The American Promise: A Concise History, Volume 1 To 1877

by Roark, James L.; Johnson, Michael P.; Cohen, Patricia Cline; Stage, Sarah; Hartmann, Susan M.

• ISBN13: 9781319042738
• ISBN10: 1319042732
• Edition: 6th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2016-12-09
• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's

Summary

A brief and affordable text, American Promise: A Concise History, Volume 1 presents history with a clear political and orderly narrative, helping you easily master American history.

Author Biography

James L. Roark (Ph.D., Stanford University) is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of American History at Emory University. In 1993, he received the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2001–2002 he was Pitt Professor of American Institutions at Cambridge University. He has written Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction and coauthored Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South with Michael P. Johnson. Michael P. Johnson (Ph.D., Stanford University) is professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. His publications include Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia; Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War: Selected Speeches and Writings; and Reading the American Past: Selected Historical Documents, the documents reader for The American Promise. He has also coedited No Chariot Let Down: Charleston’s Free People of Color on the Eve of the Civil War with James L. Roark.

Patricia Cline Cohen (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2005–2006. She has written A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America and The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York, and she has coauthored The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York. Sarah Stage (Ph.D., Yale University) has taught U.S. history at Williams College and the University of California, Riverside, and she was visiting professor at Beijing University and Szechuan University. Currently she is professor of Women’s Studies at Arizona State University. Her books include Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women’s Medicine and Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession.

Susan M. Hartmann (Ph.D., University of Missouri) is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University. In 1995 she won the university's Exemplary Faculty Award in the College of Humanities. Her publications include Truman and the 80th Congress; The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s; From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics since 1960; and The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment.

Table of Contents

The feature program includes new and revised features that emphasize skills-based learning. “Making Historical Arguments,” offers active activities, and demonstrate to students how historians make and support historical arguments. With “Analyzing Historical Evidence,” will practice skills obtained in the “Making Historical Arguments” through analysis of text and visual sources. “Beyond America’s Borders” continues to offer students a global perspective on the narrative’s themes. Collectively these features provide a range of new topics and content that includes a new focus on the weak opposition to the African slave trade in the 18th century; a nuanced look at reactions to the  Boston Port Act outside Massachusetts; an examination of the nation’s first formal declaration of war;  attention to Ida B. Wells and her campaign to stop lynching; a spotlight on FDR’s use of New Deal programs to rebuild the navy during the 1930s; an exploration of the failure of the ERA; and much more.  

Highlights of the revised narrative include coverage of Supreme Court decisions on campaign financing and same-sex marriage; updated information about immigration; 2015 changes to the No Child Left Behind law; the rise of ISIS; the Iran nuclear deal; and the opening to Cuba. 

New source-based questions in the test bank and in the LearningCurve adaptive learning tool in LaunchPad give instructors easier ways to test students on their understanding of sources in the book.

Questions in the test bank can now be sorted by chapter learning objectives. Because learning objectives are keyed to the major sections of each chapter, this new ability to sort allows instructors to test portions of the chapters, making it easier to see what major concepts students need to work on. Details from images and excerpts from the documents are provided to students for easy of reference as they answer the questions.

25% of the art in this edition is new.