Lives and Times

Lives and Times is a biographical reader designed to acquaint students with major issues in American history through the lives of individuals, prominent and otherwise, whose ideas and activities were crucial in shaping the course of the nation's history. Employing a narrative style, each volume consists of thirteen chapters in which the lives of two individuals are examined in the broader context of major historical themes. Readers will find not only a diversity of individuals profiled—including Mary Dyer and Cotton Mather, Andrew Jackson and Tecumseh, and John Brown and Abraham Lincoln—but also themes spanning political, economic, social, cultural, intellectual and military history. This combined biographical/thematic approach provides the reader with more extensive biographical information and a fuller examination of key issues than is commonly offered in core texts. Each chapter also offers study questions and a bibliography.Also Available: Lives and Times: Individuals and Issues in American History: Since 1865 by Blaine T. Browne and Robert C. Cottrell

Readers of this book will meet some of the most interesting, important, and memorable characters in American history—men and women whose stories are expertly and beautifully recounted in these pages. But they will also see reflected and illuminated in these lives great forces and momentous issues, the passions and motives and movements that have shaped our country. The authors' approach humanizes what might have been lifeless abstractions, showing how the largest of matters can touch and change the lives of individuals and how individuals can give life and voice to things bigger than themselves., These well-researched, highly readable biographical narratives vividly evoke key issues and trends in American history from the early Colonial era through the Civil War and Reconstruction. The subjects are well chosen to illuminate central features of their era, and each chapter's introductory essay positions these men and women in their larger historical context. Lives and Times: Individuals and Issues in American History should find a broad audience of readers.

Blaine T. Browne is professor of history at Broward College. Robert C. Cottrell is professor of history at California State University. Together, they have co-authored Uncertain Order: The World in the Twentieth Century, Lives and Legacies: Biographies in Western Civilization, and Modern American Lives: Biographies in American History since 1945.