The Essential America

The Essential America is a fundamentals version of the Tindall/Shi narrative packaged in an eye-popping, four-color design.

The oversized page and double-column layout make the text accessible and highlight the book’s impressive art program. The text’s outstanding pedagogy keeps the central themes of the narrative in sight throughout.

George Brown Tindall spent many years on the faculty of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He was an award-winning historian of the South with a number of major books to his credit, including The Emergence of the New South.


David Emory Shi?is president emeritus and professor emeritus at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. After receiving his PhD from the University of Virginia, he taught for seventeen years at Davidson College, where he won the Distinguished Teaching Award and served as History Department Chair. In addition to authoring the best-selling America: A Narrative History family of books, he is the author of several books focusing on American cultural history, including the award-winning?The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture?and?Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920. While serving as a Trustee at several colleges, he remains highly engaged with students and instructors around the country with his many annual “author-in-residence” campus visits.

Thomas Lee Pearcy is professor of history at Slippery Rock University. An outstanding scholar of print and multimedia sources, he regularly teaches survey courses in American and Latin American history.