United States History

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  Politics and Religion in the White South

  Politics, while always an integral part of the daily life in the southern United States, took on a new level of importance after the Civil War. Today, political strategists view the South as an essential region to cultivate if political hopefuls are to have a chance of winning elections at the national level. Although operating within the context of a secular government, American politics is decidedly marked by a Christian influence. In the mostly Protestant South, religion and politics have long been nearly inextricable. This book examines the powerful role that religious considerations and influence have played in American political ...Read More

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  Franklin on Franklin

  Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography ends in 1758, some thirty years before he died. Those three decades included some of the statesman’s greatest triumphs, yet instead of including them in his memoir, Franklin spent the years continually revising his original text. Paul Zall has created a new autobiographical account of Franklin’s entire life. By returning to a newly recovered early draft of the Autobiography, he strips away later layers of moralizing to reveal the story as Franklin first wrote it: how a poor boy from Boston used words and hard work to become America’s first world-class citizen. To cover Franklin’s career as ...Read More

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  Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850

  The crisis facing the United States in 1850 was a dramatic prologue to the conflict that came a decade later. The rapid opening of western lands demanded the speedy establishment of local civil administration for these vast regions. Outraged partisans, however, cried of coercion: Southerners saw a threat to the precarious sectional balance, and Northerners feared an extension of slavery. In this definitive study, Holman Hamilton analyzes the complex events of the anxious months from December, 1849, when the Senate debates began, until September, 1850, when Congress passed the measures.

  Holman Hamilton is the author of a two-volume work about ...Read More

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  Uncle Will of Wildwood: Nineteenth-Century Life in the Bluegrass

  Uncle Will of Wildwood is a warm and humorous memoir of the nineteenth-century Bluegrass that recalls a defining period of Kentucky’s past. It was a time of self-sufficient country estates when, as Thomas D. Clark writes in his introduction, “every Bluegrass farm gate was the entryway into a ruggedly independent domain.” Wildwood was such a place, ruled by the affable Uncle Will of this classic book.

  Everything at Wildwood revolved around Will Goddard, who was “a cross between a hurricane and an electric fan.” Uncle Will—with his mad dashes into Harrodsburg for mowing-machine parts, his habit of leaving his stallion ...Read More

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  Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s

  History has not been kind to Gerald Ford. His name evokes an image of either America's only unelected president, who abruptly pardoned his corrupt predecessor, or an accident-prone man who failed to provide skilled leadership to a country in domestic turmoil. This book reexamines Ford's two and a half years in office, showing that his presidency successfully confronted the most vexing crises of the postwar era. Surveying the state of America in the 1970s, the book focuses on the economic challenges facing the country. It argues that Ford's understanding of the national economy was better than that of any other ...Read More

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  It Seems to Me: Selected Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt

  One of the most important women of the twentieth century, Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) was also one of its most prolific letter writers. Yet never before has a selection of her letters to public figures, world leaders, and individuals outside her family been made available to general readers and to historians unable to visit the archives at Hyde Park.

  It Seems to Me demonstrates Roosevelt's significance as a stateswoman and professional politician, particularly after her husband's death in 1945. These letters reveal a dimension of her personality often lost in collections of letters to family members and friends, that of a ...Read More

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  The Unknown Dead: Civilians in the Battle of the Bulge

  Traditional histories of the hard-fought Battle of the Bulge routinely include detailed lists of the casualties suffered by American, British, and German troops. Conspicuously lacking in most accounts, however, are references to the civilians in Belgium and Luxembourg who lost their lives in the same battle. Yet the most reliable current estimates calculate the number of civilians who perished in the Ardennes in six weeks of fighting at approximately three thousand. In gruesome detail, this book tells the story of ordinary people caught up in the maelstrom of war. The book describes the horrific war crimes committed by German military ...Read More

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  Benjamin Franklin’s Humor

  Humor is sometimes a serious business, especially the humor of Benjamin Franklin, a master at revealing the human condition through comedy. For the country's bicentennial, Reader's Digest named Franklin “Man of the Year” for embodying the characteristics we admire most about ourselves as Americans: humor, irony, energy, and fresh insight. Recreating Franklin's words in the way that his contemporaries would have read and understood them, this book chronicles Franklin's use (and abuse) of humor for commercial, diplomatic, and political purposes. Dedicated to the uniquely appealing and enduring humor of Benjamin Franklin, the book samples Franklin's apologues on the necessity of ...Read More

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  Running Mad for Kentucky: Frontier Travel Accounts

  The crossing of America’s first great divide—the Appalachian Mountains—has been a source of much fascination but has received little attention from modern historians. In the eighteenth century, the Wilderness Road and Ohio River routes into Kentucky presented daunting natural barriers and the threat of Indian attack.

  Running Mad for Kentucky brings this adventure to life. Primarily a collection of travel diaries, these day-to-day accounts illustrate the dangers thousands of Americans, adult and child, black and white, endured to establish roots in the wilderness. Ellen Eslinger’s vivid and extensive introductory essay draws on numerous diaries, letters, and oral histories of trans-Appalachian ...Read More

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  Front Line of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley

  The Underground Railroad, an often misunderstood antebellum institution, has been viewed as a simple combination of mainly white “conductors” and black “passengers.” Keith P. Griffler takes a new, battlefield-level view of the war against American slavery as he reevaluates one of its front lines: the Ohio River, the longest commercial dividing line between slavery and freedom. In shifting the focus from the much discussed white-led “stations” to the primarily black-led frontline struggle along the Ohio, Griffler reveals for the first time the crucial importance of the freedom movement in the river’s port cities and towns. Front Line of Freedom fully ...Read More