About the Author

Nell Irvin Painter is the award-winning author of many books, including Sojourner Truth, Southern History Across the Color Line, Creating Black Americans, The History of White People, and Standing at Armageddon. She is currently the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University and lives in Newark, New Jersey, and the Adirondacks.

Reviews

The turmoil that attended America's shift from a rural, agrarian society to an urban, industrial one, described with a highly readable combination of scholarly thoroughness and stylistic verve. . . . A consistently engrossing, occasionally irreverent, always smoothly written history of America's painful entry into the modern age.