Supplements

This updated reader is a compilation of current newspaper, magazine, and journal articles relating to issues in American history. The topics include: the new land; revolutionary America; and new directions for American history. This title is supported by Dushkin Online (www.dushkin.com/online/), a student Web site designed to provide study support tools and links to related Web sites.

This reader is a compilation of current newspaper, magazine, and journal articles on American history. The issues discussed include: reconstruction and the gilded age; the emergence of modern America; and new directions for America. Annual Editions titles are supported by Dushkin Online (www.dushkin.com/online/), a student Web site designed for additional study support tools and links to related Web sites.

In this module, students investigate one of the oldest murder mysteries in American history: the Salem Witch Trials. What began with a girl taken ill in the winter of 1692 grew within months into a religious trial that hanged nineteen, pressed to death one, and disrupted the lives of colonists high and low throughout the region. The module’s vibrant sample of primary documents includes court records, diaries, paintings, sermons, an interactive map, and even colonial tavern songs. Together they illuminate the web of social, religious, and personal motives behind the trials and introduce one of the best-documented yet fiercely debated questions in American history.

This module invites students to explore the historiography and sources of the Silk Roads, the most important zone of cross-cultural encounter during the classical period. Far from isolated pockets of civilization, the rise of complex and unified classical societies made possible an extensive network of trade routes between the Mediterranean and East Asia, and were in turn transformed (some even destroyed) by the forces unleashed through those exchanges.

This module invites students to explore the historiography and sources of the Atlantic Basin during the age of exploration. Once a nearly impassable barrier, Columbus and subsequent explorers punctured the veil of ignorance and uncertainty cloaking the Atlantic. In doing so, they raised the curtain on a new, dramatic chapter of cross-cultural encounters whose cultural, political, economic, and biological exchanges transformed the modern world.

This module invites students to follow muckraker Upton Sinclair into the political maelstrom caused by his 1905 investigation, The Jungle, whose lurid account of tainted meats and murderous working conditions inside the nation’s massive new meatpacking factories revolted and shocked the American public. When the outcry was taken up by President Theodore Roosevelt, the scandal evolved into a crucial proving ground for Roosevelt’s vision of a federal government equal to powerful trusts such as the meatpackers. Students will use newspaper articles, editorial cartoons, Jungle excerpts, Roosevelt letters and speeches, and Congressional testimony to investigate the enactment of the nation’s first comprehensive food inspection legislation.

This module invites students to investigate the dramatic shifts for women from the exigencies of wartime employment symbolized by Rosie the Riveter during World War II to the cultural pressures of domestic life dramatized by the nation's favorite television wife and mother, Lucille Ball. Recent works in women's history and primary sources will show how women faced on one level a turbulent symbolic battle over the ideal of femininity and on another level were coping with surprisingly steady but nonetheless dramatic changes in employment and social conditions.

This module invites students to investigate the complex story behind the myth of Abraham Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves. The historiography and primary documents will reveal a more diverse cast of individuals, movements, armies, and social groups all of whom played important roles in emancipation, not least among them enslaved African Americans.