Major Problems in American History, Volume I

Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, the MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY series introduces you to both primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in U.S. history. This collection serves as the primary anthology for the introductory survey course, covering the subject’s entire chronological span. Comprehensive topical coverage includes politics, economics, labor, gender, culture, and social trends. The fourth edition has been revised to reflect two new historiographical trends: the emergence of the history of religion as an exceptionally lively field and the internationalization of American history. Several chapters include images, songs, and poems to give you a better “feel” for the time period and events under discussion. Key pedagogical elements of the Major Problems format have been retained: chapter introductions, headnotes, and suggested readings.

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 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 I.

Edward J. Blum is a professor in the History Department at San Diego State University. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. He is the author and co-author of several books on United States history, including "War is All Hell: The Nature of Evil and the Civil War" (2021), "Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898" (2005; reissued 2015), "W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet" (2007) and "The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America" (2012). Blum is the winner of numerous awards, including the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship, the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities and the John T. Hubbell Prize for best article published in Civil War History in 2015. At present, he is working on a book exploring the role of the census in forming and almost destroying the United States from the writing of the Constitution to the end of the Civil War.

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.