America Firsthand, Volume I: Readings from Settlement to Reconstruction

This distinctive, class-tested primary source reader tells America’s story through the words and other creative expressions of the ordinary and extraordinary Americans who shaped it. Now featuring the contributions of new co-author John M. Giggie, an award-winning teacher and scholar from the University of Alabama, America Firsthand offers a remarkable range of first-person perspectives that bring the past vividly to life — from an African American minister’s message of racial liberation, to the prison notes of suffragists, to a writer’s recollections of Sputnik. “Points of View” sections provide varied vantage points on important topics, and “Visual Portfolios” draw students into interpreting the visual record. This carefully crafted, ready-to-go collection saves instructors time and effort in finding consistently engaging and informative sources.

Anthony Marcus is an Associate Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. He has published widely on urban public policy, American legal history, African American history and culture, and economic and social development in America and abroad. His book, Where Have All the Homeless Gone: The Making and Unmaking of a Crisis looks at political discourses on poverty and public policy from the Great Depression to the Clinton era.

John M. Giggie is an Associate Professor of history at the University of Alabama. His published works include articles on nineteenth-century America, southern U.S. history, and U.S. religion, as well as his recently published books After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875–1915 and Faith in the Market: Religion and the Rise of Urban Commercial Culture. His current research projects include African American religion and the Civil War; early blues music; and religion and the civil rights movement.

David Burner, late professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote two books on John F. Kennedy, as well as books on Herbert Hoover, the 1960s, the Democratic Party in the 1920s, and a number of textbooks.