All comprehensive United States survey textbooks, including this one, give full coverage to standard political, economic, diplomatic, and legal events. But these elements of history are largely the story of elites. This textbook also provides social history captured in the recognizable lives of ordinary people. Presidents, congressmen, and corporate executives are quoted throughout the book. So are soldiers, slaves, indentured servants, cowboys, working girls and women, and civil rights activists. Firsthand America, using more than 2,000 quotations, therefore gives due place both to the traditional leaders and to the myriad Americans never named in formal historians.

In "America's Right Turn" historian William Berman examines the political, cultural, and economic contexts in which Republican conservatives operated and explores the crisis of the liberal welfare state against the background of presidential politics. Berman demonstrates the key roles played by conservative populism and the conservative backlash to the rights revolution in the collapse of Democratic hegemony. But most importantly, he shows how conservative politics became allied with conservative economics--an alliance forged with singular success during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. In this new edition, Berman discusses the initial failure of the Clinton administration to establish a viable political alternative to the GOP. Berman also shows how Clinton won reelection in l996 by moving steadily to the center, even to the extent of co-opting the Republican agenda, while defending a number of key Democratic programs.

In this now-classic work in legal and constitutional theory, Stanley Kutler examines one of the Supreme Court's most celebrated decisions: the right of the state of Massachusetts to erect a free bridge over the Charles River in 1837--even though the state had previously chartered a privately owned toll bridge at the same location. (Legal Reference)

It was a decade of great heroes like Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh, and of passive leaders like Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. The exuberant freedom of flappers drinking bathtub gin and dancing the Charleston did little to counter such powers of oppression as the rapidly rising Ku Klux Klan. Only the fictional wealth of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby survived the stock market crash unscathed; by the end of the decade, the comic adventures of Charlie Chaplin's "little tramp" bore faint resemblance to the grim realities faced by countless destitute Americans.

Too often, notes historian David Goldberg, the mythic allure of the "Roaring Twenties" has deafened our ears to the real voices of those who lived through the decade. In "Discontented America," he integrates social and political history to provide a new take on the 1920s--an account deeply rooted in the perspectives of that time. Goldberg argues that this contentious and fascinating decade should be viewed now as it was viewed then, as a distinctive postwar period, during which many of the conflicts generated by World War I continued to reverberate throughout American society.

As America sought to step back from the leadership role it had taken in the Great War, Goldberg explains, the nation faced internal battles over women's suffrage, prohibition of the sale of "intoxicating beverages," the specter of communism, and the declining power of labor unions. Large numbers of African Americans migrated from the southern states to the north in search of employment and a better life, and at the same time, there was another heavy wave of newcomers from overseas. These, Goldberg concludes, were the issues that preoccupied serious Americans, and their concern is reflected in the federal legislation of the period, from constitutional amendments providing for prohibition and women's suffrage to the National Origins Act, meant to curtail immigration from nonwestern European countries.

"The 1920s involved a time of confronting (or sometimes, ignoring) profound social problems, fears, and anxieties that had nagged the national consciousness for decades. David Goldberg very properly calls it a time of discontent, and in this work he thoroughly probes much of the underside of life that pitted Americans of differing classes, ethnicity, and religion against one another... As Goldberg notes, the Great Depression exposed underlying fallacies and weaknesses in the economy and provided the occasion for the great political and social transformation of the twentieth century. The achievements of the 1920s are long behind us, but the lessons of unbridled capitalism, intolerance, and the clashes between traditionalism and modernism very much remain."--from the foreword by Stanley I. Kutler

"The definitive account of Watergate." —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Kutler's book is a watershed event—the beginning of the passage of Watergate from the stuff of journalism and instant history to real history." —Thomas Oliphant, Boston Globe

"A big powerhouse of a book, one crackling with suspense and filled with insight into the origins, the unfolding, and the consequences of perhaps the gravest political and constitutional crisis in our history." —Michael E. Parrish, San Diego Union

"It is balance, breadth of vision, documentary research, historical context, and insight that Kutler provides—lucidly, gracefully, and far better than anyone before him. . . . This book should be regarded as the definitive reply to Nixon's attempts at rehabilitation. . . . [It] is about ethics, ends and means, and the dangers of an imperial presidency. . . . The republic owes Kutler a reward. It need not be elaborate: Americans need only to read him—and take his book seriously." —Leonard Bushkoff, Christian Science Monitor

"A scholarly and thoughtful account. . . . [Kutler's] serious book is frequently as tense as a thriller." —The New Yorker

"Stanley I Kutler's ambitious synthesis details the complexities of political sabotage and conspiracies to obstruct justice in evocative contexts including Vietnam and the growth of the imperial presidency. . . . Overall this study is, and will remain, the standard book on the 'underside' of the Nixon presidency for the foreseeable future." —American Historical Review

The new Third Edition covers cases down to the present, including important decisions on racial discrimination, privacy, the rights of women, the "new equal protection" and the welfare state, and executive power.

The cases, selected for their long-standing significance for constitutional law, are arranged in chronological fashion and further subdivided into pertinent topical categories. Headnotes for each case are designed to familiarize the reader with the historical and constitutional context, the factual background, and the relationship of the case to prior and subsequent ones.

While the cases are, of course, edited, generous extracts are provided so that the reader may more fully understand the legal, political, social, and economical considerations employed in a judicial decision. Where appropriate, portions of dissenting opinions are included. Emphasis is on cases which best depict the Supreme Court's role in the making of public policy, particularly those Supreme Court decisions that have served as an instrument for reform and change.