19th Century

Before skyscrapers and streetlights glowed at all hours, American cities fell into inky blackness with each setting of the sun. But over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new technologies began to light up streets, sidewalks,...

After its early introduction into the English colonies in North America, slavery in the United States lasted as a legal institution until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. But increasingly during the contested politics of the early...

Undoing Slavery excavates cultural, political, medical, and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Motivated by their conviction that the physical form of the human body was universal and faced with the growing...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781439124611Author Fergus M BordewichFormat PaperbackPage Count 496Imprint Simon & SchusterPublisher Simon & SchusterWeight(grams) 517gDimensions(mm) 234mm...

Abigail Jane Scott was seventeen when she left Illinois with her family in the spring of 1852. Her record of the journey west is full of expressive detail: breakfasting in a snowstorm, walking behind the wagons to keep warm, tasting buffalo meat, trying...

After serving in the Indian Wars, Edward S. Farrow set out to provide a manual for soldiers and officers bound for frontier army duty. "I have endeavored to present," Farrow writes, "such knowledge as the young officer often acquires by...

John James Audubon's The Birds of America stands as an unparalleled achievement in American art, a huge book that puts nature dramatically on the page. With that work, Audubon became one of the most adulated artists of his time, and America's first...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781560372639Author Barbara FiferFormat PaperbackImprint Farcountry PressPublisher Farcountry PressWeight(grams) 535g

Images of the West in its heyday from the end of the Civil War to the end of the 19th century depicting the men and women who were replacing the Indians and shaping a new America from Brigham Young to Billy the Kid and Calamity Jane to John Wesley Hardin...

The ‘Wild West’, or American Frontier as it is also known, developed in the years following the American Civil War. However, this period of myth-making cowboys, infamous gunslingers, not always law-abiding lawmen, and saloon madams, is as much the...

This volume explores the Industrial Age (1860–1914), bringing together published and archival primary sources with introductory essays that contextualize a period of extraordinary social, cultural, and economic transformation.The Industrial Age’s...

This volume explores the Industrial Age (1860–1914), bringing together published and archival primary sources with introductory essays that contextualize a period of extraordinary social, cultural, and economic transformation.

A global history of how Thomas Jefferson’s descendants navigated the legacy of the Declaration of Independence on both sides of the color line

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9798765114339Author John A. WagnerFormat HardbackPage Count 240Imprint Bloomsbury Publishing USAPublisher Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781440881404Author Cassandra Newby-AlexanderFormat HardbackPage Count 256Imprint Bloomsbury AcademicPublisher Bloomsbury AcademicWeight(grams) 454g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781800087217Author Eva MillerFormat PaperbackImprint UCL PressPublisher UCL Press

Lumberjacks: the men, the myth, and the making of an American legend The folk hero Paul Bunyan, burly, bearded, wielding his big ax, stands astride the story of the upper Midwest—a manly symbol of the labor that cleared the vast north woods for the march...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781800087224Author Eva MillerFormat HardbackImprint UCL PressPublisher UCL Press

In the spring of 1851 nine members of the Oatman family set out for California on the old Santa Fe Trail. Seventy miles from the California border they were attacked by Indians, who killed the entire family, except a boy, Lorenzo (mistakenly left for...

How do social movements arise, wield power, and decline? Renowned scholar Linda Gordon investigates these questions in a groundbreaking work, narrating the stories of many of America’s most influential twentieth-century social movements. Beginning with...

This book examines the 1894 Pullman Strike, one of the most consequential clashes between labor and capital that paralyzed America’s railroad system.The Gilded Age saw rapid economic growth, expansion of industrialization, and real wage growth. Yet...

A prizewinning historian uncovers the first instances of reparations in America—ironically, though perhaps not surprisingly, paid to slaveholders, not former slaves “A spectacular achievement of historical research. Forret shows for the first time just...

A fascinating new history of Texas that emphasizes the importance of Mexico's political culture in attracting US settlers and Texas's unique role in the nation-building efforts of both Mexico and the United States.Why did tens of thousands of Anglo...

Mental Health, Gender, and the Rise of Sport explores the historical role of sport in the prescription for mental and physical health through the epidemic of neurasthenia, a debilitating neurological disorder that afflicted American society throughout...

For two generations after independence, Americans viewed the Mediterranean as the new commercial frontier. From common sailors to wealthy merchants, hundreds of Americans flocked to live and work there. Documenting the eventful lives of three American...

In this sequel to his landmark study, historian Peter Kolchin compares the transition to freedom after American emancipation with the Russian Great Reforms The two largest transitions from unfree to free labor of the many that occurred in Europe and the...

An eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor. The industrializing North and the agricultural South—that’s how we have been taught to think...

Angel in the Forest is Marguerite Young's fascinating chronicle of two attempts to establish utopian communities in nineteenth-century America.In it, she recounts the strange tale of New Harmony, Indiana, a community originally founded in 1814 by the...

How important black abolitionists joined famous Transcendentalists to create a political philosophy to fight slavery In Fighting for the Higher Law, Peter Wirzbicki explores how important black abolitionists joined famous Transcendentalists to create a...

If not for an unlikely alliance among a bespectacled cowboy, a former Confederate general, and a millionaire newspaper publisher, the Spanish-American War might never have been. How these three outsize characters—Theodore Roosevelt, Joseph “Fighting Joe”...

This book examines the 1894 Pullman Strike, one of the most consequential clashes between labor and capital that paralyzed America’s railroad system.The Gilded Age saw rapid economic growth, expansion of industrialization, and real wage growth. Yet...

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the formation of the U.S.-Mexico border through the rise of capitalism brought new forms of violence, this time codified in law, land surveys, and capitalist land and resource regimes—the markers of modernity and...

At the beginning of the 19th century, New England physicians teaching anatomy in their medical schools expected students to have hands-on experience with cadavers. The only bodies that could be dissected legally were convicted murderers, and this led to...

This new biography of Princess Victoria Ka'iulani goes far beyond most accounts of her life, which tend to dwell on nostalgic recollections of what could have been rather than the reality of her life. Many of the most cherished depictions of Ka'iulani...

Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853 1920, is the first comprehensive examination of a workhouse in the United States, offering a critical history of the institution in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Using the Old St. Louis Workhouse as a...

From the colonial era to the beginning of the twentieth century, horse racing was by far the most popular sport in America. Great numbers of Americans and overseas visitors flocked to the nation's tracks, and others avidly followed the sport in both...

Kathleen M. Byrd's Natchitoches, Louisiana, 1803-1840 is an examination of one French Creole community as it transitioned from a fur-trading and agricultural settlement under the control of Spain to a critical American outpost on the Spanish/American...

Few legal cases in American history are as riveting as the controversy surrounding the will of Virginia Senator John Randolph (1773–1833), which—almost inexplicably—freed all 383 of his slaves in one of the largest and most publicized manumissions in...

With so many of our histories falling into dour critique or blatant celebration, here is a welcome departure: a book that offers hope as well as honesty about the American past. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery,...