A People and a Nation, Volume I: to 1877, 12th Edition

Jane Kamensky, Beth Bailey, Carol Sheriff, Howard P. Chudacoff, Fredrik Logevall, David W. Blight

Copyright 2025
{{checkPublicationMessage('Published', '2024-03-02T00:00:00+0000')}}

Starting At $79.95 See pricing and ISBN options

Instructor Next Steps

Students: Buy now

A People and a Nation, Volume I: to 1877 12th Edition by Jane Kamensky/Beth Bailey/Carol Sheriff/Howard P. Chudacoff/Fredrik Logevall/David W. Blight

Quick Navigation

Overview
Meet the Authors
What's New
Features
Table of Contents
Pricing

Overview

Kamensky/Bailey/Sheriff/Chudacoff/Logevall/Blight's A PEOPLE AND A NATION, VOLUME I: to 1877, 12th Edition, offers a lively narrative that tells the stories of the diverse peoples in the United States and challenges students to think about the meaning of democracy and equality in the nation’s past. The authors are prize-winning historians and experienced teachers who know how to explain historical change -- whether in public policy and economics, family life, the significance of race, gender and class, popular culture or international relations and warfare -- in ways that students understand. As the first textbook to pay close attention to U.S. social history, it also supports more specialized lectures through its attention to international history and the place of the U.S. in the world, politics and policy, social movements and economic issues.

Meet the Authors

{{collapseContainerClosed['meet-the-author'] ? 'Show More' : 'Show Less'}}

Jane Kamensky

Jane Kamensky earned her B.A. and Ph.D. in history from Yale University. She is an American historian whose scholarship has covered the sweep of British colonial and United States history, with books centered in the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Her many books include A REVOLUTION IN COLOR: THE WORLD OF JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY, winner of the New-York Historical Society’s American History book prize, along with three others. For 30 years, she worked as a history professor and higher education leader, most recently as Trumbull Professor of American history at Harvard University and director of the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. In 2024, Kamensky became the president of Monticello/The Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Beth Bailey

Beth Bailey is Foundation Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Military, War and Society Studies at the University of Kansas. She earned her B.A. from Northwestern University and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Bailey is a historian of the 20th and 21st century United States, whose research focuses on U.S. military, war and society and the history of gender and sexuality in the United States. A prize-winning teacher who has worked in large state universities and liberal arts colleges, she is the author or editor/co-editor of a dozen books, the most recent of which is AN ARMY AFIRE: HOW THE US ARMY CONFRONTED ITS RACIAL CRISIS IN THE VIETNAM ERA. Her recent scholarly awards include the Higuchi-Balfour Jeffrey award for research in the humanities and social sciences, the Society for Military History’s Samuel Eliot Morison award for lifetime achievement in military history and the Pitt Professorship in American History at Cambridge university (2025–2026). She currently serves, by appointment of the Secretary of the Army, as chair of the Department of the Army’s Historical Advisory Subcommittee.

Carol Sheriff

Carol Sheriff is a Professor of History at William & Mary in Virginia, where she has taught since 1993. She received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her Ph.D. from Yale University. She specializes in 19th century United States social and cultural history, with an emphasis on the period from 1815–1865, and she has an allied interest in early 20th century Civil War memory. She is completing a monograph on controversies surrounding 20th century history textbooks’ portrayals of the Civil War and Reconstruction; a piece of this project won the John T. Hubbell Prize from Civil War History. She has co-authored A PEOPLE AT WAR: SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS IN AMERICA'S CIVIL WAR, 1854–1877, and has written THE ARTIFICIAL RIVER: THE ERIE CANAL AND THE PARADOX OF PROGRESS, 1817–1862, which earned the Dixon Ryan Fox Award from the New York State Historical Association and the Award for Excellence in Research from the New York State Archives. At William & Mary, she has won several teaching awards.

Howard P. Chudacoff

Howard P. Chudacoff, the George L. Littlefield Emeritus Professor of American History at Brown University, was born in Omaha, Nebraska. He earned his A.B. (1965), M.A. (1967) and Ph.D. (1969) at the University of Chicago. He has written MOBILE AMERICANS (1972), THE EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN URBAN SOCIETY (eight editions between 1975 and 2014), HOW OLD ARE YOU: AGE CONSCIOUSNESS IN AMERICAN CULTURE (1989), THE AGE OF THE BACHELOR: CREATING AN AMERICAN SUBCULTURE (1999), CHILDREN AT PLAY: AN AMERICAN HISTORY (2007) and CHANGING THE PLAYBOOK: HOW POWER, PROFIT, AND POLITICS TRANSFORMED COLLEGE SPORTS (2015). His articles have appeared in The Journal of American History, The Journal of Family History, Reviews in American History and The Journal of Sport History. At Brown, he has served as Co-Chair of the Program in American Civilization, Chair of the History Department, Executive Committee of the Urban Studies Program and Faculty Representative to the NCAA. The National Endowment for the Humanities, Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation have funded his scholarship.

Fredrik Logevall

A native of Stockholm, Sweden, Fredrik Logevall is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University, where he holds appointments in the Department of History and the Kennedy School of Government. He received his B.A. from Simon Fraser University and his Ph.D. from Yale University. He is the author or editor of 11 books, most recently JFK: COMING OF AGE IN THE AMERICAN CENTURY, 1917–1956 (2020), which received the Elizabeth Longford Prize and was The Times (UK) biography of the year and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His book EMBERS OF WAR: THE FALL OF AN EMPIRE AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA'S VIETNAM (2012), won the Pulitzer Prize in History and the Francis Parkman Prize, in addition to other awards. A past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), Logevall is a member of the Society of American Historians and the Council of Foreign Relations and serves on numerous editorial advisory boards.

David W. Blight

David W. Blight received his B.A. from Michigan State University and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He is the Sterling Professor of American History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University. In 2019, he won the Pulitzer Prize in history for his work, FREDERICK DOUGLASS: PROPHET OF FREEDOM. His RACE AND REUNION: THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICAN MEMORY, 1863–1915, received eight awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize and four prizes awarded by the Organization of American Historians. Blight’s essays and op-eds have appeared in numerous journals and newspapers. From 2013–2014, he was the Pitt Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge in the UK. For the first seven years of his career Dr. Blight was a high school history teacher in his hometown of Flint, MI. In 2023, he served as president of the Organization of American Historians.

What's New

{{collapseContainerClosed['whats-new'] ? 'Show More' : 'Show Less'}}

This edition includes major revisions of final chapters to update coverage into the 2020s and to reorganize chapters on the 1980s and forward to make them fit better into a teaching schedule.
This edition continues our commitment to portraying the diversity of the American people. The authors have added more discussion of Asian Pacific Americans to Chapter 11 and includes revised coverage of indigenous people.
New features allow students to connect past events to contemporary debates and concerns. For example, this edition includes features on the peaceful transfer of power, the renaming of 10 military bases that previously bore the names of ex-Confederate generals, the past and future of the Social Security system and the role of coalition politics in shaping the original Republican party of the 1850s.

Features

{{collapseContainerClosed['features'] ? 'Show More' : 'Show Less'}}

The text is written by a multi-author team. Its authors work closely together to create a single, coherent work. This approach means that each author writes about their own expertise, including topics about which they are the leading scholars in the field.
Chapter-opening vignettes introduce key themes through a brief, engaging, beautifully told story about a person or event related to the chapter.
"Visualizing the Past" features in each chapter treat images, including artifacts, paintings, photographs and advertisements, as primary sources to explore major themes. Illustrations and extended captions help students understand how the examination of visual materials can reveal aspects of America's story that otherwise would remain unknown. Topics include naming America, selling war, gilded age politics, combating the spread of AIDS and war deaths. Two new Visualizing features on indigenous peoples are featured.
"Links to the World" essays -- one in each chapter -- connect figures, topics orevents in U.S. history to the history of the greater world. Topics include turkeys, writing and stationery supplies, William Walker and filibustering, the "Back to Africa" movement, Sputnik, Margaret Mead and the Swine Flu pandemic.
"Legacy for a People and a Nation" essays -- one in each chapter -- offer compelling and timely answers to students who question the relevance of historical study by exploring the historical roots of contemporary topics. Topics include revitalizing native languages, witch hunting, P.T. Barnum's publicity stunts, the Mexican-United States border, Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, national parks, nuclear proliferation and the Immigration Act of 1965.
While the text was the first to focus on U.S. social history, its attention to international history and the place of the U.S. in the world, politics and policy, social movements and clear explanations of economic issues makes it a useful resource for more specialized lectures or AP courses.

{{collapseContainerClosed['table-of-contents'] ? 'Show More' : 'Show Less'}}

1. Three Old Worlds Create a New, 1492–1600.
2. Europeans Colonize North America, 1600–1650.
3. North America in the Atlantic World, 1650–1720.
4. Becoming America, 1720–1760.
5. The Ends of Empire, 1754–1774.
6. American Revolutions, 1775–1783.
7. Forging a Nation, 1783–1800.
8. Defining the Nation, 1801–1823.
9. The Rise of the South, 1815–1860.
10. The Restless North, 1815–1860.
11. The Contested West, 1815–1860.
12. Politics and the Fate of the Union, 1824–1859.
13. Transforming Fire: The Civil War, 1860–1865.
14. Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution, 1865–1877.
15. The Ecology of the West and South, 1865–1900.
16. Building Factories, Building Cities, 1877–1900.
17. Gilded Age Politics, 1877–1900.
18. The Progressive Era, 1895–1920.
19. The Quest for Empire, 1865–1914.
20. Americans in the Great War, 1914–1920.
21. The New Era, 1920–1929.
22. The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929–1939.
23. The Second World War at Home and Abroad, 1939–1945.
24. The Cold War and American Globalism, 1945–1961.
25. America at Midcentury, 1945–1960.
26. The Tumultuous Sixties, 1960–1968.
27. A Pivotal Era, 1969–1980.
28. Conservatism Revived, 1980–2000.
29. Into the Global Millennium, the United States since 2000.

Compare Buying Options

{{collapseContainerClosed['compare-buying-options'] ? 'Show More' : 'Show Less'}}

Textbook Only Options

Traditional eBook and Print Options

{{collapseContainerClosed['detail_0'] ? 'Show More' : 'Show Less'}}

eTextbook: A People and a Nation, Volume I: to 1877

ISBN-10: 0357948165
ISBN-13: 9780357948163

RETAIL $79.95