- The Harvard Book, rev. ed
- Hardcover December 1969
- Constructing the Monolith
- Hardcover February 2009
- Exiles at Home
- Hardcover February 2009
- How Free Is Free?
- Hardcover February 2009
- The Selma of the North
- Hardcover February 2009
- Strait Talk
- Hardcover February 2009
- The Origins of Canadian and American Political Differences
- Hardcover January 2009
- Up from History
- Hardcover January 2009
- Why the Garden Club Couldn't Save Youngstown
- Hardcover January 2009
- Horses at Work
- Hardcover November 2008
- The Triumph of Music
- Hardcover November 2008
- Who Owns the Sky?
- Hardcover November 2008
- Creating a Nation of Joiners
- Hardcover November 2008
- Ethnic Modernism
- Paperback November 2008
- Migration Miracle
- Hardcover November 2008
- Dry Manhattan
- In 1919, the United States made its boldest attempt at social reform: Prohibition. This "noble experiment" was aggressively promoted, and spectacularly unsuccessful, in New York City. In the first major work on Prohibition in a quarter century, and the only full history of Prohibition in the era's most vibrant city, Lerner describes a battle between competing visions of the United States that encompassed much more than the freedom to drink.
- Paperback October 2008
- First Lady of the Confederacy
- When Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederacy, his wife, Varina Howell Davis, reluctantly became the First Lady. Pro-slavery but also pro-Union, Varina Davis was inhibited by her role as Confederate First Lady and unable to reveal her true convictions. A century after Varina Davis's death in 1906, Joan E. Cashin offers the first definitive biography of this truly modern, but deeply conflicted, woman. In this path-breaking book, Cashin offers a splendid portrait of a fascinating woman who struggled with the constraints of her time and place.
- Paperback October 2008
- The Jamestown Project
- Despite the original settlers' dependence on the Chesapeake Algonquians and strained relations with their London backers, they forged a colony that survived where others had failed. Reconfiguring the myth of Jamestown's failure, Kupperman shows how the settlement's messy first decade actually represented a period of ferment in which individuals were learning how to make a colony work.
- Paperback October 2008
- Killing for Coal
- Hardcover October 2008
- Stealing Lincoln's Body
- On the night of the 1876 presidential election, a gang of counterfeiters attempted to steal the entombed embalmed body of Abraham Lincoln and hold it for ransom. Craughwell returns to this bizarre, and largely forgotten, event with the first book to place the grave robbery in historical context. This rousing story of hapless con men, intrepid federal agents, and ordinary Springfield citizens offers an unusual glimpse into late-nineteenth-century America.
- Paperback October 2008
- What Blood Won't Tell
- Hardcover October 2008
- A Nation by Design
- In A Nation by Design, Aristide Zolberg explores American immigration policy from the colonial period to the present, discussing how it has been used as a tool of nation building. This is an authoritative account of American immigration history and the political and social factors that brought it about. Zolberg's book shows how America has struggled to shape the immigration process to construct the kind of population it desires.
- Paperback September 2008
- Saltwater Slavery
- This bold, innovative book promises to radically alter our understanding of the Atlantic slave trade, and the depths of its horrors. Stephanie E. Smallwood offers a penetrating look at the process of enslavement from its African origins through the Middle Passage and into the American slave market. Saltwater Slavery is animated by deep research and gives us a graphic experience of the slave trade from the vantage point of the slaves themselves. The result is both a remarkable transatlantic view of the culture of enslavement, and a painful, intimate vision of the bloody, daily business of the slave trade.
- Paperback September 2008
- Americans All
- From the 1920s—a decade marked by racism and nativism—through World War II, hundreds of thousands of Americans took part in a vibrant campaign to overcome racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices. Progressive activists encouraged pluralism in homes, schools, and churches across the country.Selig tells the neglected story of the cultural gifts movement, which flourished between the world wars.
- Hardcover June 2008
- American Mediterranean
- How did slave-owning Southern planters make sense of the transformation of their world in the Civil War era Guterl shows that they looked beyond their borders for answers and examines how the Southern elite connected—by travel, print culture, even the prospect of future conquest—with the communities of New World slaveholders as they redefined their world.
- Hardcover June 2008
- Nexus
- In an illuminating study that blends diplomatic, military, technology, and business history, Winkler shows how U.S. officials during World War I discovered the enormous value of global communications. In this absorbing history, Winkler sheds light on the early stages of the global infrastructure that helped launch the United States as the predominant power of the century.
- Hardcover June 2008
- Democracy's Prisoner
- In 1920, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs ran for president while serving a ten-year jail term for speaking against America's role in World War I. In this book, Freeberg shows that the campaign to send Debs from an Atlanta jailhouse to the White House was part of a wider national debate over the right to free speech in wartime. In this story of democracy on trial, Freeberg excavates an extraordinary episode in the history of one of America's most prized ideals.
- Hardcover May 2008
- Papers of John Adams, Volume 14, 27 October 1782 - 31 May 1783
- John Adams reached Paris on October 26, 1782, for the final act of the American Revolution: the peace treaty. This volume chronicles his role in the negotiations and the decision to conclude a peace separate from France.
- Hardcover May 2008
- Woodrow Wilson and the American Myth in Italy
- In 1918, Woodrow Wilson’s image as leader of the free world and the image of America as dispenser of democracy spread throughout Italy, filling an ideological void. American popularity, though, did not ensure mutual understanding. Rossini sets the Italian-American political confrontation within the full context of the two countries’ cultural perceptions of each other, different war experiences, and ideas about participatory democracy and peace.
- Hardcover May 2008
- Degrees of Freedom
- As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late nineteenth century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. Degrees of Freedom compares and contrasts these two societies in which slavery was destroyed by war, and citizenship was redefined through social and political upheaval. Both Louisiana and Cuba were rich in sugar plantations that depended on an enslaved labor force. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, they diverged sharply in the meanings attributed to race and color in public life and in the boundaries placed on citizenship.
- Paperback April 2008
- The Faithful
- Shaken by the ongoing clergy sexual abuse scandal, and challenged from within by social and theological division, Catholics in America are at a crossroads. O’Toole tells the story of this ancient church from the perspective of ordinary Americans, the lay believers who have kept their faith despite persecution from without and clergy abuse from within.
- Hardcover April 2008
- On Zion's Mount
- On Zion’s Mount shows how, paradoxically, the Mormons created their homeland at the expense of the local Indians—and how they expressed their sense of belonging by investing Mt. Timpanogos with “Indian” meaning.
- Hardcover April 2008
- Violence over the Land
- In this ambitious book that ranges across the Great Basin, Ned Blackhawk places Native peoples at the center of a dynamic story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that profoundly shaped the American West. Violence over the Land is a passionate reminder of the high costs that the making of American history occasioned for many indigenous peoples, written from the vantage point of an Indian scholar whose own family history is intimately bound up in its enduring legacies.
- Paperback April 2008
- American Protest Literature
- With a Foreword by John Stauffer and an Afterword by Howard Zinn
- "I like a little rebellion now and then," wrote Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, enlisting in a tradition that throughout American history has led writers to rage and reason, prophesy and provoke. American Protest Literature presents sources from eleven protest movements--political, social, and cultural--from the Revolution to abolition to gay rights to antiwar protest. In this impressive work, Trodd provides an enlightening and inspiring survey of this most American form of literature.
- Paperback April 2008
- The Averaged American
- Americans today "know" that a majority of the population supports the death penalty, that half of all marriages end in divorce, and that four out of five prefer a particular brand of toothpaste. But remarkably, such data--now woven into our social fabric--became common currency only in the last century. With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Sarah Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans' sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation.
- Paperback April 2008
- The Southern Past
- Since the Civil War whites and blacks have struggled over the meanings and uses of the Southern past. The Southern Past argues that these battles are ultimately about who has the power to determine what we remember of the past, and whether that remembrance will honor all Southerners or only select groups.
- Paperback April 2008
- The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me
- Taking us deep into King’s backstage discussions with colleagues, his preaching to black congregations, his exhortations in mass meetings, and his crossover addresses to whites, Rieder tells a powerful story about the tangle of race, talk, and identity in the life of one of America’s greatest moral and political leaders.
- Hardcover April 2008
- Nature and History in American Political Development
- In this inaugural volume of the Alexis de Tocqueville Lectures, James Ceaser traces the way certain "foundational" ideas--including nature, history, and religion--have been understood and used over the course of American history. Ceaser treats these ideas as elements of political discourse that provide the ground for other political ideas, such as liberty or equality. Three critical commentators challenge Ceaser's arguments, and a spirited debate about large and enduring questions in American politics ensues.
- Paperback March 2008
- The Road to Dallas
- The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was an appalling and grisly conspiracy. In this unvarnished story, Kaiser shows that the events of November 22, 1963, cannot be understood without fully grasping the two larger stories of which they were a part: the U.S. government’s campaign against organized crime, which began in the late 1950s and accelerated dramatically under Robert Kennedy; and the furtive quest of two administrations to eliminate Fidel Castro. This book brings to light the complete, frequently shocking, story of the JFK assassination and its aftermath.
- Hardcover March 2008
- The Transatlantic Constitution
- Departing from traditional approaches to colonial legal history, Mary Sarah Bilder argues that American law and legal culture developed within the framework of an evolving, unwritten transatlantic constitution that lawyers, legislators, and litigants on both sides of the Atlantic understood. The central tenet of this constitution--that colonial laws and customs could not be repugnant to the laws of England but could diverge for local circumstances--shaped the legal development of the colonial world.
- Paperback March 2008
- Visible Cities
- The eighteenth century witnessed the rise of the China market and the changes that resulted in global consumption patterns, from opium smoking to tea drinking. In a valuable transnational perspective, Blussé chronicles the economic and cultural transformations in East Asia through three key cities—Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia.
- Hardcover March 2008
- The Sixties Unplugged
- This book revisits the Sixties we forgot or somehow failed to witness. In a kaleidoscopic global tour of the decade, DeGroot reminds us that the “Ballad of the Green Beret” outsold “Give Peace a Chance,” that the Students for a Democratic Society were outnumbered by Young Americans for Freedom, that revolution was always a pipe dream, and that the Sixties belong to Reagan and de Gaulle more than to Kennedy and Dubcek.
- Hardcover March 2008
- Freedom Is Not Enough
- In this bold and groundbreaking work, Nancy MacLean shows how African-American and later Mexican-American civil rights activists and feminists concluded that freedom alone would not suffice: access to jobs at all levels is a requisite of full citizenship. Tracing the struggle to open the American workplace to all, MacLean chronicles the cultural and political advances that have irrevocably changed our nation over the past fifty years.
- Paperback March 2008
- Rightward Bound
- Often considered a lost decade, a pause between the liberal Sixties and Reagan’s Eighties, the 1970s were indeed a watershed era when the forces of a conservative counter-revolution cohered. A critical decade in American history, Rightward Bound illuminates the seeds of both the successes and the failures of the conservative revolution.
- Hardcover March 2008 / Paperback March 2008
- Roots Too
- In the 1970s, white ethnics mobilized around a new version of the epic tale of plucky immigrants making their way in the New World through the sweat of their brow. Although this turn to ethnicity was for many an individual search for familial and psychological identity, Roots Too establishes a broader white social and political consensus arising in response to the political language of the Civil Rights movement.
- Paperback March 2008
- Staging Race
- Drawing extensively on black newspapers and commentary of the period, Karen Sotiropoulos shows how black performers and composers participated in a politically charged debate about the role of the expressive arts in the struggle for equality. Despite the racial violence, disenfranchisement, and the segregation of virtually all public space, they used America's new businesses of popular entertainment as vehicles for their own creativity and as spheres for political engagement.
- Paperback March 2008
- In Theory and in Practice
- Harvard University inaugurated The Center for International Affairs (CFIA) in 1958 as a new research center devoted to international relations. Atkinson’s history of the Center’s first twenty-five years explores the connection between knowledge and politics, beginning with the Center’s confident first decade and concluding with the second decade, which found the CFIA embroiled in Vietnam-era student protests.
- Paperback March 2008
- Gardens and Cultural Change
- Five authors explore the variety of relationships between garden making and cultural change in Argentina, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States. They show how gardens express popular cultural invention and attempts at political manipulation, as well as provide places of cultural resistance by subjugated people.
- Paperback February 2008
- Big Enough to Be Inconsistent
- This book focuses on the most controversial aspect of Lincoln’s thought and politics—his attitudes and actions regarding slavery and race. Drawing attention to the limitations of Lincoln’s judgment and policies without denying his magnitude, the book provides the most comprehensive and even-handed account available of Lincoln’s contradictory treatment of black Americans in matters of slavery in the South and basic civil rights in the North.
- Hardcover February 2008
- Fruits and Plains
- Plant engineering has a long history, and Pauly urges us to think of horticulturists as pioneer "biotechnologists," hacking their plants to create a landscape that reflects their ambitions and ideals. In telling the histories of Concord grapes and Japanese cherry trees, the problem of the prairie and the war on the Medfly, Pauly hopes to provide a new understanding of not only how horticulture shaped the vegetation around us, but how it influenced our experiences of the native, the naturalized, and the alien.
- Hardcover February 2008
- Lincoln and the Court
- In a meticulously researched and engagingly written narrative, McGinty rescues the story of Abraham Lincoln and the Supreme Court from long and undeserved neglect, recounting the compelling history of the Civil War president's relations with the nation's highest tribunal and the role it played in resolving the agonizing issues raised by the conflict.
- Hardcover February 2008
- The Reaper's Garden
- What did people make of death in the world of Atlantic slavery? In The Reaper's Garden, Brown asks this question about Jamaica, the staggeringly profitable hub of the British Empire in America--and a human catastrophe. Popularly known as the grave of the Europeans, it was just as deadly for Africans and their descendants. Yet among the survivors, the dead remained both a vital presence and a social force.
- Hardcover February 2008
- The Fire Spreads
- Pentecostalism came to the South following the post-Civil War holiness revival, a northern-born crusade that emphasized sinlessness and religious empowerment. With the growth of southern Pentecostal denominations and the rise of new, affluent congregants, the movement slipped cautiously into the evangelical mainstream. By the 1980s the once-apolitical faith looked entirely different: while many still watched and waited for spectacular signs of the end, a growing number did so as active political conservatives.
- Hardcover January 2008
- On Religious Liberty
- Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his refusal to conform to Puritan religious and social standards, Roger Williams established a haven in Rhode Island for those persecuted in the name of the religious establishment. Davis gathers together important selections from Williams's public and private writings on religious liberty, illustrating how this renegade Puritan radically reinterpreted Christian moral theology and the events of his day in a powerful argument for freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state.
- Hardcover January 2008 / Paperback January 2008
- The Mighty Wurlitzer
- Wilford provides the first comprehensive account of the clandestine relationship between the CIA and its front organizations. Using an unprecedented wealth of sources, he traces the rise and fall of America's Cold War front network from its origins in the 1940s to its Third World expansion during the 1950s and ultimate collapse in the 1960s.
- Hardcover January 2008
- The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction
- The Civil War is often portrayed as the most brutal war in America's history, a premonition of twentieth-century carnage. In challenging this view, Neely considers the war's destructiveness in a comparative context, revealing the sense of limit that guided the conduct of American soldiers and statesmen. The modern overemphasis on violence in Civil War literature has led many scholars to go too far in drawing close analogies with the twentieth century's "total war" and the grim guerrilla struggles of Vietnam.
- Hardcover November 2007
- The Conservative Ascendancy
- In this provocative history of the Right in modern America, Critchlow finds a deep dilemma inherent in how conservative Republicans expressed their anti-statist ideology in an age of mass democracy and Cold War hostilities. As the Right moved forward with its political program, partisanship intensified and ideological division widened--both between the parties and across the electorate. This intensified partisanship reflects the vibrancy of a mature democracy, Critchlow argues, and a new level of political engagement despite its disquieting effect on American political debate.
- Hardcover November 2007
- LBJ
- A distinguished historian of twentieth-century America, Woods offers a wholesale reappraisal and sweeping, authoritative account of the life of one of the most fascinating and complex U.S. presidents.
- Paperback November 2007
- The Betrayal of Faith
- Anderson uses one man's compelling story to explore the collision of Christianity with traditional Native religion in colonial North America. Pastedechouan's story illuminates key struggles to retain and impose religious identity on both sides of the seventeenth-century Atlantic, even as it has a startling relevance to the contemporary encounter between native and nonnative peoples.
- Hardcover October 2007
- Clinging to Mammy
- Loving, hating, pitying, or pining for mammy became a way for Americans to make sense of shifting economic, social, and racial realities. Assertions of black contentment with servitude alleviated white fears while reinforcing racial hierarchy. McElya's stories expose the power and reach of this myth, not only in advertising, films, and literature about the South, but also in national monument proposals, child custody cases, New Negro activism, anti-lynching campaigns, and the civil rights movement.
- Hardcover October 2007
- Washington from the Ground Up
- At the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, President Washington chose a diamond-shaped site for the city that would bear his name, along with the burdens and blessings of democracy. Moving chronologically and geographically throughout the District, McGregor tells a tale of two cities: official Washington, whose stately neoclassical buildings expressed the government's power and global reach; and DC, whose minority communities, especially African Americans, lived in the shadows of poverty.
- Hardcover October 2007
- Among Empires
- This elegantly written book examines the structure and impact of empires and asks whether the United States shares their traits and behavior. Charles S. Maier outlines the essentials of empire throughout history, then explores the exercise of U.S. power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With learning, dispassion, and clarity, Among Empires offers bold comparisons and an original account of American power.
- Paperback October 2007
- Pull
- In retelling success stories from Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates, Laird goes beyond personality, upbringing, and social skills to reveal the critical common key--access to circles that control and distribute opportunity and information. She contrasts how Americans have prospered--or not--with how we have talked about prospering.
- Paperback October 2007
- A New Deal for the World
- In a work of sweeping scope and luminous detail, Elizabeth Borgwardt describes how a cadre of World War II American planners inaugurated the ideas and institutions that underlie our modern international human rights regime. Borgwardt finds the key in the 1941 Atlantic Charter and its Anglo-American vision of "war and peace aims." In attempting to globalize what U.S. planners heralded as domestic New Deal ideas about security, the ideology of the Atlantic Charter redefined human rights and America's vision for the world.
- Paperback September 2007
- A Nation of Counterfeiters
- Prior to the Civil War, the United States did not have a single, national currency. Counterfeiters flourished amid this anarchy, putting vast quantities of bogus bills into circulation. Their success, Mihm reveals, is more than an entertaining tale of criminal enterprise: it is the story of the rise of a country defined by freewheeling capitalism and little government control. Mihm shows how eventually the older monetary system was dismantled, along with the counterfeit economy it sustained.
- Hardcover September 2007
- Normalization of U.S.-China Relations
- Relations between China and the United States have been of central importance to both countries over the past half-century, as well as to all states affected by that relationship. The eight chapters in this volume offer the first multinational, multi-archival review of the history of Chinese-American conflict and cooperation in the 1970s.
- Paperback September 2007
- Stories of Freedom in Black New York
- This book re-creates the experience of black New Yorkers as they moved from slavery to freedom. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, New York City's black community strove to realize what freedom meant, to find a new sense of itself, and, in the process, created a vibrant urban culture.
- Paperback September 2007
- Henry Kissinger and the American Century
- What made Henry Kissinger the kind of diplomat he was? What experiences and influences shaped his worldview and provided the framework for his approach to international relations? Suri offers a thought-provoking, interpretive study of one of the most influential and controversial political figures of the twentieth century.
- Hardcover July 2007
- Sexual Reckonings
- This is the engaging tale of adolescent girls coming of age in the South during its most explosive decades. Focusing on the period from 1920 to 1960, Cahn reveals how both the life of the South and the meaning of adolescence underwent enormous political, economic, and social shifts, with the modern awareness of female sexuality clashing mightily against the white supremacist and patriarchal legacies of the old South.
- Hardcover May 2007
- Becoming Free in the Cotton South
- This book challenges our most basic ideas about slavery and freedom in America. Instead of seeing emancipation as the beginning or the ending of the story, as most histories do, O'Donovan explores the perilous transition between these two conditions, offering a unique vision of both the enormous changes and the profound continuities in black life before and after the Civil War.
- Hardcover May 2007
- The Lost Promise of Civil Rights
- Goluboff offers a provocative new account of the history of American civil rights law long dominated by Brown v. Board of Education. Since 1954, generations have viewed civil rights as a matter of breaking down formal legal barriers to integration, especially in public education. By uncovering the challenges workers and their lawyers launched against Jim Crow in the 1940s, when civil rights were legally, conceptually, and constitutionally up for grabs, Goluboff shows how Brown only partially fulfilled the lost promise of civil rights.
- Hardcover May 2007
See also: All Books in HISTORY.