W. Humphrey, April 1782).
4.7 The Great Seal of the United States.
5.1 “America Triumphant and Britannia in Distress.” Frontispiece, Weatherwise’s Town and Country Almanac (Boston, 1782).
5.2 “The Federal Pillars,” August 2, 1788.
5.3 Map showing populations of free and slave states.
5.4 “Massachusetts Mechanic Association” [n.d. Engraver Samuel Hill, i766?-i804).
5.5 A slave auction in the South, from an original sketch by Theodore R. Davis, published in Harper’s Weekly, July i3, i86i.
5.6 “Southern Ideas of Liberty” (Boston, i835).
5.7 “The hurly-burly pot” (New York, James Baillie, 1850).
6.1 “Arms of ye Confederacie” (G.H. Heap Inv., 1862).
6.2 “The Southern Confederacy a Fact!!! Acknowledged by a Mighty Prince and Faithful Ally” (Philadelphia
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6.3 Map of the Civil War.
6.4 “Across the Continent (Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way),” by Fanny F. Palmer (New York:
Currier & Ives, 1868).
6.5 “Emancipation,” by Thomas Nast (Philadelphia: King and Beard, c. 1865).
6.6 “The Conquered Banner” (New Orleans: A.E. Blackmar,
i866).
6.7 “The Stride of a Century” (New York: Currier and Ives, c. 1876).
7.1 “This is a white man’s government” (Thomas Nast).
7.2 “Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make” (Thomas Nast).
7.3 “The Union as it was/The Lost Cause worse than slavery.”
7.4 “The color line still exists - in this case” (1879).
7.5 The body of John Heith (sometimes designated Heath), lynched in February 1884, in Tombstone, Arizona.
7.6 “Gotham Court.”
7.7 “Looking Backward” (Joseph Keppler).
7.8 “‘Move on!’ Has the Native American no rights that the naturalized American is bound to respect?”
(Thomas Nast).
8.1 “The Deadly Parallel” (Artist: W. A. Rogers).
8.2 “History repeats itself” (Louis Dalrymple, 1896).
8.3 “The big type war of the yellow kids” (Leon Barritt).
8.4 “Lyman H. Howe’s new marvels in moving pictures” (Courier Lithograph Company, New York, c. 1898).
8.5 “School Begins” (Louis Dalrymple, 1899).
8.6 “Welcome home!” (William Allen Rogers, 1909).
8.7 “That liberty shall not perish from the earth”
(Joseph Pennell, 1918).
9.1 Crowds at the burial ceremony of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington (i92i).
9.2 Empire State Building, New York City. View of Chrysler Building and Queensboro Bridge, low viewpoint.
9.3 New York City Deputy Police Commissioner John A. Leach (right) overseeing agents pour liquor into a sewer following a police raid during Prohibition (c. 1921).
9.4 Ku Klux Klan parade, Washington, DC (Pennsylvania Avenue), September 13, 1926.
9.5 This illustration appeared in Prof. and Mrs John W. Gibson, Social Purity: or, The Life of the Home and Nation (New York: J.L. Nichols, 1903).
9.6 Depression refugees from Iowa (Dorothea Lange, 1936).
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9.7 Pearl Harbor, December 1941 (Official U.S. Navy Photograph).
10.1 “Americans will always fight for liberty,” poster produced by the U.S. Office of War Information.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZC4-9540).
10.2 “Ours to fight for... ” (Norman Rockwell, 1943).
10.3 First-grade children at the Weill public school in San Francisco pledging allegiance to the flag (Photo by Dorothea Lange, April 1942).
10.4 “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” (February 23, 1945).
10.5 Atomic explosion over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
10.6 Korean War Memorial, Washington, DC (Photo by Peter Wilson).
10.7 Civil Rights March on Washington (Warren K. Leffler, August 28, 1963).
11.1 Ku Klux Klan members and opponents clash at a Klan demonstration in support of Barry Goldwater’s campaign for nomination at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco in July 1964 (Photo by Warren K. Leffler).
11.2 The Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara referring to a map of Vietnam at a press conference in April i965 (Photo by Marion S. Trikosko, April 26, 1965).
11.3 The aftermath of the Washington, DC, riot in i968 (Photo by Warren K. Leffler, April 8, 1968).
11.4 An antiwar protest in front of the White House following singer Eartha Kitt’s criticism of the Vietnam War (Photo by Warren K. Leffler, January 19, 1968).
11.5 A demonstration at the Democratic National Convention in New York in 1976 in support of the “pro-choice” lobby and against the anti-abortion presidential candidate Ellen McCormack, whose platform was firmly pro-life (Photo by Warren K. Leffler, July 14, 1976).
11.6 A gay rights demonstration at the Democratic National Convention in New York in 1976 (Photo by Warren K. Leffler, July ii, 1976).
11.7 World Trade Center after its collapse during the 9/11 terrorist attack.
3 .i The original thirteen colonies, in order of settlement
page 74 223
7.1 American foreign-born population, 1850-1920
No general history of any nation can be accomplished without recourse to the work of other scholars and more detailed monographs on all aspects of that nation’s development. In the case of the United States, one has a great wealth of scholarship to draw on. If the history of the land that became the United States of America is sometimes described as brief, its historians have more than made up for this in the depth of their analysis, the rigor of their research, and the extent of their enthusiasm. There are far too many of them to name individually, but the Guide to Further Reading at the end of this volume offers at least some indication of the range of their work, and the extent of my debt to colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. This particular volume has benefitted from the insights afforded by those who commented on earlier drafts, to the work of Joy Mizan, to Cecilia Mackay for the pictures, and to Ken Karpinski at Aptara and the copyediting team at PETT Fox Inc for editorial expertise. Ultimately, however, it owes its existence to Peter J. Parish and its eventual appearance to the persistence, patience, and much appreciated encouragement of Marigold Acland at Cambridge University Press.
The Making of a New World
Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
(Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, 1976)
Any historian of the United States working in Europe may easily lose count of the number of times she is advised - by students, by colleagues, by friends and family, by complete strangers - that the history she studies is a short one. The observation is frequently accompanied by a wry smile; a short history, it is implied, therefore a simple history. And anyway, short or long, who needs to study it? Don’t we all know it? Are we not all thoroughly imbued, or infected, depending on one’s perspective, with American culture? Does it not permeate our lives through television, film, popular literature, the Internet? Are we not as familiar with American culture, with American politics, as we are with our own? Perhaps even more familiar; perhaps there is no culture anymore, beyond that refracted through American-dominated media and communications networks. We live in the global village, and the corner store is a 7-11. Is America not in the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the music we listen to, and the Web we surf? America’s history is already internationally inscribed. It is not just in the political landscape of the East Coast, the racially informed social landscape of the South, the reservation lands of the Dakotas, the borderlands of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. It is much bigger than that. It is a history frequently contorted through the entertainment industry that is Hollywood, encountered in the heritage industry built on Plymouth Rock, and, above all, commemorated first, in the national landscape at Valley Forge, Stone’s River, and Gettysburg, and then the global one, at Aisne-Marne and Belleau Wood, near Omaha Beach, Normandy, and at Son My. Why go looking for America? Surely it is everywhere.