U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.
The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series. “Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again “Engaging. . . . In Gates’s telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth—as it is in heaven.” —Jon Meacham, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box, and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravity—an intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate life's blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s political landscape. At road’s end, and after Gates’s distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative—as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community’s most critical personal and social issues. In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meetinghouses were subject to surveillance and destruction. Long after slavery’s formal eradication, church burnings and bombings by anti-Black racists continued, a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the African American struggle for equality. The past often isn’t even past—Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in the Mother Emanuel AME Church 193 years after it was first burned down by white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, following a thwarted slave rebellion. But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the heart of the Black political struggle, and it has produced many of the Black community’s most notable leaders. At the same time, some churches and denominations have eschewed political engagement and exemplified practices of exclusion and intolerance that have caused polarization and pain. Those tensions remain today, as a rising generation demands freedom and dignity for all within and beyond their communities, regardless of race, sex, or gender. Still, as a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against society’s darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.
The newest volume in the Oxford History of the United States series, The Republic for Which It Stands argues that the Gilded Age, along with Reconstruction--its conflicts, rapid and disorienting change, hopes and fears--formed the template of American modernity.
Collects the complete New York Times coverage of the events in the Civil War, including accounts of battles, personal stories, and political actions, and provides cultural and historical perspective on the published issues.
The only AP® U.S. History book that weaves together content, skills, sources, and AP® exam practice is back and better than ever. AP® U.S. History is about so much more than just events on a timeline. The Course Framework is designed to develop crucial reading, reasoning, and writing skills that help students think like historians to interpret the world of the past—and understand how it relates to the world of today. And Fabric of a Nation is still one of the only textbooks that covers every aspect of this course, seamlessly stitching together history skills, sources, and AP® Exam practice. In this new edition, we make it easier than ever to cover all of the skills and topics in the AP® U.S. History Course and Exam Description by aligning our content to the Unit Topics and Historical Reasoning Processes of each Period. An Accessible, Balanced Narrative There’s only so much time in a school year. To cover everything and leave enough time for skill development, you need more focused content, not just more content—and to be most effective, skills development should be accessible and placed just where it is needed. Within the narration are AP® Skills Workshops and AP® Working with Evidence features that support students as they learn the history and prepare to take the AP® Exam. Fabric of a Nation delivers a thorough, yet approachable historical narrative that perfectly aligns with all the essential content of the AP® course. An up-to-date historical survey based on current scholarship, this book is also easy to understand and fun to read, with plenty of interesting details and a crisp writing style that keeps things fresh. Perfectly Aligned to the AP® Scope and Sequence Fabric of a Nation has an easy-to-use organization that fully aligns with the College Board’s Course and Exam Description for AP® U.S. History. Instead of long, meandering chapters, this book is divided into smaller, approachable modules that pull together content, skills, sources, and AP® Exam practice into brief 1- to 2-day lessons. Each module corresponds with a specific unit topic in the course framework, including the contextualization and reasoning process topics that bookend each time period. This approach takes the guesswork out of when to introduce which skills and how to blend sources with content—all at a manageable pace that mirrors the scope and sequence of the AP® course framework. Seamlessly Integrated AP® Skill Workshops for Thinking and Writing Skills Inspired by the authors’ classroom experience and sound pedagogical principles, the instruction in Fabric of a Nation scaffolds learning throughout the course of the book. Every module offers an opportunity to either learn or practice new skills to prepare for each section of the AP® Exam in an AP® Skills Workshop. As the book progresses, the nature of these workshops moves from focused instruction early on, to guided practice in the middle of the book, and then finally, to independent practice near the end of the year. Fabric of a Nation was designed to provide you and your students everything needed to succeed in the AP® US History course and on the exam. It’s all there. AP® Exam Practice: We Boast the Most Material Every period culminates with AP® Practice questions providing students a mini-AP® exam with approximately 15 stimulus-based multiple-choice questions, 4 short-answer questions, 1 document-based essay question, and 3 long-essay questions. Additionally, a full-length practice exam is included at the end of the textbook. Because the modules in this book are divided into periods that perfectly align to the AP® U.S. History Course and Exam Description, it’s also easy to pair Fabric of a Nation with the resources on AP® Classroom. Each textbook module can be used with the corresponding AP® Daily Videos and Topic Questions while the AP® Exam Practice at the end of each period can be supplemented with the Personal Progress Checks from AP® Classroom.
A remarkable account of the collapse of the Old South and the final years of a young boy’s privileged but afflicted life. LeRoy Wiley Gresham was born in 1847 to an affluent slave-holding family in Macon, Georgia. After a horrific leg injury left him an invalid, the educated, inquisitive, perceptive, and exceptionally witty twelve-year-old began keeping a diary in 1860—just as secession and the Civil War began tearing the country and his world apart. He continued to write even as his health deteriorated until both the war and his life ended in 1865. His unique manuscript of the demise of the Old South is published here for the first time in The War Outside My Window. LeRoy read books, devoured newspapers and magazines, listened to gossip, and discussed and debated important social and military issues with his parents and others. He wrote daily for five years, putting pen to paper with a vim and tongue-in-cheek vigor that impresses even now, more than 150 years later. His practical, philosophical, and occasionally Twain-like hilarious observations cover politics and the secession movement, the long and increasingly destructive Civil War, family pets, a wide variety of hobbies and interests, and what life was like at the center of a socially prominent wealthy family in the important Confederate manufacturing center of Macon. The young scribe often voiced concern about the family’s pair of plantations outside town, and recorded his interactions and relationships with servants as he pondered the fate of human bondage and his family’s declining fortunes. Unbeknownst to LeRoy, he was chronicling his own slow and painful descent toward death in tandem with the demise of the Southern Confederacy. He recorded—often in horrific detail—an increasingly painful and debilitating disease that robbed him of his childhood. The teenager’s declining health is a consistent thread coursing through his fascinating journals. “I feel more discouraged [and] less hopeful about getting well than I ever did before,” he wrote on March 17, 1863. “I am weaker and more helpless than I ever was.” Morphine and a score of other “remedies” did little to ease his suffering. Abscesses developed; nagging coughs and pain consumed him. Alternating between bouts of euphoria and despondency, he often wrote, “Saw off my leg.” The War Outside My Window, edited and annotated by Janet Croon with helpful footnotes and a detailed family biographical chart, captures the spirit and the character of a young privileged white teenager witnessing the demise of his world even as his own body slowly failed him. Just as Anne Frank has come down to us as the adolescent voice of World War II, LeRoy Gresham will now be remembered as the young voice of the Civil War South. Winner, 2018, The Douglas Southall Freeman Award
Discusses how West Africans were taken from their homeland and brought to America as slaves, the experiences slaves had in the new country, and the contributions this cultural group made to American society. Includes sidebars, recipes, and activities.
