A People and a Nation, Volume II: Since 1865, Brief Edition

The Brief Edition of A PEOPLE AND A NATION offers a succinct and spirited narrative that tells the stories of all people in the United States. The authors' attention to race and racial identity and their inclusion of everyday people and popular culture brings history to life, engaging readers and encouraging them to imagine what life was really like in the past.

Beth Bailey is Foundation Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Military, War and Society Studies at the University of Kansas (KU). She earned her B.A. (1979) from Northwestern University and her Ph.D. (1986) from the University of Chicago. At KU, she teaches courses on U.S. military, war and society and on the history of gender and sexuality in the United States. Her books include AMERICA'S ARMY: MAKING THE ALL-VOLUNTEER FORCE (2009), which received the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award; THE COLUMBIA GUIDE TO AMERICA IN THE 1960s (2001, co-authored with David Farber); SEX IN THE HEARTLAND (1999); THE FIRST STRANGE PLACE: RACE AND SEX IN WORLD WAR II HAWAII (1992, co-authored with David Farber); and FROM FRONT PORCH TO BACK SEAT: COURTSHIP IN 20TH CENTURY AMERICA (1988). She is co-editor of UNDERSTANDING THE U.S. WARS IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN (2015); AMERICA IN THE SEVENTIES (2004); and A HISTORY OF OUR TIME (multiple editions). Dr. Bailey is a trustee of the Society of Military History and a member of the Society of American Historians. The National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars have supported her work.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Debra Michals received her BS magna cum laude from Boston University (1984) and her Ph.D. from New York University (2002). She is an instructor of women�s history and women�s and gender studies at Merrimack College, where in 2008 she also served as acting chair of the Women�s and Gender Studies Program. In 2013, Debra co-authored a permanent exhibit for the National Women�s History Museum entitled �From Ideas to Independence: A Century of Entrepreneurial Women� (http://entrepreneurs.nwhm.org/ ). She is currently completing a book on the emergence of women entrepreneurs and the growing number of female breadwinners since World War II, and she has also begun research for a book about gender and modern fatherhood. Debra has been a visiting scholar to Northeastern University (2003), and served as the Acting Associate Director of Women's Studies at New York University (1994-1996), where she helped obtain and administer a Ford Foundation Grant in Women's and Area Studies and earned the university's President's Leadership Service Award. She has contributed to several anthologies, including Sisterhood Is Forever (2003), Image Nation: American Countercultures in the 1960s and '70s (2002); and Reading Women's Lives (2003), as well as the encyclopedia Notable American Women (2004). Debra has served as a consultant/editor for The History Channel and has written for the History Channel Magazine. She was the content director for The Women's Museum: An Institute for the Future (1998-2000), a consultant to the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Trust, and currently sits on the advisory board for the International Museum of Women. In addition to her own research, Debra is a frequent editor and advisor for scholarly books and pedagogical materials in U.S. history.

Jane Kamensky earned her B.A. and Ph.D. in history from Yale University. She is the Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University and Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her most recent book, A REVOLUTION IN COLOR: THE WORLD OF JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY, won four major awards and was a finalist for several others awards. A former commissioner of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, she serves as a trustee of the Museum of the American Revolution. She is also one of the principal investigators on the NEH/Department of Education-funded initiative, Educating for American Democracy.

Mary Beth Norton, the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History at Cornell University, received her B.A. from the University of Michigan and her Ph.D. from Harvard University. She teaches courses in the history of exploration, early America, women�s history, Atlantic world and American Revolution. Her many books have won awards from the Society of American Historians, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and English-Speaking Union. Her book, FOUNDING MOTHERS & FATHERS, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2011 her book SEPARATED BY THEIR SEX: WOMEN IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IN THE COLONIAL ATLANTIC WORLD was published. She was the Pitt Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge in 2005-2006. The Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation and Huntington Library, among others, have awarded her fellowships. Dr. Norton has served on the National Council for the Humanities and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has appeared on Book TV, the History and Discovery Channels, PBS and NBC as a commentator on Early American history.

Carol Sheriff received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her Ph.D. from Yale University. She has taught at the College of William and Mary since 1993, where she has received the Thomas Jefferson Teaching Award, the Alumni Teaching Fellowship Award and the University Professorship for Teaching Excellence. Dr. Sheriff teaches a U.S. history survey course and an introduction to historical methodology as well as classes on the early republic, the Civil War era, and the American west. She has co-authored A PEOPLE AT WAR: CIVILIANS AND SOLDIERS IN AMERICA�S CIVIL WAR, 1854�1877 and has written THE ARTIFICIAL RIVER: THE ERIE CANAL AND THE PARADOX OF PROGRESS, which earned the Dixon Ryan Fox Award from the New York State Historical Association and the Award for Excellence in Research from the New York State Archives. Dr. Sheriff has published pieces about the history of textbooks, written sections of a teaching manual for the New York State history curriculum and given presentations to public school teachers. She has also worked on public history projects marking the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, appeared in documentaries on the Erie Canal, and is involved in public and scholarly projects to commemorate the Erie Canal�s bicentennial.