The Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s stunning trilogy of American history, spanning the birth of the Constitution to the final days of the Cold War. In these three volumes, Pulitzer Prize–­ and National Book Award–winner James MacGregor Burns chronicles with depth and narrative panache the most significant cultural, economic, and political events of American history. In The Vineyard of Liberty, he combines the color and texture of early American life with meticulous scholarship. Focusing on the tensions leading up to the Civil War, Burns brilliantly shows how Americans became divided over the meaning of Liberty. In The Workshop of Democracy, Burns explores more than a half-century of dramatic growth and transformation of the American landscape, through the addition of dozens of new states, the shattering tragedy of the First World War, the explosion of industry, and, in the end, the emergence of the United States as a new global power. And in The Crosswinds of Freedom, Burns offers an articulate and incisive examination of the US during its rise to become the world’s sole superpower—through the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, and the rapid pace of technological change that gave rise to the “American Century.”

In this provocative book, Jane Tompkins seeks to move the study of literature away from the small group of critically approved texts that have dominated literary discussion over the decades, to allow inclusion of texts ignored or denigrated by the literary academy. Sensational Designs challenges comfortable assumptions about what makes a literary work a "classic."

The thesis of this book is that the 19th-century interest in the Antarctic functions for modern scholars as an important index to American self-discovery and self-definition from the 1830s onward. According to the author, American hopes for confirming identity came to be focused on an unlikely goal, the discovery of the illusive Antarctic continent. By examining in detail one literary product of the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838-1842) to Antarctica, James Croxall Palmer's epic poem Thulia: A Tale of the Antarctic (1843), and its revision, The Antarctic Mariner's Song (1868), and by locating these works within their cultural context, Lenz reveals the significance and changing meaning of exploration to emerging American concepts of nationhood. The volume also considers the tradition of American sea fiction in the works of such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, arguing that for these writers the Antarctic was a locus of symbolic meaning while for Palmer it was a process of individual and collective perception. The 1868 version of the Palmer poem is attached here as an appendix. A useful bibliography follows that appendix.

Reveals how the European travels of John and Abigail Adams helped define what it meant to be an American From 1778 to 1788, the Founding Father and later President John Adams lived in Europe as a diplomat. Joined by his wife, Abigail, in 1784, the two shared rich encounters with famous heads of the European royal courts, including the ill-fated King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette, and the staid British Monarchs King George III and Queen Charlotte. In this engaging narrative, A View from Abroad takes us on the first full exploration of the Adams’s lives abroad. Jeanne E. Abrams reveals how the journeys of John and Abigail Adams not only changed the course of their intellectual, political, and cultural development—transforming the couple from provincials to sophisticated world travelers—but most importantly served to strengthen their loyalty to America. Abrams shines a new light on how the Adamses and their American contemporaries set about supplanting their British origins with a new American identity. They and their fellow Americans grappled with how to reorder their society as the new nation took its place in the international transatlantic world. After just a short time abroad, Abigail maintained that, “My Heart and Soul is more American than ever. We are a family by ourselves.” The Adamses’ quest to define what it means to be an American, and the answers they discovered in their time abroad, still resonate with us to this day.