American History Book List · 
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Ohio’s War
The Civil War in Documents
Edited by Christine Dee
In 1860, Ohio was among the most influential states in the nation. As the third-most-populous state and the largest in the middle west, it embraced those elements that were in concert-but also at odds-in American society during the Civil War era.…
Kansas’s War
The Civil War in Documents
Edited by Pearl T. Ponce
When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Kansas was in a unique position. It had been a state for mere weeks, and already its residents were intimately acquainted with civil strife. Since its organization as a territory in 1854, Kansas had been the focus of a national debate over the place of slavery in the Republic.…
Available January 2011 (est.)
In the Shadow of Freedom
The Politics of Slavery in the National Capital
Edited by Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon
Few images of early America were more striking, and jarring, than that of slaves in the capital city of the world’s most important free republic. Black slaves served and sustained the legislators, bureaucrats, jurists, cabinet officials, military leaders, and even the presidents who lived and worked there.…
Available December 2010 (est.)
The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume IV 1951-1954
Edited by Denton L. Watson
Volume IV of The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr. covers 1951, the year America entered the Korean War, through 1954, when the NAACP won its Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the Supreme Court declared that segregation was discrimination and thus unconstitutional.…
Available September 2010 (est.)
Do They Miss Me at Home?
The Civil War Letters of William McKnight, Seventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry
Edited by Donald C. Maness and H. Jason Combs
William McKnight was a member of the Seventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry from September 1862 until his death in June of 1864. During his time of service, McKnight penned dozens of emotion-filled letters, primarily to his wife, Samaria, revealing the struggles of an entire family both before and during the war.…
The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr.
Volume Three: NAACP Labor Secretary and Director of the NAACP Washington Bureau, 1946–1950
Edited by Denton L. Watson
Born in Baltimore in 1911, Clarence Mitchell Jr. led the struggle for passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the 1960 Civil Rights Act, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.…
Ohio’s Kingmaker
Mark Hanna, Man and Myth
For a decade straddling the turn of the twentieth century, Mark Hanna was one of the most famous men in America. Portrayed as the puppet master controlling the weak-willed William McKinley, Hanna was loved by most Republicans and reviled by Democrats, in large part because of the way he was portrayed by the media of the day.…
Indiana’s War
The Civil War in Documents
Edited by Richard F. Nation and Stephen E. Towne
Indiana’s War is a primary source collection featuring the writings of Indiana’s citizens during the Civil War era. Using private letters, official records, newspaper articles, and other original sources, the volume presents the varied experiences of Indiana’s participants in the war both on the battlefield and on the home front.…
Missouri’s War
The Civil War in Documents
Edited by Silvana R. Siddali
Civil War Missouri stood at the crossroads of America. As the most Southern-leaning state in the Middle West, Missouri faced a unique dilemma. The state formed the gateway between east and west, as well as one of the borders between the two contending armies.…
Wanted—Correspondence
Women’s Letters to a Union Soldier
Edited by Nancy L. Rhoades and Lucy E. Bailey
This unique collection of more than 150 letters written to an Ohio serviceman during the American Civil War offers glimpses of women’s lives as they waited, worked, and wrote from the Ohio home front.…
Incidental Architect
William Thornton and the Cultural Life of Early Washington, D.C., 1794–1828
While the majority of scholarship on early Washington focuses on its political and physical development, in Incidental Architect Gordon S. Brown describes the intellectual and social scene of the 1790s and early 1800s through the lives of a prominent couple whose cultural aspirations served as both model and mirror for the city’s own.…
Dead Last
The Public Memory of Warren G. Harding’s Scandalous Legacy
If George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are the saints in America’s civil religion, then the twenty-ninth president, Warren G. Harding, is our sinner. Prior to the Nixon administration, the Harding scandals were the most infamous of the twentieth century.…
James Madison
Philosopher, Founder, and Statesman
Edited by John R. Vile, William D. Pederson and Frank J. Williams
James Madison: Philosopher, Founder, and Statesman presents fresh scholarship on the nation’s fourth president, who is often called both the father of the U.S. Constitution and the father of the Bill of Rights.…
In the Balance of Power
Independent Black Politics and Third-Party Movements in the United States
By Omar H. Ali
Historically, most black voters in the United States have aligned themselves with one of the two major parties: the Republican Party from the time of the Civil War to the New Deal and, since the New Deal—and especially since the height of the modern civil rights movement—the Democratic Party.…
American Pogrom
The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics
On July 2 and 3, 1917, a mob of white men and women looted and torched the homes and businesses of African Americans in the small industrial city of East St. Louis, Illinois. When the terror ended, the attackers had destroyed property worth millions of dollars, razed several neighborhoods, injured hundreds, and forced at least seven thousand black townspeople to seek refuge across the Mississippi River in St.…
Congress and the Emergence of Sectionalism
From the Missouri Compromise to the Age of Jackson
Edited by Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon
In 1815 the United States was a proud and confident nation. Its second war with England had come to a successful conclusion, and Americans seemed united as never before. The collapse of the Federalist party left the Jeffersonian Republicans in control of virtually all important governmental offices.…
Women and Slavery, Volume One
Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic
Edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C. Miller
The literature on women enslaved around the world has grown rapidly in the last ten years, evidencing strong interest in the subject across a range of academic disciplines. Until Women and Slavery, no single collection has focused on female slaves who—as these two volumes reveal—probably constituted the considerable majority of those enslaved in Africa, Asia, and Europe over several millennia and who accounted for a greater proportion of the enslaved in the Americas than is customarily acknowledged.…
The Whiskey Merchant’s Diary
An Urban Life in the Emerging Midwest
By Joseph J. Mersman
Edited by Linda A. Fisher
Joseph J. Mersman was a liquor merchant, a German American immigrant who aspired—successfully—to become a self-made man. Hundreds of the residents of Mersman's hometown in Germany immigrated to Cincinnati in the 1830s, joining many thousands of other German immigrants.…
Teller Tales
Histories
By Jo Carson
“All my work fits in my mouth,” Jo Carson says. “I write performance material no matter what else the pieces get called, and whether they are for my voice or other characters’ voices … they are first to be spoken aloud.…
One Day for Democracy
Independence Day and the Americanization of Iron Range Immigrants
Just before the turn of the twentieth century, immigrants from eastern and southern Europe who had settled in mining regions of Minnesota formed a subculture that combined elements of Old World traditions and American culture.…
The Future City on the Inland Sea
A History of Imaginative Geographies of Lake Superior
Throughout the nineteenth century, the southern shores of Lake Superior held great promise for developers imagining the next great metropolis. These new territories were seen as expanses to be filled, first with romantic visions, then with scientific images, and later with vistas designed to entice settlement and economic development.…
