Brian E. Strayer

Western Civ 101 was never quite like this!

"The Pharisees showed off their goodness by praying in synonyms" . . . "The fourteenth century was an unpleasant era to be alive in, much less dead in" . . . "The Vaccuum is a large empty space where the popes live in Rome" . . .

This is the history you never learned in school (or maybe you did).

Art Linkletter once noted that small children often mix fantasy and reality, making their views of everyday life wildly askew. But when the Baby Boomers and Generation Xers entered college, they were still mixing fantasy and reality, as their history and English essays demonstrated in a fractured, fictionalized, hilarious interpretation of events.

Here are gems uncut and unpolished, straight from the pens of freshmen and sophomores trying desperately to make some sense out of the past. If these bloopers prove nothing else, they demonstrate that Art Linkletter's "little kids" still say "the darndest things" when faced with college history exams . . .

"You don't need to be a history teacher at any level to appreciate this book . . . [or] to see the absolute humor in the convoluted reasoning, the wonderfully creative spelling, and the sneaking feeling that, despite the whopping errors, there is more truth than not in this artfully arranged collection of student wisdom—or unintentional wisecracking. . . . While the average person will think this book is hysterical, anyone who has taught at the junior college/community college/university levels will be on the floor. . . . Even though the students' world view is all so wrong, it's nevertheless endearing, and beyond funny." —Margaret Scott Chrisawn, Ph.D.