A Patriot's History of the United States From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Schweikart, Larry; Allen, Michael Patrick

• ISBN13: 9781595230010
• ISBN10: 1595230017
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-12-29
• Publisher: Sentinel

Summary

For at least thirty years, high school and college students have been taught to be embarrassed by American history. Required readings have become skewed toward a relentless focus on our country’s darkest moments, from slavery to McCarthyism. As a result, many history books devote more space to Harriet Tubman than to Abraham Lincoln; more to My Lai than to the American Revolution; more to the internment of Japanese Americans than to the liberation of Europe in World War II.Now, finally, there is an antidote to this biased approach to our history. Two veteran history professors have written a sweeping, well-researched book that puts the spotlight back on America’s role as a beacon of liberty to the rest of the world.Schweikart and Allen are careful to tell their story straight, from Columbus’s voyage to the capture of Saddam Hussein. They do not ignore America’s mistakes through the years, but they put them back in their proper perspective. And they conclude that America’s place as a world leader derived largely from the virtues of our own leaders— the men and women who cleared the wilderness, abolished slavery, and rid the world of fascism and communism.The authors write in a clear and enjoyable style that makes history a pleasure, not just for students but also for adults who want to learn what their teachers skipped over.

Author Biography

Larry Schweikart is a history professor at the University of Dayton.

Michael Allen is a professor of history and American studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	vii
INTRODUCTION	xi
CHAPTER ONE: The City on the Hill, 1492-1707	1	(37)
CHAPTER TWO: Colonial Adolescence, 1707-63	38	(20)
CHAPTER THREE: Colonies No More, 1763-83	58	(30)
CHAPTER FOUR: A Nation of Law, 1776-89	88	(39)
CHAPTER FIVE: Small Republic, Big Shoulders, 1789-1815	127	(52)
CHAPTER SIX: The First Era of Big Central Government, 1815-36	179	(40)
CHAPTER SEVEN: Red Foxes and Bear Flags, 1836-48	219	(30)
CHAPTER EIGHT: The House Dividing, 1848-60	249	(45)
CHAPTER NINE: The Crisis of the Union, 1860-65	294	(59)
CHAPTER TEN: Ideals and Realities of Reconstruction, 1865-76	353	(39)
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Lighting Out for the Territories, 1861-90	392	(30)
CHAPTER TWELVE: Sinews of Democracy, 1876-96	422	(35)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: "Building Best, Building Greatly," 1896-1912	457	(35)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: War, Wilson, and Internationalism, 1912-20	492	(41)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Roaring Twenties and the Great Crash, 1920-32	533	(25)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Enlarging the Public Sector, 1932-40	558	(31)
The New Deal: Immediate Goals, Unintended Results	568	(21)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Democracy's Finest Hour, 1941-45	589	(22)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: America's "Happy Days," 1946-59	611	(56)
CHAPTER NINETEEN: The Age of Upheaval, 1960-74	667	(53)
CHAPTER TWENTY: Retreat and Resurrection, 1974-88	720
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: The Moral Crossroads, 1989-2000	703	(100)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: America, World Leader, 2000 and Beyond	803	(21)
CONCLUSION	824	(3)
NOTES	827	(70)
SELECTED READING	897	(2)
INDEX	899

Excerpts

CHAPTER ONE: The City on the Hill, 1492?1707 The Age of European Discovery God, Glory, and gold?not necessarily in that order?took post-Renaissance Europeans to parts of the globe they had never before seen. The opportunity to gain materially while bringing the Gospel to non- Christians offered powerful incentives to explorers from Portugal, Spain, England, and France to embark on dangerous voyages of discovery in the 1400s. Certainly they were not the first to sail to the Western Hemisphere: Norse sailors reached the coasts of Iceland in 874 and Greenland a century later, and legends recorded Leif Erickson?s establishment of a colony in Vinland, somewhere on the northern Canadian coast.1 Whatever the fate of Vinland, its historical impact was minimal, and significant voyages of discovery did not occur for more than five hundred years, when trade with the Orient beckoned.Marco Polo and other travelers to Cathay (China) had brought exaggerated tales of wealth in the East and returned with unusual spices, dyes, rugs, silks, and other goods. But this was a difficult, long journey. Land routes crossed dangerous territories, including imposing mountains and vast deserts of modern-day Afghanistan, northern India, Iran, and Iraq, and required expensive and well-protected caravans to reach Europe from Asia. Merchants encountered bandits who threatened transportation lanes, kings and potentates who demanded tribute, and bloodthirsty killers who pillaged for pleasure. Trade routes from Bombay and Goa reached Europe via Persia or Arabia, crossing the Ottoman Empire with its internal taxes. Cargo had to be unloaded at seaports, then reloaded at Alexandria or Antioch for water transport across the Mediterranean, or continued on land before crossing the Dardanelles Strait into modern-day Bulgaria to the Danube River. European demand for such goods seemed endless, enticing merchants and their investors to engage in a relentless search for lower costs brought by safer and cheaper routes. Gradually, Europeans concluded that more direct water routes to the Far East must exist. The search for Cathay?s treasure coincided with three factors that made long ocean voyages possible. First, sailing and shipbuilding technology had advanced rapidly after the ninth century, thanks in part to the Arabs? development of the astrolabe, a device with a pivoted limb that established the sun?s altitude above the horizon. By the late tenth century, astrolabe technology had made its way to Spain.2 Farther north, Vikings pioneered new methods of hull construction, among them the use of overlapping planks for internal support that enabled vessels to withstand violent ocean storms. Sailors of the Hanseatic League states on the Baltic coast experimented with larger ship designs that incorporated sternpost rudders for better control. Yet improved ships alone were not enough: explorers needed the accurate maps generated by Italian seamen and sparked by the new inquisitive impulse of the Renaissance. Thus a wide range of technologies coalesced to encourage long-range voyages of discovery. Political changes, a second factor giving birth to the age of discovery, resulted from the efforts of several ambitious European monarchs to consolidate their possessions into larger, cohesive dynastic states. This unification of lands, which increased the taxable base within the kingdoms, greatly increased the funding available to expeditions and provided better military protection (in the form of warships) at no cost to investors. By the time a combined Venetian-Spanish fleet defeated a much larger Ottoman force at Lepanto in 1571, the vessels of Christian nations could essentially sail with impunity anywhere in the Mediterranean. Then, in control of the Mediterranean, Europeans could consider voyages of much longer duration (and cost) than they ever had in the past. A new generation of explorers found that mo