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A manifesto that argues for the importance of consumption in driving the economy, forming identity, creating meaning—and saving the world.
A Being So Gentle: A Frontier Love Story of Rachel and Andrew Jackson
The story of the marriage of Rachel and Andrew Jackson has come down to us as one of the most romantic love stories in American history. But aside from treatment in a chapter of the many biographies of Andrew – Rachel’s story has been barely told. (at least not since Irving Stone’s The President’s Lady!)
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur
Winner of the US German Studies Association’s 2009 Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize and the Independent Publishers Association 2008 gold medal for the best work of History published in 2007.
The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare: A Tale of Forgery and Folly
William-Henry Ireland was nineteen years old in 1795 when he handed his father a document that he claimed was written and signed by William Shakespeare, and alluded to a trunk full of such documents that belonged to a mysterious Mr. H. by whom he was employed. His father, along with an impressive group of scholars, collectors, theatre-goers and the press, enthusiastically and uncritically accepted his claims as true. Encouraged by their credulousness, and beginning to believe his own ruse, William-Henry went on to produce many more signatures, letters, hand-written play scripts, sonnets, and even an entire play.
Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes
Hay fever got you down? Feel an asthma attack coming on? Drop the inhaler and reach for Gregg Mitman’s book instead. His inspired history of these ailments in the United States won’t provide a cure but does offer a sort of palliative context.
— Adrian Higgins, The Washington Post
A Capital Miracle: Biography of a Cure
In the spring of 1824 in the young capital city of Washington D.C., Ann Mattingly, the sister of the city’s mayor, was miraculously cured of cancer, purportedly through the intervention of a charismatic German cleric. Her miraculous healing shook the American Catholic Church just as it was attempting to establish itself on respectable footing in the largely Protestant culture. Belief became a political act: those who believed in the miracles pointed to them as manifestations of the truth of Catholic doctrine; skeptical Protestants regarded them as further evidence that the Church of Rome’s deceptions might undermine the strength of the new nation.
The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena
…shifts the lens through which we view both the Cold War and the civil rights movement, revealing something new and provocative: the extent to which ‘domestic and foreign policies regarding people of color developed as two sides of the same coin’ and ‘how those racial lenses helped shape U.S. relations with the outside world in the era of American dominance in the international sphere.’ No history could be more timely or more cogent.
Creatures of Empire: People and Animals in Early America
A most original, gracefully written, and thoroughly fascinating exploration of Colonial history.
Discovering Empire: France and the Atlantic World from the Age of Columbus to the Rise of Napoleon
Americans know much about the British empire that spanned the Atlantic, but few realize that as early as the 1500s, a French web of influence extended across the Atlantic, moving people, products, disease, technologies, and ideas between and among the Americas, Europe, and Africa. By the middle of the 18th century, France claimed nearly one third of North America, ran the Caribbean’s most profitable plantations, and was deeply involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The Dominion Of War: Liberty And Empire In North America
The very best histories not only elucidate the past but illuminate the present. Far and away the most important contribution to U.S. military history to appear since this nation emerged as the world’s sole superpower, The Dominion of War meets and easily surpasses that demanding standard…. A magnificent accomplishment.
Duty, Honor, Treason: Reconsidering Benedict Arnold
Duty, Honor, Treason: Reconsidering Benedict Arnold considers Benedict Arnold’s well-known but little understood treasonous act and considers why Arnold turned against the war effort to which he had so long been dedicated.
Encounter at the Heart of the World: The Rise and Fall of the Mandan People
Most of us have never heard of the Mandans, and yet the Mandan villages of the upper Missouri were a bustling, prosperous, hub of trade and commerce by the middle of the 18th century. Food, trade, and culture; Native American and European visitors, all passed through their densely settled towns. Commercial ties stretched from New Mexico to Hudson Bay. Lewis and Clark wintered with the Mandans in 1804 on their way west and a Mandan chief, Sheheke, accompanied them back to Washington in 1806.
Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
Read this book and understand why delirious disorder will soon make us all smarter.
Exploring Stone Walls: A Field Guide to New England's Stone Walls
“Every stone wall is unique and every stone tells a story,” says Robert M. Thorson, the author of this field guide to historic New England stone walls.
While the American South had grown to expect a yellow fever breakout almost annually in the 1800s, the 1878 epidemic was without question the worst ever. Moving up the Mississippi in the late summer, in the span of just a few months the fever killed more than 18,000 people. The city of Memphis was particularly unprepared and hard hit, of the approximately 20,000 who didn’t flee the city, 17,000 contracted the fever and more than 5,000 of its citizens died.
It’s 1884, and America is obsessing over one of the closest and dirtiest presidential races in history. A high-profile tussle in the mud, it seems well suited to American tastes. Even the race for the nation’s highest office has become vulgar and sensational, as the public clamors for trashy stories and celebrity exposes generated by cheap, popular newspapers.
Fire & Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834
…a gripping story of prejudice and pride, courage and cowardice in early nineteenth-century America that not only restores a clouded chapter in the country’s history but also has a poignant resonance for our own times.
Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments That Changed the Course of the Civil War
This absorbing narrative of a little-known Civil War campaign adds a key dimension to our knowledge of black troops in the Civil War. The capture of Jacksonville, Florida in March 1863 by a Union regiment composed of free slaves had important consequences. Its success convinced the Lincoln administration to go forward with the large-scale recruitment of black regiments. Stephen Ash tells this story with flair.
The Future of the Wild: Radical Conservation for a Crowded World
Fertile with fresh thinking, this book is an uncommonly eloquent call for urgent but thoughtful action.
The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth
Endless economic growth rests on a belief in the limitless abundance of the natural world. But when did people begin to believe that societies should—even that they must—expand in wealth indefinitely? In The Great Delusion, the historian and storyteller Steven Stoll weaves past and present together through the life of a strange and brooding nineteenth-century German engineer and technological utopian named John Adolphus Etzler, who pursued universal wealth from the inexhaustible forces of nature: wind, water, and sunlight.
Imperial America: The Eighteenth-Century Volume in the Oxford History of the United States
A new volume in the prestigious series, The Oxford History of the United States, Imperial America will cover the period from 1672 to 1763. In it, historians Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton and will retell the history of the pre-Revolutionary era, during which the English, Spanish, and French empires competed for control of North America.
Mesa of Sorrows: Archaeology, Prophecy, and the Ghosts of Awat’ovi Pueblo
In the fall of 1700, Awat’ovi, a Hopi community that had existed peacefully on Antelope Mesa in Arizona for generations, was decimated; its inhabitants the victims of genocide carried out by their neighbors and fellow Hopi Indians. The story of what happened there has been tangled in mystery and fraught with controversy ever since. Told and retold by the Hopi and by archaeologists, anthropologists, Native American activists and others, it continues both to haunt and to take on new meaning as other acts of communitarian violence and genocide echo its story.
Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination
Ginger, Sandalwood, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Ambergris, Galangal, Spikenard, and Zedoary. Spices—some familiar today, others much more exotic—are well known to have been in enormous demand in medieval times. Their widespread appeal fueled an active trade; they were carried from Asia and India to the marketplaces of Europe where they were sold at exorbitant prices.
Outliers and Savages: The 200 Year Struggle for the American Land
In the 1790s, more than 90 percent of Americans lived on farms. Two hundred years later, only 2 percent did. In 1935 there were 6.5 million farms. In 1997 there were just over 2 million. Agriculture might be very much alive in the American landscape, but the farm is nearly gone. We know how the countryside became de-populated, but why did it happen? In a deeper historical sense, why has capitalism been so destructive to this form of settlement?
A Perfect Temper: The Life and Times of Martha Jefferson Randolph
Books on the founding fathers abound, but there are few opportunities to see the early history of the US through the eyes of a woman of their times. The life of Martha Jefferson Randolph, the oldest child of Thomas and Martha Wayles Jefferson and the only one to survive to adulthood, offers that perspective and it sheds new light on the otherwise familiar history of the times.
Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
Since the rise of Napster and other file sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a product of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion in revenue to piracy online. But here Adrian Johns shows that piracy has a much longer and more vital history than we have realized—one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood.
Pox Americana: The Great North American Smallpox Epidemic 1775 - 1783
Elizabeth Fenn provides a dazzling new perspective that embraces the entire continent . . . [and she] recovers the larger picture that we have long missed . . . A story that is timely as well as powerful and sobering.
Queen of the Oil Club: The Intrepid Wanda Jablonski and the Power of Information
How one woman hurdled journalism’s gender barrier to help shape the future of Big Oil… Intimate but also sweeping, capturing the myopia of both business and government as America’s addiction to foreign oil set in over four decades.
— Kirkus Reviews
The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer
Sunflower County, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, stood at the epicenter of Civil Rights activism in the 1960s, in part because it was a black majority county in which white cotton farmers held all the power, and in part because Senator James Eastland and activist Fannie Lou Hamer, two of its most prominent citizens, were such compelling, and contrasting symbols of the struggle.
Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation
As a beneficiary of the G.I. Bill, I can’t recommend enough Suzanne Mettler’s examination of the Bill and its transformative effect on the lives of so many veterans like me…This book is a must-read not o nly for those interested in the ‘Greatest Generation’ but also for anyone who wants to know what it takes ot make a great country.
The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America
As critics of McCarthyism derided the period’s anti-Communist campaign as a “witch hunt,” the 1950s Broadway drama The Crucible underscored the link between contemporary political investigations and the 1692 Salem witch trials. The Specter of Salem reveals that this twentieth-century cultural moment, often cited as marking the emergence of such associations, actually followed a long and colorful history of appeals to American memories of the witch trials.
Stone By Stone: The Magnificent History in New England's Stone Walls
…an open invitation to head into the country oneself and explore a stone wall.
Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty
An up-close and personal account of nine strong-minded African-American women who became welfare-rights activists in Las Vegas . . . A worthy history of the country“s changing attitudes toward welfare and the various attempts to eradicate poverty.
The Two Hendricks: Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery
In this dazzling work, Hinderaker recovers two Mohawk chiefs who became transatlantic celebrities in a time of imperial intrigue and violence. He vividly reveals the interplay of empire building, image making, and memory shaping as natives and colonists jockeyed for an edge. Ultimately, the American victors trapped the Indians within legends, but Hinderaker has now restored their rich humanity.
Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries: Scandinavia in the Early Middle Ages
Around the year 1000, Scandinavia embraced European religious, political, and economic culture. Unlike many other regions, Northern Europe chose to become Christian without being conquered by any Christian power.
The War that Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War
Anderson, a meticulous historian, writes with intelligence and vigor. He has given us a rich, cautionary tale about the unpredictability of war – then no less than today.”
West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War
A substantial achievement. . . . [Richardson] expertly redraws a map of post-Civil War America that only grows more complex a century-and-a-half later.
Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre
Superb … [Richardson’s] account of the confrontation that precipitated the massacre is riveting…While her description of that hell packs a wallop, Richardson’s greatest contribution is her meticulously researched, groundbreaking analysis of the tragedy’s root causes.
