I know all that. I'm not endorsing all the stuff that was done in the name of individualism and greed - I'm down with booing down that kind of stuff. It's a period of history that makes me not very proud of my country, but this book goes pretty far out there with the negativity. When you switch from "wantonly displacing and killing Indians" to "ruining the topsoil" without a change in tone (Even though farmers didn't really know the long-term, damaging effects of certain agricultural practices), it makes me scratch my head a little.
I dunno. Maybe I'm just an idealist who thinks that history lessons should let
you draw a conclusion from what happened (Wikipedia's spoiled me), since that encourages discussion and open thought. If we allow ourselves to be too angry about the past, we'll be too frustrated about it to fix our future. Most people hold biases that they're not even aware of that can cause these sorts of events to happen - It doesn't have to be as blatant as going out and killing people of a certain ethnicity, but bias is bias. The book makers lost an opportunity to present a neutral argument and present some hard questions to students. It shouldn't be "this was a terrible, bad thing, guys", it should be "this is what happened, and here's some thought provoking questions that will challenge you morally".
And it feels rather petty when they start kicking around early settlers for poor agricultural practices when you're talking about how terrible it is that they stole the land from the natives. It's like rightfully pointing out how terrible such and such massacre was, and then crying about how some of the soldiers accidentally brushed their dirty shoes on some of the bodies afterwards. You can't act like they're both equally terrible things.
Part of my frustration may be that they use weasel words (Some sources, modern scholars, etc) and vague numbers (Many, most, some) to present their facts.
And here's another WTF: This rant turned out much longer than I thought it would.