Joyce Oldham Appleby, PhD

With its deep roots and global scope, the capitalist system provides the framework for our lives--a framework of constant change, sometimes measured and predictable, sometimes drastic and out of control. Yet what is now ubiquitous was not always so. Capitalism took shape centuries ago, starting with a handful of isolated changes in farming, trade, and manufacturing, clustered in early-modern England. Astute observers began to notice these changes and consider their effects. Those in power began to harness these new practices to the state, enhancing both. A system generating wealth, power, and new ideas arose to reshape societies in a constant surge of change. Approaching capitalism as a culture, as important for its ideas and values as for its inventions and systems, award-winning historian Joyce Appleby gives us a fascinating introduction to this most potent creation of mankind from its origins to the present.--From publisher description.

THE FIRST GENERATION of Americans—inherited a truly new world—and, with it, the task of working out the terms of Independence. Anyone who started a business, marketed a new invention, ran for office, formed an association, or wrote for publication was helping to fashion the world’s first liberal society. These are the people we encounter in Inheriting the Revolution, a vibrant tapestry of the lives, callings, decisions, desires, and reflections of those Americans who turned the new abstractions of democracy, the nation, and free enterprise into contested realities. Through data gathered on thousands of people, as well as hundreds of memoirs and autobiographies, Joyce Appleby tells myriad intersecting stories of how Americans who lived between 1776 and 1830 reinvented themselves and their society in politics, economics, reform, religion, and culture. They also had to grapple with the new distinction of free and slave labor, with all its divisive social entailments; the rout of Enlightenment rationality by the warm passions of religious awakening; the explosion of small business opportunities for young people eager to break out of their parents’ colonial cocoon. Few in the nation escaped the transforming intrusiveness of these changes. Working these experiences into a vivid picture of American cultural renovation, Appleby crafts an extraordinary—and deeply affecting—account of how the first generation established its own culture, its own nation, its own identity. The passage of social responsibility from one generation to another is always a fascinating interplay of the inherited and the novel; this book shows how, in the early nineteenth century, the very idea of generations resonated with new meaning in the United States. From the dust jacket.

The author claims that liberal assumptions color everything American, from ideas about human nature to fears about big government. Not the dreaded "L" word of the 1988 presidential campaign; liberalism in its historical context emerged from the modern faith in free inquiry, natural rights, economic liberty, and democratic government. The author contrasts this view with classical republicanism--ornate, aristocratic, prescriptive, and concerned with the common good. The two concepts, as the author shows, posed choices in their day and in ours, specifically in addressing the complex relations between individual and community, personal liberty and the common good, aspiration and practical wisdom.

"A Restless Past carefully examines the ways in which the dynamic events of the second half of the twentieth century have significantly altered how historians approach the past and highlights the incredible power they hold in shaping a national identity. Through the considerable ideological shifts of the last half century, historians have responded by asking new questions about those who preceded us and creating powerful identities for those who had been long ignored."--Jacket.

Students explore the history of our nation in a whole new way with the first fully integrated print and digital curriculum for today's technology-ready students. Networks combines print resources grounded in solid pedagogy with a full suite of teaching and learning tools for a flexible, customized learning experience. - Publisher.

Presents more than nine hundred alphabetized entries and related essays on topics and important figures in the history of American women from 1585 to 2001, as well as several source documents.

We have lost our grip on historical truth. Popular films depict subterranean conspiracies that shape historical events and public knowledge of those events. Best-selling narrative histories dissolve the border between fact and fiction, allowing the author's imagination to roam freely. Influential critics dissolve the author herself into one among many sources of meaning, reducing historical knowledge to a series of texts engaged with each other, not with the past. Powerful constituencies call for histories that affirm more than inform. This new book by three of our most accomplished historians engages the various criticisms that have fragmented the authority of historical knowledge. Although acknowledging degrees of legitimacy in the criticisms, the authors launch a pragmatic response that supports the historian, as they put it, in her long climb, notebook computer in tow, up the 300 stairs to the archives in Lyon. Even if historical truth is an ever-receding goal, the effort to approach it, they show, is legitimate, worthy, and governed by agreed-upon rules. And while affirming the claims of women and ethnic minorities to a rightful place in any narrative of American history, the authors insist on the accountability of history. They outline a coherent narrative of the American past that incorporates its multicultural dimension without special pleading. From the dust jacket.

Each lesson includes a variety of print-based and digital activities designed to teach a range of skills, including: critical thinking skills, visual skills, reading skills, technology skills, and writing skills. Each chapter planner concludes with intervention and remediation strategies for every lesson, as well as online resources that can be used to help students understand the content. Each lesson ends with activities designed to help students link the content to the lessons Guiding Questions and the chapters Essential Questions special features include: analyzing primaries sources, analyzing supreme court cases, biography, thinking like a historian. Each chapter ends with a chapter assessment that includes the following: Lesson Review, 21st Century Skills, exploring the Essential Question, analyzing Historical Documents, Extended-response Question. Chapters include Creating a Nation, Settling the West, Industrialization, Urban America, Becoming a World Power, The Progressive Movement, World War I and Its Aftermath, The Jazz Age, The Great Depression Begins, Roosevelt and the New Deal, A World in Flames, America and World War II, The Cold War Begins, Post-war America, The New Frontier and the Great Society, The Civil Rights Movement, The Vietnam War, The Politics of Protest, Politics and Economics, The Resurgence of Conservatism, A Time of Change, America's Challenges for a New Century.

Recounts the triumphs and mishaps of Columbus and other explorers, following the naturalists--both famous and obscure--whose investigations of the world's fauna and flora fueled the rise of science and technology that propelled Western Europe towards modernity.