KEY BENFIT: Taking political economy as its organizing theme,Making A Nation offers an intellectual focus to history that is sensitive to the recent innovations in women's history and environmental history. The book focuses on the relationships that shape and define human identity--cultural, diplomatic, race, gender, class and sectional relations-- and recognizes the importance of such traditional fields as politics and diplomacy. The reference synthesizes the literature in such as way as to allow readers to see the links between the particular and the general, between large and seemingly abstract forces such as globalization and political struggle and the daily struggles of ordinary men and women. The Combined Volume covers U.S. history in its entirety from its early days in 1450 and moves through colonial outposts, the eighteenth-century world, creating a new nation, liberty and empire, the market revolution, securing democracy, reform and conflict, the manifest destiny, the politics of slavery, a war for union and emancipation, reconstruction, the triumph of industrial capitalism, cultural struggles of industrial America, the politics of industrial society, a global power, a great depression and a new deal, the second World War, the Cold War, the consumer society, the rise and fall of the new liberalism, living with less, the triumph of a new conservatism, and a new America. For historians and others interested in a comprehensive overview of the relationships that shape and define U.S. history.