A Concise American History

"A Concise American History is an impressive achievement. It is wide-ranging in scope, rigorous but accessible, and attentive to complexity and nuance without sacrificing clarity or narrative drive. Each chapter covers a great deal of ground in an insightful way, but the reader benefits from helpful chapter summaries and 'concept boxes' to aid understanding. The book successfully places US economic, social, and political development from colonial times to the present in wider global context." Jonathan Bell, University College London, UK "This book provides an excellent introduction to US history. Its authors, distinguished scholars in their fields, bring to bear a unique global perspective on the subject since they were themselves educated abroad or teach abroad. The text sweeps aside the myths often still taught in American schools, avoids hagiography of national political figures, and provides careful analysis of the major events and developments." Carol Berkin, City University of New York, USA "This authoritative and fast-paced text, admirably attentive to global connections, introduces readers to the turbulent history of the United States from the colonial era to the present day. Highly recommended to anyone seeking a reliable and readable account of the restless American Republic and its formative role in the making of the modern world." Robert Cook, University of Sussex, UK "This textbook accomplishes something highly distinctive in its field it introduces students to the huge breadth of American History (from 1492 to the present) while directing them toward an appreciation of interdisciplinary and interlinking concepts of the subject. Students will find it a highly accessible text that gives them a firm basis for understanding the USA, both in domestic policy and foreign relations. Indeed, this text should also establish itself as an essential teaching tool in American survey courses." Lee Sartain, University of Portsmouth, UK "A Concise American History offers a compelling account of the highly indeterminate, four-century-long formation of 'what we know today as the United States.' It is compelling precisely because it is indeterminate, steering clear of both progressivist and declensionist narratives to instead provide readers with an account woven of continuity and changedevelopment and destruction. It does so through a commitment to multiple historical approaches including social, cultural, and transnational explanatory frameworks and a carefully conceived thematic framework. With clarifying timelines, organizational roadmaps, discussion questions, and helpful lists of further reading accompanying the text and images, this accessibly written text paints for students a picture of a country predicated on ambition and conflict, on achievement and suffering, on plurality and power, in equal measurea national history not, if we are honest with ourselves, easily summarized, but one that is all the more fascinating when we accept its complexity. ACAH distinguishes itself from many other U.S. History textbooks particularly in its agile selection of interpretive emphases. At moments, we see events through prevailing notions of identity or human difference as in passages describing the course of European colonialization of North America, Native American genocide, slavery, womens suffrage, immigrant experiences, and the long Civil Rights era. In other historical episodes, political and economic ideologies are highlighted we follow the nineteenth-century rise of industrial capitalism and the discontent of reformers, for example, while later the authors trace conflicting conceptions of what shall constitute just labor systems and representative government, into our own neoliberal era. The roles played by racial ideologies, imperialism, and nationalism, alongside commitments to democracy and liberation, over many generati

David Brown is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. Thomas Heinrich is Associate Professor in US Business History at Baruch College, City University of New York, USA. Simon Middleton is Associate Professor in History at the College of William & Mary, USA. Vivien Miller is Professor of American History at the University of Nottingham, UK.

Introduction 1 In Indian Country 2 A provincial society in an Atlantic World 3 The revolution that made a republic 4 A union and a nation 5 The growth of the white republic 6 Problems of slavery, freedom, and sectionalism in the antebellum US 7 Civil War and the wars of Reconstruction 8 Western conquest, white supremacy, and the rise of a superpower 9 The rise of imperial America 10 State building in the United States 11 Depression and New Deal America 12 From neutrality to war 13 Cold war America, 19451954 14 Prosperity and crisis in the 1950s 15 The turbulent sixties 16 Economic turmoil and conservative triumph, 19691988 17 The age of neoliberalism, 19892016 Index