For the Record: A Documentary History of America: From First Contact through Reconstruction

The most accessible collection of primary sources available.

The reader features 250 primary source documents, both textual and visual, drawn from a vast range of government documents, newspapers, speeches, letters, novels, and images. Twenty-five updated selections offer strengthened coverage of African American history and reflect the latest structure of America: A Narrative History, Ninth Edition.

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.

Holly Mayer is professor emeritus at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Holly’s PhD is from the College of William and Mary. Her research field is late-eighteenth-century America, and she is especially interested in civil-military relations during the War for Independence and the evolution of American character and culture. Her monograph, Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community during the American Revolution (1996), is a path-breaking study of the Continental Army as a community. Her new book, Congress's Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and American Union (2021), chronicles Colonel Moses Hazen’s 2nd Canadian Regiment.