A Little History of the United Statesby James West DavidsonYale University Press, 2015To the ranks of Yale's series of “little” histories (art, science, the world, etc.) James West Davidson now adds his pithy and surprisingly sharp A Little History of the United States, which despite its title begins its story well before the thirteen American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. In fact, Davidson begins his story centuries earlier, with the North American continent's discovery by the voyagers of Europe … and the often terrible consequences that resulted:

Historians have long spoken of the Americas as the New World, contrasted with the Old World of Europe, Africa, and Asia. I have not used those terms because the Americas were certainly not new to the Indians, who had been living there for thousands of years. But two hundred years after the first contact between Europeans and Americans, much of North and South America was new – vastly different from the world before 1492. The Americas had become a new world, transformed by wars of conquest, germs of smallpox, and the seeds of dandelions, melons, onions, and oranges.

There follows roughly forty chapters, each roughly seven pages long, covering the broad outline of U.S history and filling in most of the usual details about the usual major incidents. Decades ago, when American school children were taught American history, they would have been taught a lamp post-to-lamp post version of that story in a fashion very similar to the way Davidson goes about it. We get Plymouth Rock. We get Jamestown. We get the French and Indian War. And of course we get all the run-up events to the American Revolution, including the famous Boston Tea Party:

But by now [1773] everyone's guard was up. If a small tax was accepted, what was to stop Parliament from passing larger ones? When the first ships carrying East India tea sailed into Boston, the Sons of Liberty were ready, organized by a tough local politician named Samuel Adams. Adams was a round-faced man, blue-eyed, pale-skinned, and utterly determined. “Put your adversary in the wrong and keep him there,” he liked to say. When the royal governor of Massachusetts insisted the tea must be unloaded, Adams stood before a candlelit crowd in Boston's Old South Church and spoke words meant to be a secret signal: “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.” Immediately, a Boston mob dressed as Indians swarmed down to the harbor, chopped open the tea chests, and dumped the leaves into the icy waters.

It will immediately be clear that the distinguishing feature of such a tour will be its compression rather than its investigation, and on this heading Davidson reveals himself to be quite adept. Just look at all he's doing in that one-paragraph account of the Tea Party: there's atmosphere, personality, and a palpable momentum, all crammed into seven sentences. A Little History of the United States may be something of a trot for time-pressed or simply lazy readers, but nevertheless: writing like that takes a certain kind of skill that a good many professional historians ostentatiously lack.That skill is evident throughout the book, from the Civil War to Theodore Roosevelt, from the Second World War to the dramatic high point of the Kennedy administration:

The Cuban missile crisis had come and gone in thirteen days. In the large scale of history, it was hardly a blip on the radar screen. Yet the world as we know it nearly ended. “The other fellow blinked,” Dean Rusk had boasted. But both sides had blinked: Kennedy as well as Khrushchev. It was not an easy decision for either man. Castro was furious with the Soviet leader for not launching atomic missiles at America first. Kennedy showed no little courage in rejecting the advice of his military advisors (“These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor,” complained the president, speaking of the generals. “If we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”) Standing at the nuclear brink, Khrushchev had seen “death and destruction”; Kennedy a globe ruined by “fire, poison, chaos, and catastrophe.” Both men had stepped back.

James West Davidson is the author of many popular high school history textbooks, and at the close of his Little history, something of the challenging, optimistic pedagogue peaks through. After a barrage of summing-up inquiries, the book ends with the irresistible lines: “Enough questions. The past asks more of us because the future deserves more. It's your history now, to write and to live. You tell me.”All of the Yale “Little” series are easy to recommend – A Little History of the United States a bit more so than the rest.