First published in 1937, it covered the period from the discovery of the Americas in 1492 to the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Four revised editions followed that also covered the Reconstruction Era up to 1877, and accordingly were published with an updated subtitle.

[1][2] The Federal Union was primarily written as a university-level textbook, and was published with accompanying manuals for instructors[3] and for students.

An abridged one-volume edition first appeared in 1946 as A Short History of American Democracy.

For example, historian George Fort Milton admired Hicks's "capacity for extraordinary compression without at the same time either getting the style too bare-bones for pleasurable reading; or the facts too black-and-white for the necessary implications of gradations of gray.