Allen C. Guelzo
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The immense vitality and diversity of American life have been sustained by several recurrent themes. Compared to its high ideals, America always fell short. Compared to the other nations of the world, however, America was far more impressive for its successes than for its failings.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
This episode examines the experiences of African Americans on both sides, addressing, among other topics, black soldiers in US military forces, the experience of hundreds of thousands of black refugees in the South, the weakening of the bonds of slavery in much of the Confederacy, and Confederate debates over emancipation late in the conflict.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
America is a far more religious society than other Western industrial nations - another example of its exceptionalism. It also tolerated an exotic array of sects and cults, from hippies to the followers of Jim Jones who committed mass suicide in 1978. Religious groups also played a role in the moral-political debates over civil rights, feminism, abortion, homosexuality, and nuclear weapons.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
When the Soviet Union went through a peaceful transition to democracy, the United States was left as the world's one great superpower, able to preside over the creation of numerous new nations with more or less democratic and America-inspired political systems. In the 1990s, the absence of Communist repression permitted old ethnic and religious animosities in Eastern Europe to resurface.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
Declining profitability before 1800 suggested that slavery would gradually die out, but the success of cotton agriculture and the labor needed to sustain it resurrected slavery. Northern abolitionists gathered force in the 1830s; southern demands for protection and extradition of runaways led to mob violence and aggressive antislavery organizing in the North.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
Columbus's discovery of a New World allowed Europeans to, first, exploit natural and human resources, and later, to write new social, economic, and political scripts for their lives in a place where European ideas of society no longer applied.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
Late 19th-century Europe was full of stories about America, and bad conditions for farmers prompted many of them to emigrate. Parents found that, with hard work, they, or their children, could climb to American prosperity and respectability. Fears of "race suicide" in the 1920s gave rise to an immigration restriction policy.
8) The History of the United States, 2nd Edition: Episode 13,The American Revolution - Washington's War
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The money, credit, weapons, and French naval and military resources forced the British to shift the focus of their war. British field forces fell under a combined land-and-sea campaign conducted by Washington and the French at Yorktown, where the British surrendered. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 reluctantly conceded American independence.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The Spanish tapped sources of wealth in the Americas, displaying the most wanton cruelty in obtaining it. By 1600, they had evolved from an extraction society to a settler society. The French attempted extraction incursions and to settle in North America but did not succeed as the Spanish had in the South.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The first transcontinental railroad was finished in 1869. Completion cut travel time from the Mississippi to the West Coast from three months to about one week. The line was joined by other transcontinentals; a national network facilitated settlement in the plains and mountain states that had been too remote.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
Deep South states seceded in response to Lincoln's election, but only the crisis at Fort Sumter in April 1861 convinced the Upper South to secede. A range of opinion existed in most slaveholding states regarding secession. This episode also describes the formation of the Confederate States of America.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The year 1819 blew up in the faces of the bankers, brokers, National Republicans, and everyone else who had leveraged themselves to the market system. It was the year of the Great Panic. The United States had to learn that committing itself to the world market system exacted a price in the form of the unpredictable cycle of boom and bust.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
Congress took control of Reconstruction policy in early 1867. Ulysses S. Grant, who supported Congress, won the presidency in 1868. This episode examines the struggle between Johnson and Congress, analyzes Reconstruction legislation, describes the state governments set up under that legislation in former Confederate states, and assesses the meaning of the election of 1868.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
By the mid-1700s, Britain and France were the two rivals for dominance of America. The war for empire, the French and Indian War, broke out in 1754, and at first went badly for England. But the British Empire had greater resources to draw on. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 forced the French to withdraw entirely from North America.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The broad stretch of coastal territory between the Chesapeake and Long Island had been settled by the Swedes along the Delaware Bay and the Dutch along the Hudson River. Dutch settlements (renamed New York) developed into a major commercial center. Quaker William Penn's Pennsylvania emerged, by the 1750s, with a commercial aristocracy similar to that of New England.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
In the Second Continental Congress of July 1776, a resolution declaring independence was adopted by the Congress and framed by a Declaration of Independence composed by Thomas Jefferson. In the Articles of Confederation of 1781, a joint government for the United States was created.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The sense that the American Republic represented the vanguard of a new age of freedom spawned campaigns to advance American perfection and freedom. Their common message was one of optimism, but it carried the threat that a democracy would find itself incapable of achieving stability. Alexis de Tocqueville, in "Democracy in America," gave a favorable reading to the American future.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The outcome of the war remained uncertain as late as the summer of 1864. Successes turned the tide decisively in favor of the Union. This episode examines the final year of military action, highlighting the roles of Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Grant and Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. It also describes Lincoln's assassination and gives a reckoning of the war's cost.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
Adams's presidency was one of the worst political disasters in the history of the American presidency. Jackson gathered his forces for 1828, and won by a staggering landslide in the first popular election of a president. It showed a shift in American political consciousness and the movement of the United States from its original shape as a republic toward the newer shape of popular democracy.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
The coming of settlers with the railroads made continuation of the Indians' independent life impossible, in addition to the near extinction of the buffalo and gold rushes. Plains tribes were warrior societies that lived to fight and ought not to be romanticized. After the Battle at Little Bighorn in 1876, the US Army intensified its campaign against them and broke all resistance within a year.