no doubt declassified by the time that book came out. This was a testbed for the SM-64 Navajo missile.)
Just the fact the last landmark date they reference is the founding of the UN is a “dump it” flag, surely.