A Short History of America，中文译名《美国简史》，这是一部通俗、生动的美国史书，由荷兰裔美国有名历史学家、作家房龙编著。作者以其渊博的知识，讲述了从哥伦布发现新大陆至第二次世界大战前的美国历史，对这个时期的历史事件、西方文明、科技发明以及美国的政治生活进行了深刻而独到的描述；还特别介绍了殖民地、独立战争、南北战争以及美国发展时期的一些重要历史人物，如哥伦布、亨利王子、乔治二世国王、华盛顿、富兰林、拿破仑、林肯和罗斯福等。 无论作为通俗的美国简史读本，还是作为语言学习的课外读物，本书对当代中国的读者都将产生重要的影响。为了使读者能够了解每章内容概况，进而提高阅读速度和阅读水平，在每章的开始部分增加了中文导读。
作者简介
亨德里·威廉·房龙(Hendrik Willem Van Loon，1882-1944)，荷兰裔美国人，20世纪美国很伟大的历史学家、科普作家和文学家。 房龙始终站在全人类的高度在写作，他摈弃了深奥理论，却拥有自己独立的思想和体系，他的论述主要是围绕人类生存与发展等本质的问题，贯穿其中的精神是科学，宽容和进步，他的目标是向人类的无知与偏执挑战，他采取的方式是普及知识和真理，使它们成为人所皆知的常识。
His mere displeasure was more terrible than a threat of war on the part of emperor or king.
Surrounded by the cleverest of diplomats, the most astute of politicians, he was able to divert the rising tide of unrest into the practical channels of foreign conquest and to bring about that great migration towards the East which ever since has been known as the era of the Crusades. Unfortunately this episode has been so often chosen as a subject for romantic literary rhapsodies that we are apt to forget the true if more prosaic nature of the conflict.
The ancient world was the world of the Mediterranean. He who had command of that vast tract of water could dictate his will to the rest of mankind.
It was an ambitious undertaking, and the small fry of pirates and buccaneers who infested the deep bays of the Spanish and Greek and Italian peninsulas and who lived along the shallow coast of Morocco and Tripoli and Egypt could not possibly hope for more than a trifling local success.
Nothing short of "racial groups"——vast agglomerations of people bound together by tens of thousands of years of a common social, economic and religious development were able to handle a problem that must be settled upon so gigantic a scale. They well knew the risk they took, for such quarrels were apt to be quite as disastrous to the victor as to the vanquished.
Only twice before had it come to an open break.
The first time in the fifth century before our era, when Greece as the champion of the West had defeated the invading hordes of the Persians and in a series of brilliant counter-attacks had pursued her enemies as far as the shores of the river Indus.
The second time two hundred years later, when the Romans narrowly averted disaster by such a display of national energy that the state almost perished before the last of the Carthaginian strongholds had been reduced to ashes.
Then, for more than eight centuries, there had been peace.
