Who Built America? - Softcover

"This is an amazing job. The text reads as if it were the work of a single, eloquent, spirited and committed writer. The material is rich and interesting, the language forceful and compelling...the production of the book does it proud." --Roger Kennedy, Director of the National Museum of American History, on Who Built America? Volume One

"The first accessible yet sophisticated reinterpretation of early U.S. history based on the new social history. Who Built America? [Volume One] clearly reveals ours as a land of many peoples, and so it will be welcomed not only by history teachers who believe workers and the labor movement have been left out of history books but also by those high school and college educators who want to address an increasingly diverse student population with a multicultural approach to U.S. history." --James Green, Boston Globe

"My task would have been easier if I had been using Who Built America? as [my] course text. Who Built America?, Volume One, offers the most effective visual record of 18th- and 19th-century America that I have seen in text... [presenting] the graphics as documents to be analyzed and interpreted in their own right.... Similarly the written documents...bring the values, aspirations, and prejudices of the past alive and help students to understand the kinds of records from which history is constructed."
--Elizabeth Blackmar, Columbia University

Workers, women and minorities are the focus of a volume more successful as a textbook than as a history for the general reader. At its best, this offers enlightening glimpses of the impact of white settlers on American Indians, early stirrings of the labor movement, the hardships imposed by slavery, and "the capacity of ordinary people to alter the very process of history." However, the book is marred by sweeping assertions ("More and more people were now making their living in ways that challenged the values of the revolutionary generation"), a careless blunder (that Andrew Johnson was not impeached) and a relentless contempt for wealth: virtue is here the province of those with modest means. Also, this America is inhabited not so much by individuals as by economic groups: the British "invaders" (meaning the colonists, not Redcoat soldiers), Northern merchant elite, mill women, landlords and, of course, the "poor, cringing tenant." The text is liberally embellished with contemporaneous drawings, cartoons, photographs and prose excerpts.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.