MAKING AMERICA: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, BRIEF, International Edition, presents history as a dynamic process shaped by human expectations, difficult choices, and often the surprising consequences. With this focus on history as a process, MAKING AMERICA encourages students to think historically and to develop into citizens who value the past. The clear chronology, straightforward narrative, and strong thematic structure emphasize communication over intimidation, and appeal to students of varied learning levels. The Brief Fifth Edition retains a hallmark feature of the MAKING AMERICA program: pedagogical tools that allow students to master complex material and enable them to develop analytical skills. Every chapter has chapter outlines, chronologies, focus questions, and in-text glossaries to provide guidance throughout the text. A new feature called Investigating America gets to the heart of learning history: reading and analyzing primary sources. The text's new open, inviting design allows students to access and use pedagogy to improve learning.

Before the voyage of Columbus in 1492, the Atlantic Ocean stood as a barrier to contact between the people (and their ideas and institutions), plants, animals, and microbes of Eurasia and Africa on the one hand and the Americas on the other. Following Columbus's voyage, the Atlantic turned into a conduit for transferring these things among the four continents bordering the ocean in ways that affected people living on each of them.

The appearance of The Atlantic World marks an important achievement, for it stands out as the first successful attempt to combine the many strains of Atlantic history into a comprehensive, thoughtful narrative. At the core of this ground-breaking and eloquently written survey lies a consideration of the relationships among people living in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, with a focus on how these relationships played important roles--often the most important roles--in how the histories of the people involved unfolded. The ways of life of millions of people changed, sometimes for the better but often for the worse, because of their relationship to the larger Atlantic world. And unlike existing texts dealing with one or another aspect of Atlantic history, The Atlantic World does not subjugate the history of Africa and South America to those of the "British Atlantic" or Europe.

With historians and other scholars beginning to reconceptualize the Atlantic World as a dynamic zone of exchange in which people, commodities, and ideas circulated from the mid-fifteenth century until the dawn of the twentieth century, the interconnections between people along the Atlantic rim create a coherent region, one in which events in one corner inevitably altered the course of history in another. As this book testifies, Atlantic history, properly understood, is history without borders--in which national narratives take backstage to the larger examination of interdependence and cultural transmission.

Conceived of and produced by a team of distinguished authors with countless hours of teaching experience at the college level, this thoughtfully organized, beautifully written, and lavishly illustrated book will set the standard for all future surveys intended as a core text for the new and rapidly growing courses in Atlantic History.

Rich Fritzky poses five questions to forty-five individuals who have devoted much, if not all of their lives, to Abraham Lincoln. The individuals reveal what led them to him in the first place, the conversations that they would most have liked to have had with him, the words of his that they were most moved by, and the why and how of his, maybe just maybe, helping save the soul of the Republic yet again in our own time. Among those interviewed were eleven celebrated Lincoln scholars and historians, the leaders of the National Lincoln Forum, the Abraham Lincoln Association, Lincoln Groups, and Civil War Roundtables from coast to coast, two celebrated Lincoln artists, an array of Lincoln impersonators, including Gettysburg's own, curators, animators, professors, teachers, presenters, etc. They so movingly responded, inspiring and driving the author deep into Lincoln's universe and to much that is not often considered especially as to racism and race, his shadow-boxing with God, his faith and doubt, his exquisite humanity and extraordinary ability to lead, his nation of suffering and the torture it exacted upon him, and his rich reverence for both all that America was and could be.