Greetings, Wonkademics! So glad you could roll up for our magical history tour! This week, we continue our look at two textbooks for homeschoolers and Christian schools, the 8th-grade text from A Beka Book, America: Land I Love, and Bob Jones University Press’s backpack-burster for 11th/12th graders, United States History for Christian Schools. This time around, we’ll look at how these books approach the story of how a just and merciful God brought civilization and smallpox to the original inhabitants of North America.

As we noted last week, Land I Love is the more aggressive of the two books when it comes to telling students that history is an account of how things turned out exactly like God planned. In a brief section on ‘America Before Columbus,