A Shaw Creative Works project
American History, Firsthand
No chapters to wade through — just search or browse straight into the moment you're curious about, told through the people, places, and primary sources that were actually there. Each volume on the shelf covers one era in full.
The Shelf
Vol. I
A City Upon a Hill
Colonial America · 1607–1763
Follow the chartered companies, dissenting preachers, enslaved laborers, and frontier wars that argued out, long before any revolution, what kind of society this would be.
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Vol. II
Liberty’s Ledger
The American Revolution · 1763–1783
Search the causes, battles, and founding papers that made thirteen colonies into a nation.
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Vol. III
Trail & Territory
Westward Expansion · 1803–1890
Follow the trails, treaties, and territory disputes that carried the nation from the Mississippi to the Pacific.
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Vol. IV
Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights
The War of 1812 · 1807–1815
Follow the impressed sailors, burned capital, and a flag that survived the night that made the young republic’s second war with Britain into a second proof of independence.
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Vol. V
Trail of Broken Treaties
Native Nations & Sovereignty · 1830–2021
Follow nearly two centuries in which Native nations were removed from ancestral homelands, confined to reservations, and pressed to abandon their own languages and ways of life — and the long, unbroken thread of resistance, survival, and sovereignty reclaimed that runs through every decade since.
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Vol. VI
House Divided
The Civil War · 1861–1865
Follow the war that decided what the Union would become, from Sumter to Appomattox.
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Vol. VII
A New Birth of Freedom
Reconstruction · 1865–1877
Follow the twelve years after the Civil War when the nation tried, and largely failed, to remake the South on the promise of equal citizenship.
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Vol. VIII
A Cross of Gold
Gilded Age & Industrial Revolution · 1873–1900
Follow the decades when railroads, steel, and oil built an industrial colossus, cities filled with immigrant labor, and a handful of fortunes grew larger than the government meant to regulate them.
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Vol. IX
The Golden Door
Immigration & Ellis Island · 1880–1924
Follow the four decades when millions crossed the Atlantic in steerage to pass beneath a new colossus’s torch, funneled through one small island in New York Harbor into a nation that needed their labor and feared their difference in equal measure, until the golden door swung nearly shut.
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Vol. X
Failure Is Impossible
Progressive Era & Women’s Suffrage · 1901–1920
Follow the muckrakers, trust-busters, and suffragists who turned against the excesses of the Gilded Age, from an assassin’s bullet in Buffalo to the vote women had fought seventy years to win.
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Vol. XI
Over There
World War I & the Treaty Fight · 1914–1920
Follow the war America swore for three years was not its own, from a single gunshot in Sarajevo through the trenches of Belleau Wood and the Meuse-Argonne, to a peace treaty a wounded President could not persuade his own Senate to ratify.
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Vol. XII
Boats Against the Current
Roaring Twenties & Prohibition · 1920–1929
Follow the decade that outlawed liquor and drank anyway, gave Harlem a renaissance, and rode an uninterrupted boom in stocks and speakeasies toward the single October it all came due.
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Vol. XIII
The Only Thing We Have to Fear
Great Depression & New Deal · 1929–1941
Follow the twelve years when the bottom fell out of the American economy and the federal government remade its role in American life.
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Vol. XIV
The Plow That Broke the Plains
Dust Bowl · 1931–1941
Follow a plowed-up prairie as drought and wind strip away its topsoil, from the first black blizzards and a storm that darkened the sky over Congress, through an untested federal effort to put the land back together, to the rains that finally returned at decade’s end.
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Vol. XV
Arsenal of Democracy
World War II · 1939–1945
Follow the fronts, the home front, and the alliances and atrocities that defined the deadliest conflict in history.
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Vol. XVI
Solidarity Forever
Labor Movement · 1945–1999
Follow organized labor from the largest strike wave in American history through the legal backlash of Taft-Hartley, the farm fields of Delano and the sanitation trucks of Memphis, to the single defeated strike that became a turning point — and the unlikely coalition that carried labor’s fight into a new century.
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Vol. XVII
A Long Twilight Struggle
The Cold War · 1945–1991
Follow the forty-six-year standoff between two superpowers, fought in embassies, in orbit, and in one divided city, from the iron curtain to the Soviet collapse.
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Vol. XVIII
Free at Last
Civil Rights Movement · 1954–1968
Follow the movement that forced America to confront its unfinished promise of equality, from Brown v. Board to the Fair Housing Act.
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Vol. XIX
A Problem With No Name
Second-Wave Feminism & the ERA · 1963–1982
Follow the two decades when a book about suburban unhappiness became a movement — the organizations, protests, and new laws that remade work, sport, and public life for American women, and the single constitutional amendment that came within three states of ratification and fell short.
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Vol. XX
Hearts and Minds
Vietnam War · 1954–1975
Follow the two decades when a divided Vietnam, American escalation, and a fractured home front turned a distant civil war into the nation’s longest conflict yet.
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Vol. XXI
One Giant Leap
Space Race · 1957–1975
Follow the eighteen years two superpowers spent racing each other off the planet, from a Soviet satellite’s first beep to an American and a Soviet spacecraft docking in orbit.
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Vol. XXII
Silence = Death
Gay Liberation & the AIDS Crisis · 1969–1996
Follow the quarter-century from a police raid on a Greenwich Village bar to the first drugs that turned a death sentence into a manageable illness — the public silence that let an epidemic spread unchecked, and the funerals, quilts, and civil disobedience that eventually broke it.
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Vol. XXIII
The End of History
Watergate to 9/11 · 1972–2001
Follow the three decades from a break-in at a Washington office building to a single September morning, as a disgraced presidency, a quietly ending Cold War, and a confident decade of renewal gave way to a new kind of war.
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Vol. XXIV
Blizzard of Prescriptions
The Opioid Crisis · 1995–2025
Follow three decades from a painkiller’s FDA approval and a company executive’s private prediction of a “blizzard of prescriptions” to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths, two corporate bankruptcies, and a Supreme Court ruling that finally stripped the family that built it of its fortune’s protection.
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Vol. XXV
Love Wins
Marriage Equality · 1996–2015
Follow a generation’s legal campaign for recognition — from a law signed at midnight defining marriage for the whole federal government, through courthouses and ballot boxes across two decades, to three Supreme Court rulings that, by coincidence, all fell on the very same June date.
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Vol. XXVI
The Forever War
War on Terror · 2001–2021
Follow the two decades after September 11th when a declared war on terrorism reshaped American power abroad and civil liberties at home — from the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, through torture and surveillance scandals that tested the nation’s own ideals, to the long, inconclusive withdrawal that finally closed the books on America’s longest wars.
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Vol. XXVII
Too Big to Fail
The 2008 Financial Crisis · 2007–2011
Follow the housing bubble that inflated for years and burst in eighteen months — a bank run that toppled Lehman Brothers, an $85 billion rescue of an insurance giant, a $700 billion bailout fought over in Congress, and the slow recovery that left millions of homeowners, and a protest camp near Wall Street, asking who would answer for it.
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What this is
Each volume is a self-contained explorer: a searchable timeline, a cast of people, the places it happened, and the documents worth reading in their own words — cross-linked so one thread leads to the next.
Who it's for
Built for anyone curious about history, whether you're browsing for ten minutes or going deep on one figure or battle. No account, no clutter — just search and go.