New and reorganized parts in each volume bring key moments into clear focus for easy assignment. Volume One has been expanded from 6 parts to 7 and features two new highly teachable units — Part Five “Reimagining Family, Community, and Society: An Age of Reform” and Part Six “The Growing Sectional Controversy: Slavery and Its Discontents.” Volume Two features a reorganized treatment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with Part Two now focused tightly on industrial growth and crisis and a new Part Three “A Society in Flux: Preparing for an American Century” showcasing social activism during the transition to the twentieth century. A reimagined Part Seven, “Between History and Tomorrow: Toward a New Century” explores recent governmental and societal challenges ranging from the PATCO strike to Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War.
Over one-third new documents in each volume broaden the spectrum of voices and topics, with new coverage of nineteenth-century reform, the sectional crisis, the Spanish-American War, and governmental and societal challenges from the Reagan years to the present. Among the new readings are Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s letters spotlighting a colonial woman’s experience, Ida B. Wells’s writings on African American protest, pilot Jason Armagost’s reflections on the Iraq War’s costs and meanings, and environmentalist Tom Bennett’s observations on the impact of coal mining.
Three new “Points of View” per volume provide fresh opportunities for comparative work. New Points of View in in this edition focus on Indian captivity narratives, prison reform, and secession in Volume One, and the rise of unions, temperance, and Hurricane Katrina in Volume Two.
Over 70 images — 20 percent more in this edition — provide captivating sources for classroom discussion. Two additional “Visual Portfolios” per volume provide dynamic sources for student analysis. New portfolios in Volume One include “Mapmaking and Colonialism in the New World” and “The Civil War Presidency through the Eyes of Political Cartoonists” and “Advertising in the Interwar Years: The Marketing of Race” and “Some Consequences of Reaganomics” in Volume Two. New individual images for analysis include a daguerreotype of Gold Rush miners and an Indiana lynching in 1930.