Written by Gary W. Gallagher , Patrick N. Allitt , Allen C. Guelzo
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 32 Kbps

This is the story of a country in which immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries huddled in cramped tenement apartments lit by hazardous kerosene lamps. And a country that, little more than a half-century later, renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith described as "The Affluent Society."

This is the chronicle of a nation that enslaved a race of people. And of a nation that fought a Civil War that freed its slaves, and outlawed segregation and discrimination.

This is history shaped by Revolutionary War and Vietnam, Thomas Jefferson and William Jefferson Clinton, Puritanism and Feminism, Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King, Jamestown and Disneyland, Harpers Ferry and Henry Ford, oil wells and Orson Welles.

This is a review of the extraordinary blend of people, ideas, inventions, and events that comprise The History of the United States. In this seven-part, 84-lecture series, three noted historians and lecturers—two of whom teach other popular Teaching Company courses—present the nation's past through their areas of special interest.


84 Lectures
30 minutes / lecture


1 Living Bravely
2 Spain, France, and the Netherlands
3 Gentlemen in the Wilderness
4 Radicals in the Wilderness
5 Traders in the Wilderness
6 An Economy of Slaves
7 Printers, Painters, and Preachers
8 The Great Awakening
9 The Great War for Empire
10 The Rejection of Empire
11 The American Revolution—Politics and People
12 The American Revolution—Howe's War
13 The American Revolution—Washington's War
14 Creating the Constitution
15 Hamilton's Republic
16 Republicans and Federalists
17 Adams and Liberty
18 The Jeffersonian Reaction
19 Territory and Treason
20 The Agrarian Republic
21 The Disastrous War of 1812
22 The "American System"
23 A Nation Announcing Itself
24 National Republican Follies
25 The Second Great Awakening
26 Dark Satanic Mills
27 The Military Chieftain
28 The Politics of Distrust
29 The Monster Bank
30 Whigs and Democrats
31 American Romanticism
32 The Age of Reform
33 Southern Society and the Defense of Slavery
34 Whose Manifest Destiny?
35 The Mexican War
36 The Great Compromise
37 Sectional Tensions Escalate
38 Drifting Toward Disaster
39 The Coming of War
40 The First Year of Fighting
41 Shifting Tides of Battle
42 Diplomatic Clashes and Sustaining the War
43 Behind the Lines—Politics and Economies
44 African Americans in Wartime
45 The Union Drive to Victory
46 Presidential Reconstruction
47 Congress Takes Command
48 Reconstruction Ends
49 Industrialization
50 Transcontinental Railroads
51 The Last Indian Wars
52 Farming the Great Plains
53 African Americans after Reconstruction
54 Men and Women
55 Religion in Victorian America
56 The Populists
57 The New Immigration
58 City Life
59 Labor and Capital
60 Theodore Roosevelt and Progressivism
61 Mass Production
62 World War I—The Road to Intervention
63 World War I—Versailles and Wilson's Gambit
64 The 1920s
65 The Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression
66 The New Deal
67 World War II—The Road to Pearl Harbor
68 World War II—The European Theater
69 World War II—The Pacific Theater
70 The Cold War
71 The Korean War and McCarthyism
72 The Affluent Society
73 The Civil Rights Movement
74 The New Frontier and the Great Society
75 The Rise of Mass Media
76 The Vietnam War
77 The Women's Movement
78 Nixon and Watergate
79 Environmentalism
80 Religion in Twentieth-Century America
81 Carter and the Reagan Revolution
82 The New World Order
83 Clinton's America and the Millennium
84 Reflections