Black examines the environmental history of America and its linkage to economic history, crucially, the clearing of forests; the spread of agriculture; mineral, coal and iron extraction; industrialisation; urbanisation; and current and growing climate-crisis concerns. He explores the political shaping of America: indigenous American polities; free European and unfree African settlements; the creation of an American State, and its successes and failures from 1783 to 1861; Civil War; democratisation; the rise of the federal Government from the 1930s; the Civil Rights movement from the 1950s onwards, and tensions in more recent governance. The book considers America in the World: as a pre-colonial and colonised space; as a newly-independent power, then a rising international one, the Cold War and the USA as the sole superpower in the post-Cold-War world. These key themes are tackled chronologically for the sake of clarity, beginning with the geological creation of North America, human settlement and native American cultures to 1500; the arrival of Europeans and enslaved Africans to 1770, the Spanish and French in the Gulf of Mexico and Florida, the English and French, and the Dutch and Swedes further north. The focus then shifts to settler conflicts with native Americans and between European powers leading to a British-dominated North America by 1770. Then the end of European rule and the foundation of an American trans-continental state. The section dealing with the years from 1848 to 1880 looks at the Civil War between North and South, reconstruction and the creation of a new society. Between 1880 and 1920, the United States became an industrial powerhouse and an international power, also a colonial power, the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and a participant in the First World War. The interwar years, 1921 to 1945, brought turmoil: the Roaring Twenties; the growth of Hollywood; Prohibition; jazz; the Great Depression and the New Deal; finally the Second World War.
