Astonishing American History

Four centuries of American history, and 360 things you were never told about it.

Massachusetts printed the first government paper money in the Western world because an invasion of Quebec came home empty-handed and the soldiers wanted paying. Baltimore burned for thirty hours in 1904 while fire engines from three cities stood useless in the street, because their hoses would not fit its hydrants. The Pentagon was built with twice the restrooms it needed, and nobody ever lettered the doors.

None of these are the stories you got in school. All of them are true, and this book shows you exactly how anyone knows.

360 entries. Eight chapters. Every fact explained, every fact sourced.

Each entry runs about a hundred words and works the same way: the fact first, then the reason it is true, then the number that leads to the work it came from. Nothing is left as a bare claim. Where two accounts disagree, the entry says so instead of picking whichever reads better. Where the famous version of a story turns out to be wrong, you get the plain version and the point at which somebody improved it.

What is inside

• Eight chapters running in order, from the continent before the colonies to the turn of this century
• 360 source entries printed at the back, numbered to match the facts, with two independent works behind each one
• Boxed questions scattered through the chapters, written to be asked out loud at a table
• A ten-question quiz closing every chapter, with the answers together at the back
• A note on method explaining the two tests every entry had to pass

Written to be argued with. There are no verdicts here on parties, movements or living people, and no adjectives doing the work that evidence should be doing. What happened, who did it, when, and what followed. The rest is left to the reader.

Open it anywhere. Read three entries and put it down, or read forty and miss your stop. Then hand it to somebody who thinks they already know the story.