The History of the United States, 2nd Edition

Columbus's discovery of a New World; Europeans exploit natural and human resources; they write new social, economic, and political scripts for their lives in a place where European ideas of society no longer applied.

The Spanish tap sources of wealth in the Americas; they obtain it by various methods; they evolve from an extraction society to a settler society; the French attempt extraction incursions to settle in North America but do not succeed.

The English join the game of settlement and extraction after all other major European nations; settlements around the Chesapeake Bay achieve success with tobacco and the involuntary recruitment of a workforce of African slaves.

The northern settlements are motivated by ideas; the southern English colonies are motivated by economic self-interest; in New England's case, the ideas are religious; the first Puritans are succeeded by the same slow tendency toward aristocracy.

Swedes settle in the coastal territory between Chesapeake and Long Island along the Delaware Bay; the Dutch settle along the Hudson River; Dutch settlements develop into a major commercial center; Pennsylvania emerges by the 1750s.

Cheap labor provides settlements with commercial success; America's immensity of land and lack of labor to develop it requires the forced migration of laborers; a less expensive source of labor are 11 million Africans slaves.

American music and art are forms of its culture; the European Enlightenment; it is a transition from a religious to a scientific and secular understanding of the world; Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards.

The stresses of colonial life produce unusual social eruptions that are aimed at regaining a sense of control; the Great Awakening is a revival of radical Protestant religion across New England; it recovers a sense of spiritual significance.

Britain and France become rivals while establishing dominance in America; the French and Indian War breaks out in 1754; it goes badly for England at first, but the British Empire has greater resources to draw on; the Treaty of Paris in 1763.

Regulating colonial trade; levying direct taxes in favor of England; legislatures of North American colonies protest; this leads to outright conflict; the suspension of colonial governments; the creation of a Continental Congress.

The Second Continental Congress in 1776; a resolution declaring independence is adopted by the Congress; the Declaration of Independence is composed by Thomas Jefferson; the Articles of Confederation of 1781; a joint government is created.

The Continental Army faces losses under George Washington; they abandon land to the British; victory at Saratoga in the summer of 1777 is attained due to British incompetence rather than American planning.

The Treaty of Paris is signed in 1783; America gains independence; Washington conducts a combined campaign that causes British forces to fall; the British surrender; they reluctantly concede American independence.

The Articles of Confederation; their ramshackle nature begins to show; a convention is assembled in 1787 to construct a constitution; it proposes a single executive president, a bicameral Congress, and a judiciary.

Alexander Hamilton is opposed by Thomas Jefferson; Hamilton develops the republic's systems of finance, manufacturing and commerce; Jefferson believes the future of America lies in independent domestic agriculture.

The formation of political parties is a new development; James Madison becomes the organizer of the Democratic-Republicans; Hamilton recruits his Congressional supporters into the Federalist Party; the Federalists elect their candidate.

Adams squanders his political capital; his first challenge is a foreign policy problem; Hamilton persuades the Federalists to dump Adams before the election of 1800; the Democratic-Republicans win.

The scope of Jefferson's actions; the federal judiciary, under Chief Justice John Marshall, operates as a restraint for Jefferson; Thomas Jefferson proves incapable of creating a practical set of alternatives to Hamilton's fiscal policies.

Napoleon offers to sell the entire Louisiana province; Jefferson asks Congress to finance a secret scouting party under Lewis and Clark; Aaron Burr is saved from a treason indictment only by Chief Justice John Marshall.

The claims of North American Indians; Americans pour into the West in search of cheap land; disheartened Indians are either accommodated, as with the Seneca and Cherokees, or resisted, as in the revolt of Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh.

Madison sends a request to Congress for a declaration of war; the War of 1812 is a debacle; the Massachusetts legislature passes a peace resolution; the signing of the Treaty of Ghent; a New England separatist movement.

The War of 1812 collapses the US Treasury and bankrupts businesses; government borrowing soaks up the tiny hoard of American financial capital; Henry Clay becomes a spokesmen for rebuilding the infrastructure of the American economy.

Immigrants arrive in America; the clearance of Indian resistance; the Northwest Territory is opened by massive government land sales; emigrants, however, chose to stay in the cities they first entered; the American urban population.

The unpredictable boom and bust of the world market system; the year of the Great Panic; 1819 causes problems for bankers, brokers, National Republicans, and everyone else who has leveraged themselves to the market system.

Three factors play a role in creating a Christian America; the resiliency of revival; the absorption of virtue; the substitution of millennialism.

The Industrial Revolution involves invention and reinvention of machines, power, labor and capital; industrial growth cannot go on forever without serious social consequences; the first labor strikes; union organizations.

Jefferson's Republican Party splits in 1824; the National Republicans; the Democratic-Republicans; John Quincy Adams is a National Republican; the most unpredictable candidate is Andrew Jackson; he did not get a majority.

The shift in American political consciousness; the movement of the United States from a republic to a democracy; Adams's presidency is one of the worst political disasters in the history of the American presidency.

The Second Bank of the United States regulates the economy by controlling the money supply and by promoting national investment; Nicholas Biddle applies to Congress for rechartering; Jackson vetoes the bill; Biddle shortens credit.

Voters elect William Henry Harrison as the first Whig president; Harrison dies a month after inauguration; his vice president, John Tyler, was an old-line Democrat who promptly reinstalls the Jackson agenda.

The work of Ralph Waldo Emerson; the Transcendentalists; Romanticism in American literature; the Mercersburg theology; the rhetoric of Whigs and Democrats and the argument over passion.

The American Republic represents the vanguard of a new age; campaigns to advance American perfection and freedom; the common message is one of optimism; Alexis de Tocqueville, in "Democracy in America," gives a favorable opinion of the future.

The resurrection of slavery; the success of cotton agriculture; its requirements of labor; Northern abolitionists gather forces in the 1830s; the south demands for protection and extradition of runaways; mob violence.

Three major conflicts; Americans swarm the Louisiana Purchase territories; fighting with over the province of Texas; combating the Plains Indian tribes; the admission of slavery into the Louisiana Purchase.

James K. Polk's election; the renewal of Jacksonian expansionism; the use of expansionism to serve the interests of slavery; Polk aggressively pushes American claims to territory along the southern border with Mexico and the Canadian border.

Slavery in the territories from the Mexican Cession; southern threats of disunion; the sudden death of President Taylor; Henry Clay shapes his last Union-saving compromise; permanently dampening the slavery agitation.

Manifestations of sectional animosity; the brief hostory of the American Party; Northerners and Southerners increasingly prove willing to believe the worst about the other.

The failure of national institutions; compromise on slavery and its extension into the territories; the Dred Scott case of 1857; debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas; the impact of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859.

Deep South states secede in response to Lincoln's election; the crisis at Fort Sumter in 1861 convinces the Upper South to secede; opinions about secession in slaveholding states; the formation of the Confederate States of America.

An analysis of the Civil War; either side can win the Civil War; their strengths and weaknesses.

The year between the summer of 1862 and the summer of 1863; Americans believe the war will be long and bitter; the major military campaigns; the enormous swings of morale behind the lines in the North and South as each side suffers defeats.

Diplomacy and the blockade; the difficulty and cost of fielding and maintaining large armies; Union and Confederate conscription; the ways each side raise money; the production and delivery of military supplies.

Military campaigning in the Confederacy; its impact on industrial and agricultural production; material hardships to its population; the North produces guns and butter; the Republican-dominated Congress passes legislation.

The experiences of African Americans on both sides; black soldiers in US military forces; the experience of hundreds of thousands of black refugees in the South; the weakening of the bonds of slavery in much of the Confederacy.

The outcome of the war remains uncertain in the summer of 1864; the Union gains ground; the final year of military action; highlighting the roles of Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Grant and Robert E. Lee at Appomattox.

Debates in the North; assimilating Confederate states back into the Union; the wartime context; Johnson's early presidency; the final showdown between the president and Congress in the fight over Reconstruction in the South.

Congress takes control of the Reconstruction policy in 1867; Ulysses S. Grant wins the presidency; the struggle between Johnson and Congress; Reconstruction legislation; state governments under that legislation in former Confederate states.

Reconstruction improves aspects of black Southerners' lives; Reconstruction and the white South; the South projects an image of Northern oppression; African Americans in the United States.

The scale of American industry in the late 19th century; Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller build a massive corporation; they dominate entire sectors of the economy; the United States becomes one of the three world leaders in industry.

The first transcontinental railroad is finished in 1869; it cuts travel time from the Mississippi to the West Coast from three months to a week; other transcontinentals; settlement in the remote plains and mountain states.

The coming of settlers with the railroads makes the Indians' independent life impossible; the near extinction of the buffalo and gold rushes; plain tribes are warrior societies that live to fight; the Battle at Little Bighorn in 1876.

The Homestead Act encourages farmers to acquire land at almost no cost; those who overcome the loneliness, prairie fires, insect infestations, extremes of climate, and incessant winds build prosperous lives, growing massive annual surpluses.

Reconstruction ends in 1876; southerns take political control of the South; passing legislation enforcing racial segregation; the white elite rule unchallenged for much of the next 80 years; most African Americans live by sharecropping.

Early advocates of suffrage; middle-class Americans emphasize differences between the two sexes; doctors believe political rights for women would make them mannish; Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony argue for women's rights.

Victorian religion in America is less doctrinal and more sentimental than its Puritan antecedents; traveling revivalists and preachers try to help the poor and reform grim urban conditions while outlawing alcohol.

Southern cotton sharecroppers, black and white, and Midwestern farmers are falling into debt; cooperative marketing schemes; they turn to politics to legislate for better conditions; the Populist Party enjoys local and state-level successes.

Late 19th-century Europe is full of stories about America; bad conditions for farmers prompt many of them to emigrate; American prosperity and respectability; fears of race suicide in the 1920s give rise to an immigration restriction policy.

American cities are often badly planned and become overcrowded with ethnic and linguistic neighborhoods; cities are severely polluted with smoke and ash; worsening public health conditions; reformers try to Americanize urban immigrants.

The railroad strike of 1877 shows that strikes succeed if they enjoy community support; they fail if business owners use their political influence; bitter union-management confrontations punctuate the 1890s; the American Socialist Party in 1900.

Progressive reformers in the early 1900s try to increase efficiency in business and government; Roosevelt establishes the principle of presidential initiative in progressive legislative programs; increasing federal government power over the states.

Manufacturers begin to mass-produce products they can sell cheaply and in large numbers through nationwide advertising campaigns; Henry Ford perfects the automobile assembly line in 1914; reducing the price of cars; increased workers' loyalty.

When Europe goes to war in 1914, America stays aloof; sympathy for Britain is strong among President Wilson's cabinet; the decision to declare unrestricted submarine warfare against American ships; America's army under General Pershing's leadership.

President Wilson travels to Versailles to discover that victorious English and French leaders want vindictive reparations; Wilson is thwarted by the Senate's refusal to join the League; a Red Scare; many Socialists and Communists are deported.

Prohibition creates ideal conditions for organized crime; the Ku Klux Klan targets Catholics and Jews; a brighter side is high levels of employment, improving city conditions; the rapid spread of cars and appliances; the maturing movie industry.

The collapse of share prices on Wall Street in 1929; from 1929 to 1933, a downward spiral of economic shrinkage, bankruptcies and factory closings occur; drought in the Great Plains states; President Hoover becomes the scapegoat for these disasters.

Franklin Roosevelt's creation of federal agencies marks a shift of power out of the states and into the federal government; Roosevelt tries to safeguard his political innovations by enlarging the Supreme Court; he oversteps his mandate.

Hitler's attacks on his European neighbors and his anti-Jewish policies cause many Americans to seek intervention on behalf of Britain; the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; America's military forces expand; victory appears remote in early 1942.

Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin determine how to engage their forces over Europe and North Africa; the defeat of Germany; the Holocaust's full horror; America transforms into a high-employment economy; women take jobs previously reserved for men.

Aircraft carriers become the crucial weapon of the Pacific war; by mid-1945, Allied victory in the Pacific is assured; the Japanese refusal to surrender prompts Harry Truman to approve the use of the war's greatest secret weapon, the atomic bomb.

America and the Soviet Union disagree over the future of eastern Europe; a temporary dividing line drawn through Europe becomes permanent; Soviet possession of nuclear weapons creates a geopolitical stalemate; the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Espionage cases heighten fears of Communism; the Truman administration begins to investigate the loyalty of federal employees; anti-Communist fears allow Senator Joseph McCarthy to exploit irrational public fears; post-war Korea and Berlin.

World War II causes a redistribution of income; steady rises in discretionary income; America becomes one of the wealthiest societies; the Soviet Union's victory in the space race; American dedication to education in science and technology.

The Supreme Court's decisions in the Brown case and the Montgomery bus boycott inaugurate the activist phase of the civil rights movement; disputes over busing and affirmative action; the interracial civil rights coalition break up.

John Kennedy's escalation of the Cold War is offset by a concern for legislating on behalf of the poor and minorities; Kennedy's assassination in November 1963; his successor, Lyndon Johnson, pursues antipoverty and anti-discrimination legislation.

Newspapers and other media in 20th-century America inform citizens about their political and social questions; media power transforms the nature of politics, lobbying and even the military, as the armed forces discover to its detriment in Vietnam.

By 1968, half a million American soldiers are fighting in Vietnam; casualties and TV footage of troops persecuting villagers turn public opinion against the war; President Johnson abandons his re-election plans; the last Americans withdraw in 1973.

In the late 1960s, the women's liberation movement is formed; the National Organization for Women campaigns successfully for the abolition of gender discrimination in employment; women campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.

By the standards of his Republican successors, President Richard Nixon is a center or even liberal Republican; Nixon wins in 1972 against George McGovern; revelations that he had known of a break-in of McGovern's campaign headquarters; Nixon resigns.

The first Earth Day is celebrated in 1970, the year the Environmental Protection Agency is created; endangered species and scarce water resources become issues of government concern; environmentalists alert the nation to further resource shortages.

America is a far more religious society than other Western industrial nations; it also tolerates an array of sects and cults; religious groups play a role in the moral-political debates over civil rights, abortion, homosexuality and nuclear weapons.

Jimmy Carter wins the 1976 presidential race but is presented with economic stagnation, inflation, the Iranian revolution and the Tehran hostage crisis; Ronald Reagan escalates the Cold War by planning space-based weapons; his use of the media.

The Soviet Union goes through a peaceful transition to democracy; the creation of various new nations with more or less democratic and America-inspired political systems; in the 1990s, old ethnic and religious animosities in Eastern Europe resurface.

Bill Clinton's administration underlines the difference between America and other Western nations that create cradle-to-grave social welfare states; continued turbulence in the Middle East; the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The immense vitality and diversity of American life are sustained by several recurrent themes; compared to its high ideals, America always falls short; compared to the other nations of the world, however, America is more impressive for its successes.