Ebook: Freedom and Crisis - American History

Freedom and Crisis is a book of discovery about the American past. The reader will quickly recognize, by glancing at the table of contents or by flipping through the pages, that this book is different from the ordinary "text." The difference is embodied in the way that Freedom and Crisis organizes the American experience. Units are arranged in pairs of chapters. Every pair opens with a dramatic narrative of a significant episode in the American past. Each episode was chosen not only because it conveys an exciting story but also because it introduces many aspects of American life during the period under investigation. The chapter that follows then locates the episode within its appropriate historical context, interpreting the major forces that shaped the actions described in the episode. This remains the book's basic format: a narrative chapter on a single episode, based on fresh documentary research, followed by an explanatory chapter linking historical fact and interpretation to the episode itself. The account of Jamestown in Chapter 3, for example, is followed by a chapter on seventeenth-century plantation colonies. Similarly, the Watergate drama serves as the basis for examining American politics and society during the 1970s in the accompanying chapter. I have employed this novel approach to an introductory book on American history because my primary concern from the start has been to write a book that would hold the interest of today's students, perhaps the most inquisitive but skeptical generation of students ever. To do this, I felt that a book had to be readable and realistic. Freedom and Crisis is both. The book dramatizes critical moments in the American democratic experience and deals candidly with both the extension and the denial of liberty at those times. Freedom and Crisis, then, is not a traditional book on United States history. Often such traditional books are written in the belief that there exists a certain body of data (election results, dates and outcomes of wars, treaties, major laws, and so forth) that comprises American history. I accept this idea only to the extent that most of the data of conventional texts can be found somewhere in this book. Sometimes, however, the information is located in maps, charts, and special features rather than in the text itself. Frequently overlooked by students (and even by some teachers) is the point that this central body of data, the "facts," emerges only after a certain selection on the part of historians. There exists, after all, an almost infinite number of facts that could be chosen to represent the history of the human experience. In writing this book, I simply carried the usual selection process a step farther. Half the book is devoted to selected dramatic episodes. When linked to the accompanying chapters, the episodes forn1 my bedrock of factual material. Using this foundation, students can then inquire into the fundamental questions of American history. Most episodes can be read simply as absorbing stories. Thus readers will discover much about the country's past merely by studying such vivid incidents as the Boston massacre, the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Nat Turner revolt, the Custer massacre, the Triangle fire, the Philippines revolt, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Watergate. But by using the interpretative chapter accompanying each episode, students will develop the ability to extract greater meaning from the facts in these dramas and, at the same time, acquire an understanding of related historical events. Freedom and Crisis moves chronologically through the American experience, but certain themes recur and receive particular attention. The book devotes several episodes, for example, to patterns of race and ethnic relations, especially the treatment of blacks, Indians, immigrants, and other oppressed minorities. The struggle for political liberties and economic betterment, class conflicts, territorial expansion, technological change, and basic ideological and cultural disputes are also treated. The constant interplay of factual drama and careful interpretation is the book's distinctive feature. Facts and concepts cross paths on each page, thereby avoiding the usual unhappy classroom extremes of concentrating either on what happened or on why it happened. Freedom and Crisis has no room for empty historical abstractions that leave students without a factual anchor. Nor does an uncontrolled flood of rampaging facts lacking solid conceptual boundaries spill endlessly off the printed pages. The paired-chapter format, I believe, avoids both these extremes: The episode-explanatory chapter pairs present a concise but comprehensive introduction to the history of the United States. Yet although the book covers the American experience, I wrote with less urgent concern for coverage than for concreteness, drama, and interpretative depth. Almost every detail included in the narrative episodes has a larger meaning, so that students and instructors must work outward in this text from concrete detail to generalized understanding. History as an act of inquiry involves putting great questions to small data, discovering general significance in particular events. Freedom and Crisis evolved from my belief that students are both willing and able to engage in the same process of inquiry as professional historians. In this manner each incident in the American odyssey, from the earliest European discoveries to our generation's exploration of the moon, can become a personal act of discovery for the reader, risky but rewarding. The first two editions of Freedom and Crisis involved the joint efforts of myself and my collaborator, R. J. Wilson of Smith College, whose subtle intelligence contributed meaningfully to the book's success. This edition includes eighteen new chapters and thoroughly updates the others, so that it represents an entirely fresh attempt to make the paired chapter format even more effective and useful to teachers and students. The popular short biographies of earlier editions have been supplemented with a series of "American profiles." Pictures and maps have also been revamped. In the third and subsequent editions of Freedom and Crisis, Frank Otto Gatell joins me as co-author. Professor Gatell had contributed significantly, though without prior acknowledgment at his own request, to the book's first two editions. The chapters that follow chart the authors' personal roadmap through American experience. This book will achieve its purpose only if it helps the reader begin his or her own private journey through the national past.
Allen Weinstein