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Shaping of America, 1783-1815, Reference Library. By Richard C. Hanes, Sharon M. Hanes, and Kelly Rudd. Ed. by Lawrence W Baker. Detroit, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2006. 4 vols, acid free $215 (ISBN 1-4144-0181-7).
If the goal of reference books for younger readers is to spark their interest, Shaping of America: 1783-1815 should far exceed that goal. Juvenile works for this time period are generally either fairly brief (for example, Stephen Feinstein's Rise of a New Nation: The Chronicle of American History from 1787 to 1815 [Bluewood Bks., 2000] and Isaac Asimov's The Birth of the United States, 1763-1816 [Dennis Dobson, 1974]) or concentrate on a single person (for example, James Giblin's The Amazing Life of Benjamin Franklin [Scholastic Pr., 200O]). An exception is America Speaks: The Birth of a Nation (Grolier, 2005), which in ten slim volumes examines the time period through various trades and occupations, such as Merchants (vol. 1), Transporters (vol. 4) or Lawmen (vol. 8). America Speaks seems to be aimed at audiences that are a bit younger. Shaping of America combines well-written and in-depth coverage of the era with rather detailed biographies and a separate volume of primary sources, offering more than one thousand pages on the subject.
Shaping of America has four volumes: Almanac, Biographies (2 volumes), and...