Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. In a single volume the author tells how America endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities. He demonstrates that the economic crisis of the 1930s was more than a reaction to the excesses of the 1920s. For more than a century before the Crash, America's unbridled industrial revolution had gyrated...

In this addition to the esteemed Oxford history series, historian Daniel Walker Howe illuminates the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican–American War, an era of revolutionary improvements in transportation and communications that accelerated the extension of the American empire. He examines the era's politics but contends that John Quincy Adams and other advocates of public education and economic integration, defenders

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"During Reconstruction Northerners attempted to remake the United States in their own image. They would make incarnate the new world Republicans imagined at the end of the Civil War. That new world seemed possible because the Republican Party controlled the Union in 1865 as fully as any political party would ever control the country. Reconstruction would produce a nation built around free labor with a homogeneous citizenry whose rights would be guaranteed...

"The Berlin Wall is arguably the most prominent symbol of the Cold War era, demarcating real and figurative divisions between east and west, Communism and capitalism, oppression and freedom. Its fall in 1989 is broadly understood as a pivotal moment in the history of the last century. For years afterward, tourists, locals, and even private businesses shipped fragments from the concrete structure around the world, turning it into a collectible commodity...