Rating: 
Summary: Overall an average book
Review: Paul Johnson does an excellent job of covering many of the great men who helped to build the United States of America. Men such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson are described in great detail. Johnson gives the reader an in depth biography of many of these men's personal, social, business, and political lives. Much of this information is left out of the traditional textbooks that many of us received in high school or college. However, Johnson includes many useless facts such as the number and types of silverware, types of furniture, and the name of a dog owned by George Washington. Many of these useless laundry lists of facts occur throughout his book. Other than Johnson's great man theory I had a tough time identifying his thesis throughout the different chapters. It almost seemed as if he was rambling on about American history, with the only guide to his writing being a chronological ordering of United States history. Despite Johnson's shortcomings I enjoyed reading about many of the great men who helped to shape the United States.While reading Johnson's book for my History 110 Class, American History to 1877, my classmates and I noticed that Johnson left out important details in American history, such as class struggle, repression of women, and the mistreatment of African Americans. Our class also read Howard Zinn's, A People's History of the United States. Zinn took a much different approach to writing a United States history book than did Johnson. Zinn focuses in greater detail on class struggle, repression of women, and the mistreatment of African Americans. Zinn, time and again puts down many of the people and events that occurred in American history. Then again Zinn is Marxist, so it is easy to understand why he took this approach. Johnson seems to offer a much more optimistic and uplifting version of American history. These two books were extreme opposites of each other. If you want to get an opinion from both sides of the spectrum, Zinn on the left, and Johnson on the right, read these two books and decide for yourself which is more accurate. Even though at times I had a tough time focusing on Johnson's book I enjoyed reading about many of the great men that aided in forming our nations history. It is also refreshing to hear history written from someone on the right side of the political spectrum, rather than from liberal university professors and historians. However, his inability to consistently capture my attention, create a strong thesis, and his repetition of useless facts gives Johnson an overall rating of three stars.
Rating: 
Summary: First-rate one valume history of the U.S.
Review: One of the hallmarks of Mr. Johnson's spectacular career as a historian is his desire to get beyond the trivialities of detail (i.e. nitpickey reader from San Gabriel) and to explain how we, as Americans, have gotten to this point in time - good and bad. The sheer scope of this work can be overwhelming if not viewed from this vantage point. Also, this book makes you think and it is HIGHLY opinionated. However, Johnson meticulously footnotes his tome and gives readers a bibliography in which he points readers in the direction of books with opposing viewpoints to his own. It is true that anal-retentive liberals won't like this book and will, instead of focusing on the profound issues of the book, use the "hey this fact isn't correct" diversion. Don't be fooled! With a book of this size, an error here and there is bound to happen and a better editor might have caught this. However, it does not detract from a well-written and highly entertaining history
Rating:
Summary: A fantastic read!!
Review: After reading some of the previous reviews I was a bit skeptical about the book but ordered it anyway - and boy am I glad I did. What a fantastic story. Johnson writes history that is both readable and entertaining. While there are some factual errors this does not deter from the books greatness. All of those who say this book is rife with errors and conservative twists are just angry to find out the conservative nature of our great countrys history. God bless America. Thanks Paul for a great book.
Rating: 
Summary: A Seriously Flawed Version of US History
Review: Paul Johnson is a British journalist who also is an amateur historian. In this book he sets out to write a comprehensive history of the US; however, his book is marred by serious shortcomings. The most obvious failing of this book is its abundance of factual errors. Previous reviewers have noted whoppers like Johnson's conflation of Civil War Gens. Joseph and Albert Sidney Johnston. Such errors abound throughout. Opening at random to the description of the Constitutional Convention, I quickly found Johnson erroneously describing Alexander Hamilton as "leading the federalists" during the convention; in fact Hamilton was absent from much of the convention and had little influence on its outcome. In the same account Gouvernor Morris of Pennsylvania is misidentified as a delegate from New York. It is true that in a book of such length and scope, even a professional historian could make errors, but the number of Johnson's mistakes and the ease with which many of them could have been avoided suggests that he did much of his writing and research sloppily. While the factual errors are the most apparent flaw in AHotAP, other shortcomings are more serious. Johnson repeatedly displays poor judgement in choosing which events to emphasize. He discusses minor issues and events at great length while giving short shrift to much more important topics. For example, writing about the Civil War, Johnson gives much attention to the actions of Col. John Mosby, an irregular cavalry leader who had little effect on the course of the war, while giving much less space to Grant's campaigns in the West from Fort Henry to Vicksburg, which were extremely important, and in some historians' view decisive. Turning to the post WW2 era, Johnson repeatedly trivializes major social movements, while magnifying trivial issues. The environmental movement gets a mere two paragraphs, and these merely to lament that it "added to [America's] problems of competing in the world." The environmental degradation which gave rise to the movement is barely noted. But Johnson has time to run on for pages about the "political correctness" issue, a teapot tempest manufactured by right-wing pundits. The civil rights movement fares a bit better--the entire period from the Montgomery bus boycott to Martin Luther King's murder gets a whopping two pages. Even so, the focus is almost entirely on King; Malcolm X, for example, an important and complex figure, is summarily, and inaccurately, dismissed as a "black racist." People like Fannie Lou Hamer are non-persons in Johnson's account. But he has space for a rhapsody of several pages on the "power" of Ronald Reagan's humor (humor that was in most cases, like the "there you go again" quip made much of by Johnson, scripted by the Gipper's aides). A third weakness is the incompleteness of Johnson's research. On many subjects, his notes reveal a failure to consult major, standard works on the topic. For example, no serious treatment of the rise of giant corporations can ignore the books of Alfred Chandler. No one could fairly criticize the foreign policy of FDR, as Johnson does, without at least consulting the standard works on that topic by Dallek and Divine. And any treatment of the Cold War worthy of serious attention must at least take into account the arguments of revisionist historians like Williams, Kolko, Gardner and Alperovitz. Yet Johnson appears never to have read any of their work. Of all AHotAP's faults, the most glaring are Johnson's dubious interpretations and judgements. Events are frequently viewed through an ideological filter, leading Johnson to conclusions that are almost impossible to justify rationally. The Great Depression, for example, would have ended, according to Johnson, by the end of 1930, had the government not interfered with the "self-adjusting" abilities of the economy (self-adjusting abilities which even conservative economists like Milton Friedman now admit do not exist). Prior to the civil rights movement, Johnson tells us, "blacks had failed to participate fully in American political life," as if blacks were not voting by choice, not because a mix of law and terror prevented them. Johnson's most warped judgements, which border on hysteria, concern President Nixon and his crimes--crimes which in Johnson's view were, as he says of the "plumbers" illegal acts, "activities of an entirely justified nature." Watergate is portrayed as an effort by evil liberal "witchhunters" to drive a good man from office; Nixon's central impeachable offense, that of obstruction of justice, goes entirely unmentioned. Also absent is the famous "smoking gun tape," which proved that Nixon was complicit in the Wagergate coverup from the start, and by providing such proof, caused most Senate Republicans to turn against Nixon, and caused Nixon to resign in the face of certain conviction and removal from office. Johnson simply pretends that this sequence of events never happened, and misrepresents Nixon as resigning "in the national interest" even though, as Johnson distorts it, he would not have been convicted. This book's shrill, tendentious nature make it entirely unsuited as an introduction to US history, and to anyone with knowledge of the subject, as I have, it is often genuinely painful to read. Doubtless many conservatives will find it congenial reading, since it tells them things they want to hear (the previous reviewer who acknowledged how glad he was to see a book that trashed FDR was tacitly admitting this). But a historian's job is not to comfort his readers in their prejudices, but to respect the truth and present the truth as best he can. Paul Johnson fails completely at this task.
Rating:
Summary: An extraordinary tale of an extraordinary country
Review: Paul Johnson is not an author for the faint hearted, especially those with just the slightest left-wing sensitivities. But then neither is he an ordinary historian, and certainly no ordinary writer. Above all he is a storyteller of extraordinary power and skill, making even the dourest subject a fascinating, encyclopaedic experience. History of the American People carries that Johnsonesque trait of being a story about people. His eye for a good tale is already apparent in the title, where a less savvy author might have discarded any reference to humans. Only Johnson has the intellectual dexterity required for this particular style - to throw a blanket over any period of history, and then examine the men and women who make up the primary threads of its fabric. He focuses on prominent and not so prominent individuals, telling their life stories in such fine, but expansive detail, that you come away after each chapter with a massively enriched appreciation of the United States's journey to greatness. In this way, Johnson exploits all too well the real universal interest in the United States - what makes it different, successful and powerful? Always, he manages to artfully juxtapose America's achievements against its grubby, conceited and banal side. While the historical minutiae are all there, relativism is the outstanding feature to look out for. It's a recurrent theme in all Johnson's books, where moral ambivalence is exposed and skewered. He gets to grips with American intellectuals who were great social schemers. Invariably, they were rogues and fakes who led less than exemplary lives were ill-equipped to preach about social change. To illustrate where lefties might get queasy, he does a brilliant job of rehabilitating the robber barons. Their contributions to a more complete society are simply staggering, even when measured in today's money. A revulsion for history is soon cured by Johnson, and History of the American People is *the* place to start if you're a novice to the author or his craft, which is about understanding the cycles of life.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent in-your-face people's lives within historical view
Review: This book reminds me of the old T.V. show I used to love as a kid," YOU WERE THERE!" they used to take historical events and cover them as a news jockey would now cover any NFL football game. You felt you were there. Paul Johnson sets the stage for the same feeling. It is very enjoyable way to read history.
Rating: 
Summary: A Worthwhile History
Review: I found this book informative and interesting, and would recommend it to anyone seeking to gain some understanding of American history. However, as a Englishman, I find at least one of the reviews on this page extremly offensive and arrogant: how dare someone casually accuse the Enlgish of living in the past and claiming to have "rescued the British way of life" when - fair enough - you gave us help that was desperatly needed, but had you given it earlier thousands of people would not have died; so, screw you, you bomabastic L.A. moron.
Rating:
Summary: A promising beginning but a pathetic end result.
Review: What began as a promising good read turned sour and distasteful long before it ended. Mr. Johnson obviously bit off more than he could chew without revealing his inability to write dispassionate history. By the time he reaches the civil war one begins to see a personal bias in his writing. I almost sensed a bit of racism and anti-Semitism in his tone. By the time he reaches the 60's it becomes obvious that he has lost control of his objectivity and has lapsed into a conservative political diatribe. You don't have to read the last 100 pages, you already know what he is going to say.
Rating:
Summary: What gives?
Review: Is there a reason (good or otherwise) why a my review has been removed? It may have been the first re: this book. Do you perform post facto editorializing? Peter Price
Rating:
Summary: The greatest book on American history ever written!!!
Review: The author covers five centuries of American history and illustrates how one period flows into or causes the next. Elements of politics, religion, economics, social forces, and science/technology are carefuly woven together into a masterpeice. I felt a sense of sadness when I neared the end of the book, knowing full well I am unlikely to ever experience anything like it for the rest of my life. I only other time I ever felt this way was when I read Modern Times by the same author.
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