American Passages, Volume 1: A History of the United States: To 1877

by Associate Professor of History Edward L Ayers, Lewis L. Gould, David M. Oshinsky

With a unique attention to time as the defining nature of history, CENGAGE ADVANTAGE BOOKS: AMERICAN PASSAGES: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, 4e, 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). To meet the demand for a low-cost, high-quality survey text, CENGAGE ADVANTAGE BOOKS: AMERICAN PASSAGES: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, 4e, offers readers the complete text in an economically priced format. All volumes feature a paperbound, two-color format that appeals to those seeking a comprehensive, trade-sized history text.

Genres: Textbooks, History

431 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Liz Derrington]

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]

Very interesting!