Professor Sarah Purcell ’92 and four students break old ground in a new way
It’s “the only U.S. history survey text that presents the traditional narrative in a global context.” So says Oxford University Press, publisher of American Horizons: U.S. History in a Global Context.
Sarah Purcell ’92, associate professor of history, director of the Rosenfield Program and one of seven authors of the two-volume text, uses the frequent movement of people, goods, and ideas into, out of, and within America’s borders as a framework.
Purcell wrote the chapters that cover the 1760s–1830s in Volume I and informed many other chapters in their coverage of gender and women's history and military history.
Mentored Advanced Project students Ethan Drutchas ’12, Christian Snow ’13, Sara Lowenburg ’13, and Amanda Borson ’12 helped Purcell edit hundreds of years worth of timelines. She says her students’ “enthusiastic response to material influenced every single page of my chapters — so Grinnell history students will be influencing the education of many other students around the country.”
