Kennedy, David M

The new edition of American Pageant, the leading program for AP U.S. history, now reflects the redesigned AP Course and Exam that begins with the 2014-2015 school year. The 16th edition helps prepare students for success on the AP Exam by 1) helping them practice historical thinking skills, pulling together concepts with events, and 2) giving them practice answering questions modeled after those they'll find on the exam. The new edition adds a two-page opener/preview to every chapter, guiding students through the main points of the chapter and using questions and elements tied to the AP Curriculum Framework to help them internalize the chapter more conceptually. Also new are additional End-of-Part multiple-choice and short answer questions reflecting the changes to the exam. Practice DBQs and other free response essay questions will still be found at the back of the book.

Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. In a single volume the author tells how America endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities. He demonstrates that the economic crisis of the 1930s was more than a reaction to the excesses of the 1920s. For more than a century before the Crash, America's unbridled industrial revolution had gyrated through repeated boom and bust cycles, consuming capital and inflicting misery on city and countryside alike. Nor was the alleged prosperity of the 1920s as uniformly shared as legend portrays. Countless Americans eked out threadbare lives on the margins of national life. Roosevelt's New Deal wrenched opportunity from the trauma of the 1930s and created a lasting legacy of economic and social reform, but it was afflicted with shortcomings and contradictions as well. The author details the New Deal's problems and defeats, as well as its achievements. Yet, even as the New Deal was coping with the Depression, a new menace was developing abroad. Exploiting Germany's own economic burdens, Hitler reached out the disaffected, turning their aimless discontent into loyal support for the Nazi Party. In Asia, Japan harbored imperial ambitions of its own. The same generation of Americans who battled the Depression eventually had to shoulder arms in another conflict that wreaked worldwide destruction, ushered in the nuclear age, and forever changed their way of life and their country's relationship to the rest of the world. In the second installment of the chronicle, the author explains how the nation agonized over its role in the conflict, how it fought the war, and why the U.S. emerged victorious, and why the consequences of victory were sometimes sweet, sometimes ironic. The author analyses the determinants of American strategy, the painful choices faced by commanders and statesmen, and the agonies inflicted on the millions of ordinary Americans who were compelled to swallow their fears and face battle as best they could.

Chronicles the years of World War I and discusses its impact on American society, including workers, women, and African-Americans.

Studies the effects of the Great Depression and World War II on American society, discussing the economic crisis of the 1930s, the effect of the Depression on cities and rural communities, and the social and economic reforms brought about by the New Deal; and argues that the country was saved by entering the war.

Chronicles the years of World War I and discusses the impact of World War I on American society, including workers, women, and blacks.