A Basic History of the United States was published by the New Home Library in 1944, and it was the Beards’ most commercially successful book — a compact, readable narrative of American history from the colonial period to the Second World War, designed for the general reader.
The book distilled the themes of the Beards’ larger works into a single volume of roughly 500 pages, sacrificing detail but preserving the essential argument: that American history was driven by economic forces, that the conflict between democratic and plutocratic tendencies was the central drama of the republic, and that the American experiment remained unfinished. The prose was simpler than in the earlier volumes — the Beards were writing for a wartime audience that wanted to understand what it was fighting for — but the intellectual framework was unchanged.
The book sold enormously, eventually reaching several million copies, and it shaped popular understanding of American history for a generation. Its influence was precisely the kind that professional historians both envy and distrust: it reached people who would never read a monograph, and it gave them a coherent story — simplified, yes, but not falsified — of how their country came to be.
Collecting A Basic History of the United States
First edition (New Home Library, 1944): Paper and cloth bindings. Common due to large print runs.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Without jacket: $5–$10
- Later revised editions: $3–$8