Who Built America?

Working People and the Nation’s History

Reviews

“Who Built America? is an extremely insightful and thoughtful compendium of social and labor history, skillfully interwoven with a far more critical than usual political history of the nation. It is a gracefully written chronicle that will serve as something of a counter-textbook, an antidote to conventional treatments that have generally given short shrift to a large segment of the population.”
— Alex Keyssar, The Nation

“This is an amazing job. The text reads as if it were the work of a single, eloquent, spirited and committed writer. The material is rich and interesting, the language forceful and compelling…the production of the book does it proud.”
— Roger Kennedy, Director, National Museum of American History

“The first accessible yet sophisticated reinterpretation of early U.S. history based on the new social history. Who Built America? clearly reveals ours as a land of many peoples, and so it will be welcomed not only by history teachers who believe workers and the labor movement have been left out of history books but also by those high school and college educators who want to address an increasingly diverse student population with a multicultural approach to U.S. history.”
— James Green, Boston Globe

“My task would have been easier if I had been using Who Built America? as [my] course text. Who Built America?, Volume One, offers the most effective visual record of 18th- and 19th-century America that I have seen in text…[presenting] the graphics as documents to be analyzed and interpreted in their own right…Similarly the written documents…bring the values, aspirations, and prejudices of the past alive and help students to understand the kinds of records from which history is constructed.”
— Elizabeth Blackmar, Columbia University