With a unique attention to time as the defining nature of history, AMERICAN PASSAGES offers students a view of American history as a complete, compelling narrative. AMERICAN PASSAGES emphasizes the intertwined nature of three key characteristics of time—sequence, simultaneity, and contingency. With clarity and purpose, the authors convey how events grow from other events, people's actions, and broad structural changes (sequence), how apparently disconnected events occurred in close chronological proximity to one another and were situated in larger, shared contexts (simultaneity), and how history suddenly pivoted because of events, personalities, and unexpected outcomes (contingency).