America: A Narrative History

by David E. Shi, Daina Ramey Berry, Joe Crespino, Amy Taylor Murrell

Overview

A history of the United States that places itself squarely within mainstream American understandings of the country's past. The focus is primarily political, but significant impact of the work of social and cultural historians can be detected. The text covers up to the first weeks of the invasion of Iraq by President George W. Bush. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324084525
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/01/2025
Edition description:	Thirteenth Edition
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Emory Shi is president emeritus and professor emeritus at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. After receiving his PhD from the University of Virginia, he taught for seventeen years at Davidson College, where he won the Distinguished Teaching Award and served as History Department Chair. In addition to authoring the best-selling America: A Narrative History family of books, he is the author of several books focusing on American cultural history, including the award-winning The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture and Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920. While serving as a Trustee at several colleges, he remains highly engaged with students and instructors around the country with his many annual “author-in-residence” campus visits.

Daina Ramey Berry is Professor of History and Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She came to Santa Barbara in August 2022 after serving as the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Associate Dean of the Graduate School at The University of Texas, Austin. She is an internationally recognized scholar of the enslaved and a specialist on gender and slavery and Black women’s history in the United States. Her most recent book, A Black Women’s History of the United States, won the 2021 Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Book in Feminist Studies, was a 2021 NAACP Finalist for Literary Non-Fiction, and received honorable mention for the 2021 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award sponsored by the Organization of American Historians.

Joseph Crespino is the Jimmy Carter Professor of History at Emory University and chair of the History Department. He is an expert in the political and cultural history of the twentieth century United States. He has served as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Tubingen, and his research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Academy of Education. Named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians, Crespino has written three books, the most recent of which is Atticus Finch: The Biography—Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon. He has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and The Wall Street Journal. Crespino regularly teaches the post-Civil War U.S. History survey; in 2009, he received the Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award from the Emory University Center for Teaching and Learning.

Amy Murrell Taylor is the T. Marshall Hahn Jr. Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. She is a social and cultural historian of the nineteenth-century United States, with a focus on the American South. The U.S. history survey course is one of her very favorite courses to teach each year, and she has been honored with her university’s Provost’s Award for Outstanding Teaching and Great Teacher Awards. Her latest book, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War's Slave Refugee Camps, received multiple national awards including the Frederick Douglass Book Prize given by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance at Yale University and the Merle Curti Social History Award from the Organization of American Historians. She has also written for The Times Literary Supplement and been featured in The Washington Post, USA Today, Slate, and C-Span.

Table of Contents

List of Maps xiii

Preface xv

Acknowledgments xix

17 Reconstruction: North and South 538

The War's Aftermath 539

The Battle Over Political Reconstruction 543

Reconstructing the South 549

The Reconstructed South 553

The Grant Years 560

Part 5 Growing Pains

18 Big Business and Organized Labor 577

The Rise of Big Business 577

Entrepreneurs 584

The Working Class 589

19 The South and the West Transformed 606

The Myth of the New South 607

The New West 612

20 The Emergence of Urban America 628

America's Move to Town 629

The New Immigration 634

Popular Culture 639

Education and Social Thought 646

21 Gilded Age Politics and Agrarian Revolt 652

Paradoxical Politics 653

Corruption and Reform: Hayes to Harrison 656

The Farm Problem and Agrarian Protest Movements 665

The Economy and the Silver Solution 670

Race Relations During

The 1890s 676

Part 6 Modern America

22 Seizing an American Empire 693

Toward the New Imperialism 694

Expansion in the Pacific 695

The War of 1898 698

Imperial Rivalries in East Asia 708

Big-Stick Diplomacy 709

23 "Making the World Over": The Progressive Era 718

Elements of Reform 719

The Social Gospel 721

Early Efforts at Urban Reform 722

Features of Progressive 725

Roosevelt's Progressivism 731

Roosevelt's Second Term 733

From Roosevelt to Taft 737

Woodrow Wilson's Progressivism 741

Limits of Progressivism 753

24 America and the Great War 756

Wilson and Foreign Affairs 756

An Uneasy Neutrality 759

America's Entry into the War 767

America at War 772

The Fight for the Peace 777

Lurching From War to Peace 784

25 The Modern Temper 790

The Reactionary Twenties 792

The "Jazz Age" During the "Roaring Twenties" 800

Mass Culture 810

The Modernist Revolt 815

26 Republican Resurgence and Decline 822

"Normalcy" 823

Isolationism in Foreign Affairs 827

The Harding Scandals 831

The New Era 835

President Hoover, the Engineer 839

Global Concerns 850

From Hooverism to the New Deal 851

27 New Deal America 858

Regulatory Efforts 862

The Social Cost of the Depression 864

The New Deal Matures 870

Roosevelt's Second Term 878

The Legacy of the New Deal 883

28 The Second World War 888

From Isolationism to Intervention 888

Foreign Crises 889

War Clouds 895

The Storm in Europe 896

The Storm in the Pacific 901

A World War 905

Mobilization at Home 907

Social Effects of the War 910

The Allied Drive Toward Berlin 916

Leapfrogging to Tokyo 924

A New Age is Born 925

The Final Ledger 936

Part 7 The American Age

29 The Fair Deal and Containment 945

Demobilization Under Truman 946

The Cold War 949

Civil Rights During the 1940s 957

The Cold War Heats Up 963

30 The 1950s: Affluence and Anxiety in An Atomic Age 974

A People of Plenty 975

A Conformist Culture 982

Cracks in the Picture Window 984

Alienation and Liberation 984

Moderate Republicanism-The Eisenhower Years 987

The Early Years of the Civil Rights Movement 992

Foreign Policy in the 1950s 998

Foreign Interventions 1001

Reflection and Foreign Crises 1005

Festering Problems Abroad 1009

Assessing the Eisenhower Presidency 1010

31 New Frontiers: Politics and Social Change in the 1960s 1014

The New Frontier 1014

Expansion of the Civil Rights Movement 1019

Foreign Frontiers 1025

Lyndon B. Johnson and the Great Society 1028

From Civil Rights to Black Power 1036

The Tragedy of Vietnam 1040

Sixties Crescendo 1046

32 Rebellion and Reaction: The 1960s and 1970s 1052

The Roots of Rebellion 1053

Nixon and Middle America 1064

Nixon and Vietnam 1070

Nixon Triumphant 1072

Watergate 1078

An Unelected President 1083

33 A Conservative Realignment: 1977-1990 1090

The Carter Presidency 1091

The Reagan Revolution 1098

Reagan's First Term 1103

Reagan's Second Term 1108

The Changing Social Landscape 1111

The Bush Administration 1118

Cultural Conservatism 1125

34 America in a New Millennium 1128

America's Changing Mosaic 1129

Bush to Clinton 1130

Domestic Policy in Clinton's First Term 1133

Republican Insurgency 1135

The Clinton Years at Home 1138

Foreign-Policy Challenges 1142

The Election of 2000 1144

Compassionate Conservatism 1146

Global Terrorism 1147

Second-Term Blues 1155

A Historic Election 1158

Obama's First Term 1160

Glossary A1

Appendix A59

The Declaration of Independence A61

Articles of Confederation A66

The Constitution of the United States A74

Amendments to the Constitution A86

Presidential Elections A96

Admission of States A104

Population of the United States A105

Immigration to the United States, Fiscal Years 1820-2011 A106

Immigration by Region and Selected Country of Last Residence, Fiscal Years 1820-2011 A108

Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Secretaries of State A117

Further Readings A123

Credits A137

Index A141