Students
should understand that the periods into which the written histories of
the United States or the world are divided are simply constructions made
by historians trying to impose some order on what is inherently an untidy
past that can be read and conceptualized in a variety of ways. In a nation
of such diversity as the United States, no periodizing scheme will work
for all groups. American Indian history has benchmarks and eras that sometimes
but not always overlap with those of European settlers in the colonial
period. For that matter, Iroquois history would have to be periodized differently
from Sioux or Zuni history. African American history would have its own
watersheds, such as the shift from white indentured servitude to black
slave labor in the South, the abolition of the slave trade, the beginning
of emigrationism, and so forth. So also with women’s history and with Mexican
American history.
Nonetheless,
we believe that teachers will appreciate a periodization that attempts
to blend political and social history. For this purpose, political events
in United States history such as the American Revolution, the Constitution,
the Civil War, Progressivism, the New Deal, and the Cold War-all of which
have fairly definite beginning and end points-continue to provide breakpoints
in the United States history curriculum. The industrial revolution, the
labor movement, environmentalism, shifts in childrearing and family size,
and so forth have no such precise beginning and end points and cut across
eras defined by revolution, civil war, depression, and the like. In fact,
none of the college texts in United States History that have tried in recent
years to infuse social history into political and institutional history
have been able to get around the general determinancy of wars and political
reform movements and the indeterminancy of demographic, cultural, and social
transformations.
We
have tried to overcome, in part, the difficulties inherent in periodizing
history by overlapping eras to demonstrate that there really is no such
thing as an era’s beginning or ending, and that all such schemes are simply
the historian’s way of trying to give some structure to the course of history.
The ten eras selected for periodizing United States history are presented
below:
Era
1: Three Worlds Meet (Beginnings to 1620)
Era
2: Colonization and Settlement (1585-1763)
Era
3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)
Era
4: Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)
Era
5: Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)
Era
6: The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900)
Era
7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)
Era
8: The Great Depression and World War II (1929-1945)
Era
9: Postwar United States (1945-early 1970s)
Era
10: Contemporary United States (1968-present)
