A History of the People of the United States

Violence, insolence, and law-breaking were not frequent along the whole border. Five open boats, full of potash, attempted to make the run from Fort Niagara to Canada, and, despite the troops and the Collector, three succeeded. On Salmon river, in Oneida County, the crew of a revenue cutter behave so insolently that the people rose, seized them, and put them into the jail. At Lewiston twenty men came over from Canada and carried off a quantity of flour by force. -from The Long Embargo A bestseller when it was first published in 1883, this third volume of historian John Bach McMaster's magnum opus is a lively history of the United States that is as entertaining as it is informative. Eventually stretching to eight volumes, McMaster's epic was original in its emphasis on social and economic conditions as deciding factors in shaping a nation's culture: in addition to the words and actions of great men and the outcomes of significant skirmishes and battles, McMaster indulges his obsession with fascinating trivia, from how the booming American economy led to an epidemic of desertions of British soldiers to high-paying merchantman jobs to the great kerfuffle over the importation of Merino sheep from Portugal. Volume 3, spanning the years 1803 through 1812, is a compulsively readable account of the birth pangs of the new nation, and covers such intriguing and unlikely topics as the vagaries of voting laws in some states that enfranchised women and nonwhites, the dangerous and unguarded state of the Western frontier, early battles over slavery and freedom of the press, and more. OF INTEREST TO: readers of American history AUTHOR BIO: American historian JOHN BACH MCMASTER (1852-1932) taught at the Wharton School of Finance and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, from 1883 to 1919. He also wrote Benjamin Franklin as a Man of Letters (1887) and A School History of the United States (1897), which became a definitive textbook.