American Passages: A History in the United States, Volume I: To 1877

by Edward L. Ayers, Lewis L. Gould, David M. Oshinsky

With a unique attention to time as the defining nature of history, AMERICAN PASSAGES offers students a view of American history as a complete, compelling narrative. AMERICAN PASSAGES emphasizes the intertwined nature of three key characteristics of time--sequence, simultaneity, and contingency. With clarity and purpose, the authors convey how events grow from other events, people's actions, and broad structural changes (sequence), how apparently disconnected events occurred in close chronological proximity to one another and were situated in larger, shared contexts (simultaneity), and how history suddenly pivoted because of events, personalities, and unexpected outcomes (contingency).

Genres: History

576 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Edward Ayers is President Emeritus of the University of Richmond, where he now serves as Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities. Previously Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, where he began teaching in 1980, Ayers was named the National Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2003.

A historian of the American South, Ayers has written and edited 10 books. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America won the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history and the Beveridge Prize for the best book in English on the history of the Americas since 1492. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2013.

A pioneer in digital history, Ayers created "The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War," a website that has attracted millions of users and won major prizes in the teaching of history. He serves as co-editor of the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States at the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab and is a co-host of BackStory with the American History Guys, a nationally syndicated radio show and podcast.

Ayers has received a presidential appointment to the National Council on the Humanities, served as a Fulbright professor in the Netherlands, and been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Reviews

[Liz Derrington · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the textbook for the early American history class I'm taking (HI 111); I've got the third edition. It's been quite a while since I've had to read a proper textbook for a class, and by and large I think the issues I have with this book are endemic to survey textbooks rather than specific to this text (i.e. whole decades, battles, social issues being confined to a single sentence). The maps are good (though occasionally mislabeled, which I hope they've fixed in the 4th ed.). Overall I suspect my grandfather, who's rather a slave to Fox News, would be apopleptic over some of what this text teaches, which is for me, of course, a point in its favor. If you're looking for an early American history textbook, I'm sure you could do worse.

[Raven Ivanov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting!