American Passages: A History of the United States (with InfoTrac and American Journey Online), Compact Edition, Volume I: To 1877 (Advantage) - Softcover

Edward L. Ayers is Hugh P. Kelly Professor of History at the University of Virginia, where he has recently been named Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He is also Executive Director of the Center for Digital History, an institute at the University of Virginia dedicated to crafting and teaching history in new media. His digital project, "The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War," was ranked by the ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA as one of the top forty education sites in the world and named the best Civil War site by Yahoo! Ayers has written and edited several books, one of which, THE PROMISE OF THE NEW SOUTH: LIFE AFTER RECONSTRUCTION (1992), was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Ayers has won numerous teaching awards. He is the author of Chapters 9?15.

"The AMERICAN PASSAGES site is by far the most thorough, the best organized, and most effective Web site that I have seen. It includes a first rate collection of online primary resources not available elsewhere. ' Thanks for great textbooks and a fantastic Web site!"

"The 'Passages' sections provide extremely useful overviews of each section's main themes. ' The timelines are also useful for showing the students that different events occurred simultaneously."

"I particularly like the organization of the chapters'especially the fact that they cover social, economic, and political events within a chronological framework that doesn't seem chopped up. It's sometimes hard to provide both a topical and chronological focus in a way that makes sense to students and yet is true to the evolution of events and trends."

"'PASSAGES has perhaps the best collection of illustrations, maps, and photos of any text I have seen. What makes this collection even more effective is that they seem to appear at the right time in the text. ' I have thought many times that photos, and especially their placement, were an afterthought'but Passages gives me the impression that a great deal of planning'went into the production process."