Description: "We wrote Becoming America in and for a new century, inspired by recent shifts in historical scholarship and the interests and learning styles of a new generation of students. Today's students live in a world where cultural, technological, and environmental transformation are palpably experienced and keenly debated. Paralleling this reorientation, the topics of environmental change, religious ritual, mass communications, technological innovation, and popular entertainment have become central and compelling subjects of historians' research and teaching. Becoming America seamlessly weaves these fascinating dimensions of the past into the core narrative of American history to produce an account that we believe students will find exciting, memorable, and relevant"--
Brief description: Since David Henkin joined the history faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997, he has taught and written about the sorts of subjects that rarely make it into traditional textbooks. He has offered entire courses on baseball, Broadway, immigration, time, leisure, the road, family life, news, and urban literature while publishing books and essays about street signs, paper money, junk mail, intimate correspondence, calendars, and temporal rhythms in the nineteenth century. The task of integrating that kind of material into the traditional narrative of the American past has been the singular challenge of his professional life. David holds a BA from Yale University and a PhD from U.C. Berkeley, and he was awarded Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award in the Social Sciences. Beyond the Berkeley campus, David teaches classes on the Talmud, plays cards, eats lots of fish and berries, and roots passionately for the St. Louis Cardinals. Raised in New York, where his family still lives, he makes his home with friends and community in San Francisco.