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Book proposals and CVs should be sent to:
Dr. Brian D. McKnight
Department of History and Philosophy
The University of Virginia's College at Wise
Zehmer 220, 1 College Ave.
Wise, VA 24293 USA
bdm2e@uvawise.edu
Brian D. McKnight and James S. Humphreys, Editors
Intended for graduate students and others interested in historiography, the Interpreting American History series surveys historiographical interpretations of important U.S. historical eras and events, examining not only the intellectual shifts that have taken place but the various catalysts that drove those shifts.

Slavery

and | Filed under: Civil War Era, History, Interpreting American History, Recent Releases
Slavery: Interpreting American History. Kent State University Press

To fully understand the various ways in which slavery has been depicted and described is a difficult task. Like any other important historical issue, this requires a thorough grasp of the underlying history, methodological developments over time, and the contemporary politics and culture of historians’ own times. And the case of slavery is further complicated, of course, by changes in the legal and political status of African Americans in the 20th and 21st centuries.

 


Interpreting American History: The New South

| Filed under: Interpreting American History, U.S. History
Humphreys Cover

The concept of the “New South” has elicited fierce debate among historians since the mid-twentieth century. At the heart of the argument is the question of whether the post–Civil War South transformed itself into something genuinely new or simply held firm to patterns of life established before 1861. The South did change in significant ways after the Civil War ended, but many of its enduring trademarks, the most prominent being white supremacy, remained constant well into the twentieth century. Scholars have yet to meet the vexing challenge of proving or disproving the existence of a New South. Even in the twenty-first century, amid the South’s sprawling cities, expanding suburbia, and high-tech environment, vestiges of the Old South remain.

 


Interpreting American History: Reconstruction

| Filed under: African American Studies, Discover Black History, Interpreting American History, U.S. History, Understanding Civil War History
Smith cover

Writing in 1935 in his brilliant and brooding Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois lamented America’s post–Civil War era as a missed opportunity to reconstruct the war-torn nation in deed as well as in word. “If the Reconstruction of the Southern states, from slavery to free labor, and from aristocracy to industrial democracy, had been conceived as a major national program of America, whose accomplishment at any price was well worth the effort,” wrote Du Bois, “we should be living today in a different world.”

 


Interpreting American History: The New Deal and the Great Depression

| Filed under: Interpreting American History, U.S. History
Purcell cover

In this second volume of the Interpreting American History series, experts on the 1930s address the changing historical interpretations of a critical period in American history. Following a decade of prosperity, the Great Depression brought unemployment, economic ruin, poverty, and a sense of hopelessness to millions of Americans. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs aimed to bring relief, recovery, and reform to the masses.

 


Interpreting American History: The Age of Andrew Jackson

and | Filed under: Audiobooks, Interpreting American History, U.S. History
McKnight Cover

Historians possess the power to shape the view of history for those who come after them. Their efforts to illuminate significant events of the past often result in new interpretations, which frequently conflict with ideas proposed by earlier historians. Invariably, this divergence of thoughts creates a dissonance between historians about the causes and meanings of prior events. The Kent State University Press’s new Interpreting American History Series aims to help readers learn how truth emerges from the clash of interpretations present in the study of history. In the series’s first volume, Interpreting American History: The Age of Andrew Jackson, experts on Jacksonian America address the changing views of historians over the past century on a watershed era in U.S. history.

 



This is a firstbook archive