A Brief History of America

The next in this series of admirably concise yet nevertheless comprehensive titles looks at the history of all Americans as well as America; its environmental history and its linkage to economic history; the political shaping of America; and America in the world, from being a colony to post-Cold War America. Black examines the environmental history of America and its linkage to economic history, crucially, the clearing of forests; the spread of agriculture; mineral, coal and iron extraction; industrialisation; urbanisation; and current and growing climate-crisis concerns. He explores the political shaping of America: indigenous American polities; free European and unfree African settlements; the creation of an American State, and its successes and failures from 1783 to 1861; Civil War; democratisation; the rise of the federal Government from the 1930s; the Civil Rights movement from the 1950s onwards, and tensions in more recent governance. The book considers America in the World: as