America Firsthand, Volume One: Readings from Settlement to Reconstruction

With its distinctive focus on ordinary people, this primary documents reader offers a remarkable range of perspectives on America’s history from those who lived it — from Jews in the Early Republic to strikers at an auto plant in 1940s Detroit, and from a Civil War battlefield nurse to a 1990s dot.com entrepreneur. Popular Points of View sections expose students to different perspectives on a specific event or topic, and Visual Portfolios invite analysis of the visual record. These features and the collection as a whole save instructors time finding consistently suitable source material on their own.

ROBERT D. MARCUS, late of the State University of New York College at Brockport, wrote on late-nineteenth-century American politics as well as on the United States in the 1960s. He developed materials for collaborative learning techniques and edited several dozen books for Brandywine Press.

DAVID BURNER, professor emeritus of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has written two books on John F. Kennedy as well as books on Herbert Hoover, the 1960s, and the Democratic Party in the 1920s, including a number of textbooks. Burner has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and is now completing a detailed history of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

ANTHONY MARCUS is an Associate Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. He has taught American History, Anthropology, and International Development Studies on three continents and founded Australia's only entirely online Internet PhD program. His published works include numerous articles and books on history, African-American life, global development and culture. His most recent book, Where Have All The Homeless Gone? The Making and Unmaking of a Crisis is about the impact of the Reagan Revolution on life and social policy in the urban United States.