American Promise : A History Of The United States : Volume I : To 1877 - 3rd edition

Summary: Widely praised for its balanced, integrated narrative and innovative visuals, The American Promise: A History of the United States is most valued for its ability to engage today's students. The voices and stories of scores of individuals connect students to the past and show events as they appeared to the people who embraced, contested and reinvented America's promise. Enhanced by an all-new design, the visual program's abundant artifacts make history tangible and in ...show moretroduce students to the study of material culture. The third edition expands coverage of the West, the environment, and America's connections with the wider world and includes thoroughly reorganized and revised coverage of the post-1945 period.

Superior balance and integration offer students a framework for comprehension. Each chapter's clear exposition of political developments provides structure so students can assimilate the engaging coverage of culture, society, economics, geography, environment, and material culture. The balanced and braided narrative enables students to discern overarching trends as well as individual stories.

Voices of individuals animate the past and highlight human agency. The words of hundreds of Americans -- from presidents to pipefitters, and sharecroppers to suffragists -- reveal history through the eyes of those who lived and shaped it. The individuals in the narrative are shown to be active participants in American history, and their stories make earlier lives and struggles vivid for today's students.

Page design and illustration program engage and support today's students. Designed to capture students' interest, the visual elements in The American Promise extend and reinforce the narrative and offer the opportunity to develop skills in analyzing visual sources.

• Hundreds of striking images with meaty captions draw students into the text. The American Promise contains a wealth of contemporaneous illustrations -- paintings, photographs, cartoons, and more -- with full captions that explain the significance of the image, pose questions, and cite the source of the image. The illustrations and captions complement the narrative and encourage students to assess visual evidence as they read. The third edition contains over 750 illustrations, many of which are unique to this text.
• Scores of artifacts highlight material culture and make the past tangible. In keeping with the text's longstanding interest in material culture, the third edition includes an expanded selection of over 300 artifacts. Each chapter opens with a distinctive artifact, an emblem of the era the chapter covers. Throughout each chapter, selected artifacts convey the look and feel of the past. Examples include a jug made by slaves, an Indian Ghost Dance dress, a barbed wire machine, and a spy camera.
• Distinctive full-color maps enhance students' understanding of geography and encourage active engagement with the text. The American Promise contains far more full-color maps than any other U.S. history textbook -- over 180 maps in all and 15 more than in the previous edition. Each chapter contains three to four full-size maps representing major developments in the narrative, including two map exercises per chapter. Each chapter includes two to three "spot" maps, small maps embedded within the narrative that emphasize an area of detail from the discussion to aid students' understanding of specific but crucial issues.

• Documenting the American Promise. These collections of primary sources juxtapose a number of documents to show varying perspectives on a topic or issue. Feature introductions and document headnotes contextualize the sources, while "Questions for Analysis and Debate" promote historical thinking skills. Among the new topics in this edition are "Families Divide over the Revolution" and "Young Women Homesteaders and the Promise of the West."
• Historical Questions. These illustrated essays pose and investigate intriguing questions to demonstrate the depth and variety of possible answers. New questions in this edition include "How Long Did the Seven Years' War Last in Indian Country?" and "Social Darwinism: Did Wealthy Industrialists Practice What They Preached?"
• The Promise of Technology. These features provide in-depth context and analysis for exploring the ramifications -- positive and negative -- of technological innovations in American society and culture. New topics in this edition include "Stoves Transform Cooking," "C.S.S. H. L. Hunley: The World's First Successful Submarine," "Artificial Limbs: Filling the Empty Sleeve," and "Solar Energy."

Edition/Copyright: 3RD 05
Cover: Paperback
Publisher: Bedford Books
Published: 10/13/2004

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American Promise : A History of the United States, Volume I : To 1877 - 4 edition

ISBN13: 978-0312452926