The Brief American Pageant

David M. Kennedy is Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus and founding Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. He also serves as editor of the Oxford History of the United States series. His volume in the series, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Ambassador's Prize, and the California Gold Medal for Literature. He is also the author of Over Here: The First World War and American Society, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, which won the Bancroft Prize. He is also editor of The Modern American Military, and co-editor of World War II and the West it Wrought. He lives in Stanford, California. Lizabeth Cohen is an historian of the United States in the 20th century in the Harvard History Department, where she is the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies and a Harvard University Distinguished Professor. She is the author most recently of Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History. Previous books include A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America and Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, which also won the Bancroft and was a finalist for the Pulitzer in History. She was Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2011-2018. Mel Piehl is professor of Humanities and History at Valparaiso University. He served as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Dayton in 2001-2002 and as Visiting Scholar in Catholic Studies at Seattle University in 2013-2014. Dr. Piehl's scholarly interests center on American intellectual and religious history, with particular emphasis on American Catholic history and the relationship between religion and social thought. His book, BREAKING BREAD: THE CATHOLIC SOCIAL WORKER AND THE ORIGIN OF CATHOLIC RADICALISM IN AMERICA, was a finalist for the Robert Kennedy National Book Award. In addition, Dr. Piehl has written numerous articles on American Catholicism and American religion and social thought. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Part I: FOUNDING THE NEW NATION ca. 33,000 B.C.E.–1783 C.E.
1. New World Beginnings 33,000 B.C.E.–1769 C.E.
2. The Planting of English America 1500–1733.
3. Settling the Northern Colonies 1619–1700.
4. American Life in the Seventeenth Century 1607–1692.
5. Colonial Society on the Eve of Revolution 1700–1775.
6. The Duel for North America 1608–1763.
7. The Road to Revolution 1763–1775.
8. America Secedes from the Empire 1775–1783.
Part II: BUILDING THE NEW NATION 1776-1860.
9. The Confederation and the Constitution 1776–1790.
10. Launching the New Ship of State 1789–1800.
11. The Triumphs and Travails of the Jeffersonian Republic 1800–1812.
12. The Second War for Independence and the Upsurge of Nationalism 1812–1824.
13. The Rise of a Mass Democracy 1824–1840.
14. Forging the National Economy 1790–1860.
15. The Ferment of Reform and Culture 1790–1860.
Part III: TESTING THE NEW NATION 1820–1877.
16. The South and the Slavery Controversy 1793–1860.
17. Manifest Destiny and Its Legacy 1841–1848.
18. Renewing the Sectional Struggle 1848–1854.
19. Drifting Toward Disunion 1854–1861.
20. Girding for War: The North and the South 1861–1865.
21. The Furnace of Civil War 1861–1865.
22. The Ordeal of Reconstruction 1865–1877.