The Barnes & Noble Review
"Douglas Brinkley has turned out the best of the recent decade's one volume histories of the United States. His keen eye and facile pen paint with a lucid narrative style a stunning portrait of our country. This is a history that captures and holds the attention with engrossing detail. This is not only a fascinating volume but an important addition to the American chronicle."
—Walter Cronkite
"To understand where we are and where we may be heading as we enter the millennium, we must reflect on how civilization got to its current state of affairs," writes Douglas Brinkley in his stunning new book, American Heritage History of the United States. Brinkley, a widely respected historian and author most recently of The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House, has always been passionate about American history. When the editor of American Heritage magazine asked him to write the history of the United States, Brinkley was thrilled at first, but then nervous; "the notion of synthesizing 500 years into a single volume was almost too overwhelming to contemplate," he comments.
Fortunately for us, the enormity of the task didn't thwart Brinkley. His magisterial American Heritage History of the United States has already garnered outstanding praise from Stephen Ambrose, the late Alfred Kazin, and David McCullough, and will surely be treasured by everyone interested in our national heritage. Brinkley guides readers on an incredible journey into the past, where a nation formed from a vast countryside made a bold playforfreedom, then burgeoned into an expanding democracy, and ultimately flourished as a world power. His central thesis — that America's economic dynamism is the engine that drives our social, political, and civic lives — is richly supported throughout the volume's informative 22 chapters.
Incorporating 500 beautiful images (many in full color) and an unusual mix of custom maps, photographs, engravings, portraits, letters, journals, and diaries, this book traces our nation's illustrious past from the Europeans' arrival in the New World to the split of the Union, the rise of American industry, the Great War and the Jazz Age, the cold war, and the Clinton years. Included are primitive maps outlining the New World; pictures of hopeful immigrant families arriving at Ellis Island; stirring images of civil rights marchers; and terrible photos of the Oklahoma City Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing.
