Louisiana Purchase - John Chase
The complete 1953 black and white comic strip, plus the 1982 addenda strips about Oliver Pollock. Everyone knows the basic story (Jefferson, Napoleon, Lewis & Clark) but this vast epic is the equivalent to an advanced middle-school semester-long unit on U.S. history. Starting with Ponce de Leon and DeSoto, it covers everything, from the Iroquois Nation to Toussaint Louverture, Robert Livingston, the XYZ Affair, etymologies of various place names (and the dollar sign!), the keelboat men, coureurs de bois, and a healthy peppering of minor historical figures. Some of the scholarship is dated, and although the book is progressive for its time, it refers to American Indians and African Americans in some stereotypical ways. Still, this is an amazing work of historical research, so broad that it requires several careful readings. [4]
