A summary of modern American history to use in the classroom.
The American Century tells the story of the United States from the confident dawn of 1900 to the pandemic year of 2020—a span in which the nation fought two world wars and a long cold one, grew fabulously rich, extended the promise of citizenship to those it had long excluded, and learned again and again that prosperity and justice neither arrive together nor stay long without effort.
Rodgir Cohen traces the arc across eighteen chapters: industrialization and the rise of the modern corporation; the Progressive reform impulse and its limits; the Great War and the Twenties; the Depression and the New Deal; the Second World War and the Cold War that followed; the prosperity and conformity of the Fifties; the upheavals of the Sixties and the disillusionment of the Seventies; the conservative revival of the Reagan years; the partisanship of the century's close; and a new century of terror, recession, division, and a common trial.
Written for the undergraduate survey and for general readers, the book pairs narrative history with the apparatus students need. Each chapter opens with learning objectives and closes with key terms, suggested readings, and references. Thirty-three "In Their Words" features set primary-source voices—Riis, Du Bois, Addams, Roosevelt, Wilson, and others - beside the analysis, letting readers hear the century in its own language.
This is a history without a tidy moral: a century of staggering achievement and grave failure, of liberty extended and promises unkept. The work of the republic, as Lincoln called it, remains unfinished. What the next century makes of it is a story not yet written—and it belongs to those who will live it.
