1001 Events That Made America: A Patriot's Handbook - Hardcover

"What, then, is the American, this new man?" asked a famous French immigrant to America back in 1782. More than two hundred years later, we're still asking the same question. We're also asking what it means to be a patriot. Alan Axelrod, author of the popular "What Every American Should Know about American History", "The Complete Idiot's Guide to American History", and "Patton on Leadership", suggests that we can answer these questions only after we look carefully and with an open mind into our collective past: the events, the people, and the history that have shaped our selves and our nation. "The Patriot Chronicles" is a handy and informative chronology of key events in American history with lively, concise explanations of the importance of those events. The chronology begins around 45,000 BC, with the intrepid Asians who crossed the Bering land bridge to populate North America, and runs well into the year 2005 with our continuing war in Iraq and recent corporate scandals. In all, Axelrod delivers 1,001 critical components of our past, which help us see just who we are and what it means to be a patriot.

Alan Axelrod is the author of two Business Week bestsellers on great leaders, General Patton and Queen Elizabeth I, as well as numerous other books about history, including The Complete Idiot's Guide to American History, The Penguin Dictionary of American Folklore, and the Encyclopedia of the American West. A veteran of twenty years in publishing, he lives in Atlanta, Georgia.