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The Civil War revealed what united as well as what divided Americans in the nineteenth century-not only in its deadly military conflict, but also in the broader battle of ideas, dueling moral systems, and competing national visions that preceded and followed. This cultural civil war was the clash among North, South, and West, as their leaders sought to shape Manifest Destiny and slavery politics. No site embodied this struggle more completely than St. Louis, the largest city along the border of...

In the century preceding World War I, the American Middle West drew thousands of migrants both from Europe and from the northeastern United States. In the American mind, the region represented a place where social differences could be muted and a distinctly American culture created. Many of the European groups, however, viewed the Midwest as an area of opportunity because it allowed them to retain cultural and religious traditions from their homelands. Jon Gjerde examines the cultural patt...

Ulysses S. Grant's ingenious campaign to capture the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River was one of the most decisive events of the Civil War and one of the most storied military expeditions in American history. The ultimate victory at Vicksburg effectively cut the Confederacy in two, gave control of the river to Union forces, and delivered a devastating blow from which the South never fully recovered. Encompassed in this first of five planned volumes on the Vicksburg campaign...

Drawing on recent studies in the history of technology, this groundbreaking work offers a new view of the Industrial Revolution in America. The author, an authority on the history of business and the economy, sees industrialization as a culturally inspired change.

An analysis of the beginnings of American imperial rhetoric; This is a study of the early writings of Richard Harding Davis, the premier American journalist of the 1890s, best remembered for his coverage of the Spanish-American War. The emphasis of the book is on Davis's reporting - including several volumes of travel writing, covering trips to the Near East and South and Central America. Some account is also made of his fiction, most especially Soldiers of Fortune (1897), which critics have see...

This major new work looks at what debt meant to Thomas Jefferson and how that affected his political career and the early history of the American Republic. Sloan argues that Jefferson was always obsessed by debt: in the public sphere because he felt that it robbed people of their independence, and in the private because he was dogged by debt throughout his life. The book depicts Jefferson as a typical representative of the Virginia gentry, subject to debt during this period, but also as a tirele...

In the age of MapQuest and GPS, we take cartographic literacy for granted. We should not; the ability to find meaning in maps is the fruit of a long process of exposure and instruction. A ""carto-coded"" America - a nation in which maps are pervasive and meaningful - had to be created. The Social Life of Maps tracks American cartography's spectacular rise to its unprecedented cultural influence. Between 1750 and 1860, maps did more than communicate geographic information and political pretensi...

During the Secession Winter session of Congress, twenty-two-year-old Henry Adams worked as private secretary to his father, Representative Charles Francis Adams. Henry wrote four accounts of these crucial months in Washington -- an essay, letters to his brother, a segment in his famous autobiography, and twenty-one unsigned letters that Adams composed as a novice correspondent for the Boston Daily Advertiser. Henry Adams in the Secession Crisis presents the Advertiser letters for the first time...

Part historical narrative and part textual analysis, this work traces the development of American Indian literature from the 17th century to the eve of the Civil War. The focus is on four prominent Indian missionaries who each struggled to secure a place between colonial rule and native rights.

From Farmer and Sailor to Mountain Man, Crow Killer, and Town Sheriff, One man's reputation lives past all others When it came to western mountain men, no one on earth ever matched the physical prowess or will to survive of John "Liver-Eating" Johnson. Throughout his life, John Johnston was known by several names, including "Crow Killer" and "Liver-Eating Johnson" (without the "t"), names he earned through his penchant for killing Crow Indians before cutting out and eating their livers. B...

Even before he was shot dead on the stairway of the tony Grand Central Hotel in 1872, financier James “Jubilee Jim” Fisk, Jr., was a notorious New York City figure. From his audacious attempt to corner the gold market in 1869 to his battle for control of the geographically crucial Erie Railroad, Fisk was a flamboyant exemplar of a new financial era marked by volatile fortunes and unprecedented greed and corruption. But it was his scandalously open affair with a showgirl named Josie Mansfield tha...

The final volume of the Correspondence of James K. Polk documents the end of a presidency and the end of a life. With the Mexican War over, Polk focused on integrating new lands into the country, resolving discord over slavery, and planning for a retirement that proved all too short. His letters of April 1848 to June 1849 reveal his and his contemporaries’ thoughts on a nation racing from an international conflict toward a civil war. Having won half of Mexico’s land, Polk wanted to create terri...

Born in Civil War-era Cincinnati in 1857, William Howard Taft rose rapidly through legal, judicial, and political ranks, graduating from Yale and becoming a judge while still in his twenties. In 1900, President William McKinley appointed Taft to head a commission charged with preparing the Philippines for US-led civil government, setting the stage for Taft's involvement in US-Philippine relations and the development of his imperial vision across two decades. While biographies of Taft and histori...