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History Matters

Browse or search over 1200 primary source documents along with teaching essays that can be added to your My WBA? collections.

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Table of Contents

 

Volume 1

Preface
Part I: Colonization and Revolution, 1492–1815
Chapter 1: A Meeting of Three Worlds: Europe, Africa, and American Colonization, 1492–1680
Chapter 2: Servitude, Slavery, and the Growth of the Southern Colonies, 1620–1760
Chapter 3: Family Labor and the Growth of the Northern Colonies, 1640–1760
Chapter 4: Toward Revolution, 1750–1776
Chapter 5: Revolution, Constitution, and the People, 1776–1815
Part II: Free Labor and Slavery, 1790–1850
Chapter 6: The Consolidation of Slavery in the South, 1790–1836
Chapter 7: Northern Society and the Growth of Wage Labor, 1790–1837
Chapter 8: Immigration, Urban Life, and Social Reform in the Free Labor North, 1838–1860
Chapter 9: The Spread of Slavery and the Crisis of Southern Society, 1836–1848
Part III: War, Reconstruction, and Labor, 1848–1877
Chapter 10: The Settlement of the West and the Conflict over Enlaved Labor, 1848–1860
Chapter 11: The Civil War: America's Second Revolution, 1861–1865
Chapter 12: Reconstructing the Nation, 1865–1877
Chapter 13: New Frontiers: Westward Expansion and Industrial Growth, 1865–1877

Volume 2

Part I: Monopoly and Upheaval, 1877–1914
Chapter 1: Progress and Poverty: Industrial Capitalism in the Gilded Age, 1877–1893
Chapter 2: Community and Conflict: Working People Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 1877–1893
Chapter 3: From Depression to Expansion: Industrial Capitalism Triumphs at Home and Abroad, 1893–1900
Chapter 4: Change and Continuity in Daily Life, 1900–1914
Chapter 5: Radicals and Reformers in the Progressive Era, 1900–1914
Part II: War, Depression, and Industrial Unionism, 1914–1946
Chapter 6: Wars for Democracy, 1914–1920
Chapter 7: A New Era, 1920–1929
Chapter 8: The Great Depression and the First New Deal, 1929–1935
Chapter 9: Labor Democratizes America, 1935–1939
Chapter 10: A Nation Transformed: The United States in World War II, 1939–1946
Part III: Cold War America—And After, 1946–2016
Chapter 11: The Cold War Boom, 1946–1960
Chapter 12: The Rights Conscious 1960s, 1960–1973
Chapter 13: Economic Adversity Transforms the Nation, 1973–1989
Part IV: A Fragmented Nation, 1989-2021
Chapter 14: The American People in an Age of Global Capitalism, 1989–2001
Chapter 15: America’s World After 9/11, 2001–2007
Chapter 16: Hope, Change, and Fear, 2007—2016
Chapter 17: Coda: “To Continue the Work of Our Foreparents”
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