Includes bibliographical references and index.

New World encounters -- Conflicting visions : England's seventeenth-century colonies -- Putting down roots : opportunity and oppression in colonial society -- Experience of empire : eighteenth-century America -- The American Revolution : from elite protest to popular revolt, 1763-1783 -- The republican experiment -- Democracy and dissent : the violence of party politics, 1788-1800 -- Republican ascendancy : the Jeffersonian vision -- Nation building and nationalism -- The triumph of white men's democracy -- Slaves and masters -- The pursuit of perfection -- An age of expansionism -- The sectional crisis -- Secession and the Civil War -- The agony of Reconstruction -- The West : exploiting an empire -- The industrial society -- Toward an urban society, 1877-1900 -- Political realignments in the 1890s -- Toward empire -- The progressive era -- From Roosevelt to Wilson in the age of progressivism -- The nation at war -- Transition to modern America -- Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal -- America and the world, 1921-1945 -- The onset of the cold war -- Affluence and anxiety -- The turbulent sixties -- A new conservatism, 1969-1988 -- To the twenty-first century, 1989-2009.