U.S. History


Book Description

U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.




These Truths: A History of the United States


Book Description

“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR Books A New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.




The American Yawp


Book Description

"I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."—Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass The American Yawp is a free, online, collaboratively built American history textbook. Over 300 historians joined together to create the book they wanted for their own students—an accessible, synthetic narrative that reflects the best of recent historical scholarship and provides a jumping-off point for discussions in the U.S. history classroom and beyond. Long before Whitman and long after, Americans have sung something collectively amid the deafening roar of their many individual voices. The Yawp highlights the dynamism and conflict inherent in the history of the United States, while also looking for the common threads that help us make sense of the past. Without losing sight of politics and power, The American Yawp incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. The fully peer-reviewed edition of The American Yawp will be available in two print volumes designed for the U.S. history survey. Volume I begins with the indigenous people who called the Americas home before chronicling the collision of Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans.The American Yawp traces the development of colonial society in the context of the larger Atlantic World and investigates the origins and ruptures of slavery, the American Revolution, and the new nation's development and rebirth through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Rather than asserting a fixed narrative of American progress, The American Yawp gives students a starting point for asking their own questions about how the past informs the problems and opportunities that we confront today.




A People's History of the United States


Book Description

Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A People's History of the United States has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version of history taught in schools -- with its emphasis on great men in high places -- to focus on the street, the home, and the, workplace. Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country's greatest battles -- the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women's rights, racial equality -- were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance. Covering Christopher Columbus's arrival through President Clinton's first term, A People's History of the United States, which was nominated for the American Book Award in 1981, features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history. Revised, updated, and featuring a new after, word by the author, this special twentieth anniversary edition continues Zinn's important contribution to a complete and balanced understanding of American history.




A Patriot's History of the United States


Book Description

For the past three decades, many history professors have allowed their biases to distort the way America’s past is taught. These intellectuals have searched for instances of racism, sexism, and bigotry in our history while downplaying the greatness of America’s patriots and the achievements of “dead white men.” As a result, more emphasis is placed on Harriet Tubman than on George Washington; more about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II than about D-Day or Iwo Jima; more on the dangers we faced from Joseph McCarthy than those we faced from Josef Stalin. A Patriot’s History of the United States corrects those doctrinaire biases. In this groundbreaking book, America’s discovery, founding, and development are reexamined with an appreciation for the elements of public virtue, personal liberty, and private property that make this nation uniquely successful. This book offers a long-overdue acknowledgment of America’s true and proud history.




Boundaries of the State in US History


Book Description

The question of how the American state defines its powernot what it is but what it "does"has become central to a range of historical discourses, from the founding of the Republic and the role of the educational system, to the functions of agencies and America s place in the world. Here, James Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen Sawyer assemble some definitional work in this area, showing that the state is an integral actor in physical, spatial, and economic exercises of power. They further imply that traditional conceptions of the state cannot grasp the subtleties of power and its articulation. Contributors include C.J. Alvarez, Elisabeth Clemens, Richard John, Robert Lieberman, Omar McRoberts, Gautham Rao, Gabriel Rosenberg, Jason Scott Smith, Tracy Steffes, and the editors."




The Complete Book of United States History


Book Description

The Complete Book of United States History provides 352 pages of fun exercises for students in grades 3 to 5 that teaches important lessons in U.S. History! The exercises cover pre-United States history with the native peoples of the American continent to present day, and it also includes a complete answer key, user-friendly activities, and easy-to-follow instructions. --Over 4 million in print! Designed by leading experts, books in the Complete Book series help children in grades preschool-6 build a solid foundation in key subject areas for learning succss. Complete Books are the most thorough and comprehensive learning guides available, offering high-interest lessons to encourage learning and fun, full-color illustrations to spark interest. Each book also features challenging concepts and activities to movtivate independent study, and a complete answer key to measure performance and guide instruction.




An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (10th Anniversary Edition)


Book Description

New York Times Bestseller Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.” Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.




Why You Can't Teach United States History without American Indians


Book Description

A resource for all who teach and study history, this book illuminates the unmistakable centrality of American Indian history to the full sweep of American history. The nineteen essays gathered in this collaboratively produced volume, written by leading scholars in the field of Native American history, reflect the newest directions of the field and are organized to follow the chronological arc of the standard American history survey. Contributors reassess major events, themes, groups of historical actors, and approaches--social, cultural, military, and political--consistently demonstrating how Native American people, and questions of Native American sovereignty, have animated all the ways we consider the nation's past. The uniqueness of Indigenous history, as interwoven more fully in the American story, will challenge students to think in new ways about larger themes in U.S. history, such as settlement and colonization, economic and political power, citizenship and movements for equality, and the fundamental question of what it means to be an American. Contributors are Chris Andersen, Juliana Barr, David R. M. Beck, Jacob Betz, Paul T. Conrad, Mikal Brotnov Eckstrom, Margaret D. Jacobs, Adam Jortner, Rosalyn R. LaPier, John J. Laukaitis, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Robert J. Miller, Mindy J. Morgan, Andrew Needham, Jean M. O'Brien, Jeffrey Ostler, Sarah M. S. Pearsall, James D. Rice, Phillip H. Round, Susan Sleeper-Smith, and Scott Manning Stevens.




History in the Making


Book Description

A peer-reviewed open U.S. History Textbook released under a CC BY SA 3.0 Unported License.