It was a nice day as we strolled into the Goodwill store. It isn’t a real Goodwill store, but some other charity whose name I cannot recall. In the window is a sign about how everything is 50% off today, the sign is up 365 days a year. After rummaging though the toy bins for anything eBayable (scored a Transformer from 2001) I went over to the books like I always do on the lookout for goofy crap. Best in Children’s Books caught my eye, because there were several volumes and it looked old enough that my mom used it in school. I was right, the copyright date inside was from the 1950s, and it reprinted stuff from even earlier. One such story is our focus today, because it is always fun to see how things were like in the olden days. I’ve scanned in some of the paragraphs of The Story of Early America that would not make it into classes in this day and age, for good reason.

This is one of those books you had in school that was made up of other, smaller books. Sort of like the Bible! These rest of the stories are not entertaining, we are only concerned about The Story of Early America.

Copyright 1937! We’ll find out what grandpa learned about America just before he had to go kill Hitler!

Stupid people are stupid. What of it?

Europeans will conquer anything, and check out those naked red men run!

The story of savages

The book waxes philosophical about civilization all of a sudden!

Let’s get us some jungle Negroes!

Don’t blame the English for killing the Indians, they were just homesick

Jungle Negroes need to go to college to work in factories

Washington and Jefferson did not approve of slavery (yet the book fails to mention they owned them…)
And didn’t anyone tell the writer the the civil war wasn’t about slavery, it was about “State’s rights”? (the right to own slaves, that is!)

He was out of his, going out of his mind, how could he ever be so blind?

That’s it as the Story of Early America ends at Lincoln’s death. The rest of the book is not interesting, except for this interesting picture in the Kipling story:

Yes, that is a mandrill spanking a short-nosed Elephant.

That’s if for now, unless I find another crazy ancient book for $1 at the thrift store! With today’s economy, it might just happen.