HIST-151 U.S. History to 1877

Reviewed: WSJ 19-20 Nov. 2016 p. C11.
Description: Discover the surprising role of the postal service in our nation's political, social, economic, and physical development. The founders established the post office before they had even signed the Declaration of Independence, and for a very long time it represented the government for most citizens. The post became the catalyst of the nation's transportation grid, from the stagecoach lines to the airlines, and the lifeline of the great migration from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Gallagher traces its origins and leaders and describes its role in every major event in American history, from the Revolutionary War to the dawn of the Internet age. (publ.)

Description: From Benjamin Franklin, Robert Morris, and Cornelius Vanderbilt to Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Gates, with Madam C.J. Walker, Martha Stewart, Jay-Z, and many more in-between, An Illustrated Business History of the United States is a sweeping, lively, and highly approachable history of American business from the nation's founding to the twenty-first century. Author Richard Vague divides this history into fourteen eras, with each era featuring lists of the wealthiest individuals, notable inventions, and companies founded, and the largest organizations, banks, and insurance companies. Much of the data to create these lists stems from original research, and the book contains a wealth of primary business information extended and supplemented on a companion website. Major themes include the nation's business beginnings in land and real estate, the pivotal place of financial institutions from the nation's earliest days, America's emergence as an industrial powerhouse, its outsized innovations, the dominance of its railways, automobiles, and other transportation companies, and the ever-changing role of government. As the book moves to the contemporary era, it highlights the merchandising of comfort, entertainment, and controversy, and looks to the future as it touches on the potential of emerging industries such as genetic engineering, green energy, and virtual reality. (publ.)

Description: In a tiny log cabin a boy listened with delight to the storytelling of his ma and pa. He traced letters in sand, snow, and dust. He borrowed books and walked miles to bring them back. When he grew up, he became the sixteenth president of the United States. His name was Abraham Lincoln. He loved books. They changed his life. He changed the world. (publ.)

Description: From the time he was a young boy roaming the forests of the unsettled Midwest, Abraham Lincoln knew in his heart that slavery was deeply wrong. A voracious reader, Lincoln spent every spare moment of his days filling his mind with knowledge, from history to literature to mathematics, preparing himself to one day lead the country he loved towards greater equality and prosperity. Despite the obstacles he faced as a self-educated man from the back woods, Lincoln persevered in his political career, and his compassion and honesty gradually earned him the trust of many Americans. As president, he guided the nation through a long and bitter civil war and penned the document that would lead to the end of slavery in the United States. (publ.)

Description: President Abraham Lincoln thought slavery was wrong. He fought a war to hold the country together and to make it free for everyone. With simple, lyrical text and bold, kid-friendly illustrations, this book introduces Abraham Lincoln to the youngest readers and inspires them to stand up for what's right. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 19 Feb. 2023 p. 12.
Description: From the fireside tales in an African village, through the unspeakable passage across the Atlantic, to the backbreaking work in the fields of the South, this is a story of a people’s struggle and strength, horror and hope. This is the story of American slavery, a story that needs to be told and understood by all of us. A testament to the resilience of the African American community, this book honors what has been and envisions what is to be. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 10 Feb. 2019 p. 18; PW 19 Nov. 2018 p. 90.
Description: A slave family is distressed when they discover their son Ben has run away. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 20 Nov. 2017 p. 93
Description: Activist Belva Lockwood never stopped asking herself the question Are women not worth the same as men? She had big dreams and didn't let anyone stand in her way–not her father, her law school, or even the U.S. Supreme Court. She fought for equality for women in the classroom, in the courtroom, and in politics. (publ.)

Description: Whitman and Lincoln shared the national stage in Washington, DC, during the Civil War. Though the two men never met, Whitman would often see Lincoln's carriage on the road. The president was never far from the poet's mind, and Lincoln's "grace under pressure" was something Whitman returned to again and again in his poetry. Whitman witnessed Lincoln's second inauguration and mourned along with America as Lincoln's funeral train wound its way across the landscape to his final resting place. (publ.)

Description: Erased. Ignored. Hidden. Lost. Underappreciated. No longer. Delve into the unique, inspiring, and world-changing history of Black people. Black leaders, writers, civil rights activists, scientists, and more have influenced, inspired, and changed the societies we live in. This history book's pages are filled with the stories of these historical giants and their contributions to the world. It prominent Black people in history such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, and Dr. Martin Luther King. The timelines have been individually commissioned, with the stunning visual designs reflecting the essence of that particular historical person. (publ.)

Note: Library standing order.

Description: Uses foreign relations as the lens through which to tell the story of America’s rise from thirteen disparate colonies along the Atlantic coast to the world’s greatest superpower. Documents America’s interaction with other peoples and nations, a story of stunning successes and some-times tragic failures, captured in a fast-paced narrative that illuminates the central importance of foreign relations to the existence and survival of the nation, and highlights its ongoing impact on the lives of ordinary citizens. (publ.)
Library Holdings: NICC/Peosta has previous vols. in series: (1) The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Years (973.73 McP). – (2) Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (973 Ken). – (3) The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (on order). – (4) Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (973.92 Pat). – (5) What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (973.5 How). – (6) The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (on order). – (7) Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (973.4 Woo). – (8) Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (973.92 Pat).

Description: In 1915, two men–one a journalist agitator, the other a technically brilliant filmmaker–incited a public confrontation that roiled America, pitting black against white, Hollywood against Boston, and free speech against civil rights. Monroe Trotter and D. W. Griffith were fighting over a film that dramatized the Civil War and Reconstruction in a post-Confederate South. Almost fifty years earlier, Monroe’s father, James, was a sergeant in an all-black Union regiment that marched into Charleston, South Carolina, just as the Kentucky cavalry–including Roaring Jack Griffith, D. W.'s father–fled for their lives. Griffith’s film, The Birth of a Nation, included actors in blackface, heroic portraits of Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and a depiction of Lincoln’s assassination. Freed slaves were portrayed as villainous, vengeful, slovenly, and dangerous to the sanctity of American values. It was tremendously successful, eventually seen by 25 million Americans. But violent protests against the film flared up across the country. Monroe Trotter’s titanic crusade to have the film censored became a blueprint for dissent during the 1950s and 1960s. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jul 2019 vol. 56 no. 11); Top 75 Titles recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Hollywood films have been influential in the portrayal and representation of race relations in the South and how African Americans are cinematically depicted in history, from The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939) to The Help (2011) and 12 Years a Slave (2013). With an ability to reach mass audiences, films represent the power to influence and shape the public’s understanding of our country’s past, creating lasting images–both real and imagined–in American culture. This collection analyzes films through the lens of religion, politics, race, sex, and class, building a comprehensive look at the South as seen on screen. (publ.)

Reviewed: WSJ 10 July 2017 p. A15
Description: “Dunmore’s War quieted the American frontier for the two critical years in which the colonies united to fight a national war for independence.” (WSJ) The 1774 campaign against a Shawnee-led Indian confederacy in the Ohio Country marked the final time an American colonial militia took to the field in His Majesty’s service and under royal command. Led by John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore and royal governor of Virginia, a force of colonials including George Rogers Clark, Daniel Morgan, Michael Cresap, Adam Stephen, and Andrew Lewis successfully enforced the western border established by treaties in parts of present-day West Virginia and Kentucky. The campaign is often neglected in histories, despite its major influence on the conduct of the Revolutionary War that followed. … As an immediate result of Dunmore’s War, the frontier remained quiet for two years, giving the colonies the critical time to debate and declare independence before Britain convinced its Indian allies to resume attacks on American settlements. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR July 2018 p. 18; TLS 7 Sept. 2018 p. 28.
Description: Uses the prism of George Washington’s life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time–Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Red Jacket, Little Turtle–and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America’s founding. This book spans decades of Native American leaders’ interactions with Washington, from his early days as surveyor of Indian lands, to his military career against both the French and the British, to his presidency, when he dealt with Native Americans as a head of state would with a foreign power, using every means of diplomacy and persuasion to fulfill the new republic’s destiny by appropriating their land. By the end of his life, Washington knew more than anyone else in America about the frontier and its significance to the future of his country. (publ.)

Description: This study tells the story of the highly organised, international legal court case for the abolition of slavery spearheaded by Prince Lourenço da Silva Mendonça in the seventeenth century. The case, presented before the Vatican, called for the freedom of all enslaved people and other oppressed groups. This included New Christians (Jews converted to Christianity) and Indigenous Americans in the Atlantic World, and Black Christians from confraternities in Angola, Brazil, Portugal and Spain. Abolition debate is generally believed to have been dominated by white Europeans in the eighteenth century. By centring African agency, José Lingna Nafafé offers a new perspective on the abolition movement, showing, for the first time, how the legal debate was begun not by Europeans, but by Africans. In the first book of its kind, Lingna Nafafé underscores the exceptionally complex nature of the African liberation struggle, and demystifies the common knowledge and accepted wisdom surrounding African slavery. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 20 Nov. 2020 p. 4.
Description: This tells how the religious values of the Pilgrims prompted their settlement of the Plymouth Colony and how those values influenced the political, intellectual, and cultural aspect of New England life a hundred and fifty years before the American Revolution. It begins in early seventeenth-century England with their persecution for challenging the established national church, and their struggles as refugees in the Netherlands in the 1610s. It then examines the challenges they faced in planting a colony in America, including relations with the Native population. The book emphasizes the religious dimension of the story, which has been neglected in most recent works. In particular it focuses on how this particular group of puritan congregationalists was driven by the belief that ordinary men and women should play the determinative role in governing church affairs. Their commitment to lay empowerment is illustrated by attention to the life of William Brewster, who helped organize the congregation in its early years and served as the colony’s spiritual guide for its first decade. The participatory democracy that was reflected in congregational church covenants played a greater role in the shaping of Massachusetts churches than has previously been accepted. This outlook also influenced the earliest political forms of the region, including the Mayflower Compact and local New England town meetings. Their rejection of individual greed and focus on community was an early form of an American social gospel. (publ.)
Note: 2020 was the 400th anniversary of the founding of Plymouth Colony in 1620.

Reviewed: Choice (Jul. 2019 vol. 56 no. 11) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: In Pocahontas and the English Boys, historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman shifts the lens on the well-known narrative of Virginia’s founding to reveal the previously untold and utterly compelling story of the youths who, often unwillingly, entered into cross-cultural relationships–and became essential for the colony’s survival. Their story gives us unprecedented access to all the players in early Virginia. Kupperman presents the real story of Pocahontas, who, from the age of ten, acted as emissary for her father, the great Powhatan, alongside the never-before-told intertwined stories of Thomas Savage, Henry Spelman, and Robert Poole, young English boys who were sent to live with powerful Native leaders and became important intermediaries. Pocahontas and the English Boys is a riveting seventeenth-century story of intrigue and danger, knowledge and power, and four youths who lived out their lives between cultures. As Pocahontas, Thomas, Henry, and Robert collaborated and conspired in carrying messages and trying to smooth out difficulties, they never knew when they might be caught up in developing hostilities. While their knowledge and role in controlling communication gave them status and a degree of power, their relationships with both sides meant that no one trusted them completely. Written by an expert in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Atlantic history, this book unearths gems from the archives–Henry Spelman’s memoir, travel accounts, letters, and official reports and records of meetings of the governor and council in Virginia–and draws on recent archeology to share the stories of the young people who were key influencers of their day and whose stories are now set to transform our understanding of early Virginia. (publ.)

Reviewed: LRB 18 Mar. 2021 p. 21.
Description: This book is a transatlantic history of Puritanism from its emergence out of the religious tumult of Elizabethan England to its founding role in the story of America. Shedding critical new light on the diverse forms of Puritan be-lief and practice in England, Scotland, and New England, David Hall provides a multifaceted account of a cultural movement that judged the Protestant reforms of Elizabeths reign to be unfinished. Hall describes the movements deeply ambiguous triumph under Oliver Cromwell, its political demise with the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, and its perilous migration across the Atlantic to establish a perfect reformation in the New World. He examines the tribulations and doctrinal dilemmas that led to the fragmentation and eventual decline of Puritanism, and presents a compelling portrait of a religious and political movement that was divided virtually from the start. In England, some wanted to dismantle the Church of England entirely and others were more cautious, while Puritans in Scot-land were divided between those willing to work with a troublesome king and others insisting on the independence of the state church. This book traces how Puritanism was a catalyst for profound cultural changes in the early modern Atlantic world, opening the door for other dissenter groups such as the Baptists and the Quakers, and leaving its enduring mark on what counted as true religion in America. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 20 Nov. 2020 p. 4.
Description: In 1620, separatists from the Church of England set sail across the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower. Understanding themselves as spiritual pilgrims, they left to preserve their liberty to worship God in accordance with their understanding of the Bible. There exists, however, an alternative, more dispiriting version of their story. In it, the Pilgrims are religious zealots who persecuted dissenters and decimated the Native peoples through warfare and by stealing their land. The Pilgrims’ definition of liberty was, in practice, very narrow. Drawing on original research using underutilized sources, John G. Turner moves beyond these familiar narratives in his sweeping and authoritative new history of Plymouth Colony. Instead of depicting the Pilgrims as otherworldly saints or extraordinary sinners, he tells how a variety of English settlers and Native peoples engaged in a contest for the meaning of American liberty. (publ.)

Description: As the essays here demonstrate, Anglo-Americans have been simultaneously experimenting with representative government and struggling with the corrosive legacy of racial thinking for more than four centuries. Virginia, contrary to popular stereotypes, was not the product of thoughtless, greedy, or impatient English colonists. Instead, the emergence of stable English Atlantic colonies reflected the deliberate efforts of an array of ac-tors to establish new societies based on their ideas about commonwealth, commerce, and colonialism. Looking back from 2019, we can understand that what happened on the shores of the Chesapeake four hundred years ago was no accident. Slavery and freedom were born together as migrants and English officials figured out how to make this colony succeed. They did so in the face of rival ventures and while struggling to survive in a dangerous environment. Three hallmarks of English America–self-government, slavery, and native dispossession–took shape as everyone contested the future of empire along the James River in 1619. (publ.)

Description: These volumes highlight important historical documents–speeches, letters, manifestos and more–from influential figures during this pivotal century. (publ.)
Holdings Note: NICC/Peosta library also has other series volumes: The Middle Ages (909.07 Mid) & The Ancient World (920 Anc). See also other series titles in this list [on order].

Reviewed: NYT/BR 22 Jan. 2023 p. 11.
Description: New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? Leaders of the founding who called for American liberty are scrutinized for enslaving Black people themselves: George Washington consistently refused to recognize the freedom of those who escaped his Mount Vernon plantation. And we have long needed a history of the founding that fully includes Black Americans in the Revolutionary protests, the war, and the debates over slavery and freedom that followed. … With slavery thriving in Britain’s Caribbean empire and practiced in all of the American colonies, the independence movement’s calls for liberty proved narrow, though some Black observers and others made their full implications clear. In the war, both sides employed strategies to draw needed support from free and enslaved Blacks, whose responses varied by local conditions. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, a widening sectional divide shaped the fateful compromises over slavery that would prove disastrous in the coming decades. Larson's narrative delivers poignant moments that deepen our understanding: we witness New York’s tumultuous welcome of Washington as liberator through the eyes of Daniel Payne, a Black man who had escaped enslavement at Mount Vernon two years before. (publ.)

Description: Chronicles key documents during the revolutionary era. Included are founding documents, speeches and political tracts, political sermons, and letters. Also included are Native American and African slave narratives. An important supplement to each historical document is a carefully designed lesson plan, which follows national history standards for learning, to guide students and educators in document analysis and historical comprehension. Study questions, activities, and suggested author pairings will establish the legacy of documents and authorship for readers today. In addition, comparative analysis highlights how every document emerges from a myriad of social and political influences. A historical timeline, maps, and a bibliography of important supplemental readings will support readers in understanding the broader historical events and subjects in the period. An introduction for each of the major subjects covered in the title considers the significance of document analysis for students and educators. (publ.)

Reviewed: LRB 6 Oct. 2016 p. 11.
Description: The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the ideal framework for a democratic, prosperous nation. Alan Taylor, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, gives us a different creation story in this history of the nation's founding. Rising out of the continental rivalries of European empires and their native allies, Taylor's Revolution builds like a ground fire overspreading Britain's mainland colonies, fueled by local conditions, destructive, hard to quell. Conflict ignited on the frontier, where settlers clamored to push west into Indian lands against British restrictions, and in the seaboard cities, where commercial elites mobilized riots and boycotts to resist British tax policies. When war erupted, Patriot crowds harassed Loyalists and nonpartisans into compliance with their cause. Brutal guerrilla violence flared all along the frontier from New York to the Carolinas, fed by internal divisions as well as the clash with Britain. Taylor draws France, Spain, and native powers into a comprehensive narrative of the war that delivers the major battles, generals, and common soldiers with insight and power. With discord smoldering in the fragile new nation through the 1780s, nationalist leaders such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton sought to restrain unruly state democracies and consolidate power in a Federal Constitution. Assuming the mantle of "We the People," the advocates of national power ratified the new frame of government. But their opponents prevailed in the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, whose vision of a western "empire of liberty" aligned with the long-standing, expansive ambitions of frontier settlers. White settlement and black slavery spread west, setting the stage for a civil war that nearly destroyed the union created by the founders. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Aug 2017 vol. 54 no. 12 (Recommended; recommended for community college library collections)
Description: On the night of March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd gathered in front of Boston's Custom House, killing five people. Denounced as an act of unprovoked violence and villainy, the event that came to be known as the Boston Massacre is one of the most familiar incidents in American history, yet one of the least understood. Eric Hinderaker revisits this dramatic episode, examining in forensic detail the facts of that fateful night, the competing narratives that molded public perceptions at the time, and the long campaign afterward to transform the tragedy into a touchstone of American identity. When Parliament stationed two thousand British troops in Boston beginning in 1768, resentment spread rapidly among the populace. Steeped in traditions of self-government and famous for their Yankee independence, Bostonians were primed to resist the imposition. Living up to their reputation as Britain's most intransigent North American community, they refused compromise and increasingly interpreted their conflict with Britain as a matter of principle. Relations between Britain and the North American colonies deteriorated precipitously after the shooting at the Custom House, and it soon became the catalyzing incident that placed Boston in the vanguard of the Patriot movement. Fundamental uncertainties about the night's events cannot be resolved. But the larger significance of the Boston Massacre extends from the era of the American Revolution to our own time, when the use of violence in policing crowd behavior has once again become a pressing public issue. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 12 May 2019 p. SR6 (author op./ed.)
u<>Description: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Atkinson tells the story of the first twenty months of the bloody struggle to shake free of King George’s shackles. From the battles at Lexington and Concord in spring 1775 to those at Trenton and Princeton in winter 1777, the ragtag Continental Army takes on the world’s most formidable fighting force and gradually finds the will and the way to win. It is a riveting saga populated by singular characters: Henry Knox, the former bookseller with an uncanny understanding of how best to deploy artillery; Nathaniel Greene, the blue-eyed bumpkin who becomes one of America’s greatest battle captains; Benjamin Franklin, the self-made man who proves himself the nation’s great-est diplomat; George Washington, the commander-in-chief who learns the difficult art of leadership amid the fire and smoke of the battlefield. And the British are here, too: we see the war through their eyes and their gunsights, and as a consequence the mortal conflict between the redcoats and the rebels is all the more compelling. Full of fresh details and untold stories, Atkinson gives stirring new life to the first act of our country's creation drama. (publ.)

Description: A comprehensive resource for understanding all aspects of the Declaration of Independence, which marked the formal beginning of the colonies’ march toward the creation of the United States of America, this encyclopedia contains more than 200 entries examining various facets of the Declaration of Independence and its enduring impact on American law, politics, and culture. It details key concepts, principles, and intellectual influences that informed the creation of the document, reviews charges leveled in the Declaration against the British crown, summarizes the events of the first and second Continental Congresses, profiles influential architects and signers of the Declaration, discusses existing copies of the Declaration, explains the document’s influence on other governments/nations, covers historic sites related to the document, and discusses depictions of the document and its architects in American art, music, and literature over time. (publ.)

Reviewed: FA vol. 97 (1) Jan./Feb. 2018 p. 151; LR 2/2018 p. 26
Description: Reminds us that the American Revolution was an astonishingly radical event–and that it didn't end with the transformation and in-dependence of America. Rather, the revolution continued to reverberate in Europe and the Americas for the next three-quarters of a century. This comprehensive history of the revolution’s international influence traces how American efforts to implement Radical Enlightenment ideas–including the destruction of the old regime and the promotion of democratic republicanism, self-government, and liberty–helped drive revolutions abroad, as foreign leaders explicitly followed the American example and espoused American democratic values. (publ.)

Description: The book features a description of the eight-year-long war, with accounts of battles and campaigns, ranging from Bunker Hill and Washington’s crossing of the Delaware to the brilliant victory at Hannah’s Cowpens and the final triumph at Yorktown, paying particular attention to what made men fight in these bloody encounters. The book concludes with a look at the making of the Constitution in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 and the struggle over ratification. Through it all, the author gives the reader a vivid sense of how the colonists saw these events and the importance they gave to them. (publ.)
Library Holdings: NICC/Peosta has previous vols. in series: (1) The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Years (973.73 McP). – (2) Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (973 Ken). – (3) The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (on order). – (4) Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (973.92 Pat). – (5) What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (973.5 How). – (6) From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (on order). – (7) Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (973.4 Woo). – (8) Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (973.92 Pat).

Reviewed: FA 97(1) Jan./Feb. 2018 p. 160.
Description: Shows that without France, there might not be a United States of America. To the rebelling colonies, French assistance made the difference between looming defeat and eventual triumph. Even before the Declaration of Independence was issued, King Louis XVI and French foreign minister Vergennes were aiding the rebels. After the Declaration, that assistance broadened to include wages for our troops; guns, cannon, and ammunition; engineering expertise that enabled victories and prevented defeats; diplomatic recognition; safe havens for privateers; battlefield leadership by veteran officers; and the army and fleet that made possible the Franco-American victory at Yorktown. Nearly ten percent of those who fought and died for the American cause were French. Those who fought and survived, in addition to the well-known Lafayette and Rochambeau, include Franois de Fleury, who won a Congressional Medal for valor, Louis Duportail, who founded the Army Corps of Engineers, and Admiral de Grasse, whose sea victory sealed the fate of Yorktown. (publ.)

Description: A spirited group biography that explores the origins of the most iconic words in American history, and the remarkable transatlantic context from which they emerged. The most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. "The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" was how Thomas Jefferson put it in the first draft of the Declaration, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with "the preservation of." In a statement as pithy–and contested–as this, a small deletion matters. And indeed, that final, iconizing revision was the last in a long chain of revisions stretching across the Atlantic and back. The precise contours of these three rights have never been pinned down–and yet in making these words into rights, Jefferson reified the hopes (and debates) not only of a group of rebel-statesmen but also of an earlier generation of British thinkers who could barely imagine a country like the United States of America. This tells the true story of what may be the most successful import in US history: the "American dream." Centered on the friendship between Benjamin Franklin and the British publisher William Strahan, and featuring figures including the cultural giant Samuel Johnson, the ground-breaking historian Catharine Macaulay, the firebrand politician John Wilkes, and revolutionary activist Thomas Paine, this book looks at the generation that preceded the Declaration in 1776. Everyone, it seemed, had "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" on their minds; Moore shows why, and reveals how these still-nascent ideals made their way across an ocean and started a revolution. (publ.)

Reviewed: Economist 1 July 2017 p. 28
Description: The American Revolution is often portrayed as an orderly, restrained rebellion, with brave patriots defending their noble ideals against an oppressive empire. It’s a stirring narrative, and one the founders did their best to encourage after the war. But as historian Holger Hoock shows in this deeply researched account of America’s founding, the Revolution was not only a high-minded battle over principles, but also a profoundly violent civil war--one that shaped the nation, and the British Empire, in ways we have only begun to understand. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 27 Aug. 2018 p. 110.
Description: December 1777. It is 18 months after the signing of the Declaration of In-dependence, and some 12,000 members of America’s beleaguered Continental Army stagger into a small Pennsylvania encampment 23 miles northwest of British-occupied Philadelphia. The starving and half-naked force is reeling from a string of demoralizing defeats at the hands of King George III’s army, and are barely equipped to survive the coming winter. Their commander in chief, the focused and forceful George Washington, is at the lowest ebb of his military career. The Continental Congress is in exile and the American Revolution appears to be lost. Yet a spark remains. Determined to keep the rebel cause alive through sheer force of will, Washington transforms the farmland plateau hard by the Schuylkill River into a virtual cabin city. Together with a dedicated coterie of advisers both foreign and domestic–Marquis de Lafayette, Baron von Steuben, the impossibly young Alexander Hamilton, and John Laurens–he sets out to breathe new life into his military force. Against all odds, as the frigid and misera-ble months pass, they manage to turn a bobtail army of citizen soldiers into a professional fighting force that will change the world forever. This book is the story of how that metamorphosis occurred, despite thousands of American soldiers succumbing to disease, starvation, and the elements. (publ.)

Description: The 19th century was an era of rapidly accelerating scientific discovery and invention that laid the groundwork for the technological advances of the 20th century as well as important social and political reforms. This set offers in-depth analysis of a broad range of historical documents, including legal codes, letters, speeches, constitutions, reports, and books that impacted the world throughout the nineteenth century, from the Napoleonic code to Darwin’s Descent of Man. It offers in-depth analysis of a broad range of historical documents and historic events that make up the story of a century during which slavery is abolished and the Industrial Revolution gives rise to the middle class. The fervor of the early days of the French Revolution has begun to wane, and Napoleon works to strike an accord with Pope Pius VII. England continues its program of empire building in Asia, while unrest and the potato famine bring on calls for Irish Home Rule. Revolutions and rebellions in China change the global balance of power away from that nation for more than a century. Communism and Marxism are on the rise, and in the United States, nation-building continues with the Louisiana and Alaska purchases. (publ.)
Holdings Note: NICC/Peosta library also has other series volumes: The Middle Ages (909.07 Mid) & The Ancient World (920 Anc). See also other series titles in this list [on order].

Reviewed: PW 5 Mar. 2018 p. 59
Description: This sweeping American epic reveals the story of the century-long blood feud between two rival Cherokee chiefs from the early years of the United States. Dramatic, far-reaching, and unforgettable, this book paints a portrait of these two inspirational leaders who worked together to lift their people to the height of culture and learning as the most civilized tribe in the nation, and then drop them to the depths of ruin and despair as they turned against each other. Theirs is a story of land, pride, honor, and loss that forms much of the country's mythic past today. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 9 Apr. 2018 p. 66; LJ 15 May 2018 p. 66; NYT 22 Sept. 2019 p. SR 6.
Description: The American frontier is one of our most cherished and enduring national images. We think of the early settlers who tamed the wilderness and built the bones of our great country as courageous, independent–and white. In this groundbreaking work of deep historical research, Anna-Lisa Cox shows that this history simply isn't accurate. In fact, she has found a stunning number of black settlements on the frontier–in the thousands. Though forgotten today, these homesteads were a matter of national importance at the time; their mere existence challenged rationalizations for slavery and pushed the question toward a crisis–one that was not resolved until the eruption of the Civil War. Blending meticulous detail with lively storytelling, Cox brings historical recognition to the brave people who managed not just to secure their freedom but begin a battle that is still going on today–a battle for equality. (publ.)

Note: 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist (History).
Description: The author offers an account of the early American Republic, ranging from 1789 and the beginning of the national government to the end of the War of 1812. As he reveals, the period was marked by tumultuous change in all aspects of American life, in politics, society, economy, and culture. The men who founded the new government had high hopes for the future, but few of their hopes and dreams worked out quite as they expected. They hated political parties but parties nonetheless emerged. Some wanted the United States to become a great fiscal-military state like those of Britain and France; others wanted the country to remain a rural agricultural state very different from the European states. Instead, by 1815 the United States became something neither group anticipated. Many leaders expected American culture to flourish and surpass that of Europe; instead it became popularized and vulgarized. The leaders also hope to see the end of slavery; instead, despite the release of many slaves and the end of slavery in the North, slavery was stronger in 1815 than it had been in 1789. Many wanted to avoid entanglements with Europe, but instead the country became involved in Europe's wars and ended up waging another war with the former mother country. Still, with a new generation emerging by 1815, most Americans were confident and optimistic about the future of their country. This volumes offers an account of this pivotal era when America took its first unsteady steps as a new and rapidly expanding nation. (publ.)

Description: The conquest of Indigenous land in the eastern United States through corrupt treaties and genocidal violence laid the groundwork for the conquest of the American West. Author Peter Stark exposes the fundamental conflicts at play through the little-known but consequential struggle between two extraordinary leaders. William Henry Harrison was born to a prominent Virginia family, the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He journeyed west, became governor of the vast Indiana Territory, and sought statehood by attracting settlers and imposing one-sided treaties. Tecumseh, by all accounts one of the nineteenth century's greatest leaders, belonged to an honored line of Shawnee warriors and chiefs. His father died while fighting the Virginians flooding into Kentucky, and in his dying words, extracted a promise from his sons to "never give in" to the land-hungry Americans. An eloquent speaker, Tecumseh traveled from Minnesota to Florida and west to the Great Plains convincing far-flung tribes to join a great confederacy and face down their common enemy. Eager to stop U.S. expansion, the British backed Tecumseh's confederacy in a series of battles during the forgotten western front of the War of 1812 that would determine control over the North American continent. Tecumseh's brave stand was likely the last chance to protect Indigenous people from U.S. expansion–and prevent the upstart United States from becoming a world power. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 22 Feb. 2021 p. 60; TLS 29 Oct. 2021 p. 25.s
Description: Historian Joshua D. Rothman tells the disturbing story of the Franklin and Armfield company and the men who built it into the largest and most powerful slave trading company in the United States. In so doing, he reveals the central importance of the domestic slave trade to the development of American capitalism and the expansion of the American nation. Few slave traders were more successful than Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who ran Franklin and Armfield, and none were more influential. Drawing on source material from more than thirty archives in a dozen states, Rothman follows the three traders through their first meetings, the rise of their firm, and its eventual dissolution. Responsible for selling between 8,000 and 12,000 slaves from the Upper South to Deep South plantations over a period of eight years in the 1830s, they ran an extensive and innovative operation, with offices in New Orleans and Alexandria in Louisiana and Natchez in Mississippi. They advertised widely, borrowed heavily from bankers and other creditors, extended long term credit to their buyers, and had ships built to take slaves from Virginia down to New Orleans. Slavers are often misremembered as pariahs of more cultivated society, but as Rothman argues, the men who perpetrated the slave trade were respected members of prominent social and business communities and understood themselves as patriotic Americans. By tracing the lives and careers of the nation’s most notorious slave traders, this book shows how their business skills and remorseless violence together made the malevolent entrepreneurialism of the slave trade. And it reveals how this horrific, ubiquitous trade in human beings shaped a growing nation and corrupted it in ways still powerfully felt today. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 22 Dec. 2022 p. 61 (reference)
Description: A groundbreaking history of the antebellum movement for equal rights that reshaped the institutions of freedom after the Civil War. The half century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over freedom as well as slavery: what were the arrangements of free society, especially for African Americans? Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted black codes that discouraged the settlement and restricted the basic rights of free black people. But claiming the equal-rights promises of the Declaration and the Constitution, a biracial movement arose to fight these racist state laws. Kate Masur’s history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Its advocates battled in state legislatures, Congress, and the courts, and through petitioning, party politics and elections. They visited slave states to challenge local laws that imprisoned free blacks and sold them into slavery. Despite immovable white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, their vision became increasingly mainstream. After the Civil War, their arguments shaped the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment, the pillars of our second founding. (publ.)

Description: This book debunks popular myths and misconceptions about the American Civil War through primary source documents and shows how misinformation can become so widespread. The American Civil War deeply divided the nation and was a pivotal point in American history. The acrimony and bitterness of this four-year struggle, coupled with its importance to the fabric of American life, has resulted in the development and perpetuation of many myths about the conflict. This work separates myth from reality. The author examines 10 popular myths about the war, each of which is examined in terms of its origins and how it became ensconced in the American memory. It uses primary sources to explain the evolution of the myths and to inform the reader about what really happened, providing a unique quality to this work. Moreover, the book not only explains the flaws in the myth but encourages the reader to further investigate each of the topics. (publ.)

Description: Surveys key documents produced during the Civil War with special attention devoted to the war-time policies of President Abraham Lincoln and the 37th US Congress. A special feature of the volumes is the inclusion of letters and diaries by soldiers and civilians writing about their experiences. The two volumes are organized into several chapters that cover the progress of the war beginning with early debates on secession, through war-time events on the political and battle fronts and concludes with a look to-ward the issues of race and reconstruction. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 24 Jan. 2021 p. 10.
Description: Some celebrate Lincoln for freeing the slaves; others fault him for a long-standing conservatism on abolition and race. James Oakes gives us another option in this exploration of Lincoln and the end of slavery. Through the unforeseen challenges of the Civil War crisis, Lincoln and the Republican party adhered to a clear antislavery strategy founded on the Constitution itself. All understood the limits to federal power in the slave states, and the need for state action to abolish slavery finally. But Lincoln and the Republicans claimed strong constitutional tools for federal action against slavery, and they used those tools consistently to undermine slavery, prevent its expansion, and pressure the slave states into abolition. This antislavery Constitution guided Lincoln and his allies as they navigated the sectional crisis and the Civil War. When the states finally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, it was a confirmation of a long-held vision. (publ.)

Description: Robert Hopkins was a man caught between two worlds. As a member of the Dakota Nation, he was unfairly imprisoned, accused of taking up arms against U.S. soldiers when war broke out with the Dakota in 1862. However, as a Christian convert who was also a preacher, Hopkins's allegiance was often questioned by many of his fellow Dakota as well. Without a doubt, being a convert–and a favorite of the missionaries–had its privileges. Hopkins learned to read and write in an anglicized form of Dakota, and when facing legal allegations, he and several high-ranking missionaries wrote impassioned letters in his defense. Ultimately, he was among the 300-some Dakota spared from hanging by President Lincoln, imprisoned instead at Camp Kearney in Davenport, Iowa, for several years. His wife, Sarah, and their children, meanwhile, were forced onto the barren Crow Creek reservation in Dakota Territory with the rest of the Dakota women, children, and elderly. (publ.)

Review: NYT/BR 30 Jan 2021 p. 13 (ref.); NYRB 8 Apr. 2021 p. 38.
Description: A stunning behind-the-curtain look into the last years of the illegal transatlantic slave trade in the United States. Long after the transatlantic slave trade was officially outlawed in the early nineteenth century by every major slave trading nation, merchants based in the United States were still sending hundreds of illegal slave ships from American ports to the African coast. The key instigators were slave traders who moved to New York City after the shuttering of the massive illegal slave trade to Brazil in 1850. These traffickers were determined to make Lower Manhattan a key hub in the illegal slave trade to Cuba. In conjunction with allies in Africa and Cuba, they ensnared around two hundred thousand African men, women, and children during the 1850s and 1860s. John Harris explores how the U.S. government went from ignoring, and even abetting, this illegal trade to helping to shut it down completely in 1867.

Reviewed: NYT/BR 28 Feb. 2021 p. 26.
Description: In a forceful but humane narrative, former soldier and head of the West Point history department Ty Seidule's Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the myths and lies of the Confederate legacy–and explores why some of this country’s oldest wounds have never healed. Ty Seidule grew up revering Robert E. Lee. From his southern childhood to his service in the U.S. Army, every part of his life reinforced the Lost Cause myth: that Lee was the greatest man who ever lived, and that the Confederates were underdogs who lost the Civil War with honor. Now, as a retired brigadier general and Professor Emeritus of History at West Point, his view has radically changed. From a soldier, a scholar, and a Southerner, American history demands a reckoning. In a unique blend of history and reflection, Seidule deconstructs the truth about the Confederacy–that its undisputed primary goal was the subjugation and enslavement of African Americans–and directly challenges the idea of honoring those who labored to preserve that system and committed treason in their failed attempt to achieve it. Through the arc of Seidule’s own life, as well as the culture that formed him, he seeks a path to understanding why the facts of the Civil War have remained buried beneath layers of myth and even outright lies–and how they embody a cultural gulf that separates millions of Americans to this day. Part history lecture, part meditation on the Civil War and its fallout, and part memoir, Robert E. Lee and Me challenges the deeply-held legends and myths of the Confederacy–and provides a surprising interpretation of essential truths that our country still has a difficult time articulating and accepting. (publ.)

Description: Paul Christopher Anderson shows how and why the conflict remains the nation's defining moment, arguing that it was above all a struggle for power and political supremacy but was also a struggle for the idea of America.

Reviewed: NYRB 23 May 2019 p. 31.
Description: Analyzes the debates over the Compromise of 1850 to reveal the underlying assumptions and values of the North and the South a decade before the outbreak of the Civil War. Rather than examining voting patterns, factional alignments, legislative maneuvering, and specific measures of the Compromise, this account looks at the language of the debate, the words of the senators and representatives, to discover the concepts and beliefs that defined the North and the South as the sectional confrontation approached. To a large extent, these opposing ideologies had common roots and were based on shared assumptions. Northerners and southerners had similar views of gender and masculinity, pursued the common goal of capital accumulation, and were in fundamental agreement over the superiority of the white race. But conflicting views of slavery, and especially slavery expansion, led to the development of highly divergent systems of belief about politics, economics, and society that would sustain the deepening sectional division and eventually support separation. This examination of the language of the debate yields a novel account of the dynamic driving the crisis of 1850 and sectional conflict generally. The ideological formulations of the Compromise debates of 1850 laid the foundations of the American Civil War. (publ.) “… By simply taking the debates seriously, Maizlish has made an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the origins of the Civil War.” (NYRB)

Description: Examines the complex origins of the U.S. Civil War and its major political, social, and military events.

Reviewed: LJ 1 June 2018 p. 102
Description: In the spring of 1860 on the eve of a civil war that threatened to tear the country apart, two Americans conceived of an audacious plan for linking the nation’s two coasts, thereby joining its present with its future. This book traces the development of the Pony Express and follows it from its start in St. Joseph, Missouri 1,500 miles west to Sacramento. It was an audacious plan to create a financial empire by transforming communications across the hostile territory between the nation’s two coasts. In the process, they created one of the most enduring icons of the American West: the Pony Express. Daring young men with colorful names like “Bronco Charlie” and “Sawed-Off Jim” galloped at speed over a vast and unforgiving landscape, etching an irresistible tale that passed into myth almost instantly. Equally an improbable success and a business disaster, the Pony Express came and went in just eighteen months, but not before uniting and captivating a nation on the brink of being torn apart. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 21 Nov. 2021 p. 1; LRB 26 May 2022 p. 13.
Description: The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin. The 1619 Project tells this new origin story, placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country. Orchestrated by the editors of The New York Times Magazine, led by MacArthur and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, this collection … shows how the tendrils of 1619–of slavery and resistance to slavery–reach into every part of our contemporary culture, from voting, housing and healthcare, to the way we sing and dance, the way we tell stories, and the way we worship. Interstitial works of flash fiction and poetry bring the history to life through the imaginative interpretations of some of our greatest writers. The 1619 Project ultimately sends a very strong message: We must have a clear vision of this history if we are to understand our present dilemmas. Only by reckoning with this difficult history and trying as hard as we can to understand its powerful influence on our present, can we prepare ourselves for a more just future. (publ.)

Review: NYRB 9 May 2019 p. 44.
Description: At the conclusion of the American Revolution, half the modern United States was part of the vast Spanish Empire. The year after Columbus’s great voyage of discovery, in 1492, he claimed Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands for Spain. For the next three hundred years, thousands of proud Spanish conquistadors and their largely forgotten Mexican allies went in search of glory and riches from Florida to California. Many died, few triumphed. Some were cruel, some were curious, some were kind. Missionaries and priests yearned to harvest Indian souls for God through baptism and Christian teaching. Theirs was a frontier world which Spain struggled to control in the face of Indian resistance and competition from France, Britain, and finally the United States. In the 1800s, Spain lost it all. Goodwin tells this history through the lives of the people who made it happen and the literature and art with which they celebrated their successes and mourned their failures. (publ.)

Description: Loewen provides an examination of historic sites all over the country where history is literally written on the landscape, including historical markers, monuments, historic houses, forts, and ships. The author uses his investigation of these public versions of history, often literally written in stone, to correct historical interpretations that are profoundly wrong, to tell neglected but important stories about the American past, and most importantly to raise questions about what we as a nation choose to commemorate and how, contrasted to what we omit and cover over. (publ.)

Description: The United States is in the grip of a crisis of bad history. Inaccurate interpretations and outright misrepresentations of the past–cultivated within and promoted by the conservative movement and right-wing media over the last several decades–hold sway among large numbers of Americans, damaging our public discourse. Historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer have assembled an all-star team of historians to provide textured analysis that explains what we get wrong about the past. Drawing on their knowledge of scholarship and their own primary research, these contributors provide correctives to the ways conservatives distort history to serve the needs of their anti-democratic agenda. … Taken together, the essays unveil how corporate interests and right-wing politicians use bad history to fan the flames of white resentment and unravel America’s social safety net. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 17 Dec. 2018 p. 132 (author interview p. 131); NYRB 9 May 2019 p. 44; LJ Winter 2018 p. 83; NYT/BR 10 Mar. 2019 p. 15; TLS 6 Dec. 2019 p. 32.
Description: Because of our shared English language, as well as the celebrated origin tales of the Mayflower and the rebellion of the British colonies, the United States has prized its Anglo heritage above all others. However, as Carrie Gibson explains with great depth and clarity, the nation has much older Spanish roots–ones that have long been unacknowledged or marginalized. The Hispanic past of the United States predates the arrival of the Pilgrims by a century, and has been every bit as important in shaping the nation as it exists today. El Norte chronicles the sweeping and dramatic history of Hispanic North America from the arrival of the Spanish in the early 16th century to the present–from Ponce de Leon's initial landing in Florida in 1513 to Spanish control of the vast Louisiana territory in 1762 to the Mexican-American War in 1846 and up to the more recent tragedy of post-hurricane Puerto Rico and the ongoing border acrimony with Mexico. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR (9 May 2017)
Description: Through 29 particularly American stories of insanity — from the superhuman Michael Malloy (whose friends tried and failed repeatedly to kill him, via booze, for insurance money) to the ethically derelict safety standards of New Jersey’s Action Park (reportedly 30 visitors a day were saved from drowning and one man died from electrocution) to the baffling idiocy of trying to make Ford Pintos fly (the “inventors” died in the attempt) — this brief survey of America’s strange past illustrates that we’ve always been a little insane, much as our current situation seems to indicate that we always will be. (NPR)

Reviewed: NYRB 12 May 2022 p. 52.
Description: Abraham Lincoln is justly revered for his brilliance, compassion, humor, and rededication of the United States to achieving liberty and justice for all. He led the nation into a bloody civil war to uphold the system of government established by the US Constitution–a system he regarded as the “last best hope of mankind.” But how did Lincoln understand the Constitution? In this groundbreaking study, Noah Feldman argues that Lincoln deliberately and recurrently violated the United States’ founding arrangements. When he came to power, it was widely believed that the federal government could not use armed force to prevent a state from seceding. It was also assumed that basic civil liberties could be suspended in a rebellion by Congress but not by the president, and that the federal government had no authority over slavery in states where it existed. As president, Lincoln broke decisively with all these precedents, and effectively rewrote the Constitution’s place in the American system. Before the Civil War, the Constitution was best understood as a compromise pact--a rough and ready deal between states that allowed the Union to form and function. After Lincoln, the Constitution came to be seen as a sacred text--a transcendent statement of the nation’s highest ideals. This is the first book to tell the story of how Lincoln broke the Constitution in order to remake it. To do so, it offers a riveting narrative of his constitutional choices and how he made them–and places Lincoln in the rich context of thinking of the time, from African American abolitionists to Lincoln’s Republican rivals and Secessionist ideologues. (publ.)

Description: The United States Constitution is a short document, and it is written in general language, which leaves much of the meaning unwritten and open to interpretation. Dig into this important document and watershed in the history of governments! (publ.)

Description: This history of the 1787 Constitutional Convention uses a chronological narrative format to capture the complexity, messiness, and unfolding daily drama behind the writing of the U.S. Constitution, as well as the role of contingency in that process. The Framers of the U.S. Constitution designed a novel republican form of government to replace the failing Confederation, one that would divide power between the federal government and the states, launching a new phase of the American "experiment" in representative democracy. Not until the end of the American Civil War, nearly a century later, would it become clear, as Abraham Lincoln put it in his Gettysburg Address, "that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." This provides an invaluable guide covering the background to the convention, the convention itself, the ratification of the Constitution, and the adoption of the Bill of Rights. In addition to the narrative itself, the story of the convention is supplemented with a detailed chronology, a rich selection of primary source documents, 15 biographical sketches of convention delegates, and a comprehensive bibliographical essay. Based largely on primary sources, the book also weighs in on some of the historiographical debates that have taken place among scholars about the convention. (publ.)

Description: The first book-length account of the origins of this element of the Second Amendment, based on the Founders’ own statements as revealed in newspapers, correspondence, debates, and resolutions. Mr. Halbrook investigates the period from 1768 to 1826, from the last years of British rule and the American Revolution through to the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the passing of the Founders’ generation. This book offers the most comprehensive analysis of the arguments behind the drafting and adoption of the Second Amendment, and the intentions of the men who created it. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Apr 2017 vol. 54 no. 8 (Essential; Recommended for Community College Libraries); TLS 9 June 2017 p. 22.
Description: Simply put, the Constitutional Convention almost didn't happen, and once it happened, it almost failed. And, even after the convention succeeded, the Constitution it produced almost failed to be ratified. Just as importantly, the Constitution was hardly the product of philosophical reflections by brilliant, disinterested statesmen, but rather ordinary interest group politics. Multiple conflicting interests had a say, from creditors and debtors to city dwellers and backwoodsmen. The upper class overwhelmingly supported the Constitution; many working class colonists were more dubious. Slave states and nonslave states had different perspectives on how well the Constitution served their interests. Ultimately, both the Constitution's content and its ratification process raise troubling questions about democratic legitimacy. The Federalists were eager to avoid full-fledged democratic deliberation over the Constitution, and the document that was ratified was stacked in favor of their preferences. And in terms of substance, the Constitution was a significant departure from the more democratic state constitutions of the 1770s. Definitive and authoritative, The Framers' Coup explains why the Framers preferred such a constitution and how they managed to persuade the country to adopt it. We have lived with the consequences, both positive and negative, ever since. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 8 Sept. 2019 p. SR7 (excerpt/op.ed); NYT/BR 13 Oct. 2019 p. 13; PW 24 June 2019 p. 163; NYRB 5 Dec. 2019 p. 24; LRB 30 July 2020 p. 21; TLS 21 Feb. 2020 p. 9.
Description: The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal, but it took the Civil War and the subsequent adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as American law. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed all persons due process and equal protection of the law, and equipped black men with the right to vote. They established the principle of birthright citizenship and guaranteed the privileges and immunities of all citizens. The federal government, not the states, was charged with enforcement, reversing the priority of the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In grafting the principle of equality onto the Constitution, these revolutionary changes marked the second founding of the United States. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 22 Mar. 2021 p. 72; NYT/BR 20 June 2021 p. 12.
Description: Constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar tells the story of America’s constitutional conversation during its first eighty years–from the Constitution's birth in 1760 through the 1830s, when the last of America’s early leaders died. Amar traces the threads of Constitutional discourse, uniting history and law in a narrative that seeks both to reveal this history anew and to make clear who was right and who was wrong on the biggest legal issues confronting early America. Amar provides an essential history of the Constitution’s formative decades and an indispensable guide for anyone seeking to understand America’s Constitution and its relevance today.

Description: Examines the tremendous change the American Civil War brought to society as reflected in the literature of the time. It delves into the cultural, historical, and literary contexts of the era, looking beyond common conceptions and instead reflecting on the era’s complexities and contradictions. The book profiles key American literature related to the war, both on and off the battlefield, including Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Ambrose Bierce’s “Chickamauga,” Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, the Civil War poems of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, and Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.” This book serves to demonstrate how profoundly the actions on the Civil War battlefield shaped American politics, society, and the arts. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Oct 2016 vol. 54 no. 2 (Essential; Recommended for Community College Libraries; Outstanding Academic Title)
Contents: (1) Harriet Beecher Stowe and the “Book That Made This Great War”; (2) The American Book Trade and the Civil War; (3) The Transatlantic History of Civil War Literature; (4) The “American Renaissance” after the American Civil War; (5) The Realists’ Civil War; (6) Dépôt Culture: The Civil War and Periodical Fiction; (7) Imitation and Resistance in Civil War Poetry and Song; (8) Children’s Literature; (9) Writing Lives: Civil War Diaries; (10) Civil War Memoir; (11) Civil War Narrative History; (12) Walt Whitman; (13) War and the Art of Writing: Emily Dickinson’s Relational Aesthetics; (14) Herman Melville and the Civilian Author; (15) Looking at Lincoln; (16) Frederick Douglass, Violence, and Abraham Lincoln; (17) Mary Boykin Chesnut: Epic and Minature; (18) Mark Twain; (19) Replay : William Faulkner and the Civil War; (20) Robert Penn Warren’s Civil War; (21) Natasha Trethewey’s Civil War; (22) Afterword: Archiving the War.

Reviewed: NYT/BR 21 Nov. 2021 p. 1; LRB 26 May 2022 p. 13.
Description: The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin. The 1619 Project tells this new origin story, placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country. Orchestrated by the editors of The New York Times Magazine, led by MacArthur and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, this collection … shows how the tendrils of 1619–of slavery and resistance to slavery–reach into every part of our contemporary culture, from voting, housing and healthcare, to the way we sing and dance, the way we tell stories, and the way we worship. Interstitial works of flash fiction and poetry bring the history to life through the imaginative interpretations of some of our greatest writers. The 1619 Project ultimately sends a very strong message: We must have a clear vision of this history if we are to understand our present dilemmas. Only by reckoning with this difficult history and trying as hard as we can to understand its powerful influence on our present, can we prepare ourselves for a more just future. (publ.)

Description: In 1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their mission, the fledgling Georgetown University. Journalist, author, and professor Rachel L. Swarns has broken new ground with her prodigious research into a history that the Catholic Church has edited out of its own narrative. Beginning in the present, when two descendants of a family enslaved by the church reconnect, Swarns follows their ancestors through the centuries to understand how slavery enabled the Catholic Church to establish a foothold in America and fuel its expansion. Ann Joice, a free Black woman and progenitor of the Mahoney family, sailed to Maryland in the 1600s as an indentured servant, but her contract was burned and her freedom stolen. Harry Mahoney, Ann’s grandson, saved lives and a Church fortune with his quick thinking during the British incursions in the War of 1812. But when the Jesuits fell into debt and were at risk of losing Georgetown University, they sold 272 people, including Harry’s daughter Anna, to plantation owners in the Gulf. Like so many of the families the Jesuits’ sale tore apart, Anna would never again see her father or her beloved sister Louisa who stayed with Harry in Maryland. Her descendants would work for the Jesuits well into the 20th century. The two sides of the family would remain apart until Swarns’ original reporting on the 1838 sale in the New York Times reunited them and led directly to reparations for all the descendants of the enslaved. (publ.)

Description: This book depicts in graphic terms, the pain, suffering, fears, and trepidations of the plaintiffs while discussing the legal system–lawyers, judges, juries, and testimony–that made judgments on their "causes," as the suits were often called. Arguments for freedom were diverse: slaves brought suits claiming they had been freed in wills and deeds, were born of free mothers, were descendants of free white women or Indian women; they charged that they were illegally imported to some states or were residents of the free states and territories. Those who testified on their behalf–usually against leaders of the communities–were generally white. So too were the lawyers who took these cases, many of them men of prominence, such as Francis Scott Key. More often than not, these men were slave owners themselves–complicating our understanding of race relations in the antebellum period. A majority of the cases examined here were not appealed, nor did they create important judicial precedent. Indeed, most of the cases ended at the county, circuit, or district court level of various southern states. Yet the narratives of both those who gained their freedom and those who failed to do so, and the issues their suits raised, shed a bold and timely light on the history of race and liberty in the "land of the free." (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR (“Fresh Air” 5/8/2018; & 2 other on air reviews); LJ 1 May 2018 p. 78.
Description: In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the mil-lions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past–memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo’s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon master-fully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. (publ.)
Note: Previously unpublished work by Hurston (1891-1960) now postumously released.

Reviewed: LR April 2022 p. 15.
Description: To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts society today, we must not only look at what slavery was, but also the unfinished way it ended. One may think of “emancipation” as a finale, leading to a new age of human rights and universal freedoms. But in reality, emancipations everywhere were incomplete. Historian and professor Kris Manjapra identifies five types of emancipation–explaining them in chronological order–along with the lasting impact these transitions had on formerly enslaved groups around the Atlantic. Beginning in 1770s and concluding in 1880s, different kinds of emancipation processes took place across the Atlantic world. These included the Gradual Emancipations of North America, the Revolutionary Emancipation of Haiti, the Compensated Emancipations of European overseas empires, the War Emancipation of the American South, and the Conquest Emancipations that swept across Sub-Saharan Africa. Tragically, despite a century of abolitions and emancipations, systems of social bondage persisted and reconfigured. We still live with these unfinished endings today. In practice, all the slavery emancipations that have ever taken place reenacted racial violence against Black communities, and reaffirmed commitment to white supremacy. … This book shines a light into the deep gap between the idea of slavery’s end and its actual perpetuation in various forms–exposing the shadows that linger to this day. (publ.)

Description: This collection of essays is a response to the false idea that slavery wasn’t so bad and something we should all just “get over”" The descendants of slaves have spent over 150 years seeking permission to put this burden down. As Riley writes in her opening essay, “slavery is not a relic to be buried, but a wound that has not been allowed to heal. You cannot heal what you do not treat. You cannot treat what you do not see as a problem. And America continues to look the other way, to ask African Americans to turn the other cheek, to suppress our joy, to accept that we are supposed to go only as far as we are allowed.” (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 6 Dec. 2018 p. 46.
Description: This book explores the impact fugitive slaves had on the politics of the critical decade leading up to the Civil War. Through the close reading of diverse sources ranging from government documents to personal accounts, the author traces the decisions of slaves to escape, the actions of those who assisted them, the many ways black communities responded to the capture of fugitive slaves, and how local laws either buttressed or undermined enforcement of the federal law. Every effort to enforce the law in northern communities produced levels of subversion that generated national debate so much so that, on the eve of secession, many in the South, looking back on the decade, could argue that the law had been effectively subverted by those individuals and states who assisted fleeing slaves. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 24 Jan. 2021 p. 10.
Description: Some celebrate Lincoln for freeing the slaves; others fault him for a long-standing conservatism on abolition and race. James Oakes gives us another option in this exploration of Lincoln and the end of slavery. Through the unforeseen challenges of the Civil War crisis, Lincoln and the Republican party adhered to a clear antislavery strategy founded on the Constitution itself. All understood the limits to federal power in the slave states, and the need for state action to abolish slavery finally. But Lincoln and the Republicans claimed strong constitutional tools for federal action against slavery, and they used those tools consistently to undermine slavery, prevent its expansion, and pressure the slave states into abolition. This antislavery Constitution guided Lincoln and his allies as they navigated the sectional crisis and the Civil War. When the states finally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, it was a confirmation of a long-held vision. (publ.)

Description: In their daily struggles to forge lives of dignity and meaning within an in-human system, slaves in the Antebellum South demonstrated creativity, resilience, and an insatiable desire to be free. This volume focuses on their struggles to create lives of meaning and dignity within a brutal and repressive system. It provides a comprehensive examination of the institution of slavery from the perspective of the slaves themselves. Readers can explore the family life, religious beliefs, political activities, intellectual aspirations, material possessions, and recreational pursuits of enslaved people. The book shows that enslaved people were tightly constrained by the harsh realities of the oppressive system under which they lived, but that they found ways to forge lives of their own. The book synthesizes the latest and best literature on slavery and gives readers the opportunity to examine history through the lens of daily life using primary source documents created by slaves or former slaves. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Sept. 2019 vol. 57 no. 1) Highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: From its origins in the 1750s, the white-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of “moral suasion” and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. But by the 1850s, the population of enslaved Americans had increased exponentially, and such legislative efforts as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case effectively voided any rights black Americans held as enslaved or free people. As conditions deteriorated for African Americans, black abolitionist leaders embraced violence as the only means of shocking Northerners out of their apathy and instigating an anti-slavery war. In this book, Kellie Carter Jackson provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum black activists. Through rousing public speeches, the burgeoning black press, and the formation of militia groups, black abolitionist leaders mobilized their communities, compelled national action, and drew international attention. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 1 Apr. 2018 p. 82.
Description: Comprising personal accounts from an intensely consequential chapter in our country's history, [this book] tells the story of American slavery from its origins in Africa to its abolition with the end of the Civil War. In this new work, Noel Rae integrates firsthand accounts into a narrative history that brings the reader face to face with slavery's everyday reality, expertly weaving together narratives that span hundreds of years. (publ.)

Description: Sarah and Angelina Grimke–the Grimke sisters–are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives.Historian Kerri Greenidge presents a parallel narrative, indeed a long-overdue corrective, shifting the focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the Black Grimkes and deepening our understanding of the long struggle for racial and gender equality. That the Grimke sisters had Black relatives in the first place was a consequence of slavery's most horrific reality. Sarah and Angelina's older brother, Henry, was notoriously violent and sadistic, and one of the women he owned, Nancy Weston, bore him three sons: Archibald, Francis, and John. While Greenidge follows the brothers' trials and exploits in the North, where Archibald and Francis became prominent members of the post-Civil War Black elite, her narrative centers on the Black women of the family, from Weston to Francis's wife, the brilliant intellectual and reformer Charlotte Forten, to Archibald's daughter, Angelina Weld Grimke, who channeled the family's past into pathbreaking modernist literature during the Harlem Renaissance. In a grand saga that spans the eighteenth century to the twentieth and stretches from Charleston to Philadelphia, Boston, and beyond, Greenidge reclaims the Black Grimkes as complex, often conflicted individuals shadowed by their origins. Most strikingly, she indicts the white Grimke sisters for their racial paternalism. They could envision the end of slavery, but they could not imagine Black equality: when their Black nephews did not adhere to the image of the kneeling and eternally grateful slave, they were cruel and relentlessly judgmental–an emblem of the limits of progressive white racial politics. A landmark biography of the most important multiracial American family of the nineteenth century, The Grimkes suggests that just as the Hemingses and Jeffersons personified the racial myths of the founding generation, the Grimkes embodied the legacy–both traumatic and generative–of those myths, which reverberate to this day. (publ.)

Description: Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks–those that are honest about the past and those that are not–that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves. (publ.)

Reviewed: WLT Summer 2019 p. 89.
Description: Based on true events, a story of courage, forgiveness, love, and freedom in pre-colonial Ghana, told through the eyes of two women born to vastly different fates. Aminah lives an idyllic life until she is brutally separated from her home and forced on a journey that turns her from a daydreamer into a resilient woman. Wurche, the willful daughter of a chief, is desperate to play an important role in her father’s court. These two women’s lives converge as infighting among Wurche’s people threatens the region, during the height of the slave trade at the end of the nineteenth century. Through the experiences of Aminah and Wurche, Attah offers a remarkable view of slavery and how the scramble for Africa affected the lives of every-day people. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 17 Mar. 2017 (new books)
Description: When Lincoln took office, in March 1861, the national government had no power to touch slavery in the states where it existed. Lincoln understood this, and said as much in his first inaugural address, noting: 'I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.' " How, then, asks Paul Finkelman in the introduction to Lincoln, Congress, and Emancipation, did Lincoln–who personally hated slavery–lead the nation through the Civil War to January 1865, when Congress passed the constitutional amendment that ended slavery outright? The essays in this book examine the route Lincoln took to achieve emancipation and how it is remembered both in the United States and abroad. (publ.)

Description: Argues that literary analysis can enhance our historical understanding of race and Reconstruction. The standard view that Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877 is a retrospective construction. Works of literature provide the perspective of those who continued to see possibilities for its renewal well past 1877. … Literature’s political allegories allow us to recreate debates rather than view the end of Reconstruction as a foregone conclusion. Because many of the issues raised by Reconstruction remain unresolved, those debates continue into the present. Chapters treat how the racial issues raised by Reconstruction are interwoven with debates over state v. national authority, efforts to combat terrorism (the KKK), the paternalism of welfare, economic expansion, and the question of who should rightly inherit the nation’s past. Thomas examines authors who opposed Reconstruction, authors who supported it, and authors who struggled with mixed feelings. (publ.)
Contents: Introduction: not in plain black and white – 1. Reconciliation and reunion: clasping hands over the bloody chasm – 2. Federalism: thinking nationally, acting locally – 3. The Ku Klux Klan: the necessity of extreme measures – 4. Of mules and men: African American manhood and the paradox of paternalism – 5. Ruiz de Burton and railroads: the westward course of reconstruction – 6. Working with the heritage of the Old South – 7. Inheriting a shadow and a dream.

Reviewed: TLS 9 Dec. 2016 p. 3
Description: Perhaps no event in American history arouses more impassioned debate than the abolition of slavery. Answers to basic questions about who ended slavery, how, and why remain fiercely contested more than a century and a half after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Ira Berlin draws upon decades of study to offer a framework for understanding slavery's demise in the United States. Freedom was not achieved in a moment, and emancipation was not an occasion but a near-century-long process–a shifting but persistent struggle that involved thousands of men and women. Berlin teases out the distinct characteristics of emancipation, weaving them into a larger narrative of the meaning of American freedom. The most important factor was the will to survive and the enduring resistance of enslaved black people themselves. In striving for emancipation, they were also the first to raise the crucial question of their future status. If they were no longer slaves, what would they be? African Americans provided the answer, drawing on ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence and precepts of evangelical Christianity. Freedom was their inalienable right in a post-slavery society, for nothing seemed more natural to people of color than the idea that all Americans should be equal. African Americans were not naive about the price of their idealism. Just as slavery was an institution initiated and maintained by violence, undoing slavery also required violence. Freedom could be achieved only through generations of long and brutal struggle. (publ.)
Holdings: Copy at Calmar.

Reviewed: Choice Apr. 2018 vol. 55 no. 8 (top 75 books recommended for community college libraries).
Description: Peck meticulously traces the conflict over slavery in Illinois from the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 to Lincoln’s defeat of his archrival Stephen A. Douglas in the 1860 election. Douglas’s attempt in 1854 to persuade Northerners that slavery and freedom had equal national standing stirred a political earthquake that brought Lincoln to the White House. Yet Lincoln’s framing of the antislavery movement as a conservative return to the country’s founding principles masked what was in fact a radical and unprecedented antislavery nationalism. It justified slavery’s destruction but triggered the Civil War. (publ.)

Reviewed: LRB 29 June 2017 p. 21
Description: A unique and extraordinary historical narrative of generations of a Black family with roots in slavery and in the South. This family won their freedom with emancipation but, instead of fleeing the poverty and oppression of the White plantation, decided to stay on the homeland of their White masters and then to purchase it for themselves within a decade. In a true counterpoint to the predominant tale of the Black exodus north in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, these African Americans chose to hold onto the land that they had rightfully inherited and to risk all to keep it in the ensuing decades. Sydney Nathans, in his deep research into family and plantation papers and archives, as well as in invaluable oral interviews, has uncovered a slice of history that would otherwise have remained unknown. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 17 Aug. 2018 p. 30.
Description: Author Siddhartha Kara has documented the realities of human trafficking and forced labor in order to reveal the degrading and dehumanizing system that strips people of their dignity for the sake of profit–and to link the suffering of the enslaved to the day-to-day lives of consumers in the West. In this book, Kara draws on his many years of expertise to demonstrate the scope of slavery and offer a concrete path to its abolition. From labor trafficking in the U.S. agricultural sector to sex trafficking in Nigeria to forced labor in the Thai seafood industry, Kara depicts the myriad faces and forms of slavery, providing a comprehensive grounding in the realities of modern-day servitude. Drawing on sixteen years of field research in more than sixty countries around the globe–including revelatory interviews with both the enslaved and their oppressors–Kara sets out the key manifestations of modern slavery and how it is embedded in global supply chains. Enslavement offers immense profits at minimal risk through the exploitation of vulnerable subclasses whose brutalization is tacitly accepted by the current global economic order. Kara has developed a business and economic analysis of slavery based on metrics and data that attest to the scale and functioning of these systems of exploitation. Beyond this data-driven approach, he unflinchingly portrays the torments endured by the power-less. (publ.)

Reviewed: FA 97(6) Nov./Dec. 2018 p. 213; NYRB 6 JUne 2019 p. 45.
Description: Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of racial slavery. Some historians have charged that slave-holders actually enshrined human bondage at the nation’s founding. Sean Wilentz shares the dismay but sees the Constitution and slavery differently. Although the proslavery side won important concessions, he asserts, antislavery impulses also influenced the framers’ work. Far from covering up a crime against humanity, the Constitution restricted slavery’s legitimacy under the new national government. In time, that limitation would open the way for the creation of an antislavery politics that led to Southern secession, the Civil War, and Emancipation. (publ.)

Holdings: Copy at Calmar; 2nd copy ordered for Peosta. Call no. 306.362 Res.
Note: Winner of Bancroft Prize in American History & Diplomacy 2017; National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction 2016.
Description: Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in this book, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors, then forced to descend into the "mouth of hell" of eighteenth-century silver mines or, later, made to serve as domestics for Mormon settlers and rich Anglos. Reséndez builds the incisive case that it was mass slavery, more than epidemics, that decimated Indian populations across North America. New evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, Indian captives, and Anglo colonists, sheds light too on Indian enslavement of other Indians–as what started as a European business passed into the hands of indigenous operators and spread like wildfire across vast tracts of the American Southwest. The Other Slavery reveals a key missing piece of American history. For over two centuries we have fought over, abolished, and tried to come to grips with African-American slavery. It is time for the West to confront an entirely separate, equally devastating enslavement we have long failed truly to see. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 21 Sept. 2020 p. 78.
Description: For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George’s County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation’s capital. Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, Univ. of Nebraska history professor William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery, beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown. (publ.)

Reviewed: FA 98(1) Jan./Feb. 2019 p. 201.
Description: The era known as Reconstruction is one of the unhappiest times in Ameri-can history. It succeeded in reuniting the nation politically after the Civil War but in little else. Conflict shifted from the battlefield to the Capitol as Congress warred with President Andrew Johnson over just what to do with the South. Johnson’s plan of Presidential Reconstruction, which was sympathetic to the former Confederacy and allowed repressive measures such as the “black codes,” would ultimately lead to his impeachment and the institution of Radical Reconstruction. While Reconstruction saw the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments, expanding the rights and suffrage of African Americans, it largely failed to chart a progressive course for race relations after the abolition of slavery and the rise of Jim Crow. It also struggled to manage the Southern resistance towards a Northern free-labor economy. … Reconstruction suffered from poor leadership and uncertainty of direction, but it also laid the groundwork for renewed struggles for racial equality during the civil rights movement. In this concise history, award-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo delves into the constitutional, political, and social issues behind Reconstruction to provide a lucid and original ac-count of a historical moment that left an indelible mark on the American social fabric. (publ.)

Description: This collection allows readers to gain new insights into the reconstruction era and the development of the industrial United States. Provides in-depth analysis of over twenty primary source documents to deliver a thorough examination of this important time in American history. (publ.)
Holdings Note: See elsewhere on this list for addition titles from this series on order.

Reviewed: Economist 26 Aug. 2017 p. 67; CHE 25 Aug. 2017 (new books); NYT/BR 24 Sept. 2017 p. 21; TLS 26 Jan. 2018 p. 3; FA 97(2) March/Apr. 2018 p. 175.
Description: During Reconstruction Northerners attempted to remake the United States in their own image. They would make incarnate the new world Republicans imagined at the end of the Civil War. That new world seemed possible because the Republican Party controlled the Union in 1865 as fully as any political party would ever control the country. Reconstruction would produce a nation built around free labor with a homogeneous citizenry whose rights would be guaranteed by a newly empowered federal government. Black as well as white citizens would inhabit a largely Protestant country of independent producers. They never realized that dream. The government’s attempts to implement this vision confronted significant obstacles. (publ.)
Library Holdings: NICC/Peosta has previous vols. in series: (1) The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Years (973.73 McP). – (2) Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (973 Ken). – (3) The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (on order). – (4) Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (973.92 Pat). – (5) What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (973.5 How). – (6) From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (on order). – (7) Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (973.4 Woo). – (8) Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (973.92 Pat).

Reviewed: NYT 8 Sept. 2019 p. SR7 (excerpt/op.ed); NYT/BR 13 Oct. 2019 p. 13; PW 24 June 2019 p. 163; NYRB 5 Dec. 2019 p. 24; LRB 30 July 2020 p. 21; TLS 21 Feb. 2020 p. 9.
Description: The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal, but it took the Civil War and the subsequent adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as American law. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed all persons due process and equal protection of the law, and equipped black men with the right to vote. They established the principle of birthright citizenship and guaranteed the privileges and immunities of all citizens. The federal government, not the states, was charged with enforcement, reversing the priority of the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In grafting the principle of equality onto the Constitution, these revolutionary changes marked the second founding of the United States. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Mar. 2019 vol. 56 no. 7) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: In 2002, we learned that President George Washington had eight (and, later, nine) enslaved Africans in his house while he lived in Philadelphia from 1790 to 1797. The house was only one block from Independence Hall and, though torn down in 1832, it housed the enslaved men and women Washington brought to the city as well as serving as the country's first executive office building. Intense controversy erupted over what this newly resurfaced evidence of enslaved people in Philadelphia meant for the site that was next door to the new home for the Liberty Bell. How could slavery best be remembered and memorialized in the birthplace of American freedom? For Marc Howard Ross, this conflict raised a related and troubling question: why and how did slavery in the North fade from public consciousness to such a degree that most Americans have perceived it entirely as a “Southern problem”? Although slavery was institutionalized throughout the Northern as well as the Southern colonies and early states, the existence of slavery in the North and its significance for the region's economic development has rarely received public recognition. (publ.)

Description: Slavery’s Descendants brings together contributors from a variety of racial backgrounds, all members or associates of a national racial reconciliation organization called Coming to the Table, to tell their stories of dealing with America’s racial past through their experiences and their family histories. Some are descendants of slaveholders, some are descendants of the enslaved, and many are descendants of both slaveholders and slaves. What they all have in common is a commitment toward collective introspection, and a willingness to think critically about how the nation’s histories of oppression continue to ripple into the present, affecting us all. The stories in Slavery’s Descendants deal with harrowing topics–rape, lynching, cruelty, shame–but they also describe acts of generosity, gratitude, and love. Together, they help us confront the legacy of slavery to reclaim a more complete picture of U.S. history, one cousin at a time. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 9 Dec. 2016 p. 3
Description: Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor. Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition. This book is a comprehensive history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave's cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice May 2018 vol. 55 no. 9 (Highly recommended; recommended for community college libraries)
Description: The Reconstruction Era–the years immediately following the Civil War when Congress directed the reintegration of the former Confederate states into the Union–remains, as historian Eric Foner suggests, Americas unfinished revolution. But Reconstruction is more than a story of great racial injustice; it has left a complex legacy involving both blacks and whites, Southerners and Northerners, that is reflected today by the fact that many of the states with the highest rates of poverty were part of the former Confederacy. In Southern Reconstruction, Philip Leigh examines Federal wartime legislation in order to broaden our understanding of Reconstruction, revealing how it led to African Americans being used as political pawns, first to ensure continued Republican rule, and finally to be blamed for the Souths hardships in order to draw poor whites away from Populism and back to the aristocratic white Democratic banner. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 28 Apr. 2019 p. 14; TLS 16 Aug. 2019 p. 12; NYT/BR 8 Dec. 2019 p. 28 ("100 Notable Books of 2019"); NYRB 5 Dec. 2019 p. 24.
Description: A profound new rendering of the struggle by African Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counterrevolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring stain on the American mind. The story of the abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar one, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: If emancipation came in Lincoln’s America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s America? … The story Gates tells begins with Union victory in the Civil War and the liberation of nearly four million enslaved people. But the terror unleashed by white paramilitary groups in the former Confederacy, combined with deteriorating economic conditions and diminished Northern will, re-stored “home rule” to the South. One of the most violent periods in our history followed the retreat from Reconstruction, with thousands of African Americans murdered or lynched and many more afflicted by the degrading impositions of Jim Crow segregation. An essential tour through one of America’s fundamental historical tragedies, this book is also a story of heroic resistance, as figures from Frederick Douglass to W. E. B. Du Bois created a counternarrative, and culture, inside the lion’s mouth. (publ)

Reviewed: NYRB 10 June 2021 p. 32 (referenced).
Description: Henrietta Wood was born into slavery, but in 1848, she was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed. In 1855, however, a wealthy Kentucky businessman named Zebulon Ward, who colluded with Wood’s employer, abducted Wood and sold her back into bondage. In the years that followed before and during the Civil War, she gave birth to a son and was forced to march to Texas. She obtained her freedom a second time after the war and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for $20,000 in damages–now known as reparations. Astonishingly, after ten years of litigation, Henrietta Wood won her case. In 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500 and the decision stuck on appeal. While nowhere close to the amount she had demanded, this may be the largest amount of money ever awarded by an American court in restitution for slavery. Wood went on to live until 1912. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 5 July 2019 p. 11.
Description: Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America. (publ.)

Reviewed: FA Jan/Feb. 2017 p. 168; TLS 20 Jan. 2017 p. 14.

Reviewed: PW 23 July 2018 p. 198.
Description: Author Bill Sizemore tells the story of his slave-owning Virginia family, their slaves, and those slaves’ descendants–a story that lay buried by a century of denial and historical amnesia. Its threads run through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the struggle for civil rights, and the crippling legacy of slavery that still plagues the nation to-day. In microcosm, it is the story of Virginia and the South. In telling it, Sizemore hopes to advance an essential, if painful, national conversation about race. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 6 June 2019 p. 46 (referenced)
Description: The essence of United States slavery was forced labor. Enslaved people’s unrequited toil built a significant portion of the nation’s wealth. They labored in many farming, mining, construction, transport, and factory settings. But by the 1830s most worked in cotton fields in the Deep South in the most important sector of the American economy. The cotton bales they made streamed into factories in New and old England, spun into yarn and woven into fabric clothing people across the globe. Cotton shipped abroad each year increased from just a few thousand bales in 1790 to four million by 1860. (publ.)

Description: As the essays here demonstrate, Anglo-Americans have been simultaneously experimenting with representative government and struggling with the corrosive legacy of racial thinking for more than four centuries. Virginia, contrary to popular stereotypes, was not the product of thoughtless, greedy, or impatient English colonists. Instead, the emergence of stable English Atlantic colonies reflected the deliberate efforts of an array of ac-tors to establish new societies based on their ideas about commonwealth, commerce, and colonialism. Looking back from 2019, we can understand that what happened on the shores of the Chesapeake four hundred years ago was no accident. Slavery and freedom were born together as migrants and English officials figured out how to make this colony succeed. They did so in the face of rival ventures and while struggling to survive in a dangerous environment. Three hallmarks of English America–self-government, slavery, and native dispossession–took shape as everyone contested the future of empire along the James River in 1619. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 17 Sept. 2018 p. 76; LJ 1 Nov. 2018 p. 77; NYT/BR 6 Jan. 2019 p. 9; NYRB 16 Jan. 2020 p. 29.
Description: Explains how fugitive slaves escaping from the South to the northern states awakened northerners to the true nature of slavery and how the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act divided the nation and set it on the path to civil war. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/M 16 Feb. 2020 p. 46 (“The 1619 Project”)
Description: In 1859, at the largest recorded slave auction in American history, over 400 men, women, and children were sold by the Butler Plantation estates. This book is one of the first to analyze the operation of this auction and trace the lives of slaves before, during, and after their sale. Immersing herself in the personal papers of the Butlers, accounts from journalists that witnessed the auction, genealogical records, and oral histories, Anne C. Bailey weaves together a narrative that brings the auction to life. Demonstrating the resilience of African American families, she includes interviews from the living descendants of slaves sold on the auction block, showing how the memories of slavery have shaped people’s lives today. (publ.)

Reviewed: Nation 21 Oct. 2019 p. 28.
Description: From the ongoing issues of poverty, health, housing and employment to the recent upsurge of lethal police-community relations, the black working class stands at the center of perceptions of social and racial conflict today. Journalists and public policy analysts often discuss the black poor as “consumers” rather than “producers,” as “takers” rather than “givers,” and as “liabilities” instead of “assets.” In his new history, Joe William Trotter, Jr. refutes these perceptions by charting the black working class’s vast contributions to the making of America. Covering the last four hundred years since Africans were first brought to Virginia in 1619, Trotter traces black workers’ complicated journey from the transatlantic slave trade through the American Century to the demise of the industrial order in the 21st century. At the center of this compelling, fast-paced narrative are the actual experiences of these African American men and women. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 15 Nov. 2017 p. 100
Description: These volumes select more than two hundred of the most important speeches in American history. They seek to provide examples and shed light on how the use of speeches in the nation's history have made contributions to the manner in which men and women in the United States have examined the crucial issues and concerns of their time. (publ.)
Contents: v. 1. The Colonial Period through the Early Republic -- v. 2. The 19th Century -- v. 3. The 20th and 21st Centuries.

Description: Gathering an array of recognized names as well as new discoveries, Bell curates two centuries of stirring public addresses by Black women, from Harriet Tubman and Ella Baker to Barbara Lee and Barbara Jordan. These magnificent speakers explore ethics, morality, courage, authenticity, and leadership, highlighting Black women speaking truth to power in service of freedom and justice. With an expansive historical lens, Blackbirds Singing celebrates the tradition of Black women’s political speech and labor, allowing the voices and powerful visions of African American women to speak across generations building power for the world. (publ.)

Description: Stories of liberation from enslavement or oppression have become central to African American women's literature. Beginning with a discussion of black women freedom narratives as a literary genre, the author argues that these texts represent a discourse on civil rights that emerged earlier than the ideas of racial uplift that culminated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An examination of the collective free identity of black women and their relationships to the community focuses on education, individual progress, marriage and family, labor, intellectual commitments and community rebuilding projects. (publ.)

Description: Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, believed that our national character was defined by three key moments: the writing of the Constitution, our declaration of independence from England, and the beginning of slavery on the North American continent. His thoughts on these landmarks can be traced through three speeches: the Lyceum Address, the Gettysburg Address, and the Second Inaugural. The latter two are well-known, enshrined forever on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial. The former is much less familiar to most, written a quarter century before his presidency, when he was a 28 year-old Illinois state legislator. Professor Diana Schaub offers a line-by-line analysis of these timeless works, placing them in historical context and explaining the brilliance behind their rhetoric. The result is a complete vision of Lincoln's worldview that is sure to fascinate and inspire general readers and history buffs alike. (publ.)

Description: Lincoln’s letters have been cited in countless biographical and critical works yet have received little scholarly attention as a whole. This comprehensive study reveals his letters as fundamental to understanding his development as a writer. Early on, he employed Hugh Blair’s popular idea of developing “taste” in written documents, and carefully studied the letters of his contemporaries. He wrote more than 5000 of his own. As he became more proficient, he employed more sophisticated rhetorical strategies to deal with political opponents, imperious generals and critics of his policies. (publ.)

Description: The first anthology to put a spotlight on American women speakers from 1637 to the present and explain how each contributed to the making of the nation. Women have not been silent in US history, but you’d hardly know it from the history books. Speaking While Female challenges long-held notions by showing that in every period, at every historic juncture, women have contributed decisively to American ideals, institutions, and culture by stepping up and delivering powerful speeches, sermons, lectures, and testimony. Even when denied access to education, excluded from political life and the professions, and forbidden to speak from the pulpit, women have still found ways to come forward and use their public voices. This collection assembles speeches by 75 American women, some whose names are recognized and others who are barely known. Some of the speeches in this collection have never been published; others not in more than a century. Arranged chronologically, from the Puritan era to the present, they demonstrate the crucial role women have played in the nation's long struggle to live up to its ideals. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR; FA 96(3) May/June 2017 p. 161
Description: Fearful for the country’s future, Washington pled with his countrymen to resist hyper-partisanship and foreign alliances. He called for unity among “citizens by birth or choice,” defended religious pluralism, called for national education. His message to the country was urgent. Avlon describes how it was quoted by Jackson, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and importantly by Lincoln in defense of the Union. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson called on it for nation-building; Kennedy for Cold war; Reagan for religion. Clinton kept a copy on his Oval Office wall. In Washington’s Farewell, Avlon offers important insight into Washington’s his final public days, presenting not only a startling description of the perilous state of the new nation but a rare view of the man behind the usual face of a tranquil First Father. (publ.)