United Nations

Is America ruled by the ‘shadowy government’ which famed journalist Ferdinand Lundberg described in 1934? Is the nation ruled by what President Carter called “an Oligarchy instead of a Democracy”?

Acclaimed historian Edward Gray offers the first comprehensive narrative of the America's defining border. Formalized in 1767, the Mason-Dixon Line resolved a generations-old dispute that began with the establishment of Pennsylvania in 1681. In 1780, Pennsylvania's Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery inaugurated the next phase in the Line's history. Proslavery and antislavery sentiments had long coexisted in the Maryland-Pennsylvania borderlands, but now African Americans faced a boundary between distinct legal regimes.

The decade of the 1790s has been called the "age of passion". Fervor ran high as rival factions battled over the course of the new republic - each side convinced that the other's goals would betray the legacy of the Revolution so recently fought and so dearly won. All understood as well that what was at stake was not a moment's political advantage, but the future course of the American experiment in democracy. In this epochal debate, no two figures loomed larger than Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

John Ross served the Cherokee Nation in a public capacity for nearly fifty years, thirty-eight as its constitutionally elected principal chief. Historian W. Dale Weeks describes Ross's efforts to protect the tribe's interests amid systematic attacks on indigenous culture throughout the nineteenth century. At the outset of the Civil War, Ross called for all Cherokees to remain neutral in a war they did not support—a position that became untenable when the US withdrew its forces from Indian Territory.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the United States led the world in negotiating one of the most important treaties in history: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Through these negotiations the United States secured the largest area of maritime jurisdiction in the world—an area larger than the continental United States itself—and protected navigational freedom, so critical for Naval mobility. Today UNCLOS is in force for 168 countries and the European Union. Isolationist arguments, however, have for a quarter-century prevented the Senate from voting on the Convention.

In June 1846, General Stephen Watts Kearny rode out of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with two thousand soldiers, bound for California. At the time, the nation was hell-bent on expansion: James K. Polk had lately won the presidency by threatening England over the borders in Oregon, while Congress had just voted to annex Texas. After Mexico declared war on the United States, Kearny’s Army of the West was sent out, carrying orders to occupy Mexican territory. Winston Groom recounts the amazing adventure and danger that Kearny and his troops encountered on the trail.

"I am in Birmingham because injustice is here," declared Martin Luther King, Jr. He had come to that city of racist terror convinced that massive protest could topple Jim Crow. But the insurgency faltered. To revive it, King made a sacrificial act on Good Friday, April 12, 1963: he was arrested. Alone in his cell, reading a newspaper, he found a statement from eight "moderate" clergymen who branded the protests extremist and "untimely." King drafted a furious rebuttal that emerged as the "Letter from Birmingham Jail".

That a new history of the United States is needed, extending from the discovery down to the present time hardly needs a statement. No such comprehensive work by a competent writer is now in existence. Individual writers have treated only limited chronological fields. Meantime there, is a rapid increase of published sources and of serviceable monographs based on material hitherto unused. On the one side, there is a necessity for an intelligent summarizing of the present knowledge of American history by trained specialists; on the other hand, there is a need for a complete work.

In 1950, Fairfax County, Virginia, was 90 percent white, 10 percent African American, with a little more than 100 families who were "other". Currently the African American percentage of the population is about the same, but the Anglo white population is less than 50 percent, and there are families of Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American origin living all over the county. A Nation of Nations follows the lives of a few immigrants to Fairfax County over recent decades as they gradually "Americanize".

This second volume takes the listener through the agonies of World War Two, the call to America to assume global responsibilities in the rising Cold War, and with that, the rise to greatness in the 1950s and early 1960s of "Middle America". The narrative looks closely at the need of American citizens themselves to retake the initiative and duty of maintaining their own political sovereignty, to take action to preserve America's longstanding Christian tradition of "democracy from below". And most critically, it looks at the matter of America getting back into a covenant with God.

Except perhaps the struggle between patriots and tories at the outbreak of the Revolution, no controversy in the history of the United States has aroused such passion and led to such momentous results as that between the advocates and the opponents of slavery … The book has the double purpose of describing the conditions of slavery and the state of mind of those interested in it or against it, and at the same time recording the events which mark the anti-slavery agitation.

From the Editor’s Introduction to Volume Fifteen: Hardly any year in American history so distinctly marks the transition from one era to another as 1829. The character of Andrew Jackson is so distinct and so aggressive that few writers upon the period can resist the temptation to group the events of his administration around his personality. This temptation Professor MacDonald has resisted. His conception of the period is that it witnessed the fruition of national policies, nearly all of which would have come up and would have divided the nation had there been no Andrew Jackson.

Although the separate history of the commonwealths is, for the most part, merged into that of the nation, the national history grows steadily more complex … The special function of this volume in the American Nation series is to describe the foundations of the present American party system and its application to the extremely difficult problems of that time …

That a new history of the United States is needed, extending from the discovery down to the present time hardly needs statement. No such comprehensive work by a competent writer is now in existence. Individual writers have treated only limited chronological fields. Meantime there, is a rapid increase of published sources and of serviceable monographs based on material hitherto unused.

To the period between 1689 and 1740 has been applied the term “The Forgotten Half-Century.” Most of the writers on colonial history in detail give special attention to the seventeenth century, the period of upbuilding; and general historians like Bancroft and Hildreth sweep rather lightly over the epoch between the English Revolution and the forerunners of the American Revolution.

The American Revolution was not only a political contest for liberty, equality, and independence (for white men, at least); it was also a contest to define certain accounts of reality to be truthful while defining others as false and dangerous. Misinformation Nation argues that we must also conceive of the American Revolution as a series of misperceptions, misunderstandings, and uninformed overreactions.

One of the darkest and cruelest chapters in the history of the United States occurred when the nation’s young government decided to remove the native peoples from their lands in the name of profit. Having helped settlers for hundreds of years, five Native American tribes found it increasingly more difficult to relate to, and trust, the country that had once acted as their allies. The native peoples had fought alongside the Americans to gain freedom from England, the nation that the colonists deemed oppressive and unfair.

In this narrative history of the US through major outbreaks of contagious disease, from yellow fever to the Spanish flu, from HIV/AIDS to Ebola, Polly J. Price examines how law and government affected the outcome of epidemics—and how those outbreaks in turn shaped our government. Price presents a fascinating history that has never been fully explored and draws larger conclusions about the gaps in our governmental and legal response.

Few periods of American history have been more written upon than the decade preceding the Revolution. Nevertheless, there is still room for a brief volume on the subject; all the world knows that the Revolution really began almost fifteen years before its beginning, because of the efforts of the British government to give greater unity and stiffness to its colonial system, both as to government and as to trade with other nations; but the real motives underlying the uneasiness of the colonies still need enlightenment.

Volume 7 of 27 in The American Nation: A History published by Harper Brothers (1904-1918). Edited by Albert Bushnell Hart, Professor of History at Harvard University.