This text uses 15 dramatic episodes in American history to show students how historians go about the business of interpreting the past. It discusses historical methods within the context of an historical narrative so that students may learn about American history at the same time as seeing how historians use a variety of evidence (diaries, letters, photographs and records) and methods to explain the past. This edition contains a new chapter on the Vietnam experience that examines how Hollywood incorporated the horror of My Lai into their mythic formulations and how dramatic films can be used as historical evidence. Some chapters have been substantially revised or rewritten to take into account recently published material - "The Invisible Pioneers" (chapter 5), "Sacco and Vanzetti" (chapter 10), "The Decision to Drop the Bomb" (chapter 12).
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
James West Davidson is a historian, writer, and wilderness paddler. He received his Ph.D. in American history from Yale University and writes full time. He is also co-editor, with Michael Stoff, of New Narratives in American History, a series published by Oxford University Press, as well as the coauthor of textbooks in American history. These include "Experience History," "After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection," and "US: A Narrative History" for the college level and "The American Nation" for the middle grades.
On a river, an eddy line marks the boundary between slack water and swift. Broaching the line, you sometimes find yourself swept quickly downstream and around a bend. As a historian, I've crossed more than one eddy line to ride currents pulling in different directions, from thinking about the end of the world to paddling the barrens of Labrador to viewing the rise of segregation through the eyes of one woman. A through-line that unites these disparate subjects is the attraction to journeys and their obsessional consequences. If you believe that your own life is joined to a biblical history of redemption--in which the world's end will soon draw nigh--how will that conviction affect your everyday behavior? ("The Logic of Millennial Thought") If you are a black woman born into freedom after the Civil War, whose goals at first seem to be teaching school, finding a husband and enjoying a decent middle-class life, how does the particular set of your character propel you to risk life and limb opposing a rising epidemic of lynching? ("They Say: Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race") If you cross Labrador intent on making a name in journalism, how far will you court hardship and starvation in order to succeed? And if you are the widow of the man who pushed one lake too far, where will your own obsessions take you in seeking to complete your husband's work? ("Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure")
We all begin journeys thinking we know where we're going, and we seldom do. Yet the course of every odyssey springs from the way in which an individual's character bends, breaks, or masters the larger movements of the day. Watching such journeys play out provides a singular pleasure, very much akin to riding the currents of a river from its turbulent headwaters to the final outwash in the sea.
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