Cover: America Firsthand, Volume 2, 10th Edition by Anthony Marcus; John M. Giggie; David Burner

America Firsthand, Volume 2

Readings from Reconstruction to PresentTenth Edition ©2016 Anthony Marcus; John M. Giggie; David Burner

This distinctive, class-tested primary source reader tells America’s story through the words and other creative expressions of the ordinary and extraordinary Americans who shaped it. "Points of View" sections provide varied vantage points on important topics, and select images draw students into int...
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ISBN:9781319029685

Cover: America Firsthand, Volume 2, 10th Edition by Anthony Marcus; John M. Giggie; David Burner

American history told by everyday Americans

This distinctive, class-tested primary source reader tells America’s story through the words and other creative expressions of the ordinary and extraordinary Americans who shaped it. "Points of View" sections provide varied vantage points on important topics, and select images draw students into interpreting the visual record. This carefully crafted, ready-to-go collection saves instructors time and effort in finding consistently engaging and informative sources.

Features

Engaging first-person accounts showcase a broad spectrum of views and give continuing attention to minority voices. Ordinary people, such as indentured servants, runaway slaves, factory workers, soldiers, civil rights activists, immigrants, and many others, speak for themselves through a diverse array of documents, including letters, interviews, diaries, testimony, speeches, photographs, and advertisements.

Part-opening "Points of View" sections group contrasting documents to expose students to different perspectives on a particular topic. Each chronological part begins with a "Points of View" document set, bringing together multiple — and sometimes conflicting　— viewpoints on an event, a development, or a trend from the period. The offerings include colonial women’s varying perspectives on their capture by Native Americans and the debate about immigration between one mayor and his community.　

A comprehensive editorial apparatus supports student learning. Part introductions, documentary headnotes, questions to consider, critical thinking questions, and gloss notes provide context and support for students as they engage with the wealth of textual and visual primary sources at hand.　

With carefully researched sources and finely crafted pedagogy, this collection allows instructors to focus on teaching rather than course preparation. The authors have compiled a rich array of high-interest primary sources, from classic to rarely seen pieces, and crafted tightly interlocking, ready-to-assign units that ensure student understanding. America Firsthand saves instructors’ time and gives students a well-rounded, meaningful, and memorable view of peoples past and present, their times, and their contributions to America’s story.

New to This Edition

New textual documents in each volume broaden the spectrum of voices and topics, including a diary entry of an Englishman who became shipwrecked on the Bermudan islands on his way to Jamestown, a free black man’s criticism of the slave system in the 1820s, an attorney’s essay on the dangers of the "white slave trade" in the Progressive era, an excerpt from the memoir of a doctor who served in the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War, and an essay by a female scientist who faced sexism as she tried to establish a career in the scientific community in the 1960s.

New visual documents will help students hone their image analysis skills. Images include a political cartoon criticizing woman’s rights activists in the mid-nineteenth century, a photograph depicting the devastation caused by the Civil War, an image of the Stonewall riot in June 1969, and a visual depiction of U.S. interrogation policies in the early twenty-first century.
[An] excellent collection of primary documents that in my experience has helped students to evaluate constructed social and racial stereotypes, analyze opposing viewpoints, and relate events to their own lives in the present.
– Petra DeWitt, Missouri University of Science and Technology

Students find it very accessible and are ALWAYS intrigued by first person accounts. … It provides a wonderful "jumping off" point for discussions of rich topics. I love the diversity of voices—and so do my students!
– Ann K. Lupo, SUNY Buffalo State College

The book provides useful tools to get students to be more aware of what life was like in the past and how it compares and contrasts with life in America today.
– Philip M. Montesano, City College of San Francisco

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Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction: Using Sources to Study the Past

PART ONE
After the Civil War: New South and New West
Points of View: The Battle of Little Bighorn (1876)
1. She Walks with Her Shawl, and One Bull, Victory at Greasy Grass
2. Charles DeRudio, Witness to Custer’s Last Stand　
3. Felix Haywood et al., African Americans during Reconstruction　
4. Ida B. Wells, African American Protest
5. Freedmen in the West
6. Caleb G. Forshey and the Reverend James Sinclair, White Southerners’ Reactions to Reconstruction　
7. Grimes Family and Swindell Brothers, Work under Sharecropper and Labor Contracts　
8. Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), School Days of an Indian Girl　
9. The Homestead Act and the Peopling of the West

PART TWO　
The Gilded Age: Industrial Growth and CrisisPoints of View: The Rise of Labor Unions
10.  The Knights of Labor, Early Efforts at Labor Organizing
11. Industrial Workers of the World, Demanding a New Workplace
12. The Industrial City
13. William Steinway, Workers Prosper as Industry Grows
14. George Rice, Losing Out to Standard Oil　
15. Joseph T. Finnerty, The Decline of the Independent Craftsman
16. Albert Parsons, The Haymarket Riot
17. Anti-Immigrant Sentiment in American Politics
18. The Omaha Platform, Agrarian Protests　
19. Pauline Newman et al., Conditions at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company

PART THREE　
A Society in Flux: Preparing for an American CenturyPoints of View: Suppressing the "Dreadful Curse of Liquor" (1890-1919)
20. Carrie Nation, Smashing the Evils of Alcohol
21. Percy Andreae, A Glimpse behind the Mask of Prohibition
22. Letters from the Battlefront and the Home Front, Debating War in the Philippines
23. Abraham Cahan, A Bintel Brief
24. Immigrant Labor at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
25. Emmett J. Scott et al., Letters from the Great Migration　
26. Lucy Burns and Alice Paul, Prison Notes
27. Edwin W. Sims, War on the White Slave Trade
28. Kate Richards O’Hare et al., The Trial of Kate Richards O’Hare

PART FOUR　
A New Society: Between the Wars
Points of View: The Great Depression
29. Anonymous, Down and Out in the Great Depression
30. Morey Skaret, On the Road during the Great Depression
31. Images of the Great Depression
32. William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, In Defense of the Bible
33. Langston Hughes, The Harlem Renaissance
34. Margaret Sanger, My Fight for Birth Control
35. Unknown Photographer, Capitalizing on New Fears: The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s
36. Luis Tenorio et al., Mexican Migrants and the Promise of America
37. Genora Dollinger, Taking a Stand: The Sit-Down Strikes of the 1930s

PART FIVE
"The American Century": War, Affluence, and Uncertainty
Points of View: Building and Using an Atomic Bomb (1942–1945)
38.  J. Robert Oppenheimer, To Build an Atomic Bomb
39. Paul Tibbets and George Weller, To Use an Atomic Bomb　
40. Fanny Christina Hill, Rosie the Riveter
41. Ben Yorita and Philip Hayasaka, Memories of the Internment Camp　
42. Otto Apel, Mechanized Angels in Korea
43. Ring Lardner Jr., Blacklisted: The Post–World War II Red Scare
44. Levittown: Making America Suburban
45. Charles Douglas Jackson, The Sputnik Crisis: The Beep Heard ’Round the World

PART SIX
Awakenings: Authority and Liberty in the Modern Age
Points of View: The My Lai Massacre and Its Aftermath (1968–1970)
46. Ronald L. Ridenhour et al., Disbelief and Corroboration　
47. General Westmoreland, President Nixon et al., Cover-Up and Outcome
48. Naomi Weisstein, The Adventures of a Woman in Science in the 1960s　
49. Phyllis Schlafly, The Limits of the Women’s Movement
50. Student Workers, Mississippi Freedom Summer
51. Protest Movements of the 1960s and 1970s
52. Pablo Guzmán, The Young Lords
53. César Chávez, Toward Mexican American Civil Rights
54. Robert Amsel et al., The Gay Rights Movement

PART SEVEN
Between History and Tomorrow: Life After the Cold War
Points of View: A Public Debate between Somalis in Lewiston, Maine, and Their Mayor (October 1, 2002-January 29, 2003)
55. Mayor Laurier T. Raymond et al., The Letter That Sparked the Debate and Supporters of It
56. Elders of the Somali Community et al., Letters in Support of the Somali Community
57. Cathy Langston, When PATCO Went on Strike
58. The Los Angeles Riots of 1992
59. Dennis W. Shepard, Homophobia in the Heartland　
60. United States Interrogation Policy
61. Ahmir Questlove Thompson, Walking While Black: The Unhappy Marriage of Race and Criminal Justice
62. Ryan J. Downey and Hannah Appel, Personal and Social Debt
63. Stanley Crouch, Barack Hussein Obama: Black Like Whom?
Headshot of Anthony Marcus

Anthony Marcus

Anthony Marcus is an Associate Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. He has published books and articles on the history of law, urban public policy, African American culture, and economic and social development in America and abroad. His current research focuses on law, youth, and public health.

Headshot of John M. Giggie

John M. Giggie

John Giggie is an associate professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Alabama, where he currently serves as the Director of the Graduate Program in History and as a Distinguished Teaching Fellow. His research specializations include the American South, African American history, and American religious history. He has published After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875-1917 and edited Faith in the Market: Religion and the Rise of Commercial Culture. He also coedits the Religion and American Culture series for the University of Alabama Press. His current scholarly project is a book on African American religion during the Civil War.

Headshot of David Burner

David Burner

David Burner, late Professor Emeritus of History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote two books on John F. Kennedy, as well as books on Herbert Hoover, the 1960s, the Democratic Party in the 1920s, and a number of textbooks.

Headshot of Susan Belasco

Susan Belasco

Susan Belasco (BA, Baylor University; PhD, Texas A&M University), professor of English and womens studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, has taught courses in writing and American literature at several institutions since 1974, including McLennan Community College; Allegheny College; California State University, Los Angeles; and the University of Tulsa. The editor of Margaret Fullers Summer on the Lakes and Fanny Ferns Ruth Hall, she is also the coeditor of three collections of essays: Approaches to Teaching Stowes "Uncle Toms Cabin"; Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America; and Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays. The editor of "Walt Whitmans Periodical Poetry" for the Walt Whitman Archive (whitmanarchive.org), she is the current president of the Research Society for American Periodicals.

Headshot of Linck Johnson

Linck Johnson

Linck Johnson (BA, Cornell University; PhD, Princeton University), the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Colgate University, has taught courses in writing and American literature and culture since 1974. He is the author of Thoreaus Complex Weave: The Writing of "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," with the Text of the First Draft, the Historical Introduction to A Week in the Princeton University Press edition of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, and numerous articles and contributions to books. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, he is a member of the Editorial Board of the Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance.