Major Problems in American History, Volume II

Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, Cobbs/Blum/Walker’s “Major Problems in American History, Volume II” 5th Edition, introduces you to primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in U.S. history. The text serves as the primary anthology for the introductory survey course, covering the subject’s entire chronological span. Topical coverage includes politics, economics, labor, gender, culture and social trends. The revised edition reflects two new historiographical trends: the emergence of the history of religion as an exceptionally lively field and the internationalization of American history. 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 text have been retained, including 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.

Vanessa Walker is the Gordon Levin Associate Professor of Diplomatic History at Amherst College, where she teaches classes on U.S. politics, foreign relations, and human rights. She received her B.A. from Whitman College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Principles in Power: Latin America and the Politics of U.S. Human Rights Diplomacy (Cornell University Press, 2020), which was awarded the 2020 William M. LeoGrande prize for best book on U.S.-Latin American Relations, and is the author of several articles on the Carter administration’s human rights policy. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, the George Mosse Program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Stanton Foundation Applied History Program. She is currently working on a project exploring U.S. domestic human rights campaign as a response to the decline of the liberal state in the 1970s.