Give Me Liberty!

Give Me Liberty! is a single-author textbook written by the pre-eminent American historian of his generation. Eric Foner excels at showing students the big picture—how events and developments fit together like the pieces of a puzzle—without excessive detail. The Brief Edition delivers the same advantages as the full text, in a more concise and affordable format. The Brief Edition was revised and cut by the author himself, who pared detail without dropping important events or developments. The result is a cohesive work that carries the strengths of the full edition, but is 30 percent shorter.

The book’s strong but unobtrusive pedagogy is enhanced in the Brief Third Edition with marginal glosses, which function as chapter outlines on the page that guide students as they read. The brief edition retains much of the student-friendly design of the regular edition, including Chapter-Opening Vignettes, paired Voices of Freedom primary source documents, illustrations and maps, key terms, and end of chapter review material.

Give Me Liberty! delivers to students a clear, event-based narrative account of American history. The basic narrative is enriched throughout by the theme of American freedom—its changing meanings, its promise, its limits, and the continuing efforts of Americans to define it and achieve it. In the Brief Third Edition, as in the full text, discussions of the global dimension of American history are integrated throughout, enriching the core national narrative without shifting the balance of the book away from American History. This content is reinforced on StudySpace by over twenty new Author Insights that focus on the United States in the world theme.

Foner’s balanced synthesis represents the culmination of a generation of scholarship and is a model introduction to the field of history as it is currently practiced. Give Me Liberty! is very strong in all of the social-history fields that have flourished in this generation’s scholarship: African-American history, women’s history, Native American history, ethnic histories, family history, and other aspects of private life. It is also very strong in political history and gives due attention to the workings of power and those who wielded it. There is a brief update at the end of the book on the 2010 congressional elections and the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East.