Major Problems in American History, Volume II: Since 1865

Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, the MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY series introduces readers to both primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in U.S. history. This collection serves as a primary anthology for introductory U.S. history, covering the subject’s entire chronological span. Comprehensive topical coverage includes politics, economics, labor, gender, culture, and social trends. The Third Edition features greater focus on visual and cultural sources throughout. Several chapters now include images, songs and poems to give readers a better "feel" for the time period and events under discussion.

Jon Gjerde died in October 2008. He was Alexander F. and May T. Morrison professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1982. His areas of expertise included nineteenth-century America with particular reference to immigration and religion, and he published some thirty articles on these subjects. He also published FROM PEASANTS TO FARMERS: THE MIGRATION FROM BALESTRAND, NORWAY, TO THE UPPER MIDDLE WEST (1985) and THE MINDS OF THE WEST: THE ETHNOCULTURAL EVOLUTION OF THE RURAL MIDDLE WEST, 1830-1917 (1997), both of which won the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award of the Immigration History Society for the best book in agricultural history.

Elizabeth Cobbs, Professor and Dwight E. Stanford Chair in American Foreign Relations at San Diego State University, has won literary prizes for both history and fiction: the Allan Nevins Prize, Stuart Bernath Book Prize, San Diego Book Award, and Director’s Mention for the Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction. Her books include AMERICAN UMPIRE (2013), BROKEN PROMISES; A NOVEL OF THE CIVIL WAR (2011), ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE: THE PEACE CORPS AND THE 1960s (2000), and THE RICH NEIGHBOR POLICY (1992). She has served on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize in History and on the Historical Advisory Committee of the U.S. State Department. She has received awards and fellowships from the Fulbright Commission; Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace; Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Organization of American States; American Philosophical Society; Rockefeller Foundation, and other distinguished institutions. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, Jerusalem Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, China Daily News, National Public Radio, Washington Independent, San Diego Union, and Reuters. Her current project is a history of women soldiers in World War One.

Edward J. Blum is a Professor of History at San Diego State University. A scholar of religion and race, he is the co-author of THE COLOR OF CHRIST: THE SON OF GOD AND THE SAGA OF RACE IN AMERICA (2012) and the author of W. E. B. DU BOIS, AMERICAN PROPHET (2007) and REFORGING THE WHITE REPUBLIC: RACE, RELIGION, AND AMERICAN NATIONALISM, 1865–1898 (2005). An award-winning author and teacher, Blum is currently at work on a project that explores issues of radical evil during the era of the Civil War. Blum has been a fellow with the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and with the National Endowment for the Humanities.