About the Book
Presents primary source readings in American history to help students identify with the nation's past. American Conversations is a two-volume anthology of original primary sources in United States history. It features texts by famous and obscure Americans, seeking to reflect the voices of Native Americans, African Americans, women, and workers out of the backwaters onto the historical mainstream by devoting attention to these "forgotten" Americans. At the same time, the text acquaints students with leading figures and core texts. This juxtaposition offers a richer understanding of American history. The people and texts presented will resonate powerfully with the contemporary American conversation. Whatever today's topic-race relations, the battle of the sexes, protest or piety, or unum vs. pluribus-readers will find its roots in these pages. A better teaching and learning experience This program will provide a better teaching and learning experience-for you and your students.
Here's how: *Personalize Learning- MySearchLab delivers proven results in helping students succeed, provides engaging experiences that personalize learning, and comes from a trusted partner with educational expertise and a deep commitment to helping students and instructors achieve their goals.*Improve Critical Thinking- Suggested answers and discussion topics are provided in the appendix.*Engage Students- Images are used as an indispensable tool for illuminating the past. To sharpen the reader's eye, American Conversations includes three chapters devoted exclusively to visual texts. Additionally, substantive head notes accompany the longer passages.*Support Instructors- MySearchLab and Class Preparation are available. For volume 1 of this text, search ISBN-10: 0132446839 Note: MySearchLab does not come automatically packaged with this text. To purchase MySearchLab, please visit: www.mysearchlab.com or you can purchase a ValuePack of the text + MySearchLab (at no additional cost): ValuePack ISBN-10: 0205840159 / ValuePack ISBN-13: 9780205840151.
Table of Contents:
Found in this Section: 1. Brief Table of Contents 2. Full Table of Contents 1. BRIEF TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgements About the Authors Introduction Chapter 1: "...We contend that the employer has no right to speculate on starvation..." Chapter 2: "Today we find collisions between...capital and labor, when there should be combination." Chapter 3: "How does it feel to be a problem?" Chapter 4: "The failure of the melting-pot, far from closing the great American democratic experiment, means that it has only just begun." Chapter 5: "Women, more than men, succumb to marriage." Chapter 6: "I am an American individualist." Chapter 7: "They're just working. They don't know what for. They're just in a rut and keep on in it." Chapter 8: "Let us now praise famous men..." Chapter 9: "They are now at the crossroads." Chapter 10: "Freedom of Speech...Freedom to Worship...Freedom from Want...Freedom from Fear." Chapter 11: "God or man?" Chapter 12: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..." Chapter 13: "A big-shouldered youth with sideburns and a full-lipped face wandered slowly on stage..." Chapter 14: "...(A) secure and reasonably happy household, a contented and proud husband...(T)hese creations call for the distinctive talents of women." Chapter 15: "I invite you to sit down in front of your television set...I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland." Chapter 16: "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." Chapter 17: "We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love." Chapter 18: "We don't go for segregation. We go for separation." Chapter 19: "I can't get out, and I can't finish it with what I have got. And I don't know what the hell to do!" Chapter 20: "Bitch is Beautiful." Chapter 21: "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Chapter 22: "Whatever happened to civic engagement?" Chapter 23: "Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world." Afterword Further Readings 2. FULL TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgements About the Authors Introduction Chapter 1: "...We contend that the employer has no right to speculate on starvation..." Workers and Owners Battle During the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 A Striker, Fair Wages (1877) Thomas A. Scott, The Recent Strikes (1877) Chapter 2: "Today we find collisions between...capital and labor, when there should be combination." Andrew Carnegie Counsels Class Cooperation An Employer's View of the Labor Question (1886) Results of the Labor Struggle (1886) Chapter 3: "How does it feel to be a problem?" W. E. B. Du Bois Calls for an American Pluralism Of Our Spiritual Strivings (1903) Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others (1903) Chapter 4: "The failure of the melting-pot, far from closing the great American democratic experiment, means that it has only just begun." Randolph Bourne Transcends the "Melting-Pot" Idea Trans-National America (1916) Chapter 5: "Women, more than men, succumb to marriage." Crystal Eastman Reimagines the Institution of Marriage Marriage Under Two Roofs (1923) Chapter 6: "I am an American individualist." Herbert Hoover Champions Individualist Values American Individualism (1923) Chapter 7: "They're just working. They don't know what for. They're just in a rut and keep on in it." Robert and Helen Lynd Search for Modern America Middletown (1929) Chapter 8: "Let us now praise famous men..." Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange Photograph the Great Depression James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) Walker Evans, Photographs from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1936) Dorothea Lange, "Migrant Mother" (1936) Chapter 9: "They are now at the crossroads." Charles Kikuchi Copes With War Relocation The Kikuchi Diary: Chronicle From an American Concentration Camp (1973) Dorothea Lange, Photographs of the Japanese Internment (1942) Chapter 10: "Freedom of Speech...Freedom to Worship...Freedom from Want...Freedom from Fear." Norman Rockwell Sees America as It Sees Itself "Four Freedoms Poster" ("Ours to Fight For") (1942) Chapter 11: "God or man?" Whittaker Chambers Defends the Anticommunist Impulse Witness(1952) Chapter 12: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..." Allen Ginsberg Begins the Counterculture Howl (1956) Chapter 13: "A big-shouldered youth with sideburns and a full-lipped face wandered slowly on stage..." Elvis Presley Shakes Up America Jean Yothers, Presley Makes 'Em Shriek, Yell, Jump (1956) Ralph J. Gleason, Presley Leaves You in a Blue Suede Funk (1956) William McPhillips, Elvis Hits Town and Teenagers Turn Out(1956) Anne Rowe, Broom-Sweeping Elvis a Regular Guy (1956) 14,600 Fans Squeal, Jump as Elvis Shakes, Gyrates (1957) Chapter 14: "...(A) secure and reasonably happy household, a contented and proud husband...(T)hese creations call for the distinctive talents of women." Life Magazine Examines "The American Woman" of the 1950s An Introduction by Mrs. Peter Marshall (1956) Mary Ellen Chase, She Misses Some Goals (1956) Emily Kimbrough, She Needs Some Years of Grace (1956) Busy Wife's Achievements (1956) Phyllis McGinley, Women are Wonderful (1956) Cornelia Otis Skinner, Women are Misguided (1956) Chapter 15: "I invite you to sit down in front of your television set...I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland." Newton Minow Takes On Television's "Wasteland" Television and the Public Interest (0000) Chapter 16: "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." Andy Warhol Celebrates the Mundane Marilyn Diptych (1962) Two Hundred Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) Five Coke Bottles (1962) Chapter 17: "We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love." Students for a Democratic Society Revives American Radicalism Students for a Democratic Society, Port Huron Statement (1962) Chapter 18: "We don't go for segregation. We go for separation." Malcolm X Rejects American Pluralism Twenty Million Black People in a Political, Economic, and Mental Prison (1963) Chapter 19: "I can't get out, and I can't finish it with what I have got. And I don't know what the hell to do!" Vietnam Traps Lyndon Johnson Excerpts from White House Tapes (1964-65) Chapter 20: "Bitch is Beautiful." Jo Freeman Redefines the American Woman The Bitch Manifesto (1968) Chapter 21: "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Ronald Reagan Confronts Marxism and Big Government Encroaching Control (1961) A Time for Choosing (1964) First Inaugural Address (1981) Address to Members of the British Parliament (1982) Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando (1983) Remarks at the Brandenburg Gate (1987) Chapter 22: "Whatever happened to civic engagement?" Robert Putnam Decries the Solitary Bowler Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital (1995) Chapter 23: "Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world." Samuel Huntington Imagines a Post-9/ 11 World The Clash of Civilizations? (1993) Afterword Further Readings
About the Author :
James Merrell, editor of Volume I of The American Conversation, Lucy Maynard Salmon Professor of History at Vassar College, has been studying history for thirty years, writing and publishing it for twenty-five, and teaching it for more than twenty -- mostly at Vassar, with brief stints at Northwestern and William and Mary. Though he has taught everything from Machiavelli to McCarthy, from Luther to LBJ, his main area of interest is American history from the dawn of European colonization to the close of Reconstruction some three centuries later. Born and raised in Minnesota, Professor Merrell earned degrees at Lawrence University and Oxford University before receiving his Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University. Prior to arriving at Vassar in 1984, he was a Fellow at The Newberry Library Center for the History of the American Indian in Chicago and the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg. He has also received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Merrell's research interests are in early American history in general and relations between Natives and newcomers in particular. Co-editor of three volumes (two anthologies by Routledge and one by Syracuse University Press) and author of numerous articles, his first book, The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (University of North Carolina Press, 1989) won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians as well as the Bancroft Prize. His second book, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (W.W. Norton, 1999), was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won Professor Merrell his second Bancroft Prize, making him only the fifth historian ever to win that prestigious award twice. Jerald Podair, editor of Volume II of The American Conversation, is associate professor of history and was appointed the Robert S. French Professor of American Studies. A specialist in 20th-century United States history, his research interests include urban history and ethnic and racial relations. His current book projects are a study of the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, a biography of baseball mogul Walter O'Malley, and a primary-source anthology in United States history after 1877 titled The American Conversation, written in collaboration with Professor James H. Merrell, '75, of Vassar College. Professor Podair's doctoral thesis at Princeton University, "Like Strangers: Blacks, Whites, and New York City's Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis," was awarded the 1998 Allan Nevins Prize by the Society of American Historians as the best-written dissertation in American history to appear that year. It was published as a book under the title The Strike That Changed New York by Yale University Press in 2002 and was a finalist for the Organization of American Historians' Liberty Legacy Foundation Award and honorable mention for the Urban History Association's Book Award. In addition to teaching courses in 19th and 20th-century American history and upper-level courses on the Civil War; the 1920s, Great Depression, and New Deal; the 1960s; and American race relations, he also teaches, with Paul Cohen, professor of history and the Patricia Hamar Boldt Professor of Liberal Studies, the history department's capstone course, The Practice of History, in which he supervises senior history majors on research projects that often result in papers presented at the annual Richard A. Harrison Symposium for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Review :
"The 3 greatest strengths of the book are: 1) the variety of topics and selections included, 2) the inclusion of both best-sellers and little-known publications, 3) the introductions are generally thoughtful and well-written." -Carol Sue Humphrey, Oklahoma Baptist University "I am thoroughly impressed with the narrative from start to finish. The author sets a very high bar with the first chapter and he continues through the last...It emphasizes depth over breadth, it contains documents rarely used in similar readers, and the chapter introductions contextual the documents better than most others." -Jeffrey G. Strickland, Montclair State University "The biographical information about each source is thorough and the use of recent secondary literature is very good." -Rebecca Hill, Borough of Manhattan Community College "The book has strong analysis of the documents and loads of information about the writers and various topics...Most of the chapters contain penetrating questions weaved into the analysis of each introduction. The questions will help the students with the readings. The author has provided analysis that will help the students on their way to answering the questions, but not gone so far as to give the reader the answers in the intros." -Robert O'Brien, Lonestar College-CyFair "The greatest strengths of this work are the use of longer excerpts from fewer texts...the vivid, informed and engaging introductory essays, and the constant "cross-fertilization" and layering of the sources. I love the way the editor models historical analysis. He provides the necessary contexts for understanding these documents as well as a very helpful and current bibliography. I don't see how students could complain about already knowing the subject matter when they are challenged to think so differently about the practice of history." -Linda K. Salvucci, Trinity University
