19th Century

In the bustling cities of the mid-nineteenth-century Northeast, young male clerks working in commercial offices and stores were on the make, persistently seeking wealth, respect, and self-gratification. Yet these strivers and "counter jumpers"...

In the bustling cities of the mid-nineteenth-century Northeast, young male clerks working in commercial offices and stores were on the make, persistently seeking wealth, respect, and self-gratification. Yet these strivers and "counter jumpers"...

Winner of the 2010 Clinton Jackson Coley Award for the best book on local history from the Alabama Historical Association Early in 1966, African Americans in rural Lowndes County, Alabama, aided by activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating...

Shawnee legend tells of a herd of huge bison rampaging through the Ohio Valley, laying waste to all in their path. To protect the tribe, a deity slew these great beasts with lightning bolts, finally chasing the last giant buffalo into exile across the...

John Recchiuti recounts the history of a vibrant network of young American scholars and social activists who helped transform a city and a nation. New York, in the late Gilded Age and Progressive Era, was the nation's financial capital, its principal hub...

In this sweeping saga that spans empires, peoples, and nations, M. Scott Heerman chronicles the long history of slavery in the heart of the continent and traces its many iterations through law and social practice. Arguing that slavery had no fixed...

Lucretia Coffin Mott was one of the most famous and controversial women in nineteenth-century America. Now overshadowed by abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mott was viewed in her time as a dominant...

The past two decades have seen a resurgence of interest in American manifestations of the nineteenth century high-church movement, including the German Reformed confessionalism of the "Mercersburg theology" of John Williamson Nevin (1803-1886) and Philip...

A social history of death investigations in the urban Midwest The scene of myriad grisly deaths, late nineteenth-century St. Louis was a hotbed for homicide, suicide, alcoholism, abortion, and workplace accidents. The role of the city’s Gilded Age...

With the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862, many states in the Midwest and the West chartered land-grant colleges following the Civil War. Because of both progressive ideologies and economic necessity, these institutions admitted women from their...

Commonly known as Custer's Last Stand, the Battle of Little Bighorn may be the best recognized violent conflict between the indigenous peoples of North America and the government of the United States. Incorporating the voices of Native Americans,...

In A Century Passing, Richard Krooth examines one of the great entrepreneurs of the late 19th century, documenting his epic, egregious struggle to accumulate wealth and power, regardless of the toll in human misery and fiber. Andrew Carnegie had well...

Boats Against the Current provides a fascinating account of how American culture emerged from the sheltered, elitist world of the eighteenth century into the dynamic, turbulent civilization that reached full bloom after the Civil War. The antebellum...

Americans in Dissent is designed as a collection of biographical essays written for general readers and undergraduates that focuses on the topic of American dissent during the period from 1830 to 1890. Centered on influential nineteenth-century social...

The African-American Experience in Nineteenth-Century Connecticut examines and analyzes the African-American experience in Connecticut as it was through primary sources. Theresa Vara-Dannen analyzes the language of real nineteenth-century Americans...

Historians have paid surprisingly little attention to state-level political leaders and judges. Edward Kent (1802-77) was both. He served three terms as a state legislator, two as mayor of Bangor, two as governor, and two as a judge of the state supreme...

On March 16, 1827,Freedom's Journal, the first African-American newspaper, began publication in New York. Freedom's Journal was a forum edited and controlled by African Americans in which they could articulate their concerns. National in scope and...

On a visit to a Berkshire paper mill, the narrator of Herman Melville's "The Tartarus of Maids" views the "wonderful" papermaking machine with awe and calls it a "miracle of inscrutable intricacy." Manifesting in their...

Selected portions from Pacifism in the United States: From the Colonial Era to the First World War Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print...

For more than half a century, the celebrated historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has been the guiding force of American liberalism, both intellectually and in practice. The author of many critically acclaimed books, Schlesinger vigorously defended FDR's...

Though central to the social, political, and cultural life of the nineteenth-century city, the urban volunteer fire department has nevertheless been largely ignored by historians. Redressing this neglect, Amy Greenberg reveals the meaning of this central...

A definitive scholarly edition of the correspondence and papers of Thomas JeffersonJefferson continues his pattern of returning home to Monticello for the summer months. He makes a brief visit to Poplar Forest in Bedford County to plan the development of...

The gripping history of Afro-Latino migrants who conspired to overthrow a colonial monarchy, end slavery, and secure full citizenship in their homelands In the late nineteenth century, a small group of Cubans and Puerto Ricans of African descent settled...

This volume's 571 documents cover both Jefferson's opposition to restrictions on slavery in Missouri and his concession that "the boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave." Seeking support for the University of Virginia, he fears that...

Aaron Burr fells Alexander Hamilton in a duel in July, but Jefferson, caring little for either adversary or for disruptive partisan warfare, gives the event only limited notice. He contends with the problem of filling the offices necessary for the...

New York City witnessed unparalleled growth in the first half of the nineteenth century, its population rising from thirty thousand to nearly a million in a matter of decades. Feeding Gotham looks at how America's first metropolis grappled with the...

The 618 documents in this volume span 1 September 1819 to 31 May 1820. Jefferson suffers from a "colic," recovery from which requires extensive rest and medication. He spends much time dealing with the immediate effects of the $20,000 addition...

The 637 documents in this volume span 1 February to 31 August 1819. As a founding member of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors, Jefferson helps to obtain builders for the infant institution, responds to those seeking professorships, and...

Building on arguments presented in The Struggle for Equality, James McPherson shows that many abolitionists did not retreat from Reconstruction, as historical accounts frequently lead us to believe, but instead vigorously continued the battle for black...

During the Civil War, Walt Whitman described his admiration for the Union soldiers' loyalty to the ideal of democracy. His argument, that this faith bonded Americans to their nation, has received little critical attention, yet today it raises...

Banks failed, credit contracted, inequality grew, and people everywhere were out of work while political paralysis and slavery threatened to rend the nation in two. As financial crises always have, the Panic of 1837 drew forth a plethora of reformers who...

Mixing idealism with violence, abolitionist John Brown cut a wide swath across the United States before winding up in Virginia, where he led an attack on the U.S. armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Supported by a "provisional army" of 21 men, Brown...

On the night of the presidential election in 1876, a gang of counterfeiters out of Chicago attempted to steal the entombed embalmed body of Abraham Lincoln and hold it for ransom. The custodian of the tomb was so shaken by the incident that he willingly...

The Filth of Progress explores the untold side of a well-known American story. For more than a century, accounts of progress in the West foregrounded the technological feats performed while canals and railroads were built and lionized the capitalists who...

Abraham Lincoln remains America’s most beloved leader. The fact that he was lampooned in his day as "ugly and grotesque" only made Lincoln more endearing to millions. In Lincoln’s Body, acclaimed cultural historian Richard Wightman Fox explores how...

Temperance and Cosmopolitanism explores the nature and meaning of cosmopolitan freedom in the nineteenth century through a study of selected African American authors and reformers: William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, George Moses Horton, Frances E. W...

This book traces the lived experiences of women lawbreakers in the state of Pennsylvania from 1820 to 1860 through the records of more than six thousand criminal court cases. By following these women from the perpetration of their crimes through the...

Long before American women had the right to vote, states dramatically transformed their status as economic citizens. In the early nineteenth century, a married woman had hardly any legal existence apart from her husband. By the twentieth, state-level...

Long before American women had the right to vote, states dramatically transformed their status as economic citizens. In the early nineteenth century, a married woman had hardly any legal existence apart from her husband. By the twentieth, state-level...

"In the beginning, all the world was America."--John Locke In the beginning, everything was America, but where did America begin? In many narratives of American nationalism (both popular and academic), the United States begins in print-with...