Turning Points
Making Decisions in American History, Volume 2
1. Edition October 2006
244 Pages, Softcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
Turning Points: Making Decisions in American History uses documents
to reintroduce students to the contingency, the adventure of the
American past. The decisions examined here all had complex
historical roots, multiple causes that could have led to quite
differing outcomes. They were not simply made in one intense moment
by some single important individual. Even when an identifiable
leader acted with the authority of Woodrow Wilson in taking the
country into war or Harry S. Truman in ordering the use of nuclear
weapons, the action was in response to the previous decisions of
many, sometimes countless people. And in other instances-when women
went to work in factories during World War II, for example, or
families moved to the suburbs afterward-major changes in American
life resulted from the private decisions of millions of Americans.
In Turning Points students will encounter what happened in the
past in the light of what might have happened. They will see points
where will and judgment produced one result rather than
another.
Chapter 2. George Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Sioux War. 13
Chapter 3. Selective Immigration: The Chinese Case. 26
Chapter 4. Dam Hetch Hetchy?. 46
Chapter 5. How America Fought Its First Drug War: The Harrison Act. 64
Chapter 6. The United States Goes to War Against the Axis Powers, 1917. 81
Chapter 7. Margaret Sanger Battles for Birth Control. 95
Chapter 8. Sit Down and Fight: Labor Wars of the 1930s. 108
Chapter 9. Leaving Home: American Women in World War II. 125
Chapter 10. The Atomic Bomb and the Era of Total War. 141
Chapter 11. Moving In: The Flight to the Suburbs. 159
Chapter 12. "I Question America": Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville, Mississippi. 173
Chapter 13. Vietman: Resisting the War. 189
Chapter 14. Social Security: You Decide. 211
received his doctorate at Columbia, where he studied under Richard
Hofstadter. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a Ford
Fellow at Harvard. His early books are The Politics of
Provincialism and Herbert Hoover: A Public Life. He is
also the author of Making Peace with the Sixties (1996) and
John F. Kennedy and a New Generation (2nd edition, 2003). He
is currently writing a history of West Point.
Anthony Marcus teaches in the School of Anthropology,
Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Melbourne
in Australia. He has published on globalization and culture change
(Anthropology For A Small Planet, 1996) and American
history, and his current writing focuses on Mexican migrants in the
northeastern United States, poverty and public policy, the politics
of the culture concept in development, and comparative
mestizajes.