BREVE HISTORIA DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA.
By David SavilleMuzzey and Horace Kidger '03. Boston:Ginn, 1953. 344 pp. $3.48.
This book is, in part, a Spanish version by Antonio J. Colorado, of The United States, the original work in English reviewed elsewhere in these columns. It offers to the highschool pupils in the Spanish-speaking world, and particularly to those in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the fundamentals of American history. Within its span, relevant names, events, and trends are developed to their significant proportions.
The Breve Historia looks on the broad panorama of this country's past - the backgrounds, the establishment, the vicissitudes of expansion to the West and of the Civil War that led to the molding of a new united nation, the political and economic forces in a changing America, and, in our own time, the global leadership and responsibilities that a victorious achievement in two world conflicts have brought about.
Time limitations in crowded school curricula must have forced the omission of the latter half of the original book in its Spanish translation. The units omitted, especially those regarding inter-American relations, would have been of particular interest to the Latin American teacher and student. It is to be hoped that a second volume will eventually bring out these illuminating aspects of a highly stimulating and comprehensive presentation of the field.
It seems logical that in the plans that Latin America is making for the education of its younger generations, the study of the history of this country will have the place it deserves. Geographical proximity, kindred political ideals, economic interdependence, and the leading position of the United States in the western world, should make of American history a sine qua non in the cultural baggage of the Latin American of today. Here in this book he would find a brief, but nonetheless thorough and attractive treatment of the subject, in graceful, idiomatic Spanish, enhanced by a profusion of pictographs and other illustrative material, such as he would seldom run across in his local textbooks.
