The Intellectual Devotional: American History Edition

I'm something of a trivia junkie.  I DVR Jeopardy every day.  I've even taken the contestant test a few times (still waiting for my call).  I'm the All-Star cleanup hitter in the annual New Year's Eve Trivial Pursuit my wife and I play with friends every year.  Give me a movie, and I can tell you who's in it.  Give me a song, I can tell you who sang it.  Give me a war, a book, a country, I can tell you who fought it, who wrote it, and what the capital city is.  Most of this information, I have no idea how I know it.  It just floated through space one day and my specially tuned magnetic brain plucked it out of the air.  None of this information is very useful, however, except in trivia games.  I was hardly a brainiac in school, and straight As were never on my report card.

The one subject I did always do well in however, was history.  Maybe that's because with all its names, facts and dates to memorize it fit naturally into my intellectual wheelhouse.  Whatever the case, I've always loved it.  That's also probably why I love the book my family gave me for Father's Day, The Intellectual Devotional:  American History.  It combines my love history with my love of factoids into one concise volume, perfect for a quick glance while drinking your morning coffee or for a longer look while retiring to the lavatory to consider more personal matters.

The Intellectual Devotional series of readers--there are five editions--are modeled after their spiritual counterparts, but instead of a passage of scripture and a brief ecclesiastical thought for the day, they devote a page every day of the year to one fact and an explanation of it.  In the case of the edition I received, American History.

The book covers topics in seven "fields of knowledge":  politics and leadership, war and peace, rights and reform, business, building America, literature, and the arts.  Within each topic, which are spread throughout the book, are the subjects of the one page synopses on everything from Jamestown to Mark Twain to the Smithsonian to the Panic of 1853 to Bob Dylan.  There are of course the well known people and things you'd expect to find, like George Washington and the Civil War, but also things you probably were supposed to learn in school but forgot about, like Brown v. the board of education and the Lend-Lease Act, to things you probably never heard about like Jacob Riis and the Utopians.

Now, it's a pretty good trick to be able to boil something as complex as the Civil War down to a one page capsule, but the authors David S. Kidder and Noah D. Oppenheimer do a pretty good job of hitting the high marks for each topic.  This obviously is not intended to be an exhaustive look at each of these aspects of American history, but it serves as a good jumping off point for further study on something maybe you weren't aware of.

Whether you're an aspiring Jeopardy contestant like me or want to brush up on your knowledge of the USA (or are looking for something to read in the bathroom) this is a book you should checkout.  I know I'll be purchasing the other editions at some point in preparation for next year's Jeopardy test.