History - United States - 19th Century

Brilliantly illuminating one of the least-understood areas of American history, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin now traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising naval power from a battered ancient empire. It is...

During the three decades before the American Civil War, Southern slaveholders tried to end the anti-slavery movement. They exerted their influence by censoring the press and the mail, attacking and killing abolitionists, burning buildings, drafting frightening new laws and repealing others, and terrorizing and...

The Battle of the Little Bighorn has long held an eminent position among the chronicles of the mythic West. None of the men who rode with Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer to his "Last Stand" survived to tell the tale, but this stunning photography...

A surprising history of human hair in nineteenth-century America, where length, texture, color, and coiffure became powerful indicators of race, gender, and national belonging. Hair is always and everywhere freighted with meaning. In nineteenth-century America, however, hair took on decisive new significance as the...

Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians * Winner of the Lincoln Forum Book Prize * Finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize A propulsive account of our history's most surprising, most consequential political club: the Wide Awake anti-slavery...

The definitive true story of Wild Bill, the first lawman of the Wild West, by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dodge City. In July 1865, "Wild Bill" Hickok shot and killed Davis Tutt in Springfield, MO--the first quick-draw duel on the...

Harriet Tubman, forced to labor outdoors on a Maryland plantation, learned from the land a terrain for escape. Louisa May Alcott ran wild, eluding gendered expectations in New England. The Indigenous women's basketball team from Fort Shaw, Montana, recaptured a sense of pride in...

Harriet Tubman, forced to labor outdoors on a Maryland plantation, learned from the land a terrain for escape. Louisa May Alcott ran wild, eluding gendered expectations in New England. The Indigenous women's basketball team from Fort Shaw, Montana, recaptured a sense of pride in...

Marginalian Editions presents a groundbreaking poet's biography of the forgotten scientist who founded physical chemistry, shaping much of the 20th century--and an ingenious, expansive treatise on American creativity, character, and remembrance. Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839-1903) was an American visionary whose work shaped a century...

William Cooper and James Fenimore Cooper, a father and son who embodied the contradictions that divided America in the early years of the Republic, are brought to life in this Pulitzer Prize-winning book. William Cooper rose from humble origins to become a wealthy land...

WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NONFICTIONFrom Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino comes a searing account of the Wilmington riot and coup of 1898, an extraordinary event unknown to most Americans.By the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina's largest city and a shining example...

More than a quarter of a million Americans crossed the continental United States between 1840 and 1870, going west in one of the greatest migrations of modern times. The frontiersmen have become an integral part of our history and folklore, but the Westering experiences...