Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Essential Histories

This book is a narrative history of the many dimensions of the War of 1812 - social, diplomatic, military and political - which places the war's origins and conduct in transatlantic perspective. The events of 1812-15 were shaped by the larger crisis of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. In synthesizing and reinterpreting scholarship on the war, Professor J. C. A. Stagg focuses on the war as a continental event, highlighting its centrality to Canadian nationalism and state development. The book introduces the war to students and general readers, concluding that it resulted in many ways from an emerging nation-state trying to contend with the effects of rival European nationalisms, both in Europe itself and in the Atlantic world.

Written as an introduction for undergraduate students, Unrequited Toil explores the history of American slavery from the American Revolution to post-Civil War Reconstruction. Personal narratives are used across twelve chronologically ordered chapters to explore themes such as politics, economics, labor, literature, rebellion, and social conditions.

Kort goes beyond the dominant orthodox narrative surrounding the Vietnam War, incorporating insight from revisionist scholarship on the war, to provide a comprehensive and concise case that the United States could and should have been able to win the war at far less cost than it suffered in defeat.

America's West: A History, 1890-1950 is a survey text, intended for undergraduate and graduate students. David M. Wrobel examines the regional history of the American West, including the march to overseas empire, the Progressive Era, the 1920s, the Great Depression and the New Deal, World War II, and the early Cold War years.

Useful for readers who want a clear and useful understanding of the origins and meaning of anti-Catholic bias in America, and the ironic role that such bias played in defining and sustaining some of the core values of American identity.

This book supplies crucial political history of the Northern war effort. It will be widely adopted in courses on American history and may also attract attention from the general audience interested in the Civil War. There is high interest on the heels of the sesquicentennial of the War.

Radicals in America offers the first complete and continuous history of left-wing social movements in the United States from the Second World War to the present. The book traces the full panoply of radical activist causes, demonstrating how successive generations join currents of dissent, face setbacks and political repression, and generate new challenges to the status quo.

This book provides a concise narrative history of the New Deal, exploring the important institutional, political, and cultural changes experienced by the United States during the Great Depression. Going into much greater depth than other recent histories of the period, this book integrates a command of the scholarly literature with a lively, engaging narrative.

This book analyzes the political culture of the American Sunbelt since the end of World War II. It highlights and explains the Sunbelt's emergence during the second half of the twentieth century as the undisputed geographic epicenter for conservative Republican power in the United States.

This book presents a new history of the most important conflict in European affairs during the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War. It describes the complex origins of the conflict, the collapse of the Spanish Republic and the outbreak of the only mass worker revolution in the history of Western Europe. Stanley Payne explains the character of the Spanish revolution and the complex web of republican politics, while also examining the development of Franco's counter-revolutionary dictatorship. Payne gives attention to the multiple meanings and interpretations of war and examines why the conflict provoked such strong reactions at the time, and long after. The book also explains the military history of the war and its place in the history of military development, the non-intervention policy of the democracies and the role of German, Italian and Soviet intervention, concluding with an analysis of the place of the war in European affairs, in the context of twentieth-century revolutionary civil wars.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s hundreds of thousands of white middle-class American youths suddenly became hippies. This short overview of the hippie social movement in the United States examines the movement's beliefs and practices.

This book asks and answers a number of key questions. Why were the atomic bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945? What role did they play in Japan's surrender? The book also explores the morality of the bombs' use and asks if it was right for the United States to use these powerful weapons.

Mass Appeal provides readers with an accessible and entertaining overview of the development of the movies, radio, and television, from the first sound movies through the 1970s. The book deftly fits the entertainment industry into the larger story of American history.

Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age examines the development of world societies and views large-scale interaction between civilizations as a driving force of history. Charles Parker argues that the formation of large empires; massive movement of peoples; spread of plants, animals and microbes; and diffusion of knowledge resulted in global regional interdependence by 1800.

This book explores the lure of market capitalism and the beginnings of industrialization in the United States. Lawson's research combines an appreciation for enterprise and innovation with recognition of negative and unanticipated consequences of the transition to capitalism and relates economic change to American freedom and self-determination, links that remain relevant today.

This is an account of the ideas about and public policies relating to the relationship between government and religion from the settlement of Virginia in 1607 to the presidency of Andrew Jackson, 1829-37. This book describes the impact and the relationship of various events, legislative, and judicial actions, including the English Toleration Act of 1689, the First and Second Great Awakenings, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights, and Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists. Four principles were paramount in the American approach to government's relation to religion: the importance of religion to public welfare; the resulting desirability of government support of religion (within the limitations of political culture); liberty of conscience and voluntaryism; the requirement that religion be supported by free will offerings, not taxation. Hutson analyzes and describes the development and interplay of these principles, and considers the relevance of the concept of the separation of church and state during this period.

This book, first published in 2007, offers a bold new interpretation of American business history during the formative years 1870-1920, which mark the dawn of modern big business. It focuses on four major revolutions that ushered in this new era: those in power, transportation, communication, and organization. Using the metaphor of America as an economic hothouse uniquely suited to rapid economic growth during these years, it analyzes the interplay of key factors such as entrepreneurial talent, technology, land, natural resources, law, mass markets, and the rise of cities. It also delineates the process that laid the foundation for the modern era, in which virtually every human activity became a business, and, in most cases, a big business. The book also profiles numerous major entrepreneurs whose careers and activities illustrate broader trends and themes. It utilizes a wide variety of sources, including novels from the period, to produce a lively narrative.

During the Cold War a series of spy trials revealed that American Communists had co-operated with Soviet espionage and assisted in stealing secrets of the atomic bomb as well as penetrating the White House. This book, first published in 2006, reviews these trials and the clashes between the American criminal justice system and counter-espionage.

This is the story of one of the most far-reaching human endeavors in history: the quest for mental well-being. From its origins in the eighteenth century to its wide scope in the early twenty-first, this search for emotional health and welfare has cost billions. In the name of mental health, millions around the world have been tranquilized, institutionalized, psycho-analyzed, sterilized, lobotomized and even euthanized. Yet at the dawn of the new millennium, reported rates of depression and anxiety are unprecedentedly high. Drawing on years of field research, Ian Dowbiggin argues that if the quest for emotional well-being has reached a crisis point in the twenty-first century, it is because mass society is enveloped by cultures of therapism and consumerism, which increasingly advocate bureaucratic and managerial approaches to health and welfare.

This book examines American engagement with the world from the fall of Soviet communism through the opening years of the Trump administration. While Timothy J. Lynch argues that the Cold War cast a shadow on every president that came after it, he finds that the US remained the world's dominant power.