Prologue: The North American continent and its native peoples
Discovery, encounter, and conquest, 1492-1607
England's first "foreign plantations": the Chesapeake and New England, 1607-1676
The empire: torn, restored, enlarged, 1640-1732
From plantations to provinces: the evolution of American society and culture, 1660-1763
Self-governing colonies in a changing empire, 1700-1775
The struggle for American independence, 1775-1783
From confederation to federal union, 1781-1788
First presidents and crucial precedents, 1789-1809
Nationalism, capitalism, sectionalism, and religion in the early republic
The coming of democratic politics: Andrew Jackson and the second party system, 1824-1844
Territorial expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the Mexican War
Sectionalism and slavery's dark cloud: the coming of the Civil War, 1846-1861
"This mighty scourge": the Civil War years
Reconstruction and the new South
Remaking the Trans-Mississippi Wests
The modern industrial city, 1850-1900
Post-Civil War thought and culture
The politics of the Gilded Age
Innocents abroad: expansion and empire, American and the world, 1865-1900
In search of efficiency: the values and ideology of Progressivism, 1900-1917
Progressivism in American politics, 1901 to World War I
A sense of mission: the United States in world affairs, 1900-1920
An exhilarating decade: American life in the 1920s
The Great Depression and the New Deal
The dilemmas of power: America and the world, 1921-1945
In the shadow of the bomb: the Cold War in the Truman years
Containment, contentment, discontent: Eisenhower Republicanism and the Fifties
The climax of liberalism in the Sixties and Seventies
The liberal hour: politics in the Sixties
A nation beset: politics from Nixon to Regan
A turn to the right: the Regan and first Bush presidencies
The politics of equilibrium: the Clinton and Bush presidencies
American society in the new millennium: a "culture war," a stable center.
