American Conversations Volume 1 Author:James H. Merrell, Jerald Podair The American Conversation: From Colonization Through Reconstruction, Volume I is the first in a two-volume anthology of original sources in United States history. The first act explores how peoples from northwestern Europe, western Africa, and eastern North America collided here after 1492, and how they crafted a strange new world from th... more »eir similarities?and their differences. The tale then chronicles how, from these inchoate beginnings, a collection of people who prided themselves on their loyalty to Britain, who bristled (or trembled) at the very idea of independence, wound up casting off that attachment and trying to fashion a new nation. The text takes the epoch from Colonization through Reconstruction on its own terms-?not just as “prelude” or “first half”. Readers get to see the nation’s past in a new light, to approach it from a new angle. These centuries, no longer mere way stations on some march of progress toward our own time, no longer the opening act for America’s modern pageant, were in fact a fascinating place that is in some ways as exotic to us as any remote land we might visit today. At the same time, of course, the people and texts the reader meets in these pages will resonate powerfully with the contemporary American conversation. Whatever today’s topic?race relations or the battle of the sexes; protest or piety; unum vs. pluribus; the grip of past on present?-readers will find its roots in the centuries between Colonization and Reconstruction.« less