There are, in general, two types of American history that one can be fascinated by. The physical (wars, homesteading, etc,) and the intellectual (creation of law, American philosophy, etc.) The second type of history is decidedly the lesser studied of the two. There have been few good books on America's intellectual tradition(s). Commager's is one.

Commager's 'thesis' is that pragmatism or variants thereof (not always explicitly so) is our nations motto. DeTocqueville, shortly after the founding, commented on American emphasis on practicality over the more European abstractions. Commager elequently backs up his thesis and gives us 450 pages of reading pleasure in the process.

The book is selective in that it tends to focus on the scientific and poltical reactions to social darwinism (which caught on like wildfire in the states, second only to the backlash it inspired). If I had to guess the thinker Commager most admires in his book, it would be Lester Ward, who developed devestating arguments against social darwinism, heightening the importance of environment to evolutionary thought. Commager is even more selective when, while rightly championing these developments, he doesn't talk much about its more extreme and ridiculous incantation in todays cultural relativism. So many subjects, so few trees!

Anyhow, if you are interested in exploring pragmatism, the rise of evolutionary environmentalism or American radicalism in politics (which is deeply connected to the previous two) then this is a great book.

The most dificult challenge is to understand what's going on, while it's going on (is George W. really President?). This book is a piece of work and well worth the effort. Make sure you have a good encyclopedia handy, time enough to stop and lookup the references, and the energy to stick with it. If so you will gain a wonderful perspective on who we are, how we got here, and the fundamental aspect of change in America. Go for it!

This book is basically a collection of legal documents collected from the arrival in America in 1492 up until 1898, showing the growth and evolution of our country through those people who lived through it.

This book is definately not to be read through, but instead used as a reference source. No one is going to sit down and read this thing cover to cover, but it's a GOD when you need primary sources for a term paper.

The documents, while not always listed in absolutely chronological order, are, nevertheless put forth in a very logical manner. Also, preceding each one is a little bit of background on the circumstances under which it was written and the author of the piece.

This is the best book I've ever used for writing history reports. It has documents about every major event in the history of the United States, and many letters and speeches on topics you can't find in any other books at the local library. It contains 633 entries, starting with "Privileges and Perogatives Granted to Columbus. April 30, 1492," and ending with the "Civil Rights Act of 1957. August 30, 1957." Again, it's a must-have for history students.

The book is good for anyone who wants a quick understanding of certain possibilities of why the North won. However, some of the essays(this is no reflection of the actual book) are not that well justified in my opinion.

Reissue of a classic collection of essays from the 60's...Currents's "God and the Strongest Battalions" is alone worth the price!...Economic, political, social, etc., aspects are all considering by the "big-gun" historians of 40 years past...Scholarly enough for the serious student, yet very reader-friendly for the novitiate...recommended in the strongest possible terms!

This is an excellent book which contains six essays on the various economic, miliary, diplomatic, social, and politiical reasons why the Confederacy lost and the Union won the Civil War. This book saved my butt

This book does a great job of tracing the history of the Constitution through its review by the Supreme Court from its inception through 1986. Would love to see an update

Flatly written and repetitive, this book misses many chances to illuminate the life and work of one of the most significant public intellectuals between the 1930s and the 1980s. Jumonville keeps calling Commager a Jeffersonian liberal but seems to have no idea about the difference between Jefferson's thought and the way that thought was understood in the era of the New Deal. Also, though Jumonville stresses that Commager used history to justify political arguments, he is silent on Commager's place in the 1960s controversy about historians writing contemporary history, on which Commager wrote extensively.

The sad thing is that this book is just scholarly enough to seem to occupy the field, but not scholarly enough to be the treatment that the subject deserves

In 1950, Henry Steele Commager was one of the best-known and most widely-read historians in the United States, and he would eventually be honored with over 40 honorary degrees. Today, he is virtually unknown to the public and, I dare say, is rarely read even by professionals in his field, American intellectual history. What a difference 50 years makes in the life of a historian's reputation and influence! The explanation may lie in part in a useful distinction, drawn early by Neil Jumonville, professor of history at Florida State University, between scholars, who write for professional audiences, and intellectuals, who write for the general public. Jumonville makes clear that Commager trained to be a scholar but, notwithstanding long appointments at New York University, Columbia University, and Amherst College, spent a good part of his career practicing as an intellectual. As a result, he was very popular in his own time but had relatively little lasting influence on scholars in his field.

Jumonville takes Commager's life from birth to burial in this wide-ranging and solid, if not entirely stimulating, biography. The ultimate issue for any biographer of Commager is: Why did he become passé, even while he was still teaching and writing? (Commager died at the age of 95 in 1998.) Jumonville posits several explanations for Commager's quick descent from national authority to obscurity. The first is that much of Commager's scholarly work had encyclopedic breadth but lacked analytic depth; his opinions and judgments were intuitional rather than carefully deductive and simply have not withstood the test of time. Second and not unrelated, Commager clearly, if unconsciously, showed a preference for being prolific rather than profound. His insistence upon writing, lecturing, and speaking to a large audience, largely for financial reasons, enhanced his popularity but may have contributed to limiting the impact he made on his professional peers. According to Jumonville: "Commager as a popularizer was not a major influence on the direction taken by intellectual historians." Although Commager aspired to recognition for a high level of scholarship, "he was not a research scholar." Commager preferred anecdotes, biographical sketches, and narrative over searching analysis. According to Jumonville: "Many historians felt [Commager's] work lacked appropriate sophistication." Third, some historians clearly resented the "breezy manner" in which Commager wrote, although that was not necessarily a criticism. Commager believed that "history is a branch of literature," and even critics of the substance of his oeuvre tended to admire his style. Fourth and finally, I believe, is the fact that he lost his intellectual curiosity and ceased to read his professional peers, which is an essential activity for scholars in any field. In the middle decades of the century, Commager was nationally known as an activist in "liberal Left politics." In particular, Commager was an outspoken foe of McCarthyism, and this brought him into sustained conflict with conservative commentators. (William F. Buckley once inquired, puckishly if not maliciously, whether Commager's middle name was a tribute to Stalin. It was, instead, a family name.) Later, Commager was an energetic critic of the Vietnam War, and he tended to be sympathetic to the student protesters of the 1960s. One of the issues which Jumonville attempts to address is whether Commager was a consistent Jeffersonian liberal. In my opinion, Jumonville spends too much time attempting to locate Commager along the liberal-conservative political continuum, although, in fairness to the author, Commager spent a lot of time thinking about it, too. This exercise would be profitable if it were necessary to explicate hidden biases, but Commager was an outspoken liberal in most senses of the mid-20th century use of that term. Furthermore, it also must be noted that, although Commager enjoyed engaging in public discourse about contemporary issues, his scholarly books were not partisan. Is professionalism in the writing of history inconsistent with partisan advocacy in public discourse? Or, as Jumonville puts, it: Must there be a clear dividing line between "the role of the historian as a scholar and as an activist intellectual"? Commager's life indicates that the answer is: Not necessarily. But, in purely practical terms, there may simply not be enough hours in the day to perform both functions well. Time magazine criticized one of Commager's books for lacking in thoroughness and suggested that he was a dilettante. That was unfair, but the tendency to write and speak glibly, which punditry requires, does not serve the scholar well because depth of insight is what proves the professional historian's mettle. Jumonville's Commager is likeable, if somewhat eccentric. When friends were invited to his home to dine, his wife entertained them during the cocktail hour, while Commager continued to work, and, when dinner was served, Commager joined them for the meal and conversation, invariably with himself as chief conversationalist. Although he was an energetic teacher, he rarely learned the names of his students. And I especially enjoyed the anecdote during which Commager was arguing with a colleague about the author of a line of Scottish poetry; when Commager could not find the line in an anthology, he concluded that the book was incomplete and tossed it out a window. On the other hand, Jumonville's periodic discussion of Commager's long friendship and correspondence with historian Allan Nevins is interesting but not especially revealing. And Jumonville's frequent references to Commager's relations with the New York Intellectuals do little, in my opinion, to add to Jumonville's thesis. Some readers will not find this book very exciting. But to the extent that intellectual history is a spectator sport, it is more akin to golf than football. I believe this book is a major achievement, but I also suspect that there still is room for another, more searching intellectual biography of Commager, especially one which examines his scholarly output in greater detail. What I am suggesting may be the equivalent of "inside the Beltway" political analysis, and, were he alive, Commager might object to this narrow focus, but it is the standard by which every professional historian is ultimately judged.

The "unraveling of america" was by far the most illrepresented mind jarble i have ever read. The authors uncanny ability to misconstrue the facts dealing with the Great Society was so incrediable it actually made me laugh out loud in mid sentence. For all of you considering to by this book my best advise would be to instead purchase a copy of charles murray's book "losing ground".

A very good review of the most turbulent decade in the 20th Century. Matusow encapsulates all of the major policy areas that the government dealt with, showing successes and failures as well as his analysis of the situation. For the book's second part, he writes about the left's reactions to these moves and how the various radical groups took certain aspects and focused their discontent upon them. Overall, well-written, very readable, and gives enough detail to satisfy most basic questions the reader might have regarding the issues he covers.

Like many of her fellow "Progressives," Jane Addams was born in the midwest and received an exceptional scholastic and religious education. She was strongly devoted to her father and shared with him a reverence for Abraham Lincoln not just as a man, but as a living ideal against which all men should measure their ideas and actions. Typical of many reformers of her era, Addams was not attracted to evangelical duty. Missionary work left her with a sense of futile detachment from the wretched social conditions she witnessed in East London. After visiting Toynbee Hall, Addams decided to establish a similar settlement house in the rapidly-growing city of Chicago, where "the evil and vices of American life seemed to be exaggerated." Her experiences at this settlement house are the subject of this book.

Although, on the one hand, Addams seemed the typical Progressive; on the other hand she did not follow many of the ideas of the more radical reformers. She was very practical and refused to be swayed by the claims of certain social movements and untried panaceas. she did not become a socialist. Although she greatly admired Tolstoy, she found his message "confused and contradictory" and doubted its suitability to the situation in Chicago. She deplored any violent tactics associated with socialist and anarchist groups despite their "noble motives." Addams demostrated an understanding of the ways in which strikes had a detrimental effect on people outside the labor movement (her dying sister was unable to see her family because the transportation system was blocked due to the Pullman strike. Unlike most reformers, she also had respect for the immigrant cultures represented at Hull House. A labor museum put native sewing machines and other instruments and crafts on display for all to enjoy.

One observation made by this reader was the animosity on the part of European reformers toward the work of the settlement residents. Tolstoy offered petty criticisms and one English visitor concluded that reformers in America were indifferent to the plight of the poor because they could not recite the "cubic feet of air required for each occupant of a tenement bedroom." Such remarks smack of a "caring competition." Addams, however, was well aware that the settlement house experiment was far from complete. Jane Addams' honest and humble account--albeit long and sometimes rambling (don't let the skinny paperback fool you)--demonstrated her unwavering commitment to achieving the improvement and unity of humanity.

Though Addams' prose often gets mired in the florid and highly mannered style of her era, this is a surprisingly compelling book. Free of the ethnic racism and stereotyping that blight many similar works of the era, Addams' account of her groundbreaking community center in one of the worst parts of late 19th-century Chicago fairly overflows with compassion and almost unbelievable fairness. Addams's intelligence is evident, and many of her ideas and attitudes seem decades ahead of their time. It's not light reading by any stretch of the imagination, but "Twenty Years at Hull House" contains many gripping portraits of the desperation of immigrant life and the simple power of human decency.

Most of the people who reviewed this book were forced to read it in college, admittedly. A couple of them openly confessed to having given up part-way through. My question: Why are you reviewing the book you haven't even read? Granted, it's not a Hollywood film, but it is perhaps one of the greatest works of the 20th century, written by an author who stands on par with Gandhi or Mother Teresa in her committment to social justice. Think about it this way: Addams' settlement house (or Hull House, as it was called) was like an ashram built in the middle of Chicago's dirtiest late 19th century slum. She was doing social work of a kind that had never been done before - working with immigrants, single mothers, orphins, troubled youth and the unemployed. The scope of her sociological experience has never been matched. Politically, Addams was an advocate for the abolition of war, and these views not only secured her the Nobel Prize, but also a black-listing with the House of Un-American Activities. I don't see what is not to like about this book. It is autobiographical in the strict sense of the term, but Addams was larger than life. If you are even vaguely interested in ethics, social work, sociology, social justice, or democracy, Addams' story will inspire and amaze you. Her life was a paradigmn of exellence. It was a life that will inspire you to achieve greatness yourself. I cannot over-recommend familiarizing yourself with this figure, and 20 Years at Hull House is the best place to start.

I must agree with the previous reviewer - the full four volume set is an essential purchase; this edition is not. Lacking in pre-Norman invasion history (I read the stuff on Roman Britain in about ten minutes, which really isn't enough considering the importance of this period to the island's history, as well as that of its offshoots) and skewed towards American material when available (there's lots of material on the civil war - funny that, given Commager's previous efforts), this volume doesn't do justice to Churchill's marvellous volumes.

As for the book itself, whilst the underlying historiography of Churchill's history may no longer be fashionable (it's a bit too conservative for my liking), the quality of the writing more than makes up for such deficiencies.

I studied English history in school and found the intertwining of "houses" and kings confusing and could never get their relationships organized in my mind.
Churchill's narrative style, along with the charts of the succession of royalty clarifies it for me. Further, knowing the succession provides "hooks" for mentally assigning other historical figures to particular eras, such as Becket, William Wallace and Joan of Arc.
It also tells the "rest of the story" for popularly well know stories such as the (fictional) Robin Hood era. "Everyone" knows that while Richard the Lion Hearted was imprisoned Prince John tried to take over the kingship, but was frustrated when Richard returned. However, how many people know that when Richard was mortally wounded in a subsequent battle he designated Prince John to become King, and that it was this King John who was forced to sign the Magna Carta?
True, this is an abridgement of Churchill's writings, but it is, nonetheless, Churchill's writings and remains fresh, direct and pungent.
Read this book!

As a very busy mother of six, I don't think I would ever have time to read the complete four volume set mentioned by other reveiwers. In the Preface, Mr. Commager writes, "This book is not, after all, meant for scholars, who will go to the original, but for the large reading public which Churchill himself most wanted to reach..." This abridgement was perfect for me. I did read part of the original ten or twelve years ago when my husband was studying it for a college research paper. My favorite part was the way Mr. Churchill related the Norman Conquest. This section in the abridged version is just as delightful as I remember the original being.

"On September 28 the fleet came safely to anchor in Pevensey Bay. There was no opposition to the landing. The local "fyrd" had been called out this year four times already to watch the coast, and having, in true English style, come to the conclusion that the danger was past because it had not yet arrived had gone back to their homes."

Mr. Churchill's style is witty and refreshingly NOT PC! I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in a broad overview of English history.

This book was excellant for a report I did on Jefferson. It is a pretty simple biography, easy to read. It gives basic information on Jefferson, but is not extremely in depth. Still,it was informative and worth reading.

Originally, this book was titled "The Blue and the Gray" and was fine as it was. Apparently, to sound more impressive and authoritative, the editors decided to call it "The Civil War Archive: The History of the American Civil War in Documents". This title is extremely misleading. Over 800 pages long, anyone who approaches it would think it is a reference book that the reader could go to and examine the complete speeches and documents that had so much of an influence on the war. Unfortunately, the editors have taken bits and pieces out, apparently for readability. In the case of the Emancipation Proclamation, the parts taken out completely change the character and meaning of the original. The Confederate Constitution is full of holes. There are other examples as well. The objectivity of the original documents is lost as the reader is dependent on what the editor feels is important.
To be sure, there are good parts in the book, but they are the first person accounts that were in the original. If it is read for that, then the book has value, but if reliance is made upon the documents contained...other sources must be referenced.