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American Cultural History: A Very Short Introduction provides a chronological look at American culture—the values, attitudes, beliefs, and myths of a particular society and the objects through which they are organized—addressing literature, music, art, architecture, theater, film, television, and the Internet. In doing so, it emphasizes culture’s role in the shaping of national identity and how previous generations of Americans have imagined themselves, their nation, and their relationship to rest of the world. Across the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, generation, and geography, diverse Americans have forged a national culture with a global reach, inventing stories to underscore the problems and possibilities of an American way of life.Less

American History: A Very Short Introduction spans the earliest migrations to the present looking at the United States's failures to live up to its oft-stated ideals. The establishment of the North American colonies had very different meanings for colonists, native peoples, and enslaved Africans. The late nineteenth century saw industrial expansion, appalling conditions, and an exploited labor force. The twentieth-century emergence of a suburban society of consumer abundance meant a better life for many, yet left behind crime-ridden inner cities and spawned a stultifying mass culture. While American popular culture has demonstrated global appeal, the projection of U.S. military power abroad has sometimes failed in its purpose and damaged the nation's international standing.Less

American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction examines the many legal efforts to curb immigration and to define who is and is not an American. It looks at immigration from the perspective of the migrant — farmers and industrial workers, mechanics and domestics, highly trained professionals and small-business owners — who willingly upped sticks for the promise of a better life. Americans have come from every corner of the globe, and have been brought together by a variety of historical processes — conquest, colonialism, the slave trade, territorial acquisition, and voluntary immigration. What is the relationship between race and ethnicity in the life of these groups and in the formation of American society?Less

Between 1760 and 1800, the American people cast off British rule to create a new nation and a radically new form of government based on the idea that people have the right to govern themselves. The American Revolution: A Very Short Introduction provides a cohesive synthesis of the military, diplomatic, political, social, and intellectual aspects of the American Revolution, paying special attention to the Revolution's causes and consequences. It recreates the tumultuous events that led to revolution, such as the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party, and highlights the major battles and commanders on both sides before exploring the aftermath of the Revolution and how the new republic developed.Less

The American West: A Very Short Introduction tracks “the West” from the building of the Cahokia Mounds around 900 ad, through early encounters with Europeans, to the Newlands Reclamation Act in 1902, and the post-World War II migration to California. It stretches the chronology, enlarges the geography, and varies the casting, providing a history of the American West that is longer, larger, and more complicated than popular culture has previously suggested. It is a history of how portions of North America became Wests, how parts of these became American, and how ultimately American Wests became the American West.Less

What does U.S. history look like with women at the center of the story? From Pocahantas to military women serving in the Iraq war, American Women's History: A Very Short Introduction chronicles the contributions, recognized and unrecognized, that women have made to the American experience. It recognizes the diversity of American women's experiences defined by race, ethnicity, and class, but also geography, sexual orientation, age, and religion. At the core of the narrative is the recognition that gender—the changing historical and cultural constructions of roles assigned to the biological differences of the sexes—is central to understanding the history of American women's lives, and the history of the United States.Less

Asians have migrated to North America for centuries, in search of opportunities and conveyed by increasingly dense, international circuits of trade, labor markets, and family networks. Asians joined a diverse array of immigrants arriving in capacities as diverse merchants, farmers, soldiers, missionaries, soldiers, artists, and students. They contributed significantly to the massive transformation of the United States into the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, particularly on the west coast and Hawaii. Asian American History: A Very Short Introduction highlights how Asian immigration has shaped the evolution of ideological and legal interpretations of America as a “nation of immigrants.”Less

Colonial America: A Very Short Introduction presents the current scholarly understanding of the subject. During the past generation, historians have broadened that understanding by adopting both a trans-Atlantic and a trans-continental perspective, examining the interplay of Europe, Africa, and the Americas through the flows of goods, people, plants, animals, capital, and ideas. Colonial America produced an unprecedented mixing of radically diverse peoples — African, European, and Indian — under stressful circumstances for all. The colonial intermingling of peoples, microbes, plants, and animals from different continents was unparalleled in speed and volume. Everyone had to adjust to a new world of unpredictable social and cultural hybrids that compromised and complicated the ambitious plans of empire-builders.Less

The Founding Fathers: A Very Short Introduction provides an overview of the brilliant, flawed, and quarrelsome group of lawyers, politicians, merchants, military men, and clergy known as “the Founding Fathers,” what they did, and what history has made of them. It traces the dynamic forces that molded Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and their contemporaries as British colonists in North America and as intellectual citizens of the Atlantic civilization’s Age of Enlightenment. It analyzes the American Revolution, the framing and adoption of state and federal constitutions, and the key concepts and problems that both shaped and circumscribed the founders’ achievements as the United States sought its place in the world.Less

The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction explores the roots, events, and legacy of the Great Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal. America's post-war laissez-faire economic policies resulted in an economic upheaval of unprecedented severity, to which President Roosevelt responded with a vigorous (and sometimes unconstitutional) set of Depression-fighting economic measures, which were only justifiable in the face of such a global economic disaster. Key New Deal programmes are examined, such as the National Recovery Agency, Public Works Administration, and Social Security, revealing why some worked and others did not.Less

North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction describes how nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers travelled over the Bering land mass between Asia and what is now Alaska from 25,000 to 15,000 years ago, settling throughout North America. When Europeans arrived in North America, between five and eight million indigenous people were already there. There was a great diversity of indigenous peoples in America, who spoke more than 400 different languages and whose ways of life varied according to the environments they settled in and adapted to. But how did they come to be there? What were their agricultural, spiritual, and hunting practices? How did their societies evolve and what challenges do they face today?Less

Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction offers an overview of progressivism in America — its origins, guiding principles, major leaders and major accomplishments. Progressivism emerged as a response to the excesses of the Gilded Age, an era that plunged working Americans into poverty while a new class of ostentatious millionaires flaunted their wealth. As capitalism ran unchecked and more and more economic power was concentrated in fewer hands, a sense of social crisis was pervasive. This VSI shows that the progressives — with the glaring exception of race relations — shared a common conviction that society should be fair to all its members and that governments had a responsibility to see that fairness prevailed.Less

Prohibition: A Very Short Introduction traces the origins of prohibition back to the evangelical-based voluntary abstinence temperance movement in the early 1800s. It makes clear that public support for prohibition collapsed due to gangster violence and the need for local, state, and federal government alcohol revenue during the Great Depression. Americans have always been a hard-drinking people, but from 1920 to 1933 the country went dry. After decades of pressure from rural Protestants, the states ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution meaning alcohol could no longer be produced, imported, transported, or sold. How and why did prohibition come about? How did it work? And how did prohibition give way to strict governmental regulation of alcohol?Less

Reconstruction: A Very Short Introduction delves into the constitutional, political, and social issues behind Reconstruction to describe a historical moment that left an indelible mark on American social fabric. The Reconstruction era was one of the unhappiest times in American history. It succeeded in reuniting the nation politically after the Civil War, but it failed to chart a progressive course for race relations after the abolition of slavery and rise of Jim Crow, and struggled to successfully manage the Southern resistance towards a Northern, free-labor pattern. Despite this, there were some notable accomplishments: the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution and the election of the first African American representatives to the US Congress.Less