The American Promise Compact, Volume I: To 1877

The American Promise: A Compact History offers a unique mid-sized alternative to brief and full-sized texts alike. Designed to draw students into the book and spark their historical imagination, abundant artifacts in the visual program make history tangible and introduces students to material culture, while numerous voices of individuals in the narrative connect students to the people who embraced and contested America's promise. The narrative is condensed by the authors to provide just the right amount of text but not too much to preclude additional readings, and it is enhanced by an abundance of full-color visuals, special features, and study tools — usually paired only with full-length narratives — to engage and support students in every facet of their learning. The unique combination of narrative, visuals, features and study tools in this mid-sized book is offered at a price thirty percent lower than that of its full-length parent text, making the compact edition just the right choice for many courses.

JAMES L. ROARK is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History at Emory University. In 1993, he received the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2001-2002 he was the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University. He has written Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction. With Michael P. Johnson, he is author of Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South and editor of No Chariot Let Down: Charleston's Free People of Color on the Eve of the Civil War. He has received research assistance from the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

MICHAEL P. JOHNSON is professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. His publications include Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia; with James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South and No Chariot Let Down: Charleston's Free People of Color on the Eve of the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln, Slavery and the Civil War: Selected Writings and Speeches; and Reading the American Past: Selected Historical Documents, the documents reader for The American Promise. Johnson has been awarded research fellowships by the American Council of Learned Societies; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University; and the Times Mirror Foundation Distinguished Research Fellowship at the Huntington Library. He has directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College Teachers and has been honored with university awards for outstanding teaching. He won the William and Mary Quarterly award for best article in 2002 and the Organization of American Historians ABC-CLIO America: History and Life Award for best American history article in 2002.

PATRICIA CLINE COHEN is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has writtenA Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America and The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York. She has published articles on quantitative literacy, mathematics education, prostitution, and murder. Her scholarly work has received assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the University of California President's Fellowship in the Humanities, the Schlesinger Library, and the Newberry Library. In 2001-2002 she was the Distinguished Senior Mellon Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. She served as chair of the history department at Santa Barbara from 2002 to 2005. She is at work on a book about women's health advocate Mary Gove Nichols.

SARAH STAGE is professor of women's studies at Arizona State University. Her books include Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women's Medicine and Rethinking Women and Home Economics in the Twentieth Century, which has been translated for a Japanese edition. She has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Charles Warren Center for the Study of History at Harvard University, and the University of California President's Fellowship in the Humanities. She is at work on a book entitled Women and the Progressive Impulse in American Politics, 1890-1914.

ALAN LAWSON is professor of history at Boston College. He has written The Failure of Independent Liberalism and coedited From Revolution to Republic. While completing the forthcoming Ideas in Crisis: The New Deal and the Mobilization of Progressive Experience, he has published book chapters and essays on political economy, the cultural legacy of the New Deal, multiculturalism, and the arts in public life. He has served as editor of the Review of Education and the Intellectual History Newsletter. Under the auspices of the United States Information Agency, Lawson has served as coordinator and lecturer for programs to instruct faculty from foreign nations in the state of American historical scholarship and teaching.

SUSAN M. HARTMANN is professor of history at Ohio State University. She has written Truman and the 80th Congress; The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s; From Margin to Mainstream: Women and Politics since 1960; and The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment. Her work has been supported by the Truman Library Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. At Ohio State she has served as director of women's studies, and in 1995 she won the Exemplary Faculty Award in the College of Humanities. Her current research is on gender and the transformation of politics since 1945.