History of the Americas Books

On the evening of August 21, 1831, Nat Turner and six men launched their infamous rebellion against slaveholders. The rebels swept through Southampton County, Virginia, recruiting slaves to their ranks and killing nearly five dozen whites-more than had...

"A Musical History of the Klamath Basin: Early Community Bands," by Klamath County Museum curator Niles Reynolds, details the history of major community music groups in the Klamath Basin from the late 1800s to the 1960s. The book examines articles,...

We are living in some of the most discouraging times in my lifetime, which has spanned some very bad periods; the Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Cuban/Russia nuclear threat, the Cold War, the assassinations of President Kennedy, Bobby...

"Thriving While Black" sets out to explore the psychological and emotional consequences of being Black in corporate America. "Ain't I an American?" the famous words of Langston Hughes, is a question every Black person unwittingly asks themselves. The...

When Thomas Jefferson travels to Paris in 1784 to negotiate trade treaties for America, he takes the enslaved James Hemings with him as his manservant. Living in Paris, where the French had abolished slavery, Hemings discovers an independence, a skill,...

From 1939 to 1945, the farming community of Clarksburg, Ohio sent 222 of its sons and daughters to war: 1 in every 5 of its residents. From Somewhere in France is a one-of-a-kind collection of letters written by these men and women, stitched together...

Examining language debates and literary texts from Noah Webster to H.L. Mencken and from Washington Irving to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this book demonstrates how gender arose in passionate discussions about language to address concerns about national...

The Spanish and Portuguese empires that existed in the Americas for over three hundred years resulted in the creation of a New World population in which a complex array of racial and ethnic distinctions were embedded in the discourse of power. During the...

Themes of the American Civil War offers a timely and useful guide to this vast topic for a new generation of students. The volume provides a broad-ranging assessment of the causes, complexities, and consequences of America's most destructive conflict to...

This book explores how Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers used public relations to support and promote their platforms and to build a grassroots community movement, as well as how the organization later rejected these strategies for a...

Because she devoted much of her life to exploring the relationships that exist between people and their built environment, Edith Wharton developed a set of philosophies that she expressed in many arenas, including interior design, architecture, and...

African-American Activism before the Civil War is the first collection of scholarship on the role of African Americans in the struggle for racial equality in the northern states before the Civil War. Many of these essays are already known as...

Between Freedom and Bondage looks at the fluctuations of black suffrage in the ante-bellum North, using the four states of New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Rhode Island as examples. In each of these states, a different outcome was obtained for...

Probationary Americans examines contemporary immigration rules and how they affect the make-up of immigrant communities. The authors' key argument is that immigration policies place race and class as important criteria for gaining entry to the United...

This bold collection clearly shows the interplay between slavery and spirituality, conversion and control, and the links between the sacred and the political.

Examining the lives of 460 of the wealthiest men who lived in colonial Maryland, Burnard traces the development of this elite from a hard-living, profit-driven merchant-planter class in the seventeenth century to a more genteel class of plantation owners...

Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy is James Livingston's virtuoso reflection on the period between 1890 and 1930, a primal scene of American history during which a wave of intellectual currents came together--and fell apart--to reorient society. ...

Negotiating the divide between "respectable manhood" and "rough manhood" this book explores masculinity at work and at play through provocative essays on labor unions, railroads, vocational training programs, and NASCAR racing.

In this beautifully written account, John Thomas details an intimate portrait of the intellectual friendship between two commanding figures of western letters and the early environmental movement--Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto.. The authors of...

A condensation and updating of his African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook (1984), noted scholar of antebellum black writing and history Dr. Allan D. Austin explores, via portraits, documents, maps, and texts, the lives of 50 sub-Saharan...

On November 22nd, 1963 the assassination of President John F. Kennedy set into motion a series of events that irrevocably changed American politics and culture. The media frenzy spawned by the controversy surrounding the death of JFK has since given way...

In the United States, as in many parts of the world, people are discriminated against based on the color of their skin. This type of skin tone bias, or colorism, is both related to and distinct from discrimination on the basis of race, with which it is...

This edited volume explores political violence and genocide in Latin America during the Cold War, examining this in light of the United States' hegemonic position on the continent.  

The volume explores several notable themes related to political processes in Latin America and offers insightful historical perspectives to understand national, regional and global issues in the continent since the beginning of the 20th century to the...

This volume explores several issues related to foreign affairs in Latin America and offers insightful historical perspectives for understanding national, regional and global issues in the region from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day.

This book surveys the labyrinthine relationship between Stephen King and American History. By depicting American History as a doomed cycle of greed and violence, King poses a number of important questions: who gets to make history, what gets left out,...

Native American Roots: Relationality and Indigenous Regeneration Under Empire, 1770-1859 explores the development of modern Indigenous identities within the settler colonial context of the early United States.With an aggressively expanding United States...

Heritage, Tourism, and Race views heritage and leisure tourism in the Americas through the lens of race, and is especially concerned with redressing gaps in recognizing and critically accounting for African Americans as an underrepresented community in...

In 1957 after a century of scathing debates and threats of provincial separation Ottawa finally tackled the dangerous fiscal inequalities among its richer and poorer provinces. Equalization grants allowed the poorer provinces to provide relatively equal...

For over forty years, Cold War concerns about the threat of communism shaped the contours of refugee and asylum policy in the United States, and the majority of those admitted as refugees came from communist countries. In the post-Cold War period, a...