Essays by historians, commentators, and writers--including Stan Katz, Sam Roberts, Anna Quindlen--in a celebration of America that combines more than 300 exquisite photos and illustrations with unsurpassed prose.

Defining Hybrid Homeschools in America: Little Platoons explores the idea of hybrid homeschools, where students attend a formal school setting for part of the week and are homeschooled the rest of the week. Eric Wearne observes that school choice in America typically comes in two forms: programs set up for disadvantaged students, and the more common form of choice that wealthy parents can exercise—paying private tuition or moving to a more desirable school district. While disadvantaged families in many places and wealthy families everywhere can exercise choice when it comes to schooling, a sizeable group typically gets left out of those options—the large number of families who are too wealthy to access state or local programs, but not wealthy enough to pay for private schooling or moving expenses. Wearne argues that this is a long-term weakness for school choice in America; the middle class is generally a well-off demographic, but is almost completely unserved when it comes to this large aspect of their children’s lives. However, one low-cost option has arisen to address this niche: hybrid home schools. Wearne cites existing research to argue for this model’s efficacy for the middle class as a strong example of a healthy civil society and examines how policy definitions are breaking down and evolving in education as we challenge the existing definitions of schooling.

The 1760s were a period of great agitation in the American colonies. The policies implemented by the British resulted in an outcry from the Americans that inaugurated the radical ideas leading to the Revolution in 1775. John Dickinson led the way in the "war of ink" between America and Britain, which saw over 1,000 pamphlets and essays written both for and against British policy. King George III, the new British monarch, wrote extensively on the role of Britain in the colonial world and sought to find a middle way between the quickly rising feelings on both sides of the debate. This book tells the story of this radical decade as it occurred in writing, drawing from primary sources and rarely seen exchanges.

From the earliest days of nationhood, the United States has determined who might enter the country and who might be naturalized. In this sweeping review of US immigration policies, Bill Ong Hing points to the racial, ethnic, and social struggles over who should be welcomed into the community of citizens. He shows how shifting visions of America have shaped policies governing asylum, exclusion, amnesty, and border policing. Written for a broad audience, Defining America Through Immigration Policy sets the continuing debates about immigration in the context of what value we as a people have assigned to cultural pluralism in various eras. Hing examines the competing visions of America reflected in immigration debates over the last 225 years. For instance, he compares the rationales and regulations that limited immigration of southern and eastern Europeans to those that excluded Asians in the nineteenth century. He offers a detailed history of the policies and enforcement procedures put in place to limit migration from Mexico, and indicts current border control measures as immoral. He probes into little discussed issues such as the exclusion of gays and lesbians and the impact of political considerations on the availability of amnesty and asylum to various groups of migrants. Hing's spirited discussion and sophisticated analysis will appeal to readers in a wide spectrum of academic disciplines as well as those general readers interested in America's on-going attempts to make one of many.

A riveting account of how Christian fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Catholics have joined forces in a battle against their progressive counterparts for control of American secular culture.

In this book Tamar Herzog explores the emergence of a specifically Spanish concept of community in both Spain and Spanish America in the eighteenth century. Challenging the assumption that communities were the natural result of common factors such as language or religion, or that they were artificially imagined, Herzog reexamines early modern categories of belonging. She argues that the distinction between those who were Spaniards and those who were foreigners came about as local communities distinguished between immigrants who were judged to be willing to take on the rights and duties of membership in that community and those who were not.

Defining Memory uses case studies of exhibits from around the country to examine how local museums, defined as museums whose collections are local in scope or whose audiences are primarily local, have both shaped and been shaped by evolving community values and sense of history. Levin and her contributors argue that these small institutions play a key role in defining America's self-identity and should be studied as seriously as more national institutions like the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.