Editor James M. Banner, Jr. has compiled a collection of 15 historiographical essays by respected scholars to provide an up-to-date overview of major topics in American History. Each essay offers a concise and insightful assessment of a central field such as religious history, women’s history, cultural history, military history, and the history of ethnicity and migration. Contributors include Sean Wilentz, Emily Rosenberg, Donald Worster, and David Hollinger, among others.

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 compelling read” that reveals how maps became informational tools charting everything from epidemics to slavery (Journal of American History). In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and Northerners mapped slavery to assess the power of the South. After the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation. By the end of the century, Congress had authorized a national archive of maps, an explicit recognition that old maps were not relics to be discarded but unique records of the nation’s past. All of these experiments involved the realization that maps were not just illustrations of data, but visual tools that were uniquely equipped to convey complex ideas and information. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten charts how maps of epidemic disease, slavery, census statistics, the environment, and the past demonstrated the analytical potential of cartography, and in the process transformed the very meaning of a map. Today, statistical and thematic maps are so ubiquitous that we take for granted that data will be arranged cartographically. Whether for urban planning, public health, marketing, or political strategy, maps have become everyday tools of social organization, governance, and economics. The world we inhabit—saturated with maps and graphic information—grew out of this sea change in spatial thought and representation in the nineteenth century, when Americans learned to see themselves and their nation in new dimensions.

"Almost all of the book appeared initially in the New Yorker." Bibliography: p. [227]-240.

This book deals with American history since 1880—a period when the United States was transformed from a relatively small, remote, and isolated outpost to the planet’s richest, most powerful, and most influential nation. It is also, not coincidentally, a period that produced some of the world’s most unforgettable characters—and some of its best stories. History is not fixed, not two-dimensional, not black-and-white; it is always open to interpretation, always subject to speculation, always riddled with mystery. Only one thing is certain about history: All of it was essential to creating the world we live in today. In that regard, every story you will read in this book, and any other history book, is your story, too. What happens to you today has a great deal to do with what happened to other people a century ago; what you do tomorrow is influenced, whether you know it or not, by what other people did yesterday. In learning about history, we invariably learn a lot about ourselves, too.