If you love to laugh, if you love your country, if you are unaware that "the Sixth Amendment states that if you are accused of a crime, you have the right to a trial before a jury of people too stupid to get out of jury duty," Dave Barry Slept Here is the book for you. Every single momentous event and crucial movement is covered, including:

The Birthing Contractions of a Nation
Kicking Some British Butt
The Forging of a Large, Wasteful Bureaucracy
The Civil War: A Nation Pokes Itself in the Eyeball
The Fifties: Peace, Prosperity, Brain Death
The Reagan-Bush Years: Napping Toward Glory
And much more!

Amazon.com Review

Dave runs American history through the wringer, and comes up with some wonderfully warped formulations. (The Vikings, for example, "were extremely rugged individuals whose idea of a fun time was to sail over and set fire to England, which in those days was fairly easy to ignite because it had a very high level of thatch, this being the kind of roof favored by the local tribespeople...") Covering pre-Columbian days through the dawn of the Bush administration, Dave Barry Slept Here is the funniest thing to hit this great nation since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930.

From Publishers Weekly

Miami Herald syndicated columnist Barry here assembles a funny U.S. history replete with malapropisms (Ferdinard and Imelda of Spain financed Columbus), parodies ("This land is your land, / This land is my land, / Looks like one of us / Has a forged deed to the land."), literal-mindedness (President Monroe Doctrine) and, above all, anachronisms (the Wrights' first flight was canceled because of equipment problems at O'Hare). Several clever gags run through the book--one about the significant contributions of women and minorities (although none is ever detailed), another ascribing the date of every major event to October 8 (for ease in remembering) and a third featuring the Hawley-Smoot tariff, which had an immediate impact on the Great Depression. There are few heroes in Barry's pantheon, and only an occasional villain--principally Richard Nixon--while other widely admired figures, like Mark Twain and Winston Churchill, are given their lumps. Author tour.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.