Astor. Rockefeller. McCormick. Belmont. All family names that still adorn buildings, streets and charity foundations. While the men blazed across America with their oil, industry, and railways, the matriarchs founded art museums, opera houses, and symphony houses that functioned almost as private clubs. These women ruled American society with a style and impact that make today's socialites seem pale reflections of their forbears. Linked by money, marriage, privilege, power and class, they formed...
A vivid description of Colorado
In "American Taxation, American Slavery", Robin Einhorn shows the deep, broad, and continuous influence of slavery on America's fear and loathing of taxes. From the earliest colonial times right up to the Civil War, slaveholding elites feared strong and democratic government as a threat to the institution of slavery. Einhorn reveals how the heated battles over taxation, the power to tax, and the distribution of tax burdens were rooted not in debates over personal liberty but rather in the rights...
Dissent & Protest (1637-2016) (Defining Documents in American History)
by Salem Press
Dissent & Protest studies crucial documents from various protests, dissents, revolts, riots, and revolutions throughout American history, from the American Revolution to the Black Lives Matter Movement of today. This text closely studies more than eighty primary source documents to deliver a thorough examination of issues so important to Americans that they took action, exercised their rights and stood up to protest. Defining Documents in American History: Dissent & Protest provides detailed th...
The Class Lives of Samuel Eliot and Nathaniel Holmes Morison
by Samuel Eliot 1887-1976 Morison
Who Rules the Synagogue? explores how American Jewry in the nineteenth century transformed from a lay dominated community to one whose leading religious authorities were rabbis. Previously, scholars have chartered the religious history of American Judaism during this era, but Zev Eleff reinterprets this history through the lens of religious authority. Early in the century, American Jews consciously excluded rabbinic forces from playing a role in their community's development. By the final decade...
Longtime thief and card sharp Steven Train is sought out by another crook, John Rainier, with a proposal. Rainier saved rich rancher Patrick Comstock from serious injury and was rewarded with an easy job. Now Comstock has asked Ranier to help find an honest man skilled with firearms for a special mission. Years ago, Comstock unintentionally benefited from bad financial advice he gave to a friend, and wants to find him to pay it back. Rainier wants Train to apply for the job -- on the understandi...
Although much has been written about the Old Northwest, "The Boundaries Between Us" fills a void in this historical literature by examining the interaction between Euro-Americans and native peoples, and their struggles to gain control of the region and its vast resources. Comprised of twelve original essays, "The Boundaries Between Us" formulates a comprehensive perspective on the history and significance of the contest for control of the Old Northwest. The essays examine the sociocultural conte...
The definitive collection of speeches and writings of one of America's most important social reformersCelebrated as the most famous woman in America at the time of her death in 1898, Frances E. Willard was a leading nineteenth-century American temperance and women's rights reformer and a powerful orator. President of Evanston College for Ladies (before it merged with Northwestern University) and then professor of rhetoric and aesthetics and the first dean of women at Northwestern, Willard is bes...
Catlin's Notes of Eight Years' Travels and Residence in Europe, with the North American Indian Collection. with Anecdotes and Incidents of the Travels and Adventures of Three Different Parties of American Indians, Whom He Introduced to the Courts of - Scho
by George Catlin
In 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson had come to a critical pass. He had lost his wife and was on the brink of leaving his career as a minister. In this reduced state he traveled to New Hampshire, where he made his famous decision to pursue wholeness--in his life and in his writing. This book reveals how Emerson went about achieving this purpose--and how he conceived a uniquely American literary practice.Central to this project were the aims and methods of natural science, which Emerson discovered in sp...
The Education of Henry Adams (Modern Library) (Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction Books)
by Henry Adams
Adams was a historian, an intellectual born into the fourth generation of a family of distinguished politicians, diplomats and statesmen that included two presidents of the United States. His "Education" is thus steeped in history, that of his family and of the American politics, culture and identity they helped to shape. At the same time he elaborates his own 'dynamic theory of history' as the product of what he calls the conflict between the Virgin and the Dynamo: 'All the steam in the world c...
Joseph Reddeford Walker looms large in the lore of the early West. From the Missouri to the San Joaquin, from the Gila to the Yellowstone, Walker spent more than thirty years - from the 1830s to the Civil War - trapping beaver in the Rockies, bartering with the Crow, Ute, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and Shoshone Indians, droving cattle and horses, and guiding emigrants and explorers. Walker was associated with Captain Bonneville in the fur trade from 1832 to 1835, but we have only an incomplete accoun...
This is an engaging study of Lincoln and how he shaped a nation.'It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us...that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth' - Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, 1863.Lincoln's life, leadership qualities and achievements have made him a figurehead of American values, ranked as one of the greatest US presidents....