The Comic History of the United States

American history from Columbus onward, told as a sustained joke by a Boston lawyer who thought the schoolbooks needed puncturing. Sherwood's version came out early in Grant's presidency, a generation before Bill Nye's, and belongs to the same short-lived fashion for making the founding fathers ridiculous in print. Eleven plates of American paintings by John Trumbull and Thomas Cole, from the Surrender of Lord Cornwallis to Comanche Warriors, give the nation's founding scenes the same straight face the text sets out to spoil.