Acclaimed historians Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue forge the panoramic and the personal into an authoritative narrative history of America in the twentieth century. They give us insightful accounts of the century’s large events—war, prosperity and depression, astute leadership and arrogant power, and the rise and decline of a broad middle class—grounding the history in the stories of everyday Americans.

The history begins and ends in periods of concentrated wealth, with immigration roiling politics and racial divisions flaring. Gilmore and Sugrue frame key questions—on how far American democracy has come, and whether the postwar decades’ prosperity and global power are a culmination of the American Century or the exception in a long history of economic and political division—by drawing the illuminating connections characteristic of the best historical writing.