Abolitionists Abroad

Lamin Sanneh

In 1792, nearly 1,200 freed American slaves crossed the Atlantic and established in Freetown, West Africa, a community dedicated to anti-slavery and opposed to the African chieftain hierarchy that was tied to slavery. Lamin Sanneh's engrossing book narrates this story of freed slaves who set out to establish communities that would be havens for ex-slaves and an example to the rest of Africa. Tracking this potent African American anti-slavery and democratizing movement through the nineteenth century, Lamin Sanneh recounts a crucial development in the history of West Africa.

Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001

Adams Family Correspondence, Volume 7, January 1786-February 1787

Adams Family

Edited by Margaret A. Hogan

Edited by C. James Taylor

Edited by Celeste Walker

Edited by Anne Decker Cecere

Edited by Gregg L. Lint

Edited by Hobson Woodward

Edited by Mary T. Claffey

In their myriad letters to one another the Adamses interspersed observations about their own family life--births and deaths, illnesses and marriages, new homes and new jobs, education and finances--with commentary on the most important social and political events of their day, from the scandals in the British royal family to the deteriorating political situation in Massachusetts that eventually culminated in Shays' Rebellion.

Hardcover 2005

Adams Family Correspondence, Volume 8, March 1787-December 1789

Adams Family

Edited by Margaret A. Hogan

Edited by C. James Taylor

Edited by Jessie May Rodrique

Edited by Hobson Woodward

Edited by Gregg L. Lint

Edited by Mary T. Claffey

By early 1787, as this latest volume of the award-winning series Adams Family Correspondence opens, John and Abigail Adams, anticipating a quiet retirement from government in Massachusetts, were quickly pulled back into the public sphere by John's election as the first vice president under the new Constitution. With their characteristic candor, the Adamses thoughtfully observe the world around them, from the manners of English court life to the politics of the new federal government in New York during this crucial historical period.

Hardcover 2007

African American Midwifery in the South

Gertrude Jacinta Fraser

Starting at the turn of the century, most African American midwives in the South were gradually excluded from reproductive health care. Gertrude Fraser shows how physicians, public health personnel, and state legislators mounted a campaign ostensibly to improve maternal and infant health, especially in rural areas. They brought traditional midwives under the control of a supervisory body, and eventually eliminated them.

Hardcover 1998

African American Women and Christian Activism

Judith Weisenfeld

When the middle class black women of Judith Weisenfeld's history organized a black chapter of the Young Women's Christian Association in 1905, it was a clear step toward establishing a suitable environment for young working women. Weisenfeld's account gives a vibrant picture of African American women as significant actors in the life of New York. It also bears telling witness to the religious, class, gender, and racial negotiations so often involved in American social reform movements.

Hardcover 1998

America's Germany

Thomas Alan Schwartz

America's Germany describes a unique period in the relationship between America and Germany, when the two nations forged an extraordinary range of connections--political, economic, military, and cultural--as the Federal Republic became part of the Western club and the new Europe.

Hardcover 1991

American Congo

Nan Elizabeth Woodruff

This is the story of how rural black people struggled against the oppressive sharecropping system of the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta during the first half of the twentieth century. Delta planters, aided by local law enforcement, engaged in peonage, murder, theft, and disfranchisement. As individuals and through collective struggle, black men and women fought back, demanding a just return for their crops and laying claim to a democratic vision of citizenship. Nan Woodruff shows how the freedom fighters of the 1960s would draw on this half-century tradition of protest, thus expanding our standard notions of the civil rights movement and illuminating a neglected but significant slice of the American black experience.

Hardcover 2003

American Politics

Samuel P. Huntington

Huntington examines the persistent, radical gap between the promise of American ideals and the performance of American politics. He shows how Americans, throughout their history as a nation, have been united by the democratic creed of liberty, equality, and hostility to authority. At the same time he reveals how, inevitably, these ideals have been perennially frustrated through the institutions and hierarchies required to carry on the essential functions of governing a democratic society.

Hardcover 1981 / Paperback

American Protest Literature

With a Foreword by John Stauffer and an Afterword by Howard Zinn

Edited by Zoe Trodd

Foreword by John Stauffer

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.

Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008

The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture

Amy Kaplan

Kaplan shows how U.S. imperialism--from "Manifest Destiny" to the "American Century"--has profoundly shaped key elements of American culture at home, and how the struggle for power over foreign peoples and places has disrupted the quest for domestic order. In literature, journalism, film, political speeches, and legal documents, Kaplan traces the undeniable connections between American efforts to quell anarchy abroad and the eruption of such anarchy at the heart of the empire.

Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005

Are We to Be a Nation?

Richard B. Bernstein

Kym S. Rice, Contributor

Hardcover / Paperback

Are We to Be a Nation?

Richard B. Bernstein

Kym S. Rice, Contributor

Hardcover / Paperback

The Autobiographical Notes of Charles Evans Hughes

Charles Evans Hughes

Hughes was lawyer, governor of New York, Supreme Court Justice, presidential candidate in 1916, Secretary of State in the Harding and Coolidge administrations, a member of the World Court, and Chief Justice of the United States from 1930 until his retirement in 1941. His Autobiographical Notes portray him as no biography could and provide comment on almost a century of American history as seen by one who played a part in shaping its course.

Hardcover 1973

Black Jacks

W. Jeffrey Bolster

Jeffrey Bolster, master mariner and historian, shatters the myth that black seafaring in the age of sail was limited to the Middle Passage. Rescuing African American seamen from obscurity, this stirring account reveals the critical role sailors played in helping forge new identities for black people in America. An epic tale of the rise and fall of black seafaring, Black Jacks is African Americans' freedom story presented from a fresh perspective.

Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1998

Black Rice

Judith A. Carney

Few Americans identify slavery with the cultivation of rice, yet rice was a major plantation crop during the first three centuries of settlement in the Americas. It accompanied African slaves across the Middle Passage throughout the New World to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. Judith Carney reveals how racism has shaped our historical memory and neglected this critical African contribution to the making of the Americas.

Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2002

Born Losers

Scott A. Sandage

This is a pioneering work of American cultural history, which connects everyday attitudes and anxieties about failure to lofty ideals of individualism and salesmanship of self. Sandage's storytelling will resonate with all of us as it brings to life forgotten men and women who wrestled with The Loser--the label and the experience--in the days when American capitalism was building a nation of winners.

Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006

Boston's Immigrants, 1790-1880

Oscar Handlin

As fresh in 1991 as when it first published a half-century ago, Boston's Immigrants illuminates the history of a particular city and an important phase of the American experience. Focusing on the life of people from the perspective of the social historian, the book explores a wide range of subjects: peasants society and the cause of European migration, population growth and industrial development, the ideology of progress and Catholic thought, and urban politics and the dynamic of prejudice.

Paperback 1991

Cannibals All! Or, Slaves without Masters

George Fitzhugh

Edited by C. Vann Woodward

Fitzhugh was provocative because of his stinging attack on free society, laissez-faire economy, and wage slavery, along with their philosophical underpinnings. He used socialist doctrine to defend slavery and drew upon the same evidence Marx used in his indictment of capitalism. Socialism, he held, was only "the new fashionable name for slavery," though slavery was far more humane and responsible, "the best and most common form of socialism."

Hardcover 1960 / Paperback

Capital and Labor in American Copper, 1845-1990

George Hildebrand

Garth Mangum

The book is the first comprehensive study of the American copper industry to include labor markets, unionism, and labor relations as an integral part of its focus. It also undertakes a careful examination of the influences exerted by geography and geology in the shaping of the industry.

Hardcover 1991

Celebrating the Family

Elizabeth H. Pleck

Elizabeth Pleck examines two centuries of changing family traditions and finds a complicated process of change in the way Americans celebrate holidays, as well as the life cycle rituals of birth, coming of age, marriage, and death. This multicultural, comparative history of American family celebration, rich in detail and spiced with telling anecdotes and illustrations and a keen sense of irony, offers insight into the significance of ethnicity and consumer culture in shaping what people regard as the most memorable moments of family life.

Hardcover 2000 / Paperback

Century of Struggle

Eleanor Flexner

Ellen Fitzpatrick

Century of Struggle tells the story of one of the great social movements in American history. The struggle for women's voting rights was one of the longest, most successful, and in some respects most radical challenges ever posed to the American system of electoral politics.

Paperback 1996 / Hardcover 1996

Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, Volume I, 1600-1865

Edited by Robert H. Bremner

John Barnard, Associate Editor

Temara K. Hareven, Associate Editor

Robert M. Mennel, Associate Editor

This book, the first of three volumes that will provide the most complete documentary history of public provision for American children, traces the changing attitudes of the nation toward youth during the first two and one half centuries of its history.

Hardcover 1970

Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, Volume II, 1866-1932

Robert H. Bremner, Editor

John Barnard, Associate Editor

Temara K. Hareven, Associate Editor

Robert M. Mennel, Associate Editor

This second of three volumes that trace the history of the nation's changing provisions for its youth covers the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the New Deal. These were years rich in innovations which, although not fully realized, represented substantial advances in the welfare, education, and health of children.

Hardcover 1971

Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, Volume III, 1933-1973

Edited by Robert H. Bremner

John Barnard, Associate Editor

Temara K. Hareven, Associate Editor

Robert M. Mennel, Associate Editor

The concluding volumes present forty years of tumultuous history. Now completed, they constitute an indispensable reference and absorbing chronicle of American social history.

Hardcover 1974 / Paperback 1974

Common Lands, Common People

Richard W. Judd

In this innovative study of the rise of the conservation ethic in northern New England, Richard Judd shows that the movement had its roots in the communitarian ethic of countrypeople rather than among urban intellectuals or politicians. Drawing on agricultural journals and archival sources, Judd demonstrates that ordinary people, struggling to define the morality of land and resource use, contributed immensely to America's conservation legacy.

Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 2000

Commonwealth

Oscar Handlin

Mary Flug Handlin

Commonwealth, when first published in 1947, was a pioneer effort to investigate the historical role of government in the American economy. It revealed for the first time the importance of political action in the development of the American free enterprise system. The present edition has been revised by the authors to take into account the research of the past two decades.

Hardcover 1969 / Paperback

The Confederate Battle Flag

John M. Coski

Pursuing the flag's conflicting meanings, Coski suggests how this provocative artifact, which has been viewed with pride, fear, anger, nostalgia, and disgust, might ultimately provide Americans with the common ground of a shared and complex history. He reveals the flag's origins as one of many banners unfurled on the battlefields of the Civil War and shows how it emerged as the preeminent representation of the Confederacy and was transformed into a cultural icon from Reconstruction on, becoming an aggressively racist symbol only after World War II and during the Civil Rights movement.

Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006

The Confederate War

Gary W. Gallagher

If one is to believe contemporary historians, the South never had a chance. Many allege that the Confederacy lost the Civil War because of internal division or civilian disaffection; others point to flawed military strategy or ambivalence over slavery. But, argues distinguished historian Gary Gallagher, we should not ask why the Confederacy collapsed so soon but rather how it lasted so long. In The Confederate War he reexamines the Confederate experience through the actions and words of the people who lived it to show how the home front responded to the war, endured great hardships, and assembled armies that fought with tremendous spirit and determination.

Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1999

Conflicting Paths

Harvey J. Graff

Spanning more than two centuries, this book traces the many paths to adulthood that Americans have pursued over time. Conflicting Paths is an innovative history of growing up in America that includes analysis and five hundred first-person testimonials--autobiographies, diaries, and letters.

Paperback 1997 / Hardcover

The De Peyster Genealogy

Waldron Phoenix, Jr. Belknap

Hardcover

The Deadly Truth

Gerald N. Grob

This book chronicles the complex interactions between disease and the peoples of America from the pre-Columbian world to the present. In a powerful challenge to our tendency to see disease as unnatural and its virtual elimination as a real possibility, Grob asserts the undeniable biological persistence of disease.

Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2005

A Democracy at War

William O'Neill

As America fought to defend democracy in Europe and Asia during World War II, its own democratic politics both aided and impeded the war effort at home and the military campaigns abroad. Now, in a broad-ranging social, political, military, and diplomatic history, William O'Neill reveals how the United States won its victory despite its reluctance to enter the war, and despite proceeding by costly half-measures even after committing to battle.

Paperback 1998

Democracy's Discontent

Michael J. Sandel

In a searching account of current controversies over morality in politics, Michael Sandel discovers that we suffer from an impoverished vision of citizenship and community. Democracy's Discontent provides a new interpretation of the American political and constitutional tradition that offers hope of rejuvenating our civic life.

Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998

The Dimensions of Liberty

Oscar Handlin

Mary Flug Handlin

Hardcover 1961

Dominance by Design

Michael Adas

Long before the United States became a major force in global affairs, Americans believed in their superiority over others because of their inventiveness, productivity, and economic and social well-being. U.S. expansionists assumed a mandate to "civilize" non-Western peoples by demanding submission to American technological prowess and design. Michael Adas brilliantly pursues the history of this mission through America's foreign relations over nearly four centuries from North America to the Philippines, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf.

Hardcover 2006

Engines of Enterprise

Peter Temin

New England's economy has a history as dramatic as any in the world. From an inauspicious beginning--as immigration ground to a halt in the eighteenth century--New England went on to lead the United States in its transformation from an agrarian to an industrial economy. And when the rest of the country caught up in the mid-twentieth century, New England reinvented itself as a leader in the complex economy of the information society. Engines of Enterprise tells this dramatic story in a sequence of narrative essays written by preeminent historians and economists.

Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002

Enterprise

Stuart Bruchey

Paperback 1990 / Hardcover 1990

Errand into the Wilderness

Perry Miller

Paperback 1956 / Hardcover

The Faithful

James M. O'Toole

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 2008

First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt

Jeffrey S. Adler

Between 1875 and 1920, Chicago's homicide rate more than quadrupled. Based on an analysis of nearly six thousand homicide cases, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt examines the ways in which industrialization, immigration, poverty, ethnic and racial conflict, and powerful cultural forces reshaped Chicago city life and generated soaring levels of lethal violence. From rage killers to the "Baby Bandit Quartet," Jeffrey Adler offers a dramatic portrait of Chicago during a period in which the characteristic elements of modern homicide in America emerged.

Hardcover 2006

Franklin of Philadelphia

Esmond Wright

The most original and delightful of the Founding Fathers, Franklin was publisher and printer, essayist and author, businessman and "general," scientist and philologist, politician and diplomat, moralist and sage--and a thoroughly rational patriot. This first comprehensive biography in fifty years has taken advantage of Yale's massive edition-in-progress of Franklin's papers and of the many specialized studies inspired by the correspondence. Designed for the general reader, it is also a work for scholars, for the author appends a thorough analysis of other interpretations of Franklin's career and personality.

Hardcover 1986 / Paperback 1988

Fruits and Plains

Philip J. Pauly

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 2008

Gardens and Cultural Change

Edited by Michel Conan

Edited by Jeffrey Quilter

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 2008

Generations of Captivity

Ira Berlin

Berlin traces the history of African-American slavery in the United States from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to its fiery demise nearly three hundred years later. Most Americans have a singular vision of slavery, fixed in the mid-nineteenth century when most American slaves grew cotton, resided in the deep South, and subscribed to Christianity. Berlin offers a major reinterpretation in which slavery was made and remade by successive generations of Africans and African Americans who lived through settlement and adaptation, plantation life, economic transformations, revolution, forced migration, war, and ultimately, emancipation.

Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2004

Glimpses of the Harvard Past

Bernard Bailyn

Donald Fleming

Oscar Handlin

Stephan Thernstrom

This combination of literary essay and elegantly-written history provides insights into a past still important in the twentieth century. The authors cover the origins of Harvard and the foundations of Harvard's character, structure, and style of governance; the shifting relationships and power struggles among faculty, administration, and students over the years; and the growing diversity of the student body.

Hardcover 1986 / Paperback 1995

Harold Ickes of the New Deal

Graham White

John Maze

Very little has been written about Harold Ickes, one of the most important, complex, and colorful figures of the New Deal. White and Maze uncover the psychological imperatives and conscious ideals of Ickes' unknown private life that illuminate his public career.

Hardcover 1985

Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups

Edited by Stephan Thernstrom

Ann Orlov, Managing Editor

Oscar Handlin, Consulting Editor

The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups is a guide to the history, culture, and distinctive characteristics of the more than 100 ethnic groups who live in the United States. The origins, history and present situation of the familiar as well as the virtually unknown are presented succinctly and objectively.

Hardcover 1980

Harvard Guide to American History, Volumes I and II

Edited by Frank Freidel

Assisted by Richard K. Showman

This thoroughly revised, comprehensive guide to American history reflects the explosive growth in historical publications and materials in the past two decades, and the expanding interests of American historians.

Hardcover 1974 / Paperback

Henry Adams

Ernest Samuels

Samuels' Pulitzer Prize-winning, multi-volume work on Henry Adams is now a compact, updated, one-volume biography.

Hardcover 1989 / Paperback

Henry Adams

Ernest Samuels

Hardcover 1964

Henry Adams

Ernest Samuels

"Education had ended in 1871, life was complete in 1890." With this paradoxical statement, Adams apparently dismissed from the record twenty of the most interesting and active years of his career. Opening on the highest note of expectation and closing with his desperate flight to the South Seas in 1890, a divided and lonely figure, that season of fulfillment and inner growth is the subject of this book. Through detailed analyses of Adams' writings, Samuels shows how this drama eventually became transformed into works of literary art.

Hardcover 1958

The History of Foreign Investment in the United States to 1914

Mira Wilkins

Hardcover 1989

How Sex Changed

Joanne Meyerowitz

From early twentieth-century sex experiments in Europe, to the saga of Christine Jorgensen, whose sex-change surgery made headlines in 1952, to today's growing transgender movement, Meyerowitz gives us the first serious history of transsexuality. She focuses on the stories of transsexual men and women themselves, as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, journalists, lawyers, judges, feminists, and gay liberationists.

Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2004

How the Indians Lost Their Land

Stuart Banner

Between the early seventeenth century and the early twentieth, nearly all the land in the United States was transferred from American Indians to whites. How did Indians actually lose their land? Stuart Banner argues that neither simple coercion nor simple consent reflects the complicated legal history of land transfers. Instead, time, place, and the balance of power between Indians and settlers decided the outcome of land struggles.

Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2007

Huck's Raft

Steven Mintz

Today, adults impose ever-increasing demands on the young for self-discipline, cognitive development, and academic achievement, even as the influence of the mass media and consumer culture has grown. With a nod to the past, Mintz revisits an alternative to the goal-driven realities of contemporary childhood. An odyssey of psychological self-discovery and growth, this book suggests a vision of childhood that embraces risk and freedom--like the daring adventure on Huck's raft.

Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2006

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Bernard Bailyn

To the original text of what has become a classic of American historical literature, Bernard Bailyn adds a substantial essay, "Fulfillment," as a Postscript. Here he discusses the intense, nation-wide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, stressing the continuities between that struggle over the foundations of the national government and the original principles of the Revolution. This detailed study of the persistence of the nation's ideological origins adds a new dimension to the book and projects its meaning forward into vital current concerns.

Paperback 1992

Independent Historical Societies

Walter Muir Whitehill

Hardcover 1962

Inheriting the Revolution

Joyce Appleby

Through data gathered on thousands of people, as well as hundreds of memoirs and autobiographies, Joyce Appleby tells myriad intersecting stories of how Americans born between 1776 and 1830 reinvented themselves and their society. The result is a vibrant tapestry of the lives, callings, decisions, desires, and reflections of those Americans who turned the new abstractions of democracy, the nation, and free enterprise into contested realities.

Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001

James M. Landis

Donald Ritchie

Hardcover 1980

Kids' Stuff

Gary Cross

Gary Cross offers here a revealing look into the meaning of American toys throughout this century. What does the endless array of action figures and fashion dolls mean? How have toys reflected who we are, and who we want our children to be? Tapping a rich vein cultural history, Kids' Stuff exposes the serious business behind a century of playthings.

Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1999

The Last Best Hope of Earth

Mark E. Neely

Mark E. Neely, Jr., gives us the first compact biography of Abraham Lincoln based on new scholarship. Neely, a Pulitzer prize-winning historian, vividly recaptures the central place of politics in Lincoln's life.

Paperback / Hardcover

Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination

Joyce Appleby

Paperback 1992 / Hardcover 1992

Making Americans

Desmond King

In the nineteenth century, virtually anyone could get into the United States. By the 1920s, however, U.S. immigration policy had become a finely filtered regime of selection. Desmond King looks at this dramatic shift, and the debates behind it, for what they reveal about the construction of an "American" identity. King gives the most thorough account yet of how eugenic arguments were used to establish barriers and to favor an Anglo-Saxon conception of American identity, rejecting claims of other traditions.

Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002

Man and Wife in America

Hendrik Hartog

Exploring a century and a half of American marriage, Henrik Hartog shatters the myth of a golden age of stable marriage in the nineteenth-century. He describes the myriad ways the law shaped and defined marital relations, and how individuals manipulated the rules of the American states to fit their needs. Hartog shows how our own conflicts and confusions about marital roles and identities are rooted in the history of marriage and the legal struggles that defined and transformed it.

Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002

Many Thousands Gone

Ira Berlin

Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life traces the evolution of black society in America from its creation in the early seventeenth century through the American Revolution. Berlin presents a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, revealing the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king.

Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2000

Merry Christmas!

Karal Ann Marling

It wouldn't be Christmas without the "things." How they came to mean so much, and to play such a prominent role in America's central holiday, is the tale told in this delightful and edifying book. In a style characteristically engaging and erudite, Karal Ann Marling, one of our most trenchant observers of American culture, describes the outsize spectacle that Christmas has become.

Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001

Mirror in the Shrine

Robert A. Rosenstone

Hardcover 1988 / Paperback 1991

The Modernist Impulse in American Protestation

William R. Hutchison

One of the nation's foremost authorities on American religion here traces the immensely important strand of liberal thought in American Protestantism during the last century. From a refreshingly candid viewpoint that religious ideas operate with some autonomy and religious thought is only partially reducible to social experience--or explained by it, William R. Hutchison has produced an original, lasting work that will appeal to readers interested in the formation of American culture and in the shaping role played by religion.

Hardcover 1976

Modernization from the Other Shore

David C. Engerman

From the late nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, America's experts on Russia watched as Russia and the Soviet Union embarked on a course of rapid industrialization. Captivated by the idea of modernization, diplomats, journalists, and scholars across the political spectrum rationalized the enormous human cost of this path to progress. In a fascinating examination of this crucial era, David Engerman underscores the key role economic development played in America's understanding of Russia and explores its profound effects on U.S. policy.

Hardcover 2004

Moving the Masses

Charles W. Cheape

Hardcover 1980

Muscular Christianity

Clifford Putney

In this fascinating study, Putney details how Protestant leaders promoted competitive sports and physical education to create an ideal of Christian manliness.

Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003

Mutual Images

Edited by Akira Iriye

Hardcover 1975

A Nation by Design

Aristide R. Zolberg

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.

Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008

A Nation of Agents

James E. Block

In this sweeping reinterpretation of American political culture, James Block offers a new perspective on the formation of the modern American self and society. Block roots both self and society in the concept of agency, rather than liberty, and dispenses with the national myth of the "sacred cause of liberty"--with the Declaration of Independence as its "American scripture."

Hardcover 2002

A Nation under Our Feet

Steven Hahn

This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people--an embryonic black nation. As Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.

Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005

Nature and History in American Political Development

James W. Ceaser

Foreword by Theda Skocpol

Contributions by Jack Rakove

Contributions by Nancy L. Rosenblum

Contributions by Rogers M. Smith

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.

Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008

The Nature and Tendency of Free Institutions

Frederick Grimke

First published in 1848, Frederick Grimke's book, in the words of the editor, "deserves comparison with Tocqueville's justly famous work, Democracy in America, and is in certain ways superior. It is the single best book written by an American in the nineteenth century on the meaning of our political way of life."

Hardcover 1968

Nature's Nation

Perry Miller

Hardcover 1967

The New England Mind

Perry Miller

Paperback 1983

The New England Mind

Perry Miller

Miller's study of the mind in America has shaped the thought of three decades of scholars. The fifteen essays here collected--several of them previously unpublished--address themselves to facets of the American consciousness and to their expression in literature from the time of the Cambridge Agreement to the Nobel Prize acceptance speeches of Hemingway and Faulkner.

Hardcover 1939 / Paperback 1983

The Newcomers

Oscar Handlin

Hardcover 1959

Northern Protest

James R. Ralph

Hardcover

Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, 1-3, 1607-1950

Edited by Edward T. James

Edited by Janet Wilson James

Edited by Paul Boyer

This superb biographical dictionary covers the lives of exceptional women throughout three and a half centuries of American history. Here are artists, lawyers, reformers, educators, entrepreneurs, physicists, writers, pioneers, presidents' ladies, film stars. Here are those known for their deeds and those famed for their looks--the genteel and the disreputable, the highborn and slave-born. Here are the famous in all areas of endeavor. Here also are many names rescued from obscurity.

Hardcover 1971 / Paperback

Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, 4, The Modern Period

Edited by Barbara Sicherman

Edited by Carol Hurd Green

Contributions by Ilene Kantrov

Contributions by Harriette Walker

The life stories of American women--442 of them--who have in some way affected contemporary American life are explored in this lauded companion to Notable American Women, 1607-1950. The basics--the crucial dates, ancestry, parents, education, marital status, and children--provide invaluable material for both the researcher and the general reader. Beyond these essentials, a brief essay focuses on each woman's life and personality, and evaluates her career from a historical framework. Sixteen new pages of photographs specially selected for the paperback edition have been included.

Paperback

Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, 5, Completing the Twentieth Century

Edited by Susan Ware

Stacy Braukman, Assistant Editor

This latest volume brings the project up to date, with entries on almost 500 women whose death dates fall between 1976 and 1999. You will find here stars of the golden ages of radio, film, dance, and television; scientists and scholars; civil rights activists and religious leaders; Native American craftspeople and world-renowned artists. For each subject, the volume offers a biographical essay by a distinguished authority that integrates the woman's personal life with her professional achievements set in the context of larger historical developments.

Hardcover 2005

Nothing Stands Still

Arthur M. Schlesinger

Introduction by Arthur M. Schlesinger

Arthur M. Schlesinger was one of America's most distinguished and influential historians. This volume brings together eleven of Professor Schlesinger's essays not previously collected in book form. Written between 1929 and 1965, they fall into two sections--"The Scholar," which includes essays dealing with historical questions, and "The Citizen," which includes those dealing with public affairs.

Hardcover 1969

The Origins of Canadian and American Political Differences

Jason Kaufman

Why do the United States and Canada have such divergent political cultures when they share one of the closest economic and cultural relationships in the world? Kaufman examines the North American political landscape to draw out the essential historical factors that underlie the countries’ differences.

Hardcover 2009

The Origins of Central Banking in the United States

Richard H. Timberlake, Jr

Hardcover 1978

Orthodoxies in Massachusetts

Janice Knight

Reexamining religious culture in seventeenth-century New England, Janice Knight discovers a contest of rival factions within the Puritan orthodoxy. Arguing that two distinctive strains of Puritan piety emerged in England prior to the migration to America, she describes a split between rationalism and mysticism, between theologies based on God's command and on God's love.

Paperback / Hardcover

Papers of John Adams, Volumes 1 and 2, September 1755-April 1775

John Adams

Edited by Robert J. Taylor

Edited by Mary-Jo Kline

Edited by Gregg L. Lint

Hardcover

Papers of John Adams, Volumes 9 and 10, March 1780 - December 1780

John Adams

Edited by Gregg L. Lint

Edited by Joanna Revelas

Edited by Richard Alan Ryerson

Edited by Celeste Walker

Edited by Anne Decker

These volumes chronicle Adams' efforts to convince the British people and their leaders that Britain's economic survival demanded an immediate peace; his "snarling growling" debate with the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, over the proper Franco-American relationship; and his struggle to obtain a loan in the Netherlands, where policies were dictated by Mammon rather than republican virtue. Adams' writings, diplomatic dispatches, and personal correspondence all make clear the scope of his intelligence gathering and his propaganda efforts in the British, French, and Dutch press.

Hardcover 1996

Patriots and Cosmopolitans

John Fabian Witt

Ranging from the founding era to Reconstruction, from the making of the modern state to its post-New Deal limits, John Fabian Witt illuminates the legal and constitutional foundations of American nationhood through the stories of five patriots and critics. In their own way, each of these individuals came up against the power of American national institutions to shape the directions of legal change.

Hardcover 2007

The Politics Presidents Make

Stephen Skowronek

This wholly innovative study demonstrates that presidents are persistent agents of change, continually disrupting and transforming the political landscape. But each president also inherits a particular type of political context, a regime shaped by his predecessors that he either rejects or affirms.

Paperback 1997

Portrait of a Port

Compiled by W.H. Bunting

Hardcover 1971 / Paperback

Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment

Leon Fink

The long-standing dilemma for the progressive intellectual, how to bridge the world of educated opinion and that of the working masses, is the focus of Leon Fink's penetrating book, the first social history of the progressive thinker caught in the middle of American political culture.

Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 1999

Public Health and the State

Barbara Rosenkrantz

Public Health and the State constitutes both a fine piece of social history and an ideal model for evaluating our current definition of public health. Rosenkrantz perceptively traces the development of the Massachusetts State Board of Health--established in 1869 as the first state institution in the United States responsible for preventing unnecessary mortality and promoting all aspects of public health.

Hardcover 1972 / Paperback

Public Vows

Nancy F. Cott

We commonly think of marriage as a private matter between two people, a personal expression of love and commitment. In this pioneering history, Nancy F. Cott demonstrates that marriage is and always has been a public institution.

Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2002

Pull

Pamela Walker Laird

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.

Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2007

Racism on Trial

Ian F. Haney López

Haney López tells the compelling story of the Chicano movement in Los Angeles by following two criminal trials, including one arising from the student walkouts of 1968. He demonstrates how racial prejudice led to police brutality and judicial discrimination that in turn spurred Chicano militancy. By tracing the fluid position of Mexican Americans on the divide between white and nonwhite, describing the role of legal violence in producing racial identities, and detailing the commonsense nature of race, he offers a much needed way to rethink race in the United States.

Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2004

The Real American Dream

Andrew Delbanco

Since we discovered that, in Tocqueville's words, "the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy the heart," how have we Americans made do? In The Real American Dream literary scholar Andrew Delbanco shows how Americans have organized their days and ordered their lives--and ultimately created a culture--to make sense of the pain, desire, pleasure, and fear that are the stuff of human experience. In a time of cultural crisis, when the old stories seem to be faltering, this book offers a lesson in the painstaking remaking of the American dream.

Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2000

Reconstructing American Education

Michael B. Katz

Paperback

Remaking the American Mainstream

Richard D. Alba

Victor Nee

In this age of multicultural democracy, the idea of assimilation seems outdated and, in some forms, even offensive. But as Richard Alba and Victor Nee show in the first systematic treatment of assimilation since the mid-1960s, it continues to shape the immigrant experience. Surveying a variety of domains--language, socioeconomic attachments, residential patterns, and intermarriage--they demonstrate the continuing importance of assimilation in American life.

Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005

Republic of Debtors

Bruce H. Mann

Debt was an inescapable fact of life in early America. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, its sinfulness was preached by ministers and the right to imprison debtors was unquestioned. By 1800, imprisonment for debt was under attack and insolvency was no longer seen as a moral failure, merely an economic setback. In Republic of Debtors, Bruce H. Mann illuminates this crucial transformation in early American society.

Hardcover 2003

Roots of Modern Mormonism

Mark P. Leone

Leone comes to new conclusions about the evolution of Mormonism, both as a self-sufficient religious sect and as a movement within the broader context of American history. Applying the tools of anthropology for the first time to this subject, he identifies the features that have allowed an outcast utopia of the nineteenth century to achieve worldwide success in the twentieth.

Hardcover 1979

Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900

Roger Lane

Lane offers a historical explanation for the rising levels of black urban crime and family instability during this paradoxical era. Modern crime rates and patterns are shown to be products of a historical culture that can be traced from its formative years. The author not only charts Philadelphia's story but also makes suggestions regarding national and international patterns.

Hardcover 1986 / Paperback

Ruling America

Edited by Steve Fraser

Edited by Gary Gerstle

This book offers a panoramic history of our country's ruling elites from the time of the American Revolution to the present. At its heart is the greatest of American paradoxes: How have tiny minorities of the rich and privileged consistently exercised so much power in a nation built on the notion of rule by the people? In a series of thought-provoking essays, leading scholars of American history examine every epoch in which ruling economic elites have shaped our national experience.

Paperback 2005 / Hardcover 2005

Salem Possessed

Paul Boyer

Stephen Nissenbaum

The stark immediacy of what happened in 1692 has obscured the complex web of human passion which had been growing for more than a generation before building toward the climactic witch trials. Salem Possessed explores the lives of the men and women who helped spin that web and who in the end found themselves entagled in it.

Paperback

A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness

Frederic Jaher

In a country founded on the principle of religious freedom, with no medieval past, no legal nobility, and no national church, how did anti-Semitism become a presence here? Frederic Cople Jaher considers this question in A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness, the first history of American anti-Semitism from its origins in the ancient world to its first widespread outbreak during the Civil War.

Paperback 1996 / Hardcover

A Scientist at the White House

George B. Kistiakowsky

This highly personal diary kept by the Ukrainian-born chemist who was President Eisenhower's science advisor offers an inside view of White House infighting, policy disputes, and bureaucratic conflict, and of the role an eminent scientist came to play in shaping presidential decisions. It records the interaction between the scientific community and the defense establishment during a critical period in the making of United States foreign policy.

Hardcover 1976

Secular Revelations

Mitchell Meltzer

The United States Constitution is a quintessentially political document. Yet, until now, no one has seriously considered the formative influence of this document on American cultural life. In this ambitious book, Mitchell Meltzer demonstrates the extent to which the Constitution is both source and inspiration for America's greatest literary masterworks.

Hardcover 2005

Separating Power

Gerhard Casper

The separation of powers along functional lines--legislative, executive, and judicial--has been a core concept of American constitutionalism since the Revolution. In Separating Power, Gerhard Casper offers a clear portrait of the issues of separation of power in the founding period, as well as a suggestion that in modern times we should be reluctant to tie separation of powers notions to their own procrustean bed.

Hardcover 1997

Separation of Church and State

Philip Hamburger

In a powerful challenge to conventional wisdom, Hamburger argues that the separation of church and state has no historical foundation in the First Amendment. The detailed evidence assembled here shows that eighteenth-century Americans almost never invoked this principle. Although Thomas Jefferson and others retrospectively claimed that the First Amendment separated church and state, separation became part of American constitutional law only much later.

Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2004

Shook over Hell

Eric T. Dean

Vietnam still haunts the American conscience. Not only did nearly 58,000 Americans die there, but--by some estimates--1.5 million veterans returned with war-induced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This psychological syndrome of social pathology is now placed in historical context by Eric Dean in this remarkable book on Civil War veterans.

Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1999

Sister Republics

Patrice Higonnet

Hardcover 1988

Sisters In Law

Virginia G. Drachman

Ranging from the 1860s when women first sought entrance into law to the 1930s when most institutional barriers had crumbled, this book defines the contours of women's integration into the most rigidly gendered profession.

Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2001

Slave Patrols

Sally E. Hadden

This book completes the grim picture of slavery by showing us the origins, nature, and extent of slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas from the late seventeenth century through the end of the Civil War. Here we see how the patrols, formed by county courts and state militias, were the closest enforcers of codes governing slaves throughout the South.

Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003

Songs of Ourselves

Joan Shelley Rubin

In a strikingly original and rich portrait of the uses of verse in America, Rubin shows how the sites and practices of reciting poetry influenced readers' lives and helped them to find meaning in a poet's words. By blurring the boundaries between "high" and "popular" poetry as well as between modern and traditional, it creates a fuller, more democratic way of studying our poetic language and ourselves.

Hardcover 2007

The Southern Past

W. Fitzhugh Brundage

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.

Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2008

The Southern Tradition

Eugene Genovese

In recent years American conservatism has found a new voice. But what seems new, Eugene Genovese shows us, may in fact have very old roots. Tracing a certain strain of conservatism to its sources in a rich southern tradition, his book opens a powerful perspective on the politics of our day. As much a work of political and moral philosophy as one of history, The Southern Tradition reconstitutes the historical canon, re-envisions the strengths and weaknesses of the conservative tradition, and broadens the spectrum of political debate for our own time.

Hardcover 1994 / Paperback 1996

Stagolee Shot Billy

Cecil Brown

Although his story has been told countless times--by performers from Ma Rainey, Cab Calloway, and the Isley Brothers to Ike and Tina Turner, James Brown, and Taj Mahal--no one seems to know who Stagolee really is. How the legend grew is a story in itself, and Cecil Brown tracks it through variants of the song "Stack Lee"--from early ragtime versions of the '20s right up to the hip-hop renderings of the '90s. Brown describes the powerful influence of a legend bigger than literature, one whose transformation reflects changing views of black musical forms, and African Americans' altered attitudes toward black male identity, gender, and police brutality.

Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2004

Strangers and Kin

Barbara Melosh

Strangers and Kin is the history of adoption. An adoptive mother herself, Barbara Melosh tells the story of how married couples without children sought to care for and nurture other people's children as their own. Taking this history into the early twenty-first century, Melosh offers unflinching insight to the contemporary debates that swirl around adoption: the challenges to adoption secrecy; the ethics and geopolitics of international adoption; and the conflicts over transracial adoption.

Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2006

Surprise, Security, and the American Experience

John Lewis Gaddis

September 11, 2001, Gaddis argues, was not the first time a surprise attack shattered American assumptions about national security and reshaped American grand strategy. We've been there before, and have responded each time by dramatically expanding our security responsibilities. How successful our current strategies will be in the face of twenty-first-century challenges is the question that now confronts us. This provocative book is one of the first attempts by a major scholar of international relations to provide an answer.

Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2005

This Was America

Oscar Handlin

Hardcover 1949

A Time for Every Purpose

Todd D. Rakoff

Who organizes our time? Who decides when we must be at work and at school, when we set back our clocks, and when retail stores will close? Todd Rakoff traces the law's effect on our use of time and discovers that the structure of our time is gradually changing. As Rakoff demonstrates, the law's influence is subtle, and so ubiquitous that we barely notice it. But its structure establishes the terms by which society allocates its efforts, coordinates its many players, establishes the rhythms of life, and indeed gives meaning to the time in which we live.

Hardcover 2002

To Keep and Bear Arms

Joyce Lee Malcolm

Joyce Malcolm illuminates the historical facts underlying the current passionate debate in America about gun-related violence, the Brady Bill, and the National Rifle Association, revealing the original meaning and intentions behind the individual right to "bear arms."

Paperback 1996 / Hardcover

To Make a Nation

Samuel H. Beer

In the clearest articulation ever of the ideas of nationalism and federalism in American political philosophy, Samuel Beer reveals the provenance, purpose, and origins of these theories. From the great English republicans of the seventeenth century, to their American descendants, to the conflicts of ideas that exist to this day, Beer reveals unsuspected dimensions that have shaped-and are still shaping-America.

Paperback 1998 / Hardcover

To Stand and Fight

Martha Biondi

The story of the civil rights movement typically begins with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and culminates with the 1965 voting rights struggle in Selma. But as Martha Biondi shows, a grassroots struggle for racial equality in the urban North began a full ten years before the rise of the movement in the South. To Stand and Fight demonstrates how black New Yorkers launched the modern civil rights struggle and left a rich legacy.

Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2006

The Triumph of Music

Tim Blanning

Blanning considers music in conjunction with nationalism, race, and sex. Although not always in step, music, society, and politics, he shows, march in the same direction.

Hardcover 2008

Unfree Labor

Peter Kolchin

The American enslavement of blacks and the Russian subjection of serfs flourished in different ways and varying degrees until they were legally abolished in the mid-nineteenth century. Kolchin compares and contrasts the two systems over time in this book, which clarifies the organization, structure, and dynamics of both social entities, highlighting their basic similarities while pointing out important differences discernible only in comparative perspective.

Hardcover 1987 / Paperback 1990

The United States and China, 4th Revised and Enlarged Edition

John King Fairbank

For generations scholars and the general public have looked to John King Fairbank for knowledge and insights about China. In four editions of this work he has provided these.

Paperback

The United States and Poland

Piotr S. Wandycz

Hardcover 1980

Unsentimental Reformer

Joan Waugh

This book challenges all previous interpretations of Josephine Shaw Lowell as a "genteel" elitist reformer. Such was the massive and pitiless industrialization of the nation after the Civil War that Lowell sought a new way to approach poverty. She rationalized charity toward hapless families and children in ways that established social responsibility for the welfare of the poor. This introduction of "scientific" methods in social work bridged two great eras of social reform, and created a civic maternalism which gave women opportunities to enlarge their presence in the public life of the country.

Hardcover 1998

Violent Land

David T. Courtwright

This book offers an explosive look at violence in America--why it is so prevalent, and what and who are responsible. David Courtwright takes the long view of his subject, developing the historical pattern of violence and disorder in this country. Where there is violent and disorderly behavior, he shows, there are plenty of men, largely young and single.

Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998

Virgin Land

Henry Nash Smith

The spell that the West has always exercised on the American people had its most intense impact on American literature and thought during the nineteenth century. Smith shows, with vast comprehension, the influence of the nineteenth-century West in all its variety and strength, in special relation to social, economic, cultural, and political forces.

Hardcover 1950 / Paperback

The Visible Hand

Alfred D. Chandler

The role of large-scale business enterprise--big business and its managers--during the formative years of modern capitalism (from the 1850s until the 1920s is delineated in this pathmarking book. Alfred Chandler, Jr., the distinguished business historian, sets forth the reasons for the dominance of big business in American transportation, communications, and the central sectors of production and distribution.

Hardcover 1977 / Paperback 1993

The Warren Court and American Politics

Lucas A. Powe

In a learned and lively narrative discussing over 200 significant rulings, Lucas Powe explores why the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren was the most revolutionary and controversial Supreme Court in American history. Challenging the reigning consensus that the Warren Court, fundamentally, was protecting minorities, Lucas Powe looks at the Supreme Court in the wide political environment to find the Warren Court to be a functioning partner in Kennedy-Johnson liberalism.

Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002

We the People, Volume 1, Foundations

Bruce Ackerman

Hardcover 1991 / Paperback 1993

We the People, Volume 2, Transformations

Bruce Ackerman

Constitutional change, seemingly so orderly, has in fact always been a revolutionary process, as Bruce Ackerman makes clear in We the People: Transformations. After the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party revolutionized the traditional system of constitutional amendment as they put principles of liberty and equality into higher law. Another wrenching transformation occurred during the Great Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt and his New Dealers vindicated a new vision of activist government against an assault by the Supreme Court. These are the crucial episodes in American constitutional history that Ackerman takes up in this second volume of a trilogy hailed as "one of the most important contributions to American constitutional thought in the last half-century" (Cass Sunstein, New Republic).

Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2000

What Blood Won't Tell

Ariela J. Gross

Unearthing the legal history of racial identity, Gross’s book examines the paradoxical and often circular relationship of race and the perceived capacity for citizenship in American society.

Hardcover 2008

What Trouble I Have Seen

David Peterson del Mar

In the first sustained history and interdisciplinary study of violence toward wives in America,David Peterson del Mar reflects on the changes in American society that have affected violence: wife-beating was quietly condoned until the spread of an ethos of self-restraint in the late nineteenth century; the practice increased with a vengeance with the florescence of expressive individualism during the twentieth century.

Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998

When Time Shall Be No More

Paul Boyer

Millions of Americans take the Bible at its word and turn to like-minded local ministers and TV preachers, periodicals and paperbacks for help in finding their place in God's prophetic plan for humankind. And yet, influential as this phenomenon is in the worldview of so many, the belief in biblical prophecy remains a popular mystery, largely unstudied and little understood. When Time Shall Be No More offers for the first time an in-depth look at the subtle, pervasive ways in which prophecy belief shapes contemporary American thought and culture.

Paperback 1994 / Hardcover

Whiteness of a Different Color

Matthew Frye Jacobson

America's racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants "race" has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities in becoming American were reracialized to become Caucasian.

Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 1999