After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection » (6th Edition)

James West Davidson received his B.A. from Haverford College and his Ph.D. from Yale University. A historian who has pursued a full-time writing career, he is the author of numerous books, among them After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (with Mark H. Lytle), The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth Century New England, and Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure (with John Rugge). He is co-editor with Michael Stiff of the Oxford New Narratives in American History, in which his most recent book appears: 'They Say': Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race.

Mark H. Lytle received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is Professor of History and Environmental Studies. he has served two years as Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History at University College, Dublin, in Ireland. His publications include The Origins of the Iranian-American Alliance, 1941-1953, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (with James West Davidson), America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon, and, most recently, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement. He is co-editor of a joint issue of the journals of Diplomatic History and Environmental History dedicated to the field of environmental diplomacy.

For more than twenty-five years, After the Fact has guided students through American history and the methods used to study it. In dramatic episodes that move chronologically through American history, this best-selling book examines a broad variety of topics including oral evidence, photographs, ecological data, films and television programs, church and town records, census data, and novels. Whether for an introductory survey or for a historical methods course, After the Fact is the ideal text to introduce readers, step by step, to the detective work and analytical approaches historians use when they are actually doing history.

Prologue: The Strange Death of Silas Deane

Ch. 1 Contact 1

Ch. 2 Serving Time in Virginia 31

Past and Present: Is Slavery Dead? 51

Ch. 3 The Visible and Invisible Worlds of Salem 52

Ch. 4 Declaring Independence 75

Ch. 5 Material Witness 98

Past and Present: Inside the Information Revolution 123

Ch. 6 Jackson's Frontier - and Turner's 124

Ch. 7 The Madness of John Brown 148

Ch. 8 The View from the Bottom Rail 171

Past and Present: Whose Oral History? 201

Ch. 9 The Mirror with a Memory 203

Past and Present: Why Can't I See Them Now? 227

Ch. 10 USDA Government Inspected 229

Ch. 11 Sacco and Vanzetti 256

Past and Present: The Mending Wall? 282

Ch. 12 Dust Bowl Odyssey 284

Ch. 13 The Decision to Drop the Bomb 310

Past and Present: Truckstop Atomic Science 337

Ch. 14 From Rosie to Lucy 339

Ch. 15 Sitting-In 366

Ch. 16 Breaking into Watergate 396

Ch. 17 Where Trouble Comes 420

Credits 449

Index 452