For Introduction to U.S. History courses.
Making a Nation, Concise Edition focuses on the relationships that shape and define human identity―culture, race, gender, class and sectional relations. The text shows that politics and the economy do not simply shape, but in turn are shaped by, the lives and cultural values of ordinary men and women. This political economy approach allows students to see the links between the particular and the general, between large and seemingly abstract forces such as globalization and political struggle, and the everyday decisions made by ordinary men and women.
Jeanne Boydston is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early American Republic, coauthor of The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women's Rights and Woman's Sphere, coeditor of The Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women (second edition), as well as author of articles on the labor history of women in the early republic. Professor Boydston teaches in the areas of early republic and antebellum United States history and United States women's history to 1870. Her BA and MA are from the University of Tennessee, and her PhD is from Yale University.
Nick Cullather is Associate Professor at Indiana University, where he teaches courses on the history of United States foreign relations. He is on the editorial boards of Diplomatic History and the Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, and is the author of Illusions of Influence (1994), a study of the political economy of United States-Philippines relations, and Secret History (1999), which describes a CIA covert operation against the government of Guatemala in 1954. He received his AB from Indiana University and his MA and PhD from the University of Virginia.
Jan Ellen Lewis is Professor of History and Director of the Graduate Program at Rutgers University, Newark. She also teaches in the history PhD program at Rutgers, New Brunswick and was a Visiting Professor at Princeton University. A specialist in colonial and early national history, she is the author of The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia (1983), and co-editor of An Emotional History of the United States (1998) and Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (1999). She is currently completing an examination of the way the Founding generation grappled with the challenge presented to an egalitarian society by women and slaves and a second volume of the Penguin History of the United States. She received her AB from Bryn Mawr College, and MAs and PhD from the University of Michigan.
Michael McGerr is Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean for Graduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is the author of The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (1986). With the aid of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is currently writing a book on the rise and fall of Progressive America. Professor McGerr teaches a wide range of courses on modern American history, including the Vietnam War, race and gender in American business, John D. Rockefeller, Bill Gates, and the politics of American popular music. He received his BA, MA, and PhD degrees from Yale University.
James Oakes is Graduate School Humanities Professor and Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught at Purdue, Princeton, and Northwestern. He is author of The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (1982) and Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (1990). In addition to a year-long research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1989-90. His areas of specialization are slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the history of American political thought. He received his PhD from The University of California at Berkeley.
