In the Great American Documents series, the teacher and graphic-book
author Ruth Ashby and the renowned illustrator Ernie Colón tell the
story of the United States through the major speeches, laws,
proclamations, court decisions, and essays that shaped it.
The Great American Documents: Volume 1 introduces as series narrator
none other than Uncle Sam, who walks us through twenty essential
documents bookended by the Mayflower Compact in 1620 and the Indian
Removal Act in 1830. Each document gets a chapter, in which Uncle Sam
explains its key passages, its origins, how it came to be written, and
its impact. In the chapter The Maryland Toleration Act, we learn that
this document was one of the first blueprints for modern religious
tolerance. Common Sense depicts the Boston Tea Party and the British
response as the prelude to Paine's stirring pamphlet. And The Louisiana
Purchase closes with Lewis and Clark setting off to map Jefferson's
empire of liberty.
As Ashby and Colón show, the creation of that empire resulted in immense
prosperity but also meant the extension of slavery and the forcible
removal of the Native Americans. Their balanced and teachable theme is
that these twenty documents reveal our early struggles to live up to the
principles of liberty and equality. This graphic primer is an
indispensable resource for students and anyone else who wants the facts
of American history close at hand.
