AMERICAN HISTORY

American History: a Survey -Volume II Alan Brinkley

American History: a Survey -Volume II Alan Brinkley

Alan Brinkley has been professor of American history at Columbia University in New York since 1991. He was educated at Princeton and Harvard, and he has taught previously at M.I.T., Harvard (where he received the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize), the City University of New York Graduate School, and Princeton. He was Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University in 1998-1999. His published works include Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression), which won the 1983 National Book Award; The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People; The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War; and Liberalism and Its Discontents.

His essays articles, and reviews have appeared in the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, Time, Newsweek, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books. He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the National Humanities Center, the Russell Sage Foundation, and others. He is chairman of the board of trustees of the Century Foundation, a member of the editorial board The American Prospect, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

This survey aims to balance social and cultural with the political and diplomatic history. It aims to help instructor to organize his or her course in many different ways confident that the text will support both the topics discussed in class and provide students with the ideal book for self-study. Every chapter begins with a summary of major themes and ends with a boxed chronology entitled "Significant Events", noting the major events discussed in the chapter. "Where Historians Disagree" essays describe major histographical debates. Greater attention is given to native American history, and there are revised sections on women's history.

Highly respected for its impeccable scholarship and elegant writing style, Alan Brinkley's American History provides students and instructors with a reliable, comprehensive account of the American past in which no single approach or theme predominates. From its first edition, this text has included a scrupulous account of American political and diplomatic history. Today, the book explores areas of history such as social, cultural, urban, racial and ethnic history, the history of the West and South, environmental history, the history of women and gender, and American history in a global context.

The past, of course, can never change. But our understanding of the past changes constantly. There may be no time in which that has been more evident than in the last several decades, when historical scholarship experienced something close to a revolution.

Once, historians viewed the past largely as the experiences of great men and the unfolding of great public events. Today, they attempt to tell a much more complicated story-one that includes private as well ...