19th Century

Celebrated accounts of lawless towns that relied on the extra-legal justice of armed citizens and hired gunmen are part of the enduring cultural legacy of the American West. This image of the frontier has been fueled for more than a century by...

Little attention has been paid to the settlement of Germans in Kansas, and Roberta Reb Allen’s Once We Were Strangers helps to fill that void. It is both the saga of an immigrant family told within the larger social, political, and economic context of...

As a fledgling republic, the United States implemented a series of trading outposts to engage indigenous peoples and to expand American interests west of the Appalachian Mountains. Under the authority of the executive branch, this Indian factory system...

Collected here are correspondence, papers, and legal documents - including selected judicial opinions - of American jurist John Marshall. Revolutionary officer, congressman, and secretary of state before his appointment to the Supreme Court, Marshall...

Reconstruction policy after the Civil War, observes Mark Wahlgren Summers, was shaped not simply by politics, principles, and prejudices. Also at work were fears--often unreasonable fears of renewed civil war and a widespread sense that four years of war...

Vegetarianism has been practiced in the United States since the country's founding, yet the early years of the movement have been woefully misunderstood and understudied. Through the Civil War, the vegetarian movement focused on social and political...

Volume 3 of A History of the Book in America narrates the emergence of a national book trade in the nineteenth century, as changes in manufacturing, distribution, and publishing conditioned, and were conditioned by, the evolving practices of authors and...

In the antebellum South, divorce was an explosive issue. As one lawmaker put it, divorce was to be viewed as a form of "madness," and as another asserted, divorce reduced communities to the "lowest ebb of degeneracy." How was it that...

It was no coincidence that the Civil War occurred during an age of violent political upheaval in Europe and the Americas. Grounding the causes and philosophies of the Civil War in an international context, Andre M. Fleche examines how questions of...

In the nineteenth century, restaurants served French food to upper-class Americans with aristocratic pretensions, but by the twentieth century, even the best restaurants dished up ethnic and American foods to middle-class urbanites spending a night on...

Fifty Years in Chains: Or, the Life of an American Slave (1859) was an abridged and unauthorised reprint of the earlier Slavery in the United States (1836). In the narratives, Ball describes his experiences as a slave, including the uncertainty of slave...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780865264984Author Beth Gilbert CrabtreeFormat PaperbackPage Count 890Imprint North Carolina Office of Archives & HistoryPublisher North Carolina Office of...

Although Angelina and Sarah Grimke have been regarded as equally gifted and involved abolitionists and nineteenth-century women's rights advocates, this first biography of Angelina clearly shows that she, indeed, was the outstanding leader, as her...

The California Gold Rush was only the first of a series of rushes that brought the first permanent settlers to much of the Far West between 1848 and 1880. Despite a flood of popular writings on separate mining regions, this book is the first to view the...

These institutions were founded ostensibly for philanthropic purposes--to encourage and reward thrift on the part of society's lower classes. For purposes of analysis, Olmstead formulates an alternative hypothesis. Men organized mutuals for the same...

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Americans increasingly came into contact with the Islamic world, U.S. diplomatic, cultural, political, and religious beliefs about Islam began to shape their responses to world events. In Sacred...

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the federal government sought to forcibly assimilate Native Americans into American society through systematized land allotment. In Sustaining the Cherokee Family , Rose Stremlau illuminates the...

In the Age of Revolution, how did American women conceive their lives and marital obligations? By examining the attitudes and behaviors surrounding the contentious issues of family, contraception, abortion, sexuality, beauty, and identity, Susan E. Klepp...

Contemporary notions of friendship regularly place it in the private sphere, associated with feminized forms of sympathy and affection. As Ivy Schweitzer explains, however, this perception leads to a misunderstanding of American history. In an...

When Anglo-Americans looked west after the Revolution, they hoped to see a blank slate upon which to build their continental republic. However, French settlers had inhabited the territory stretching from Ohio to Oregon for over a century, blending into...

Between 1865 and 1920, Congress passed laws to regulate obscenity, sexuality, divorce, gambling, and prizefighting. It forced Mormons to abandon polygamy, attacked interstate prostitution, made narcotics contraband, and stopped the manufacture and sale...

How abolitionism evolved from an elite and conservative movement to a radical, grassroots reform cause; Most accounts date the birth of American abolitionism to 1831, when William Lloyd Garrison began publishing his radical antislavery newspaper, The...

California during the gold rush was a place of disputed claims, shoot-outs, gambling halls, and prostitution; a place populated by that rough and rebellious figure, the forty-niner; in short, a place that seems utterly unconnected to middle-class culture...

In the decades before the Civil War, American society witnessed the emergence of a new form of print culture, as penny papers, mammoth weeklies, giftbooks, fashion magazines, and other ephemeral printed materials brought exuberance and theatricality to...

In the century preceding World War I, the American Middle West drew thousands of migrants both from Europe and from the northeastern United States. In the American mind, the region represented a place where social differences could be muted and a...

During Reconstruction, an alliance of southern planters and northern capitalists rebuilt the southern railway system using remnants of the Confederate railroads that had been built and destroyed during the Civil War. In the process of linking Virginia,...

In Reconstructing the Household , Peter Bardaglio examines the connections between race, gender, sexuality, and the law in the nineteenth-century South. He focuses on miscegenation, rape, incest, child custody, and adoption laws to show how southerners...

For a generation, scholarship on the Reconstruction era has rightly focused on the struggles of the recently emancipated for a meaningful freedom and defined its success or failure largely in those terms. In The Ordeal of the Reunion, Mark Wahlgren...

A celebrated triumph of historiography, Rockdale tells the story of the Industrial Revolution as it was experienced by the men, women, and children of the cotton-manufacturing town of Rockdale, Pennsylvania. The lives of workers, managers, inventors,...

Originally published in 1922, The Real Lincoln is an in-depth look at Abraham Lincoln the man, not the public figure. Acclaimed at the time as an excellent, impartial source book, The Real Lincoln was compiled by Jesse W. Weik through a series of letters...

Focusing on the Clark's Fort Bottom, a twenty-five-mile stretch between present-day Park City and Billings, Montana, this pathbreaking study examines the successive stages of capitalist development in Billings and the Yellowstone Valley during the...

All along the Mississippi - on country plantation landings, urban levees and quays, and the decks of steamboats - nineteenth-century African Americans worked and fought for their liberty amid the slave trade and the growth of the cotton South. Offering a...

America's legal consciousness was high during the era that saw the imprisonment of abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, the execution of slave revolutionary Nat Turner, and the hangings of John Brown and his Harpers Ferry co-conspirators. Jeannine...

In 1891, thousands of Tennessee miners rose up against the use of convict labor by the state's coal companies, eventually engulfing five mountain communities in a rebellion against government authority. Propelled by the insurgent sensibilities of...

The centrality of religion in the life of the Old South, the strongly religious nature of the sectional controversy over slavery, and the close affinity between religion and antebellum American nationalism all point toward the need to explore the role of...

The reconciliation of North and South following the Civil War depended as much on cultural imagination as on the politics of Reconstruction. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Nina Silber documents the transformation from hostile sectionalism to...

The annexation of Texas was one of the most momentous actions the United States government took in the antebellum period. Apart from adding what was the largest state in the Union at that time, it expedited further avenues for westward expansion,...

Pushing back against the idea that the Slave Power conspiracy was merely an ideological construction, Alice Elizabeth Malavasic argues that some southern politicians in the 1850s did indeed hold an inordinate amount of power in the antebellum Congress...

A drunken Irish maid slips and falls. A greedy Jewish pawnbroker lures his female employee into prostitution. An African American man leers at a white woman. These and other, similar images appeared widely on stages and screens across America during the...

The often-stereotyped belles and matrons of the nineteenth-century South emerge as diverse personalities in this compelling account of three generations of women from a South Carolina family whose fate rose and fell with the fortunes of the state...