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When I was nine years old, my folks took me to the famous battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was the place where, one hundred years earlier, thousands of Americans died fighting each other in the bloodiest three days of the long Civil War. Standing among the rocks at Little Round Top, where young soldiers took cover from bullets and cannonballs, I knew that something special had happened in this place, even if I didn't really understand the Civil War.
Like most kids back in those days, my friends and I liked to play war games or cowboys and Indians. But that day I understood that the field at Gettysburg was about something real. This was not about make-believe war, but about real people in real places who did real things.
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Over the years, as I have spoken to people around the country on talk radio and in bookstores, lecture halls, and classrooms, the one word I usually hear when it comes to history is "boring!" To me, history is anything but boring. The stories of what life was actually like for the people who sailed on the Mayflower and the Indians they met, or the true stories of pioneers who headed west-these stories are a vital part of what made America the nation it is today.
The book, Don't Know Much About American History asks a lot of questions about more than five hundred years of history. The answers lie in the remarkable true stories of the men and women, boys and girls who created a country. Sometimes funny, and sometimes sad, I hope you agree that the stories of American history are never boring.
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