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The story of the United States, from Revolutionary War to Donald Trump
The Oxford Illustrated History of the United States offers a completely fresh account of the founding and development of the American republic. Lavishly illustrated, drawing upon the latest scholarship, and with a more representative and diverse cast of characters than any previous study, the book charts the course of American history from the Chicxulub meteor impact off the coast of Mexico more than 66 million years ago to the second inauguration of Donald J. Trump in 2025.
Contributors examine the political, social, economic, cultural and environmental factors which shaped American development, along with the many struggles for freedom and opportunity which have defined the life of the nation. The chapters also place the United States in regional and global context, revealing how Americans came to play such a prominent role not only in shaping the fate of North America, but also in crafting political, cultural, and economic orders for the wider world. Documenting the extraordinary rise of the United States, the book also contextualizes the challenges of our current historical moment, helping readers to understand how Americans forged a society of unprecedented prosperity and became the most powerful and influential nation in the world, while offering deep insight into the nation's turbulent present.
List of contents
- 1: Joyce E. Chaplin: Before the United States
- 2: Honor Sachs: The American Revolutions
- 3: Nicholas Guyatt: The Path to Peace, 1790-1820
- 4: Christa Dierksheide: The Antebellum Era
- 5: Justene Hill Edwards: Slavery and Antislavery
- 6: Ari Kelman: The Civil War and Reconstruction
- 7: Karine Walther: U.S. Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century
- 8: Chad L. Williams: Progress and its Discontents: The United States, 1880-1930
- 9: Kathryn Olmsted and Eric Rauchway: From Depression to Civil Rights: 1929-1968
- 10: William P. Jones: The Civil Rights Movement
- 11: Ellen Wu: Migration in American Life
- 12: Penny Von Eschen: The United States in the World from 1898 to the present
- 13: Leslie Butler: Ideas, Thought, and Culture in the United States
- 14: Geraldo Cadava: "The Nation is sick": The United States in the late twentieth century
- 15: Malinda Maynor Lowery: American Indians in the American Century
- 16: N. D. B. Connolly: Recounting: the United States since 2000-2020
About the author
Nicholas Guyatt was educated at Cambridge and Princeton, where he received his PhD in History. He taught at Princeton, Simon Fraser University, and the University of York before taking up his current post at Cambridge in 2014. He is the author of seven books, including
Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation(2016),The Hated Cage: An American Tragedy in Britain's Most Terrifying Prison(2022) and, with co-author Christa Dierksheide,
Jefferson's Wolf: A Founding Fathers Troubling Answer to the Problem of Slavery.(2026).
