Students and history buffs need a good, comprehensive volume on the significant people, events, movements and changes in the United States over the course of its history. This volume, from the leading publisher of reference books in the English language, fails and disappoints with regard to these goals. This Oxford Companion tries to be the United States History of Everything, as a result it misses key aspects of political history and what it does cover is often inadequate and incomplete.

The Companion tries to cover too many aspects of cultural history and its icons. As a result it sacrifices information on many important political and public figures. We get biographies of Michael Jordan and Marilyn Monroe but no separate bios of George Mason, William Borah, Hiram Johnson, Henry Cabot Lodge, Tom Watson, Joseph Cannon, Thomas Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller, Clarence Darrow, Sam Rayburn, Jesse Jackson -- and the list goes on and on. When they are covered it is often in snipets in subject area articles, which does not give a complete overview of their public careers.

What it does cover in cultural and intellectual history is often incomplete. The Companion has separate artices on the history of the blues, jazz and a weak article on rural country and folk music, but absolutely nothing on bluegrass or commercial country music and its pioneers. The index doesn't even mention the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Bill Monroe or Hank Williams. Yet country music far exceeds both the blues and jazz in popularity in terms of its fan base and are certainly deserving popular art forms for inclusion.

The selection of significant figures for separate biographies is often strange and arbitrary. The Companion offers a bio of physicist Eugene Wigner but not of Hans Bethe or Richard Feynman, like Wigner both Nobel Prize winners. Feynman is considered by many to be the most important theoretical physicist of the second half of the 20th century. This arbitrariness in selecting subjects for biographies can be repeated in many different subject areas.

The Companion contains 26 black and white maps, often of poor resolution, and follows the same arbitrary editing in terms of subject matter. You get a map of the properties of U.S. Steel, but no map on how the United States looked at the end of the Revolution or after the Louisiana Purchase, though there is a barely readable map of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. No reference tables and charts are included to tell the reader Presidential election results, who were the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, or who occupied important positions in Congress or the military over the course of American history.

On the positive side there are many good articles here on political and social history. However the reader must use this book carefully and supplement it with other Oxford Companions and reference books. At $... I would examine this book in a library before considering a purchase.

This volume contains entries that deal with concepts, events, persons, and movements in u.s. history. The length of the entries is appropriate to the topic considered. In addition, the entires both inform the reader with up-to-date information and indicate how revisionist historians have resahped opionions or refocused the discipline. The entries are clearly written and eminently readable. They are persuasive in thier opionions, yet respectful of other stances. The cross references are helpful and ample. The same obtains for the bibliographies. The Oxford Companion to U.S. History far surpasses some other contemporary dictionaries in U.S. history. Its articles are treated in more depth and greater nuances. The entries in the other dictionaries are too short and far too superficial. I would highly recommend this for people involved in serious historical study and research. The price, especially the discounted one offered by amazon.com, is well worth the investment for scholars,libraries, and families.

This book is a must have for anyone with an interest in American History. It gives a clear, concise explanation on most important aspects of the United States history and the history of the lands that would eventually become the United States. The most unique aspect of this book is that, unlike a school textbook, it explains a topics role throughout the history of the United States in on section. In other words, if you looked up Civil Rights, you would find a history of Civil Rights in America from the colonial period to present. All the background information you would need would be in one place, not scattered throughout the book. This is beneficial for teachers who need to quickly find some basic information to answer a student's question, or for a student who needs to quickly brush up on a topic. This is a work that I will definetly use for years to come.

I found this book to be more informative and unbiased than I expected. Since Rosenberg approaches her subject from a revisionist standpoint, I feared there would be a politicized undercurrent that would turn me off. Rosenberg's thesis is well-stated and clearly explained. She examines America's economic and cultural expansion in the period between 1890 and 1945 (although she dips rather significantly at times into the late 1940s). What she discovers is a steady progression from private activity to government-led efforts to expand America's influence in the world. At the heart of her study is an ideological concept she calls liberal developmentalism; this uniquely American thinking was, she posits, pervasive in American government and culture by 1890. Americans believed their system was the best in the world and that the export of the American system (free trade, free enterprise, the free flow of information) throughout the world would guarantee America's economic preeminence while building up weaker nations and ultimately securing world peace. American motives were quite selfish, as expansionism seemed to hold the only solution for the depression of the 1890s, but Americans also truly believed the world would benefit by Americanization. She identifies three distinct eras: a "promotional state" from the 1890s up until World War I, in which the government took a hands-off approach to diplomacy while American entrepreneurs and investors worked hard to expand their business to foreign markets; a "cooperative state" in the 1920s, in which government publicly appeared to stay out of diplomatic wrangling but behind the scenes sought to guide investment that would benefit the United States, even if it involved monopolies or American-dominated cartels; and a "regulatory state" in the 1930s and beyond, in which the government actively began to seek the means by which to control the world economy that had fallen into depression as a result of the long-term failures of the cooperative approach. The Great Depression and spread of fascism convinced Roosevelt and others to seek the reins of the world economy.

Rosenberg points out the contradictory nature of American policy. While espousing free trade and free access, America continued to employ protectionist tariffs and did not mind the lack of free access for other nations in American-dominated zones of interest. She clearly explains how de facto diplomacy by private businessmen, while successful in the short-term, was helpless to stop the terrible descent into economic bad times. She easily shows that America was far from isolationist during the first three decades of the twentieth century despite appearances to the contrary. The subject I found most interesting in the book had to do with the export of American cultural values. Rosenberg provides an enlightening discussion of movies/radio, communications, philanthropy, and missionary work in spreading the American way of life to other countries. While this is a rather dry book at times, the discussion of cultural issues is a fascinating examination of a topic often overlooked by authors in this field of study.

The historian in me does frown upon Rosenberg's lack of footnotes. While she does provide a helpful bibliography at the end of the book, the lack of distinct, verifiable citations robs a little bit of the authority so eloquently expressed in her thesis. All in all, though, the book presents a compelling and forceful argument and provides a valuable new insight into the history of post-1890 American diplomacy.

The book reads a lot like an encyclopedia. It contains a lot of good information about social work administration, but is quite dry reading.

Recent (post-WWII) American history is a highly interesting and frequently-overlooked genre under the overall umbrella of American history study. Many tend to simply forget about it -- after all, it's hard to step back from the times in which one lives and analyze them objectively -- or shrug it off as not important. After all, we LIVED that, right? -- How can it possibly stand up as history? This overlooks the self-evident but rarely-ackwnoledged fact that merely living through something does not mean you understand it -- or, as with one aspect of contemporary American history covered in this book, the counterculture, if you remember it, the saying goes, you weren't there. Certainly, recent history is as interesting and vital as any other era to the objective historian -- and it is certainly the most applicable to our current social and political climate. One can read ancient Greek texts and see how that great society laid the foundation for what is going on at the moment -- but it is much more cognizable, not to mention jolting, when reading about something that happened much more recently, which we can clearly discern as sowing the seeds for the present day. What one often forgets when reading histories of the days of yore is that all histories are inherently prejudiced -- and even, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, autobiographical. When reading about events that one has actually lived through, this oft-forgotten fact becomes apparent.

Though individual parts of post-1945 American history have inspired volumes upon volumes, and even mini cottage industries, general, overarching texts of the period are not abundant. In Our Times is one of the most prevalent. Though this book is often used as a college textbook, it works better as a single reading than as a textbook or a reference. Certainly, it contains a wealth of good information -- but it is presented in the driest, most unimaginable way possible. Chapters are long, with little to no break in text: no captions, graphics, or eye-catching features whatsoever, and very few pictures (none in color) or graphs. Chapters are broken up only by bold typeheadings, and quite rarely at that, making it very difficult to look things up or search for something quickly; this renders the book almost useless as a reference and quite limited as a textbook. As a sit-through read, though, it is quite adequate. This book lends itself more to the historically-curious individual reader than to the student or scholar.

This text doesn't contain anything not available on many of the current biotechnology-oriented web sites. Each business is listed with an address, keywords, and a one-sentence summary. Is that adequate for large companies such as Chiron and Amgen? The preface is fairly generic and doesn't describe job titles in terms of day to day duties and work environment. All in all, I think a non-current (1996?) listing of biotech companies shouldn't cost $45, especially when biotech changes so rapidly.