An anthology of excerpts from primary materials on the Americans & their development: Native American traditions; Spanish & Portuguese explorers; factors in global exploration; short route to Asia; contact in Meso-America; British colonies in the 17th & 18th cent.; Chesapeake: England's first colonization; New England: Puritan colonies; colonial women; enslavement of Africans; origins of American foreign policy; creation of the Constitution of 1787; African Americans in the Revolutionary Age; Antebellum reform & reformers; Industrial Revolution; slavery & the Old South; Civil War; Emancipation; Manifest Destiny & the war with Mexico; Reconstruction: Repub. Party, & the African-American experience; & Whitman remembers Lincoln.