Much has changed in the past seventy-five years, and for that we owe no greater debt than to the publication of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.'s life work, the first comprehensive social history of the United States ever undertaken, A History of American Life. Published in twelve volumes from 1927 to 1944, A History of American Life pushed the study of American history into places it had never been before, and legitimized a new discipline - social history - in its wake. Few series before or since have boasted more notable contributors, among them Pulitzer Prize winners James Truslow Adams and Allan Nevins, and Schlesinger himself, one of the most influential historians of the twentieth century. To this day, A History of American Life remains one of the most magnificent attempts ever made to comprehend the American experience in its totality, from the coming of the first explorers to the Great Depression. A work of astonishing narrative power, richly enjoyable in the broadest of its strokes and the most minute of its particulars, it offers a definitive answer to the question "What is the American civilization?" We celebrate its republication in a single volume, sensitively abridged by Mark C. Carnes, and including a lengthy introduction by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.'s son, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and an extended historiographical essay by Professor Carnes.