"... Here is a good subject for an argument or debate: Are we any happier with all these inventions than people were a thousand years ago without them?
Life is faster and more exciting; but it is more difficult and more dangerous. Instead of enjoying a book curled up in the corner of a sofa by a crackling fire, we leave a steam radiator and go out to the movies. Instead of singing or playing the violin, we turn on the graphophone or the player-piano and miss the chief joy in music, the joy of making it ourselves. Instead of the jogging drive in an old buggy behind a horse that goes along through the country-side almost by himself, we speed on in dangerous autos, to which we must pay constant, undivided attention or be wrecked..."
Figured I'd see how much of the world was covered and searched "China."
It mentions Confucius, featuring the line "Yet we know little of China’s history until a great deal later." Then the theft of silk, the Mongols, a brief mention with Columbus and Peter the Great, and ending with Commodore Perry's ending of Japan's millennia of isolation.
Pretty poor coverage before you factor in the "yellow race" parts. Those get pretty bad, like the discussion of the Teutons vs the Huns
>It was white toughs against yellow toughs, and the Huns were beaten. It was lucky they were beaten, for if they had won, these dreadful wild, yellow people might have conquered and ruled the world. The white toughs were bad enough, but the yellow would have been worse
Agreed- anyone who attended a public elementary school in the US up til about 20 years ago got the traditional western white male story of history ("Columbus sailed the ocean blue / in 1492," the mnemonic goes, but of course no mention of the extermination of the Arawak in the textbook)- considering that implicit bias, yes, 100% if I found this book on my grandparents' bookshelf when I was a kid I would have devoured it too- and I say it with confidence because their shelves did have books like this and I did read them, eagerly.
They also had a Childcraft set from the 1940s, which included a "peoples of the world" volume, and a "Myths and legends" volume, and even though there was bias, I absolutely absorbed those as well.
> All of the people who lived in the country of the Tigris and Euphrates were white. We don’t know how nor when nor where colored people first lived, though it is interesting to guess.
I guess you can read this as a funny, outdated text but I personally would not give it to my kid.
I would show my kids how the good intentions in the foreword were unachievable (by today's standards) by the genuinely intelligent and educated adult author, because of their cultural conditioning.
It's like an exclamation mark on the initial point.
"... Here is a good subject for an argument or debate: Are we any happier with all these inventions than people were a thousand years ago without them?
Life is faster and more exciting; but it is more difficult and more dangerous. Instead of enjoying a book curled up in the corner of a sofa by a crackling fire, we leave a steam radiator and go out to the movies. Instead of singing or playing the violin, we turn on the graphophone or the player-piano and miss the chief joy in music, the joy of making it ourselves. Instead of the jogging drive in an old buggy behind a horse that goes along through the country-side almost by himself, we speed on in dangerous autos, to which we must pay constant, undivided attention or be wrecked..."