History - United States - 19th Century

Captive of the Labyrinth is reissued here to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of rifle heiress Sarah L. Winchester in 1922. After inheriting a vast fortune upon the death of her husband in 1881, Winchester purchased a simple farmhouse in San José,...

The most recent state to join the union, Hawaii is the only one to have once been a royal kingdom. After its "discovery" by Captain Cook in the late 18th Century, Hawaii was fought over by European powers determined to take advantage of its...

"The best all-around study of the American cowboy ever written. Every page crackles with keen analysis and vivid prose about the Old West. A must-read!" -- Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America The open-range cattle era...

The spectacular story of the Great Centennial Exhibition of 1876, a world's fair to mark America's hundredth birthday--and a moment of reckoning for a nation barrelling toward the Gilded Age "Those who were there felt that the wheel of history itself had turned before...

For 130 years historians and military strategists have been obsessed by the battle of Chancellorsville. It began with an audaciously planned stroke by Union general Joe Hooker as he sent his army across the Rappahannock River and around Robert E. Lee's lines. It ended...

Charity and Sylvia is the intimate history of two ordinary women who lived in an extraordinary same-sex marriage during the early nineteenth century. Based on diaries, letters, and poetry, among other original documents, the research traces the women's lives in sharp detail. Charity Bryant...

An exciting story of a Texas Ranger, adventurer, and immigration officer who became a symbol of his age while gambling with death in the wild frontier regions of Texas, Arizona, and Old and New Mexico. Charles Goodnight knew the West of Jim Bridger, Kit...

A look at the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the plant specimens the great explorers gathered on their way--and of their amazing afterlife. Elizabeth Adelman's Chasing the Missing Monkeyflower is the two hundred-year saga of finding, losing, and finding the wild plants collected on...

From an acclaimed historian, the full and authoritative story of one of the most iconic disasters in American history, told through the vivid memories of those who experienced it Between October 8-10, 1871, much of the city of Chicago was destroyed by one of...

Confronting Bad History is about our history's most infamous villain and debunks the conspiracy story that Lincoln' assassin escaped justice. John Wilkes Booth's assassination of President Abraham Lincoln is the most infamous political assassination in United States history. The assassination of Lincoln suddenly ended...

How a Lost Cause and FraudulentBook Caused the John Wilkes Booth Exhumation TrialConfronting Bad History is about our history's most infamous villain and debunks the conspiracy story that Lincoln' assassin escaped justice. John Wilkes Booth's assassination of President Lincoln is the most infamous political...

In this profound and fascinating book, the authors revisit an overlooked Supreme Court decision that changed forever how justice is carried out in the United States. In 1906, Ed Johnson was the innocent black man found guilty of the brutal rape of Nevada Taylor,...

Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in History Winner of the 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History Winner of the 2024 Caughey Western History Prize Winner of the 2024 Spur Award Named a Best Civil War Book of 2023 by Civil War Monitor In...

Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in History Winner of Columbia University's 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History Winner of the 2024 Caughey Western History Prize Winner of the 2024 Spur Award Named a Best Civil War Book of 2023 by Civil War Monitor...

The women who traveled west in covered wagons during the 1840s speak through these letters and diaries. Here are the voices of Tamsen Donner and young Virginia Reed, members of the ill-fated Donner party; Patty Sessions, the Mormon midwife who delivered five babies on...

The full story of what led Crazy Horse and Custer to that fateful day at the Little Bighorn, from bestselling historian Stephen E. Ambrose. On the sparkling morning of June 25, 1876, 611 U.S. Army soldiers rode toward the banks of the Little Bighorn...

"[One] of the great stories of the West, and written . . . in the spirit of the sages, with a scrupulous regard for truth and history."--Atlantic MonthlyCrazy Horse, the legendary military leader of the Oglala Sioux whose personal power and social nonconformity contributed...

The Santa Fe Trail has a special allure in southwestern history--it was a road of lucrative commerce, military expansion, and great adventure. Because these themes are connected with the Santa Fe Trail in the American imagination, however, the trail is not often associated with...

The movie Jeremiah Johnson introduced millions to the legendary mountain man, John Johnson. The real Johnson was a far cry from the Redford version. Standing 6'2" in his stocking feet and weighing nearly 250 pounds, he was a mountain man among mountain men, one...

In his new preface to this paperback edition, the author observes, "The Indian world has changed so substantially since the first publication of this book that some things contained in it seem new again." Indeed, it seems that each generation of whites and Indians...