A collection of secondary sources that examine the history of the United States by connecting the private lives of its people to the public issues that have had a major impact on the nation’s destiny. The text examines much of what we call “history” as the product of conflict or concord (or some combination of the two) between private aspirations, frustrations, and values on the one side, and public issues, events and policies on the other. Dominick Cavallo is Professor of History at Adelphi University. He is the author of A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History , Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880-1920 , and co-editor of Family Life in America, 1492-2000.