History

One of our questions to answer as we prepared to do today's reading asked us to guess how our history books would portray the events we were going to read about. I hadn't really thought about Paul Johnson's point of view on history, but after reading the question and thinking about it I've come to this: Johnson portrays the history of America in a worldly way. He explains what was going on in certain parts of the world that directly related to what was happening in the colonies and the founding of our country. For example, on page 71 he explains that America was being colonized right at the time of "smoldering dispute between the king and parliament". Because of this dispute, Johnson explains, the history of America took the course it did. Throughout the rest of his book Johnson explains events in worldly context. He describes the different groups of people, where they were from and why they decided to come to America. He differs from Takaki because he doesn't focus on them but certainly takes them into account.