Americans: A Social History of the United States, 1587-1914

1015 pp. "Brilliantly recounts America's past and its bearing on how and why we live and think as we do today... investigates American traits for more than three centuries, charting the evolution of national attitudes and practices from pre-Colonial times to World War I. Even those phenomena that the author finds particularly deplorable -- slavery, Temperance, the excesses of estheticism -- receive their due as forces that shaped a new country." CONTENTS: Acknowledgments; Introduction; Prologue; The Big Water and the Big Woods: John Smith's America; Outlandersland: William Penn's America; At Home Abroad: William Byrd II's America; Thirteen Prosper: Benjamin Franklin's America; The American, This New Man: Oliver Evans' America; Ideas and the Almighty Dollar: Abraham Lincoln's America; A Chromo Civilization: Horatio Alger's America; The Midway Age: Mr. Dooley's America; Notes; Quoted Sources; Index.