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From:	Tennessee Linda (user-24-214-41-38.knology.net)
Subject:	Some thoughts
Date:	January 31, 2007 at 5:55 am PST

In Reply to: Re: American History posted by Debbie in OR on January 30, 2007 at 6:11 pm:

Some thoughts...I'm presuming you are looking for secular materials, so I'll stick with that.

You could go ahead and use the Hakim books. For high school I would probably add some biographies and original documents to the course.

You could use Clarence Carson's A Basic History of the United States. There is a teacher's guide that goes along with it. I believe these books are available at Rainbow Resource online. This is a more conservative look at American History than Hakim's.

Another option would be Beautiful Feet's study guide for Senior High US and World History. It is not a secular study guide, but you could easily skip the particularly religious questions and still have plenty of meat in the course. It uses some of the Hakim books and one of the Carson books. It also uses a great deal of commonly read American literature in the course. You can look at the books at their web site at bfbooks.com .

You could also look at a used bookstore near you to find a public school or community college American History textbook. One my husband used recently when he went back to college and had to take a general American history course was The American Promise from Bedford/St.Martin's press. They have a lot of additional information and assignments for the text on their web page.

Finally, right now I'm reading America: The Last Best Hope Volume 1 by William Bennett. I'm considering using this and Volume 2 as spines, while adding some additional literature. Then I'll have her answer some basic essays relating to American history. One resource I'll use is Kathryn Stout's A Guide to History Plus (from Design a Study), and maybe some of the questions available from the MIT OpenCourse Ware site. I'll link the page for history, then you look under the appropriate American history course and then click on the assignments for that course. They generally have assignments for papers.

I hope that helps

• MIT History courses