America Firsthand, Volume Two Readings from Reconstruction to the Present

by Marcus, Robert D.; Burner, David; Marcus, Anthony

• ISBN13: 9780312489076
• ISBN10: 0312489072
• Edition: 8th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-02-27
• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's

Summary

With its distinctive focus on ordinary people, this primary documents reader offers a remarkable range of perspectives on America's history from those who lived it from Jews in the Early Republic to strikers at an auto plant in 1940s Detroit, and from a Civil War battlefield nurse to a 1990s dot.com entrepreneur.

Author Biography

ROBERT D. MARCUS, late of the State University of New York College at Brockport, wrote on late-nineteenth-century American politics as well as on the United States in the 1960s. He developed materials for collaborative learning techniques and edited several dozen books for Brandywine Press.

DAVID BURNER, professor emeritus of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has written two books on John F. Kennedy as well as books on Herbert Hoover, the 1960s, and the Democratic Party in the 1920s, including a number of textbooks. Burner has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and is now completing a detailed history of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

ANTHONY MARCUS is an Associate Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. He has taught American History, Anthropology, and International Development Studies on three continents and founded Australia's only entirely online Internet PhD program. His published works include numerous articles and books on history, African-American life, global development and culture. His most recent book, Where Have All The Homeless Gone? The Making and Unmaking of a Crisis is about the impact of the Reagan Revolution on life and social policy in the urban United States.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: Using Sources to Study the Past

Part One: After the Civil War: New South and New West
Points of View: The Battle of Little Bighorn (1876)

1. Victory at Greasy Grass
    She Walks with Her Shawl and One Bull

2. Witness to Custer’s Last Stand
    Charles DeRudio

3. African-Americans during Reconstruction
    Felix Haywood, et al.

4. White Southerners’ Reactions to Reconstruction
    Caleb G. Forshey and the Reverend James Sinclair

5. The Murder of Jim Williams
    Rosy Williams, et al.

6. Work under Sharecropper and Labor Contracts
    Grimes Family and Swindell Brothers

7. School Days of an Indian Girl
    Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin)

Visual Portfolio: The Peopling of the West

Part Two: The Gilded Age: Industrial Growth and Crisis
Points of View: Industrialism and Progress (1882)

8. The Decline of the Independent Craftsman
    Joseph T. Finnerty

9. Workers Prosper as Industry Grows
    William Steinway

10. Losing Out to Standard Oil
      George Rice

11. Honest and Dishonest Graft
      George Washington Plunkitt

12. Antilynching Campaign in Tennessee
      Ida B. Wells-Barnett

13. Protecting Yosemite
      John Muir

Part Three: An Age of Reform: Responses to Industrial America
Points of View: The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911)

14. Conditions at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company
      Pauline Newman, et al.

15. A Fire Trap
      William Gunn Shepherd

16. A Bintel Brief
      Abraham Cahan

17. Letters from the Great Migration
      Emmett J. Scott, et al.

18. The Trial of Kate Richards O’Hare
      Kate Richards O’Hare, et al.

19. Suppressing the “Dreadful Curse of Liquor”
      Carrie Nation

Visual Portfolio: Urban Industrial America

Part Four: A New Society: Between the Wars
Points of View: The Scopes Trial (1925)

20. In Defense of the Bible
      William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow

21. An Odd Eulogy for William Jennings Bryan,
      H.L. Mencken

22. The Harlem Renaissance
      Langston Hughes

23. My Fight for Birth Control
      Margaret Sanger

24. On the Road during the Great Depression
      Morey Skaret

25. Taking a Stand: The Sit-Down Strikes of the 1930s
      Genora Dollinger

26. Advertising in the Interwar Years
      Scott Tissue and Brer Rabbit Molasses Advertisements

Part Five: “The American Century”: War, Affluence, and Uncertainty
Points of View: Building and Using an Atomic Bomb (1942–1945)

27. To Build an Atomic Bomb
      J. Robert Oppenheimer

28. To Use an Atomic Bomb
      Paul Tibbets and George Weller

29. Rosie the Riveter
      Fanny Christina Hill

30. Memories of the Internment Camp
      Ben Yorita and Philip Hayasaka

31. The Bataan Death March
      Blair Robinett, et al.

32. Blacklist: Post–World War II Red Scare
      Ring Lardner Jr.

33. Levittown: Making America Suburban
      Homeowner’s Guide and Images

Part Six: Contested Boundaries: Moral Dilemmas at Home and Abroad
Points of View: The My Lai Massacre and its Aftermath (1968–1970)

34. Disbelief and Corroboration
      Ronald L. Ridenhour, et al.

35. Cover-Up and Outcome
      General Westmoreland, President Nixon, et al.

36. Feminism and Consciousness-Raising
      Kathie Sarachild

37. Mississippi Freedom Summer
      Student Workers

38. The Young Lords
       Pablo Guzman

39. An American Hostage in Tehran
      Barry Rosen

40. Border Crossings
      Ramón Pérez, et al.

Visual Portfolio: Protest Movements of the 1960s and 1970s

Part Seven: Between History and Tomorrow: After the Cold War
Points of View: Security versus Freedom after September 11, 2001

41. Securing the Nation and Fighting a War on Terror
      Gordon Cucullu and John Ashcroft

42 What Price Security? The View from Inside Gitmo
      Eric Saar, et al.

43. Los Angeles Burning, April 1992
      Riots in the Wake of the Rodney King Verdict

44. Daughter of America
      Shams Alwujude

45. Homophobia in the Heartland
      Dennis W. Shepard

46. The Dot-Com Bubble
      Tom Ashbrook

47. Confronting a Planetary Emergency
      Al Gore