19th Century

Whale oil lit the cities and greased the machines of the Industrial Revolution. In light of its importance, competition between whalers was high. Far from courts and law enforcement, competing crews of American whalers not known for their gentility and...

The history of domestic labor markets in 19th century America From the era of Irish Famine migration to the passage of quota restrictions in the 1920s, household domestic service was the single largest employer of women in the United States, and, in...

In 1854, a Cherokee Indian called Yellow Bird (better known as John Rollin Ridge) launched in this book the myth of Joaquin Murieta, based on the California criminal career of a 19th century Mexican bandit. Today this folk hero has been written into...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depictions of New England flooded the American art scene. Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Theodore Robinson, and Julian Weir, and other well-known artists produced images of quaint villages,...

First published in 1848, What I Saw in California has long been recognized as the foremost trail guide for the Forty-niners. Almost overnight, Edwin Bryant became their authority on how to survive the grueling passage from Independence, Missouri, to San...

In the first half of the nineteenth century, rural New England society underwent a radical transformation as the traditional household economy gave way to an encroaching market culture. Drawing on a wide array of diaries, letters, and published writings...

In the two decades since Feminism and Suffrage was first published, the increased presence of women in politics and the gender gap in voting patterns have focused renewed attention on an issue generally perceived as nineteenth-century. For this new...

In 1812, eight American missionaries, under the direction of the recently formed American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, sailed from the United States to South Asia. The plans that motivated their voyage were ano less grand than taking part...

This book explores the values and aspirations of early settlers in the American Far West. It compares those who settled in the Willamette Valley in the 1840s, the Utah Valley in the 1850s, and the Boise Valley in the 1860s. The Oregon and Utah settlers...

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was one of the most influential jurists of his time. From the antebellum era and the Civil War through the First World War and into the New Deal years, Holmes' long life and career as a Supreme Court Justice spanned an...

Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party was the first party built on opposition to slavery to win on the national stage-but its victory was rooted in the earlier efforts of under-appreciated antislavery third parties. Liberty Power tells the story of how...

Many of us may not realize that what we now call snail mail was once just as revolutionary as e-mail and text messages are today. As David M. Henkin argues in "The Postal Age", a burgeoning postal network initiated major cultural shifts during the...

Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first to draw attention to Americans' propensity to form voluntary associations-and to join them with a fervor and frequency unmatched anywhere in the world. For nearly two centuries, we have sought to understand how...

During the last half of the 19th century, Americans built many of the country's most celebrated museums, such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Chicago's Field Museum. This text argues that...

In this fresh study Brian Schoen views the Deep South and its cotton industry from a global perspective, revisiting old assumptions and providing new insights into the region, the political history of the United States, and the causes of the Civil War...

In They Will Have Their Game, Kenneth Cohen explores how sports, drinking, gambling, and theater produced a sense of democracy while also reinforcing racial, gender, and class divisions in early America. Pairing previously unexplored financial records...

During America's turbulent antebellum era, the Supreme Court decided important cases - most famously Dred Scott - that spoke to sectional concerns and shaped the nation's response to the slavery question. Much scholarship has been devoted to individual...

For President Ulysses S. Grant and blacks in the South following the Civil War, the conflict did not end with the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox in April 1865, but continued with the Ku Klux Klan's terror campaign against blacks...

This richly illustrated volume explores Edison's inventive and personal pursuits from 1888 to 1889, documenting his responses to technological, organizational, and economic challenges.Thomas A. Edison was received at the 1889 Paris Exposition...

The Burr treason trial, one of the greatest criminal trials in American history, was significant for several reasons. The legal proceedings lasted seven months and featured some of the nation's best lawyers. It also pitted President Thomas Jefferson (who...

From its origins in the 1750s, the white-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of "moral suasion" and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. But by the 1850s, the population of enslaved Americans had...

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...

Historians typically depict nineteenth-century militiamen as drunken buffoons who stumbled into crooked lines, poked each other with cornstalk weapons, and inevitably shot their commander in the backside with a rusty, antiquated musket. Citizens More...

This is the first paperback edition of a moving appraisal of the infamous Haymarket bombing (May 1886) and the trial that followed it--a trial that was a cause celebre in the 1880s and that has since been recognized as one of the most unjust in the...

A century and a half after the Civil War, Americans are still dealing with the legacies of the conflict and Reconstruction, including the many myths and legends spawned by these events. The Long Reconstruction: The Post-Civil War South in History, Film,...

Winner of the Speech Communication's Winans-Wichelns Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address. Zarefsky examines the dynamics of the seven 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates, placing them in historical context and explaining the...

Glossy magazines write about them, celebrities give their names to them, and you'd better believe there's an app (or ten) committed to finding you the right one. They are New York City restaurants and food shops. And their journey to international...

In the months after the end of the Civil War, there was one word on everyone's lips: redemption. From the fiery language of Radical Republicans calling for a reconstruction of the former Confederacy to the petitions of those individuals who had worked...

This book offers a meticulous reconstruction of the life of Rufus Kinsley - an ordinary New England soldier who during the Civil War became an officer in one of the nations's first and most famous black regiments - and an expertly edited transcription of...

The Greek Fire examines the United States' early global influence as the fledgling nation that inserted itself in conflicts that were oceans away. Maureen Connors Santelli focuses on the American fascination with and involvement in the Greek Revolution...

Early nineteenth-century American prisons followed one of two dominant models: the Auburn system, in which prisoners performed factory-style labor by day and were placed in solitary confinement at night, and the Pennsylvania system, where prisoners faced...

Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party was the first party built on opposition to slavery to win on the national stage-but its victory was rooted in the earlier efforts of under-appreciated antislavery third parties. Liberty Power tells the story of how...

This book offers a history of crime and the criminal justice system in America, written particularly for students of criminal justice and those interested in the history of crime and punishment. It follows the evolution of the criminal justice system...

The Genesis of America investigates the ways in which US foreign policy contributed to the formation of an American national consciousness. Interpreting American nationalism as a process of external demarcation, Jasper M. Trautsch argues that, for a...

On July 4, 1791, the fifteenth anniversary of American Independence, John Crane, a descendant of prominent Virginian families, killed his neighbor's harvest worker. Murder in the Shenandoah traces the story of this early murder case as it entangled...

The story of a black day-laborer called Sam Hose killing his white employer in a workplace dispute ended in a lynching of enormous religious significance. For many deeply-religious communities in the Jim Crow South, killing those like Sam Hose restored...

This classic history of frontier violence and law enforcement presents a thoroughly researched, well-documented, and entertaining account of the United States marshals in tumultuous territorial New Mexico and Arizona. Included in the story are notable...

Highly readable . . . . interdisciplinary history of a high order. -- The Historian Well-written and superbly documented . . . . Both physicians and lawyers will find this book useful and fascinating. -- Journal of the American Medical Association ...

From the end of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth, the United States experienced unprecedented structural change. Advances in communication and manufacturing technology brought about a revolution for major industries such...

What did politics and public affairs mean to those generations of Americans who first experienced democratic self-rule? Taking their cue from vibrant political campaigns and very high voter turnouts, historians have depicted the nineteenth century as an...