From the first colonies to the present day: the story of the United States in one illustrated volume.
AMERICA follows the nation from the Native peoples and English settlers of the colonial era through the Revolution, the Constitution, the Civil War, two world wars, the Cold War and the early twenty-first century. It is a story of presidents and founders, generals and inventors, reformers and ordinary families.
You will stand in the Assembly Room at Independence Hall, at Saratoga and Yorktown, at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, and at the launch of Apollo 11. You will meet Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Neil Armstrong and every president through the present.
The book is about how Americans lived as well as how they governed. Chapters describe colonial farms, early mills and canals, tenement apartments, factory floors, the Dust Bowl, wartime home fronts, 1950s suburbs, and the construction of the Capitol, the Erie Canal, the transcontinental railroad, the Brooklyn Bridge, Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. Three hundred illustrations show homes, kitchens, ships, machines, battlefields and cities, with maps throughout.
Every chapter ends with The Historian's Verdict, a plain look at what the evidence shows, what is probable and what remains disputed. Politics are covered even-handedly, and painful chapters of the national story are told honestly. Three Cultural Interludes explore founding myths, American music and speech, and the frontier idea. Appendices include the presidents, a timeline, battles and wars, landmarks and a cast of notable Americans.
If you enjoyed SPQR, HELLAS, EGYPT and KNIGHTS, AMERICA continues the series.
