GOOD AND BAD HISTORY PICTURE BOOKS
Hesseltine, William B.
The Progressive s Bookshelf Good And Bad History Picture Books NEWS OF THE NATION: A Newspaper History of the United States, by Sylvan Hoffman and C. Hartley Grattan. Garden City $3.49. ALBUM OF...
...Far better is the volume of Meserve photographs of Lincoln...
...Probably the best use that the good teacher can make of this volume is to teach students how to be on their guard when reading the papers...
...18, 1906—contains the news from 1901 to 1906...
...The pictures are mostly small, and they are poorly reproduced...
...Edited by James Truslow Adams...
...Ingenious is also a word to apply to the Album of American History...
...Scribners...
...But not clever...
...There are 41 "issues" from Apr...
...Pictures and cartoons illustrate the stories, and columns on best sellers and popular entertainments round out the issue...
...Inside pages give space to the Panama Revolution, the election of 1904, the Northern Securities Case, the anthracite strike of 1903, the invention of the safety razor, and the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk...
...7.50...
...Japan's victory over Russia (1905), the first automobile trip across the continent (1903), and the El-kins Act forbidding railroad rebates (1903) fill up the rest of the page...
...The daily press is notoriously inaccurate, and the ingenious authors of this newspaper history have succumbed to the occupational disease of journalists...
...The device suffers from the common defects of the daily newspaper...
...Certainly this is ingenious, and, in the hands of that rarest of jewels, a good teacher, it might be a valuable classroom device for making history lively...
...But the cumulative effect on the general reader is not likely to be good...
...Modern photographs and contemporary drawings appear side by side without differentiation...
...The stories are sketchy, superficial, and inadequate...
...Moreover, its very format seems to produce inaccuracies...
...It is undoubtedly both of these, but whether it has any value aside from being a curiosity piece, ©nly experience will show...
...ALBUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY: Colonial Period...
...The photographs of Lincoln will be a continued source of joy long after the colonial album has been relegated to the attic and the garbled journal of national "news" has been used to wrap up the garbage...
...Front page headline news of the day is the San Francisco earthquake and Theodore Roosevelt's condemnation of the muckrak-ers...
...All of which probably goes to prove that, even in picture books, there's an enormous difference between solid scholarship and superficial cleverness...
...It's as dull as a newspaper, and people who have learned- to "scan" their daily journal will scan this without reading it...
...A sample issue—that of Apr...
...8, 1941 which purport to relate, in modern journalese, the significant events and movements in American history...
...Here he presents the 120 known photographs, ranging from a daguerreotype made in 1848 to seven pictures taken on May 10, 1865,- of Abraham Lincoln...
...It is an excellent collection, made with the zeal of a collector, and presented with scholarly care...
...In addition there are 100 pictures of men and women who were close to the martyred President...
...Meserve himself has •written a careful, and much too modest, introduction to the pictures, which, without his interest, would long since have been lost...
...14, 1493 to Dec...
...THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, by Frederick Hill Meserve and Carl Sandburg...
...Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine «»T NGENIOUS" and "clever" are the words the ob-JL servers have been applying to the News of the Nation...
...The 400 large pages of this volume are cluttered with pictures illustrating American colonial history from Columbus to Corn-wallis...
...For 40 years F. H. Meserve has been collecting the photographic record of the Civil War...
...Har-court, Brace, $3.50...
...News of the Nation is a tabloid "newspaper" of American history...
...An editorial, "For the Square Deal," explains that T. Roosevelt was a middle-of-the-roader...
...The accompanying text is a bare and barren commentary which seldom rises above mere elongated captions...
...Carl Sandburg has contributed an essay on "The Face of Lincoln" and a sketch of Meserve...
Vol. 8 • April 1944 • No. 17
