The Bill of Rights is an extraordinary collection of original documents, carefully introduced and put into context by historian John Patrick, that traces the origins of the Bill of Rights back to England's Magna Carta and its legal traditions through to present day controversies over freedoms of speech, religion, bearing arms, assembling, and more. Examples of challenges to the Bill of Rights include:
* The Sedition Act of 1798, which made it illegal to express criticism of the U.S. government
* The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II * George W. Bush's...

From slave ships to plantations to freedom, The Struggle Against Slavery traces the remarkable history of the heroic fight to end slavery, from its North American beginnings in the early 1600s to its violent demise in the mid-1800s with the Civil War. Captured in their own words from transcripts, diaries, memoirs, newspaper clippings, drawings, and other documents are the stories of how slaves and free blacks fought against the dehumanization of slavery by developing anti-racist arguments, creating their own institutions, physically escaping, and fighting with weapons. An exceptional...

The Civil War was not only a stunning event in military history; it defined the American people by forcing them to grapple with the founding principles of the nation. Rachel Seidman brings together an array of primary sources from the antebellum period, the war, and Reconstruction to provide a well-rounded account of this pivotal era. Political debates and military developments may occupy the historical foreground, but it is the letters, diary entries, memoirs, and testimony of blacks, Native Americans, women, children, farmers, and foot soldiers in the richly textured background that bring...

From Columbus's voyage in 1492 to the publication of the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, a former slave, in 1789, Jill Lepore, winner of the distinguished Bancroft Prize for history, brings to life in exciting, first-person detail some of the earliest events in American history in Encounters in the New World.
Providing fascinating commentary along the way, Lepore seamlessly links together primary sources that illustrate the powerful clash of cultures in the Americas. Through emotional eyewitness accounts -- memoirs, petitions, diaries, captivity narratives, private correspondence --...

The Vietnam War tells the story of one of the most divisive episodes in modern American history through primary sources, ranging from government documents, news reports, speeches, popular songs to memoirs, writings by Vietnam veterans (including coauthor John Fitzgerald), and poetry by Vietnamese and Americans on matching themes. The book begins in the 19th century when Vietnam became a French colony, and traces the insidious route by which the United States became involved in a war on the other side of the world.

The Depression and New Deal is a collection of primary sources documenting American life during the longest and deepest economic collapse in American history. From the prosperity and rampant consumerism of the 1920s, the book moves forward to cover the double shock of the stock market crash and dust bowl and then on to the recovery efforts of Roosevelt's New Deal. Some of the most revealing testaments to the times-including songs by Woody Guthrie, articles from sources as diverse as Fortune magazine and the communist periodical New Masses, murals and posters...

When many Americans think of the Gilded Age, they picture the mansions at Newport, Rhode Island, or the tenements of New York City. Indeed, the late 19th century was a period of extreme poverty thinly veiled by fabulous wealth. However, we should not remember the era only for the strides made by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie or social reformer Jane Addams. All Americans had to adjust to the dynamic social and economic changes of the Gilded Age--the booming industries, growing cities, increased ethnic and cultural diversity. African American W. E. B. Du Bois, Native American Sitting Bull, and...

Employing a wide range of primary source materials, Modern Japan: A History in Documents, Second Edition, provides a colorful narrative of Japan's development since 1600. A variety of diary entries, letters, legal documents, and poems brings to life the early modern years, when Japan largely shut itself off from the outside world. A picture essay highlights the tumultuous decade and a half following the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry and the U.S. Navy in 1853, which led to unprecedented changes and a new government. The dramatic rush to modernity in the late 1800s and early...

Offering a comprehensive account of the war as more than a purely military phenomenon, World War I: A History in Documents, Second Edition, also addresses its profound social, cultural, and economic implications. Authors Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee and Frans Coetzee use editorials, memoirs, newspaper articles, poems, and letters to re-create the many facets of the war. Technological developments such as the machine gun and barbed wire brought the world trench warfare, which is vividly depicted here in a firsthand account of then-soldier Benito Mussolini. An Atlantic Monthly essay by the...

Revolutionary Russia: A History in Documents provides a visually stimulating survey of revolutionary Russia, from the collapse of the autocracy in 1917 to the consolidation of the Stalinist system in the 1930s. Authors Robert Weinberg and Laurie Bernstein have collected far-flung documents--many available in English for the first time--and woven them into a narrative that focuses on the effort to build communism in Russia and its effects on the lives of ordinary people. Providing introductions to each chapter and document along with sidebars and detailed photo captions, the main text...