19th Century

The Puritans of popular memory are dour figures, characterized by humorless toil at best and witch trials at worst. "Puritan" is an insult reserved for prudes, prigs, or oppressors. Antebellum American abolitionists, however, would be shocked...

The history of New York City's urban development often centers on titanic municipal figures like Robert Moses and on prominent inner Manhattan sites like Central Park. New York Recentered boldly shifts the focus to the city's geographic edges--the...

In this eye-opening work of American history, Todd DePastino tells the epic story of the veritable army of homeless men that swept across America after the Civil War and crafts a stunning new interpretation of the "American century" in the process...

A gripping and masterful account of the moment one of America's founding cities turned on itself, giving the nation a preview of the Civil War to come.America is in a state of deep unrest, grappling with xenophobia, racial, and ethnic tension a national...

Why did trade with the United States prolong Spanish colonial rule during the Venezuelan independence struggles?From 1790 to 1815, much of the Atlantic World was roiled by European imperial wars. While the citizens of the United States profited from the...

The emergence of the Mormon church is arguably the most radical event in American religious history. How and why did so many Americans flock to this new religion, and why did so many other Americans seek to silence or even destroy that movement?Winner of...

Anyone interested in the rise of American corporate capitalism should look to the streets of Baltimore. There, in 1827, citizens launched a bold new venture: a “rail-road” that would link their city with the fertile Ohio River Valley. They dubbed this...

Elite Confederate Women in the American Civil War is a wide-ranging primary source collection that offers a compelling selection of upper-class, white Confederate women's voices from archives across the South.From the prison diary of Mary Terry to...

This thematic biography demonstrates how Stephen Douglas's path from a conflicted youth in Vermont to dim prospects in New York to overnight stardom in Illinois led to his identification with the Democratic Party and his belief that the federal...

On the cusp of the American Civil War, a new generation of reformers, including Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Robison Delany and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, took the lead in the antislavery struggle. Frustrated by...

City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780806158945Author Frank ChristiansonFormat HardbackPage Count 264Imprint University of Oklahoma PressPublisher University of Oklahoma PressWeight(grams)...

In "American Taxation, American Slavery", Robin Einhorn shows the deep, broad, and continuous influence of slavery on America's fear and loathing of taxes. From the earliest colonial times right up to the Civil War, slaveholding elites feared strong and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781558614291Author Helen LaKelly HuntFormat PaperbackPage Count 248Imprint Feminist Press at The City University of New YorkPublisher Feminist Press at The...

Folklore, archaeological data, and first-person narratives contrast the wanton destruction of the eastern buffalo with the spirit and heroism of the early frontier.About the AuthorTed Franklin Belue is the author of Finding Daniel Boone: His Last Days in...

In Scientific Americans, Susan Branson explores the place of science and technology in American cultural independence from Europe and America's nation building in the early republic and antebellum eras. This engaging tour of ordinary citizens' scientific...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780821425084Author Jane HooperFormat HardbackPage Count 258Imprint Ohio University PressPublisher Ohio University PressWeight(grams) 152g

The Partisan Republic is the first book to unite a top down and bottom up account of constitutional change in the Founding era. The book focuses on the decline of the Founding generation's elitist vision of the Constitution and the rise of a more...

Elected for two-year terms, frontier sheriffs were the principal peace-keepers in counties that were often larger than New England states. As officers of the court, they defended settlers and protected their property from the ever-present violence on the...

From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siecle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character, that curiously formable yet equally formidable "stuff," has had a long...

In her 1855 fictionalized autobiography, Mary Gove Nichols told the story of her emancipation from her first unhappy marriage, during which her husband controlled her body, her labor, and her daughter. Rather than the more familiar metaphor of...

Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University. In the late nineteenth century, the Texas Rangers and Canada's North-West Mounted Police were formed to bring the resource-rich hinterlands...

After the Revolution, Americans faced the challenge of expanding representative government throughout an extensive territory. The complex process of adapting republicanism to a vast area generated many conflicts over representation in both states and the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780791472248Author A. S. EisenstadtFormat PaperbackPage Count 220Imprint State University of New York PressPublisher State University of New York...

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

This cultural history of American federalism argues that nation-building cannot be understood apart from the process of industrialization and the making of the working class in the late-eighteenth-century United States. Citing the coincidental rise of...

In the late nineteenth century, the United States underwent an extremely rapid industrial expansion that moved the nation into the front ranks of the world economy. At the same time, the nation maintained democratic institutions as the primary means of...

The dramatic story of the fights and compromises that shaped an Irish communityBook InformationISBN 9780252073380Author Brian C. MitchellFormat PaperbackPage Count 272Imprint University of Illinois PressPublisher University of Illinois Press

In this new edition, Samuel P. Hays expands the scope of his pioneering account of the ways in which Americans reacted to industrialism during its early years from 1885 to 1914. Hays now deepens his coverage of cultural transformations in a study well...

An English emigre who became America's first professional architect, Benjamin Henry Latrobe put his stamp on the built landscape of the new republic. Latrobe contributed to such iconic structures as the south wing of the US Capitol building, the White...

Investing in Life considers the creation and expansion of the American life insurance industry from its early origins in the 1810s through the 1860s and examines how its growth paralleled and influenced the emergence of the middle class. Using the...

New Orleans is unique – which is precisely why there are many Crescent Cities all over the world: for almost 150 years, writers, artists, cultural brokers, and entrepreneurs have drawn on and simultaneously contributed to New Orleans’s fame and...

A compelling history of the national conflicts that resulted from efforts to produce the first definitive American dictionary of English The Dictionary Wars recounts the patriotic fervor in the early American republic to produce a definitive national...

The never-before told story of how Napoleon's top brass escaped to America after Waterloo. Empire's Eagles is colorful, new, and an effectively unknown chapter in American history. In its center is the mystery of whether Napoleon's "Bravest of the...

According to accepted historical wisdom, the goal of the African Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816 to return freed slaves to Africa, was borne of desperation and illustrated just how intractable the problems of race and slavery had become in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781328568892Author Michael MeyerFormat HardbackPage Count 368Imprint Mariner BooksPublisher Mariner BooksWeight(grams) 513gDimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm *...

In the eyes of both contemporaries and historians, the United States became an empire in 1898. By taking possession of Cuba and the Philippines, the nation seemed to have reached a watershed moment in its rise to power-spurring arguments over whether it...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780226815848Author Allison K LangeFormat PaperbackPage Count 320Imprint University of Chicago PressPublisher University of Chicago PressWeight(grams) 152g

This book examines the environmental and technological complexity of South Carolina inland rice plantations from their inception at the turn of the seventeenth century to the brink of their institutional collapse at the eve of the Civil War. Inland rice...

For a century and a half, Abraham Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation has been the dominant narrative of African American freedom in the Civil War era. However, David Williams suggests that this portrayal marginalizes the role that African...