Customer Reviews

A People And A Nation: A History Of The United States Complete Sixth Edition

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I used this textbook as a junior in high school and recently purchased a later edition. Although the wonderful charts plotting the states and electoral numbers of the Presidential elections are long gone it is still a great reference book on our nations history.

This book handles about the history of the U.S. from the time of the first settlers until the 1990's. The autors divided the American history in 13 themes. This themes sometimes overlap eachother in time. The result is a book which create a very complete view on the American history. Of course, it is not possible to review such an period of time, without making any choices. The authors of "A People" choose to put the book in a more or less social historical perspective. Every ethnic and social group in the American society is handled in the perspective of every theme. This makes the book sometimes a little boring to read, but the whole story is very political correct. In my view gives the book to little attention to the complex American polital history. Especially the very complex evolution of the American political history in late 18th and 19th century deserves more attention. In the book "The limits of liberty American history 1607-1992" (M.A. Jones) is more complete in this matter. Though you can say that the latter gives very little attention to the problem of the native Americans. I would recommand to read them both to get most complete view on the history of the United States. After finishing the book you have a really understanding of the large events in the American history in context of the normal people. Norton does this by putting a large number of "real life" cases in the book. This microhistorical perspective isn't nesessary for the understanding of the general line of events. But it brings history to life. Bringing history to life should be the objective of every historian, but most of them never succeed in it. Norton does and I think that that is greatest achievement of this book.

Though this book is well written, there is a newer edition out. If you need it for class, you probably are gonna need the seventh edition. Other then that, it still contains a few useful maps and charts, covering through the 1990s... It could serve as a decent enough reference, but the bottom line here is that there is a newer version.

My students really enjoyed this textbook because it was so inclusive of all American heritages. It is up-to-date with current trends in American history and has a little bit of everything your students might be interested in.

I use this textbook in my AP US II class, and I've found while trying to study from it that is almost too comprehensive. However, I particularly enjoy the 'How do historians know' sections of the text because I think it adds an element of realism to the text, as does the story of a person or persons at the beginning of each chapter. All in all, I think the 'Norton' (as we have dubbed it at school) is the perfect textbook for an AP History course.

We use this as the main text in my US History AP course. It's a good, fairly comprehensive, yet easy to read text.