Basic American Government

by Clarence Carson, BS, MS, PhD. (1925 – 2003)

2^nd edition, 2025 by Boundary Stone.org
591 pages, hard cover ISBN: 9781931789257

Also available online https://boundarystone.org/full-course-bundles/

As added bonuses, Boundary Stone has a FREE Study Guide available, a full pdf Teacher’s Guide and an online semester-long course to help pace a student, that includes an optional Research Project on Public Policy.

Assessed by Michael Leppert

Among the books about American History and Government that should be part of every family’s library, this book by Dr. Clarence Carson is in the Top 5 or 10. If homeschooling parents and their children read this book and discuss it, they will possess a wealth of knowledge to use for their lifetimes to be proactive, living citizens of the US with a year’s worth of academic work or more!

Dr. Carson was an excellent thinker and author, writing clearly and to the point, about our government and history. His insights are valuable across the decades and he was a statesman of the highest order, without having held elected office. His writing instills and develops critical thinking and questioning anything that passes for information through the digital world.

He begins with a discussion of the Political Crisis, which we are all familiar with, developing over the past 20 years. The increased availability to information that we possess today, compared to times past, he likens to being on a ship at sea and dying of thirst. We are truly less informed, but drowning in information more than in previous decades.

He provides a history of the growth of communism and socialism that sheds clarifying light on the climate that caused WWII and the Cold War. After providing that background, Dr. Carson launches into the definition of our form of government, pointing out that it is not a democracy, but a Constitutional Federated Republic. He states that “as a form, it is the result of the long heritage of political thought developed during the emergence of Western Civilization . . .” This statement alone will lead to hours of research and discussion of the British and French cultural and political philosophers who influenced the Founding Fathers of the U.S. To aid in this endeavor, in a later section, he discusses some of these thinkers in detail, including John Locke, William Blackstone and Adam Smith.

Dr. Carson goes on to impart the importance of a written Constitution, which few countries have. Jefferson and Washington both, viewed the document as a safeguard from despotic, tyrannical usurpation of power against the citizens.

Virtually every page of this book is impossible to turn, as it demands one’s full attention, packed with pertinent information about the presidents’ views of their power, the development of the welfare mentality, foreign aid, taxation . . . any topic of interest is represented and intelligently explained by Dr. Carson. Visit the Boundary Stone website and see the complete line of publications and information available. Ω