The Unfinished Nation A Concise History Of The American People

Known for its clear narrative voice and impeccable scholarship, Alan Brinkley's best-selling program for the U.S. survey course invites students to think critically about the many forces that continually create the Unfinished Nation that is the United States. In a concise but wide-ranging narrative, Brinkley shows the diversity and complexity of the nation and our understanding of its history--one that continues to evolve both in the events of the present and in our reexamination of new evidence and perspectives on the past. This edition features a series of Patterns of Popular Culture essays, as well as expanded coverage of pre-Columbian America, new America in the World essays, and updated coverage of recent events and developments that demonstrates how a new generation continues to shape the American story.

The study of two great demagogues in American history--Huey P. Long, a first-term United States Senator from the red-clay, piney-woods country of nothern Louisiana; and Charles E. Coughlin, a Catholic priest from an industrial suburb near Detroit. Award-winning historian Alan Brinkely describes their modest origins and their parallel rise together in the early years of the Great Depression to become the two most successful leaders of national political dissidence of their era. *Winner of the American Book Award for History*

Known for its clear narrative voice, impeccable scholarship, and affordability, Alan Brinkley' s "The Unfinished Nation" offers a concise but comprehensive examination of American History. Balancing social and cultural history with traditional political and diplomatic themes, it tells the story of the diversity and complexity of the United States and the forces that have enabled it to survive and flourish despite division. This fifth edition features eight new essays and enhanced coverage of recent events and developments in the continuing American story.

At a time when liberalism is in disarray, this vastly illuminating book locates the origins of its crisis. Those origins, says Alan Brinkley, are paradoxically situated during the second term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose New Deal had made liberalism a fixture of American politics and society. The End of Reform shows how the liberalism of the early New Deal—which set out to repair and, if necessary, restructure America’s economy—gave way to its contemporary counterpart, which is less hostile to corporate capitalism and more solicitous of individual rights. Clearly and dramatically, Brinkley identifies the personalities and events responsible for this transformation while pointing to the broader trends in American society that made the politics of reform increasingly popular. It is both a major reinterpretation of the New Deal and a crucial map of the road to today’s political landscape.