Using a thematic approach, this concise survey explores the many and varied threads of American history-social, intellectual, cultural, political, diplomatic, economic, and military-from the arrival of the first native American inhabitants thousand of years ago throught the crisis following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.
Â
 Irwin Unger, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, wrote this book after discovering from his own experiences teaching American History at the University of California at Davis and at NYU, that a thematic approach was much more interesting to students than a purely descriptive one.