These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present
About this audiobook
A powerful history of the making and unmaking of American democracy and global power, told in sweeping scope and intimate detail
In the winter of 1936, Franklin Roosevelt remarked in a fireside chat, “I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making.” Certainly apt in the midst of the Great Depression, the idea of a nation in the making still resonates today as we measure the achievements and shortcomings of our democracy. Over the twentieth century, Americans have worked, organized, marched, and fought to make the nation’s ideals a reality for all. This shared commitment to achieving an American democracy is the inspiring theme of These United States.
Acclaimed historians Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue forge the panoramic and the personal into an authoritative narrative. They give us insightful accounts of the century’s large events―war, prosperity, and depression; astute leadership and arrogant power; the rise and decline of a broad middle class. And they ground the history in the stories of everyday Americans such as William Hushka, a Lithuanian immigrant who makes and loses an American life; Stan Igawa, a Japanese-American who never doubts his citizenship despite internment during World War II; and Betty Dukes, a Wal-Mart cashier who takes on America’s largest corporation over wage discrimination.
The history begins and ends in periods of concentrated wealth, with immigration roiling politics and racial divisions flaring. Its arc over those hundred-plus years raises key questions: How far has our democracy come? Were the postwar decades of middle-class prosperity and global power a culmination of the American Century or the exception in a long history of economic and political division? Gilmore and Sugrue frame these questions by drawing the illuminating connections characteristic of the best historical writing.
About the author
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore is Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University. Her book Gender and Jim Crow won the James A. Rawley Prize in 1997 for the best book in race relations and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book, both given by the Organization of American Historians. It also won the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize, awarded by the Southern Association for Women Historians and Yale University’s Heyman Prize. Defying Dixie was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post and a Notable Book of 2009 by the American Library Association. Gilmore has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, among others.
Thomas J. Sugrue is a prizewinning twentieth-century American historian who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and is currently working on a history of real estate in modern America. He grew up in Detroit.
William Hughes is an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator. A professor of political science at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon, he received his doctorate in American politics from the University of California at Davis. He has done voice-over work for radio and film and is also an accomplished jazz guitarist.
