By the People: A History of the United States, 3rd, AP® Edition ©2024

James W. Fraser is Professor of History and Education at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University, where he has previously served as a department chair and interim vice dean for Academic Affairs.

His teaching includes a survey course in U.S. History for future Social Studies teachers and courses in the History of American Education, the History New York University, Religion & Public Education, and Global Culture Wars. He holds a PhD from Columbia University. Dr. Fraser was the 2013–2014 President of the History of Education Society and is a former member of the Editorial Board of the History of Education Quarterly. He served as Senior Vice President for Programs at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey, from 2008 to 2012. He has also served as NYU liaison to the New Design High School, a public high school in New York’s Lower East Side, and to Facing History and Ourselves.

Before coming to New York University, Dr. Fraser taught in the Department of History and the School of Education at Northeastern University in Boston, where he was the founding dean of the School of Education. He was also a member and chair of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Education Deans Council, the Boston School Committee Nominating Committee, and other boards. He was a lecturer in the Program in Religion and Secondary Education at the Harvard University Divinity School from 1997 to 2004. He has taught at Lesley University; University of Massachusetts, Boston; Boston University; and Public School 76 Manhattan. He is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and was pastor of Grace Church in East Boston, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2006.

In addition to By the People, Dr. Fraser is the author or editor of twelve books, including Teaching Teachers: Changing Paths and Enduring Debates with Lauren Lefty (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America (second edition, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016); The School in the United States: A Documentary History (third edition, Routledge, 2014), Preparing America’s Teachers: A History (Teachers College Press, 2007), and A History of Hope: When Americans Have Dared to Dream of a Better Future (Palgrave, 2002).

He has four grown children and six grandchildren. He lives in New York City and Rochester, Massachusetts, with his wife Katherine Hanson and their dogs, Ava and Tammy.

Brief Contents
PART 1 Contact and Exploration, 1491–1607

• The World before 1492
• First Encounters, First Conquests, 1492–1607

PART 2 Settlements Old and New, 1607–1754

• Settlements, Alliances, and Resistance, 1607–1718
• Creating the Culture of British North America, 1689–1754

PART 3 A New Birth of Freedom—Creating the United States of America, 1754–1800

• The Making of a Revolution, 1754–1783
• Creating a Nation, 1783–1789
• Practicing Democracy, 1789–1800

PART 4 Crafting a Nation, People, Land, and a National Identity, 1800–1848

• Creating a New People, Expanding the Country, 1801–1823
• New Industries, New Politics, 1815–1828
• Democracy in the Age of Andrew Jackson, 1828–1844
• Manifest Destiny: Expanding the Nation, 1830–1853

PART 5 Expansion, Separation, and a New Union, 1844–1877

• Living in a Nation of Changing Lands, Changing Faces, Changing Expectations, 1831–1854
• The Politics of Separation, 1850–1861
• And the War Came: The Civil War, 1861–1865
• Reconstruction, 1865–1877

PART 6 Becoming an Industrial World Power—Costs, Benefits, and Responses, 1865–1914

• Conflict in the West, 1865–1912
• The Gilded Age: Building a Technological and Industrial Giant and a New Social Order, 1876–1913
• Responses to Industrialism, Responses to Change, 1877–1914
• Progressive Movements, Progressive Politics, 1879–1917

PART 7 War, Prosperity, and Depression, 1890–1945

• Foreign Policy and War in a Progressive Era, 1890–1919
• A Unique, Prosperous, and Discontented Time, 1919–1929
• Living in Hard Times, 1929–1939
• Living in a World at War, 1939–1945

PART 8 Fears, Joys, and Limits, 1945–1980

• The World the War Created, 1945–1952
• Complacency and Change, 1952–1965
• Lives Changed, 1961–1968
• Rights, Reaction, and Limits, 1968–1980

PART 9 Certainty, Uncertainty, and New Beginnings, 1980 to the Present

• The Reagan Revolution, 1980–1989
• A New World Order, 1989–2001
• New Times, New Problems, New Faces, 2001–2016
• A Troubled and Divided Nation, 2017