Understanding the American Promise: A History, Volume II: From 1865: A History of the United States

Understanding the American Promise, Second Edition, features a brief, question-driven narrative that models for students the inquiry-based methods used by historians and features innovative active learning pedagogy to help students understand what’s really important to know about U.S. history. This affordable text comes integrated with LearningCurve, an adaptive learning tool that helps students retain what they’ve read and come to class prepared.

What's in the LaunchPad

Michael P. Johnson (Ph.D., Stanford University) is professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. His publications include Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia; Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War: Selected Speeches and Writings; and Reading the American Past: Selected Historical Documents, the documents reader for The American Promise. He has also coedited No Chariot Let Down: Charlestons Free People of Color on the Eve of the Civil War with James L. Roark.

Patricia Cline Cohen (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 20052006. She has written A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America and The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York, and she has coauthored The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York.

Sarah Stage (Ph.D., Yale University) has taught U.S. history at Williams College and the University of California, Riverside, and she was visiting professor at Beijing University and Szechuan University. Currently she is professor of Womens Studies at Arizona State University. Her books include Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Womens Medicine and Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession.

Susan M. Hartmann (Ph.D., University of Missouri) is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University. In 1995 she won the university's Exemplary Faculty Award in the College of Humanities. Her publications include Truman and the 80th Congress; The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s; From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics since 1960; and The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment.