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American sociologist Claude S. Fisher, drawing on a considerable amount of historical work and, in the case of the twentieth century, numerous sociological surveys, explores the culture and character of Americans from the colonial era to the early twenty-first century. The author not only traces the changes in the material and social conditions of ordinary Americans, in their culture and character, but also tries to find the unchanging features. The book covers a wide variety of topics in American social history, with the emergence, growth, and eventual dominance of middle-class bourgeois culture as the central thread. Among the themes explored by the author are physical and economic security, health, violence, material well-being, inequality, slavery, racial segregation, possessions, shopping and compulsive consumerism, materialism, social groups (family, neighbours, religious, friends, colleagues, formal and informal associations) and Americans' participation in them, individualism, voluntarism, contractualism, egalitarianism, liberalism, the status of women and children, Americans' religious faith, their participation in public spaces and political life, domesticity, mass suburbanisation, etc. A separate chapter is devoted to the analysis of the American mentality and the historical emergence of such components as self-analysis, self-improvement and construction of the self, rational thinking, a sense of control over one's life, compassion and sentimentality, open sexuality, etc.

The book will be of interest not only to sociologists, historians, and cultural studies scholars, but also to a wide range of readers who want to know the details of the lives of ordinary Americans over four centuries.