Created Equal A History of the United States, Brief Edition, Combined Volume

Explores American History through the theme of equality. With its inclusive view of American history, Created Equal, Brief Edition emphasizes social history-including the lives, labors, and legacies of women, immigrants, working people, and minorities in all regions of the country-while delivering the fundamental elements of political and economic history. In the new edition ofCreated Equal, the authors have preserved the chronological framework and strong narrative thread, the engaging and illuminating stories of everyday people and events, and the Interpreting History features of the previous edition, but have sharpened the presentation, prose, and pedagogy by incorporating additional examples and end of chapter review material.

Jacqueline Jones teaches American history at the University of Texas at
Austin, where she is Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History and Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas. She was born in Christiana, Delaware, a small town of 400 people in the northern part of the state. The local public school was desegregated in 1955, when she was a third grader. That event, combined with the peculiar social etiquette of relations between blacks and whites in the town, sparked her interest in American history. She attended the University of Delaware in nearby Newark and went on to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she received her Ph.D. in history. Her scholarly interests have evolved over time, focusing on labor, women’s, African American, and southern history. In 1999 she received a MacArthur Fellowship. One of her biggest challenges has been to balance her responsibilities as teacher, historian, wife, and mother (of two daughters). She is currently working on a book of essays that illustrate, through the biographies of several individuals, the fluidity of racial ideologies in America, from the colonial period to the present.  She is the author of several books, including Saving Savannah:  The City and the Civil War (2008);  Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks (1980);  Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and Family Since Slavery (1985), which won the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize; The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses Since the Civil War (1992); and American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (1998). In 2001 she completed a memoir that recounts her childhood in Christiana: Creek Walking: Growing Up in Delaware in the 1950s.

 

Peter H. Wood was born in St. Louis (before the famous arch was built). He recalls seeing Jackie Robinson play against the Cardinals, visiting the courthouse where the Dred Scott case originated, and traveling up the Mississippi to Hannibal, birthplace of Mark Twain. Summer work on the northern Great Lakes aroused his interest in Native American cultures, past and present. He studied at Harvard (B.A., 1964; Ph.D., 1972) and at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar (1964–1966). His pioneering book Black Majority (1974), concerning slavery in colonial South Carolina, won the Beveridge Prize of the American Historical Association. He taught early American history at Duke University from 1975 to 2008. The topics of his articles range from the French explorer LaSalle to Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. He coedited Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, now in its second edition. His demographic essay in that volume provided the first clear picture of population change in the eighteenth-century South. His most recent books are Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America (2003), Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer’s “Gulf Stream” (2004), and “Near Andersonville”: Winslow Homer’s Civil War (2010). Dr. Wood has served on the boards of the Highlander Center, Harvard University, Houston’s Rothko Chapel, the Menil Foundation, and the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg. He is married to colonial historian Elizabeth Fenn; his varied interests include archaeology, documentary film, and growing gourds. He keeps a baseball bat used by Ted Williams beside his desk.

Thomas (“Tim”) Borstelmann, the son of a university psychologist, taught and coached at the elementary and high school levels in Washington state and Colorado before returning to graduate school. From 1991 to 2003, he taught American history at Cornell University while living in Syracuse, New York, before becoming the Elwood N. and Katherine Thompson Distinguished Professor of Modern World History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He lives with his wife, a health care administrator, and two sons in Lincoln. An avid bicyclist, runner, swimmer, and cross-country skier, he earned his B.A. from Stanford University in 1980 and Ph.D. from Duke University in 1990. He became a historian to figure out the Cold War and American race relations, in part because he had grown up in the South. His first book, concerning American relations with southern Africa in the mid-twentieth century, won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize of the Society for Historians of Foreign Relations. His second book, The Cold War and the Color Line, appeared in 2001. His commitment to the classroom earned him a major teaching award at Cornell, the Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship. He found writing Created Equal a natural complement to what he does in the classroom, trying to provide both telling details of the American past and the broad picture of how the United States has developed as it has. A specialist in U.S. foreign relations and modern world history, he is equally fascinated with domestic American politics and social change. He is currently working on a book about the United States and the world in the 1970s. In 2011 Dr. Borstelmann will publish his next book, entitled More Equal, Less Equal: Egalitarianism, Market Values, and the Reshaping of America and the World in the 1970s

Each chapter ends with "Conclusion," "Chronology," "Key Terms," and "For Review" questions.

 

I. NORTH AMERICAN FOUNDATIONS.

1. First Founders.

 

Ancient America.

A Thousand Years of Change: 500 to 1500.

Linking the Continents.

Spain Enters the Americas.

The Protestant Reformation Plays Out in America.

Interpreting History: “These Gods That We Worship Give Us Everything We Need.”

 

2. European Footholds in North America, 1600-1660.

 

Spain's Ocean-Spanning Reach.

France and Holland: Overseas Competition for Spain.

English Beginnings on the Atlantic Coast.

The Puritan Experiment.

The Chesapeake Bay Colonies.

Interpreting History: Anne Bradstreet: “The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America.”

 

3. Controlling the Edges of the Continent, 1660-1715.

 

France and the American Interior.

The Spanish Empire on the Defensive.

England's American Empire Takes Shape.

Bloodshed in the English Colonies: 1670-1690.

Consequences of War and Growth: 1690-1715.

Interpreting History: “Long Enough to be Called a City.”

 

II. A CENTURY OF COLONIAL EXPANSION TO 1775.

 

4. African Enslavement: The Terrible Transformation.

 

The Descent into Race Slavery.

The Growth of Slave Labor Camps.

England Enters the Atlantic Slave Trade.

Survival in a Strange New Land.

The Transformation Completed.

Interpreting History: “Releese Us out of This Cruell Bondegg.”

 

5. An American Babel, 1713-1763.

 

New Cultures on the Western Plains.

Britain's Mainland Colonies: A New Abundance of People.

The Varied Economic Landscape.

Matters of Faith: The Great Awakening.

The French Lose a North American Empire.

Interpreting History: “The Creature Must Have Been the Size of a Small House”

 

6. The Limits of Imperial Control, 1763-1775.

 

New Challenges to Spain's Expanded Empire.

New Challenges to Britain's Expanded Empire.

“The Unconquerable Rage of the People.”

A Conspiracy of Corrupt Ministers?

Launching a Revolution.

Interpreting History: “Squeez’d and Oppressed.” A 1768 Petition by 30 Regulators.

 

III. THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION, 1775-1803.

 

7. Revolutionaries at War, 1775-1783.

 

“Things Are Now Come to That Crisis.”

Declaring Independence.

The Struggle to Win French Support.

Legitimate States, a Respectable Military.

The Long Road to Yorktown.

Interpreting History: “By What Means Do You Expect to Conquer America?”

 

8. New Beginnings: The 1780s

 

Beating Swords into Plowshares.

Competing for Control of the Mississippi Valley.

Debtor and Creditor, Taxpayer and Bondholder

Drafting a New Constitution.

Ratification and the Bill of Rights.

Interpreting History: Demobilization: “Turned Adrift Like Old Worn-Out Horses.”

 

9. Revolutionary Legacies, 1789-1803.

 

Competing Political Visions in the New Nation.

People of Color: New Freedoms, New Struggles.

Continuity and Change in the West.

Shifting Social Identities in the Post-Revolutionary Era.

The Election of 1800: Revolution or Reversal?

Interpreting History: A Farmer Worries About the Power of “The Few,” 1798

 

IV. EXPANDING THE BOUNDARIES OF FREEDOM AND SLAVERY, 1803-1848.

 

10. Defending and Expanding the New Nation, 1803-1818.

 

The British Menace.

The War of 1812.

The “Era of Good Feelings”?

The Rise of the Cotton Plantation Economy.

Interpreting History: Cherokee Women Petition Against Further Land Sales to Whites in 1817

 

11. Expanding Westward: Society and Politics in the “Age of the Common Man,” 1819-1832.

 

The Politics Behind Western Expansion.

Federal Authority and Its Opponents.

Real People in the “Age of the Common Man.”

Ties That Bound a Growing Population.

Interpreting History: Eulalia Perez Describes her Work in a California Mission, 1823

 

12. Peoples in Motion, 1832-1848.

 

Mass Migrations.

A Multitude of Voices in the National Political Arena.

Reform Impulses.

The United States Extends Its Reach.

Interpreting History:Senator John C. Calhoun Warns Against Incorporating Mexico into the United States.

 

V. DISUNION AND REUNION.

 

13. The Crisis over Slavery, 1848-1860.

 

Regional Economies and Conflicts.

Individualism vs. Group Identity.

The Paradox of Southern Political Power.

The Deepening Conflict over Slavery.

Interpreting History:Professor George Howe on the Subordination of Women.

 

14. “To Fight to Gain a Country”: The Civil War.

 

Mobilization for War, 1861-1862.

The Course of War, 1862-1864.

The Other War: African American Struggles for Liberation.

Battle Fronts and Home Fronts in 1863.

The Prolonged Defeat of the Confederacy, 1864-1865.

Interpreting History: A Virginia Slaveholder Objects to the Impressment of Slaves.

 

15. In the Wake of War: Consolidating a Triumphant Union, 1865-1877.

 

The Struggle over the South.

Claiming Territory for the Union.

The Republican Vision and Its Limits.

Interpreting History: A Georgia Planter Appeals to a Freedmen’s Bureau Officer

 

VI. THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA, 1877-1900.

 

16. Standardizing the Nation: Innovations in Technology, Business, and Culture, 1877-1890.

 

The New Shape of Business.

The Birth of a National Urban Culture.

Thrills, Chills, and Toothpaste: The Emergence of Consumer Culture.

Defending the New Industrial Order.

Interpreting History: Andrew Carnegie and the “Gospel of Wealth.”

 

17. Challenges to Government and Corporate Power, 1877-1890.

 

Resistance to Legal and Military Authority.

Revolt in the Workplace.

Crosscurrents of Reform.

Interpreting History: Albert Parson’s Plea for Anarchy.

 

18. Political and Cultural Conflict in a Decade of Depression and War: The 1890s.

 

Frontiers at Home, Lost and Found.

The Search for Alliances.

American Imperialism.

Interpreting History: Proceedings of the Congressional Committee on the Philippines.

 

VII. REFORM AT HOME, REVOLUTION ABROAD, 1900-1929.

 

19. The Promise and Perils of Progressive Reform, 1900-1912.

 

Immigration: The Changing Face of the Nation.

Work, Science, and Leisure.

Reformers and Radicals.

Expanding National Power.

Interpreting History: Defining Whiteness.

 

20. War and Revolution, 1912-1920.

 

A World in Upheaval.

The Great War and American Neutrality.

The United States Goes to War.

The Struggle to Win the Peace.

Interpreting History: African American Women in the Great War.

 

21. All That Jazz: 1920s.

 

The Decline of Progressive Reform and the Business of Politics.

Hollywood and Harlem: National Cultures in Black and White.

Science on Trial.

Consumer Dreams and Nightmares.

Interpreting History: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

 

VIII. FROM DEPRESSION AND WAR TO WORLD POWER, 1929-1953.

 

22. Hardship and Hope: The Great Depression of the 1930s.

 

The Great Depression.

Presidential Responses to the Depression.

The New Deal.

A New Political Culture.

Interpreting History: Songs of the Great Depression.

 

23. Global Conflict: World War II, 1937-1945.

 

The United States Enters the War.

Total War.

The Home Front.

The End of the War.

Interpreting History: Zelda Webb Anderson, “You Just Met One Who Does Not Know How to Cook.”

 

24. Cold War and Hot War, 1945-1953.

 

The Uncertainties of Victory.

The Quest for Security.

American Security and Asia.

A Cold War Society.

Interpreting History: NSC-68.

 

IX. THE COLD WAR AT FULL TIDE, 1953-1979.

 

25. Domestic Dreams and Atomic Nightmares, 1953-1963.

 

Cold War, Warm Hearth.

The Civil Rights Movement.

The Eisenhower Years.

The Kennedy Era.

Interpreting History: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring.

 

26. The Nation Divides: The Vietnam War and Social Conflict, 1964-1971.

 

Lyndon Johnson and the Apex of Liberalism.

Into War in Vietnam.

The Movement.

The Conservative Response.

Interpreting History: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Vietnam War.

 

 

27. Reconsidering National Priorities, 1972-1979.

 

Twin Shocks: Détente and Watergate.

Discovering the Limits of the U.S. Economy.

Reshuffling Politics.

Diffusing the Women's Movement.

Interpreting History: The Church Committee and CIA Covert Operations.

 

X. GLOBAL CONNECTIONS AT HOME AND ABROAD, 1979-2006.

 

28. The Cold War Returns–and Ends, 1979-1991.

 

Anticommunism Revived.

Republican Rule at Home.

Cultural Conflict.

The End of the Cold War.

Interpreting History: Religion and Politics in the 1980s.

 

29. Post-Cold War America, 1991-2000.

 

The Economy: Global and Domestic.

Tolerance and Its Limits.

The Clinton Years.

The Contested Election of 2000.

Interpreting History: Vermont Civil Union Law.

 

30. A Global Nation in the New Millennium.

 

Politics in the New Millennium.

The American Place in a Global Economy.

The Stewardship of Natural Resources.

The Expansion of American Popular Culture Abroad.

Identity in Contemporary America.

Interpreting History: The Slow Food Movement.

 

Appendix.

 

The Declaration of Independence.

The Articles of Confederation.

The Constitution of the United States of America.

Amendments to the Constitution.

Presidential Elections.

Present Day United States.

Present Day World.

 

Glossary.