The essential primer on the most influential American documents
between 1831 and 1900
The Great American Documents series, written by the graphic-book
author Ruth Ashby and illustrated by the renowned Ernie Colón, tells the
history of America through the major speeches, laws, proclamations,
court decisions, and essays that shaped it.
The second volume begins where the first left off. Uncle Sam returns to
take us through numerous major documents, ranging from the Texas
Declaration of Independence from Mexico in 1836 to Jacob Riis's seminal
exposé of slum life in New York City, How the Other Half Lives,
published in 1900. Each document gets its own chapter, in which Uncle
Sam explains not only its key passages but its origins, how it came to
be written, and its impact. In the chapter "The Compromise of 1850" we
learn how westward expansion forced the federal government to confront
the expansion of slavery. "The Emancipation Proclamation" places Abraham
Lincoln's famous decree within the context of the ongoing Civil War. And
"The Chinese Exclusion Act" depicts the unique discrimination faced by
Chinese immigrants and shows how that 1882 law presaged the restrictive
policies and quotas established in the early twentieth century.
As Ashby shows, the growth and expansion of the United States through
the nineteenth century forced the nation to reckon with and confront
many of its original injustices, plunging the country into the Civil War
and emerging into new challenges as it rose to become a world power. A
handy and elegantly concise guide, this masterfully illustrated volume
is the perfect book for students of American history, young and old.
