1903 was a seminal but overlooked year in the development of the United States. Through an analytical narrative of 31 historic events, this book examines how these 12 months would prefigure and shape significant transformation in the U.S.A. for over a century to come.In the late nineteenth century, America emerged as an increasingly urbanized and industrialized society connected to an informal global empire. Americans struggled with the fears and divisive issues that were manifesta...

From June 1775 to February 1781, during the American War of Independence, ten patriot generals died as a result of combat wounds. Their service and deaths spanned most of the warÆs duration and geographical expanse. The generals were a diverse group, with six born in America and four in Europe, three coming from professional military backgrounds, and the rest citizen-soldiers, mostly with limited military experience. As the colonists won their independence, the fallen generals became martyrs ...

Born into a Quaker family, Nathanael Greene had nothing in his background that pointed to a military career. His total military training before mid-1775, when he abandoned pacifism, consisted of serving as a private in the Rhode Island militia for a few hours each week. Yet, no doubt because of his leadership ability, the Rhode Island Assembly in May 1775 appointed Greene commander of the Rhode Island Army of Observation at the siege of Boston. In June, at age thirty-two, Greene became the yo...

The second volume of Burns's acclaimed history of America, from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great DepressionAbraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address pointed to a new way to preserve an old hope—that democracy might prove a vibrant and lasting form of government for people of different races, religions, and aspirations. The scars of the Civil War would not soon heal, but with that one short speech, the president held out the possibility that such a ...

Become a US trivia whiz with this crash course through four centuries of change, rebellion, conflict, and triumph in the United States.Where was America's lost colony? What tipped the balance in the Civil War? Were there second thoughts about dropping the atomic bomb?Acclaimed historian Dan Roberts—host of radio's A Moment in Time—takes readers on a bite-sized romp through five-hundred years of American history. With just one minute a day, y...

In this utterly immersive volume, Mike Wallace captures the swings of prosperity and downturn, from the 1898 skyscraper-driven boom to the Bankers' Panic of 1907, the labor upheaval, and violent repression during and after the First World War. Here is New York on a whole new scale, moving from national to global prominence -- an urban dynamo driven by restless ambition, boundless energy, immigrant dreams, and Wall Street greed. Within the first two decades of the twentieth century, a newly...

Most great figures in American history reveal great contradictions, and Henry Ford is no exception. He championed his workers, offering unprecedented wages, yet crushed their attempts to organize. Virulently anti-Semitic, he never employed fewer than 3,000 Jews. An outspoken pacifist, he made millions producing war materials. He urbanized the modern world, and then tried to drag it back into a romanticized rural past he'd helped to destroy. As the American auto industry struggles to reinve...

The seventy-fifth anniversary edition of Gunther's classic portrait of AmericaJohn Gunther's Inside series were among the most popular books of reportage of the 1930s and 1940s. For Inside U.S.A., his magnum opus, Gunther set out from California and visited every state in the country, offering frank, lucid, and humorous observations along the way in what legendary publisher Robert Gottlieb, writing in the New York Times, calls Gunther's "...

An intimate and searching account of the life and legacy of one of America’s towering educators, a woman who dared to center the progress of Black women and girls in the larger struggle for political and social liberationWhen Mary McLeod Bethune died, tributes in newspapers around the country said the same thing: she should be on the Mount Rushmore of Black American achievement. Indeed, Bethune is the only Black American whose statue stands in Statuary Hall in the ...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER“Superb. Hiltzik makes a compelling case that California is the heartbeat of our nation.”—Douglas Brinkley, New York Times bestselling author of Silent Spring RevolutionFrom Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Hiltzik, a definitive new history of California—from the Spanish conquistadors to the Gold Rush to the state’s meteoric rise as a tech powerhouse and bulwark of progressivism—and of its indelible...

California, Wallace Stegner observed, is like the rest of the United States, only more so. Indeed, the Golden State has always seemed to be a place where the hopes and fears of the American dream have been played out in a bigger and bolder way. And no one has done more to capture this epic story than Kevin Starr, in his acclaimed series of gripping social and cultural histories. Now Starr carries his account into the 1930s, when the political extremes that threatened so much of the Depress...

Winner of the Bancroft PrizeWinner of the David J. Langum PrizeWinner of the Lillian Smith Book AwardWinner of the Order of the Coif Book AwardWinner of the OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation AwardA New York Times Critics’ Top Book of the Year“This extraordinary book is a powerful addition to the history of travel segregation…Mia Bay shows that Black mobility has always been a struggle.”—Ibram X. Kendi, author of Ho...