Published

Winner of the J. David Greenstone Prize and the Gladys Kammerer Award

Transcending the boundaries of class and race, the G.I. Bill enabled a sizable portion of the hallowed “greatest generation” to gain vocational training or to attend college or graduate school at government expense. Its beneficiaries had grown up during the Depression, living in tenements and cold-water flats, on farms and in small towns across the nation, most of them expecting that they would one day work in the same kinds of jobs as their fathers. Then the G.I. Bill came along, and changed everything. They experienced its provisions as inclusive, fair, and tremendously effective in providing the deeply held American value of social opportunity, the chance to improve one’s circumstances.

But the G.I. Bill fueled not only the development of the middle class: it also revitalized American democracy. Americans who came of age during World War II joined fraternal groups and neighborhood and community organizations and took part in politics at rates that made the postwar era the twentieth century’s civic “golden age.” In an age of rising inequality and declining civic engagement, Soldiers to Citizens offers critical lessons about how public programs can make a difference.

Like the Greeks who sailed with Jason in search of the Golden Fleece, the new Argonauts—foreign-born, technically skilled entrepreneurs who travel back and forth between Silicon Valley and their home countries—seek their fortune in distant lands by launching companies far from established centers of skill and technology. Their story illuminates profound transformations in the global economy.

The New Argonauts extends Saxenian’s pioneering research into the dynamics of competition in Silicon Valley. The book brings a fresh perspective to the way that technology entrepreneurs build regional advantage in order to compete in global markets. For Americans accustomed to unchallenged economic domination, the fast-growing capabilities of China and India may seem threatening. But as Saxenian convincingly displays in this pathbreaking book, the Argonauts have made America richer, not poorer.

The Companion Volume to the PBS Series

Apart from The Last of the Mohicans, most Americans know little of the French and Indian War—also known as the Seven Years’ War—and yet it remains one of the most fascinating periods in our history.

In The War That Made America, Fred Anderson deftly shows how the expansion of the British colonies into French territory in the 1750s and the ongoing Native American struggle for survival would erupt into seven years of bloodshed and unrest. The struggle would spread from the backwoods of Pennsylvania to the high courts of Europe, eventually overturning the balance of power on two continents and laying the groundwork for the American Revolution.

Beautifully illustrated, richly detailed, and utterly compelling, The War That Made America is the story of how America as we know it today emerged from a series of fractured colonies and warring tribes into a nation ripe for independence—and nobody tells this story better than Fred Anderson.

The first study to examine why violence erupts in America’s small towns and suburbs—and what can be done to prevent it.

In the last decade, school shootings have decimated communities and terrified parents, teachers, and children in even the most “family friendly” American towns and suburbs. These tragedies appear to be the spontaneous acts of troubled, disconnected teens, but this important book argues that the roots of violence are deeply entwined in the communities themselves. Rampage challenges the “loner theory” of school violence, and shows why so many adults and students miss the warning signs that could prevent it.

Drawing on more than 200 interviews with town residents, distinguished sociologist Katherine Newman and her co-authors take the reader inside two of the most notorious school shootings of the 1990s, in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Paducah, Kentucky. In a powerful and original analysis, she demonstrates that the organizational structure of schools “loses” information about troubled kids, and the very closeness of these small rural towns restrained neighbors and friends from communicating what they knew about their problems. Her conclusions shed light on the ties that bind in small-town America.

Winner of the Phi Alpha Theta Best Book Award

When we think of the key figures of early American history, we think of explorers, or pilgrims, or Native Americans—not cattle, or goats, or swine. But as Virginia DeJohn Anderson reveals in this brilliantly original account of colonists in New England and the Chesapeake region, livestock played a vitally important role in the settling of the New World.
Livestock were a central factor in the cultural clash between colonists and Indians as well as a driving force in the expansion west.

Settlers believed that Indians who learned to keep livestock would also advance along the path toward civility and Christian faith. But colonists failed to anticipate that the animals they hoped would convert Indians instead generated friction as Indians encountered free-ranging livestock at almost every turn, often trespassing in their cornfields. Moreover, concerned about feeding their growing populations and committed to a style of husbandry that required far more space than they had expected, colonists could see no alternative but to appropriate Indian land. This created tensions that soon reached the boiling point and it established a pattern that would repeat time and again over the next two centuries.

A stunning account that presents our history in a truly new light, Creatures of Empire restores a vital element of our past, illuminating one of the great forces of colonization and the expansion westward.