Books in In American History series

Young learners will be introduced to an important stage in history when they read Building The Transcontinental Railroad. This book is filled with photographs, interesting facts, discussion questions, and more, to effectively engage young learners in such a significant re-telling of events. Each 48-page title in The History Of America Collection delves into complex narratives in history. Concise, but comprehensive, these titles are very approachable for transitioning readers and learners beginning to recognize detail orientation and how to analyze text. Each book in this series features photographs, timelines, discussion questions, and more, to fully engage transitioning readers. The History Of America Collection engages students in major historical events with fascinating facts, photographs, and more. Readers are able to gauge their own understanding with before-reading questions that help build background knowledge and end-of-book comprehension and extension activities.

When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620, much of America remained a vast wilderness. Within sixty years of their arrival, America's first cities were thriving seaports, the first college was founded, public education had begun, books were printed, coins minted, and postal service launched. The New Americans tells the story of the origins of our rich multicultural heritage, an exciting chapter in Betsy and Giulio Maestro's acclaimed American Story series.

World War II: 1939?1945 takes readers on a vivid journey through the most important events of the conflict, with illustrations by Mort Künstler?one of American’s foremost historical painters?and an inquiry-based text by renowned historian James I. Robertson, Jr. Young readers are encouraged to look for details and discover key moments of the war?including Pearl Harbor, D-Day, and the Battle of the Bulge?to learn how it really felt to be there. A timeline and short biographies of notable figures, such as Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, provide excellent supplements to each chapter. From high-action combat to soldiers reflecting post-battle, each scene captures a historically accurate, visually rich portrait of the war. No other living historical artist is as celebrated as Künstler, and his work continues to attract history lovers of all ages.

The birth of rock 'n roll ignited a firestorm of controversy--one critic called it "musical riots put to a switchblade beat"--but if it generated much sound and fury, what, if anything, did it signify? As Glenn Altschuler reveals in All Shook Up, the rise of rock 'n roll--and the outraged reception to it--in fact can tell us a lot about the values of the United States in the 1950s, a decade that saw a great struggle for the control of popular culture. Altschuler shows, in particular, how rock's "switchblade beat" opened up wide fissures in American society along the fault-lines of family, sexuality, and race. For instance, the birth of rock coincided with the Civil Rights movement and brought "race music" into many white homes for the first time. Elvis freely credited blacks with originating the music he sang and some of the great early rockers were African American, most notably, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. In addition, rock celebrated romance and sex, rattled the reticent by pushing sexuality into the public arena, and mocked deferred gratification and the obsession with work of men in gray flannel suits. And it delighted in the separate world of the teenager and deepened the divide between the generations, helping teenagers differentiate themselves from others. Altschuler includes vivid biographical sketches of the great rock 'n rollers, including Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly--plus their white-bread doppelgangers such as Pat Boone. Rock 'n roll seemed to be everywhere during the decade, exhilarating, influential, and an outrage to those Americans intent on wishing away all forms of dissent and conflict. As vibrant as the music itself, All Shook Up reveals how rock 'n roll challenged and changed American culture and laid the foundation for the social upheaval of the sixties.

Almost immediately, the Civil War transformed the way Southerners ate, devastating fields and food transportation networks. The war also spurred Southerners to canonize prewar cooking styles, resulting in cuisine that retained nineteenth-century techniques in a way other American cuisines did not. This fascinating book presents a variety of Civil War-era recipes from the South, accompanied by eye-opening essays describing this tumultuous period in the way people lived and ate. The cookbooks excerpted here teem with the kinds of recipes we expect to find when we go looking for Southern food: grits and gumbo, succotash and Hopping John, catfish, coleslaw, watermelon pickles, and sweet potato pie. The cookbooks also offer plenty of surprises. This volume, the second in the American Food in History series, sheds new light on cooking and eating in the Civil War South, pointing out how seemingly neutral recipes can reveal unexpected things about life beyond the dinner plate, from responses to the anti-slavery movement to shifting economic imperatives to changing ideas about women’s roles. Together, these recipes and essays provide a unique portrait of Southern life via the flavors, textures, and techniques that grew out of a time of crisis.

Cookbooks offer a unique and valuable way to examine American life. Their lessons, however, are not always obvious. Direct references to the American Civil War were rare in cookbooks, even in those published right in the middle of it. In part, this is a reminder that lives went on and that dinner still appeared on most tables most nights, no matter how much the world was changing outside. But people accustomed to thinking of cookbooks as a source for recipes, and not much else, can be surprised by how much information they can reveal about the daily lives and ways of thinking of the people who wrote and used them. In this fascinating historical compilation, excerpts from five Civil War–era cookbooks present a compelling portrait of cooking and eating in the urban north of the 1860s United States.