This collection of essays on American history reflects recent scholarship. Contributors new to this edition include Gary Nash, Arthur Schlesinger, Richard P. McCormick, Gerda Lerner, Ellen C. DuBois, Vicki L. Ruiz, Nathan I. Huggins, John Lewis Gaddis, Paul Kennedy and Kevin P. Philips.

Interpretations of American History, 6th ed, vol. 1: To 1877 (Interpretations of American History; Patterns and Perspectives)

Literature & Fiction

Grob, Gerald N.

United States

Free Press

Americans want to be humane toward the mentally ill, yet we have always been divided about what is best for them and for society. Now, the foremost historian of the care of the mentally ill compellingly recounts our various attempts to solve this ever-present dilemma. In the first comprehensive one-volume history of the treatment of the mentally ill, Gerald Grob begins with colonial America, when families and local communities accepted responsibility for their mentally ill members. Their solutions varied, from confinement under lock and key, to granting mentally ill persons a wide measure of autonomy. As American society grew larger and more complex, the first mental hospitals were created to deal with growing numbers of the severely and persistently mentally ill. Grob brings to life the charismatic and innovative individuals who administered these hospitals and shows how they were successful at first in providing humane care and treatment. But under the pressure of too many patients and too few resources, the hospitals subsequently deteriorated into custodial institutions, and Grob charts this transformation. He traces the growth of the psychiatric profession, the change of the mental health field during World War Il, and the use of controversial shock therapies, drugs, and lobotomies. Mounting criticism of some of these techniques and of mental institutions as inhumane places led to the emptying of the hospitals and a new emphasis on community care and treatment. Americans daily encounter the pitiful sight of homeless, mentally ill people in the streets of our cities, and wonder how it came to be this way. Grob shows that while many patients benefited from the new community policies, there arose a new group of mentally ill substance abusers who desperately need treatment but who resist it. He argues that these people, and not deinstitutionalized patients, make up most of the disturbed homeless who confront us today. Their presence demands new solutions, and Grob's definitive history points the way. It is at once an indispensable reference and a call for a humane and balanced policy in the future.

The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America's Mentally Ill

History

Americas

Interpretations of American History (Interpretations of American History; Patterns and Perspectives)

GROB

Exposes the tragic treatment of the mentally ill in America from colonial times to 1875, revealing the development of a humane approach to their care

Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875

Asia

Free Pr

Now in a new edition from Bedford/St. Martin€™s, Interpretations of American History offers an essential collection of essays and readings on American historiography. Each chapter opens with an extended essay that explores the historiography specific to that chapter€™s topic, followed by two readings by preeminent historians that highlight different €” although not always diametrically opposed €” historical approaches. Fully updated for the next generation of scholars, the most respected historiographical reader now comes with all the care and quality that you expect from Bedford/St. Martin€™s.

Interpretations of American History: Patterns & Perspectives: Through Reconstruction: 1

SAXTON, Martha

Billias, George Athan

Couvares, Francis G.

Bedford/St.Martin's

Interpretations of American History: Patterns & Perspectives: Since Reconstruction: 2

American Perceptions of Drug Addiction: Five Studies, 1872-1912 (Addiction in America)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Addiction & Recovery

Ayer Co. Pub

Alcohol and Man: The Effects of Alcohol on Man in Health and Disease

Emerson, Haven

Medical Books

The Deadly Truth chronicles the complex interactions between disease and the peoples of America from the pre-Columbian world to the present. 
 Grob's ultimate lesson is stark but valuable: there can be no final victory over disease. The world in which we live undergoes constant change, which in turn creates novel risks to human health and life. We conquer particular diseases, but others always arise in their stead. In a powerful challenge to our tendency to see disease as unnatural and its virtual elimination as a real possibility, Grob asserts the undeniable biological persistence of disease. 
 Diseases ranging from malaria to cancer have shaped the social landscape--sometimes through brief, furious outbreaks, and at other times through gradual occurrence, control, and recurrence. Grob integrates statistical data with particular peoples and places while giving us the larger patterns of the ebb and flow of disease over centuries. Throughout, we see how much of our history, culture, and nation-building was determined--in ways we often don't realize--by the environment and the diseases it fostered. 
 The way in which we live has shaped, and will continue to shape, the diseases from which we get sick and die. By accepting the presence of disease and understanding the way in which it has physically interacted with people and places in past eras, Grob illuminates the extraordinarily complex forces that shape our morbidity and mortality patterns and provides a realistic appreciation of the individual, social, environmental, and biological determinants of human health.

The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America

Harvard University Press

The Deadly Truth chronicles the complex interactions between disease and the peoples of America from the pre-Columbian world to the present. 
Grob's ultimate lesson is stark but valuable: there can be no final victory over disease. The world in which we live undergoes constant change, which in turn creates novel risks to human health and life. We conquer particular diseases, but others always arise in their stead. In a powerful challenge to our tendency to see disease as unnatural and its virtual elimination as a real possibility, Grob asserts the undeniable biological persistence of disease. 
Diseases ranging from malaria to cancer have shaped the social landscape--sometimes through brief, furious outbreaks, and at other times through gradual occurrence, control, and recurrence. Grob integrates statistical data with particular peoples and places while giving us the larger patterns of the ebb and flow of disease over centuries. Throughout, we see how much of our history, culture, and nation-building was determined--in ways we often don't realize--by the environment and the diseases it fostered. 
The way in which we live has shaped, and will continue to shape, the diseases from which we get sick and die. By accepting the presence of disease and understanding the way in which it has physically interacted with people and places in past eras, Grob illuminates the extraordinarily complex forces that shape our morbidity and mortality patterns and provides a realistic appreciation of the individual, social, environmental, and biological determinants of human health.

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Books by Grob, Gerald N.