Firsthand America: A History of the United States, Volume 1

All comprehensive United States survey textbooks, including this one, give full coverage to standard political, economic, diplomatic, and legal events. But these elements of history are largely the story of elites. This textbook also provides social history captured in the recognizable lives of ordinary people. Presidents, congressmen, and corporate executives are quoted throughout the book. So are soldiers, slaves, indentured servants, cowboys, working girls and women, and civil rights activists. Firsthand America, using more than 2,000 quotations, therefore gives due place both to the traditional leaders and to the myriad Americans never named in formal historians.

1. Europe, Africa, and the Americas. 2. North America. 3. The Developing Colonies. 4. An Independent Spirit 1763–1776. 5. Revolution and Independence 1776–1787. 6. We the People 1787–1800. 7. Independence Confirmed 11800–1816. 8. Sinews of Nationhood. 9. Sectionalism and Part 1816–1828. 10. The Jacksonian Era 1828–1840. 11. An Age of Reform. 12.Westward Expansion: The 1840s. 13. Impending Crisis: The 1850s. 14. A Great Civil War 1861–1865. 15. “Been in the Strom So Long”: Emancipation and Reconstruction. Appendixes. Index.

David Burner , a professor of history at SUNY at Stony Brook, received his doctorate at Columbia, where he studied under Richard Hofstadter. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a Ford Fellow at Harvard. His early books are The Politics of Provincialism and Herbert Hoover: A Public Life . He is also the author of Making Peace with the Sixties (1996) and John F. Kennedy and a New Generation (2nd edition, 2003). He is currently writing a history of West Point. Virginia Bernhard has published two historical novels, set in seventeenth–century Virginia and Bermuda, as well as a biography of a Texas governor′s daughter. She coedited Southern Women: Histories and Identities (1992) and teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. Professor Bernhard has served on the Advanced Placement test development committee for United States history. Stanley I. Kutler is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin. He was the founding editor of Reviews in American History and is editor of “The American Moment” series at Johns Hopkins University Press. Among his many books are The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War (1982), Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case (1989), and The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (1990). In 1996, along with the advocacy group Public Citizen, he won a landmark decision to release the suppressed secret Watergate tapes, which led to his book Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (1997).