Using a thematic approach, this concise survey explores the many and varied threads of American history-social, intellectual, cultural, political, diplomatic, economic, and military-from the arrival of the first native American inhabitants thousand of years ago throught the crisis following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

Irwin Unger, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, wrote this book after discovering from his own experiences teaching American History at the University of California at Davis and at NYU, that a thematic approach was much more interesting to students than a purely descriptive one.