American History
Featured Title(s)
Ohio’s War
The Civil War in Documents
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.…
Coal and Culture – On Sale
Opera Houses in Appalachia
Opera houses were fixtures of Appalachian life from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s. Most towns and cities had at least one opera house during this golden age. Coal mining and railroads brought travelers, money, and change to the region.…
The Collected Works of William Howard Taft, Volume I – On Sale
Four Aspects of Civic Duty & Present Day Problems
Edited by David H. Burton and A. E. Campbell
The inaugural volume of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft is composed of two of his earliest books, Four Aspects of Civic Duty and Present Day Problems. Based on a series of lectures delivered at Yale in 1906, Four Aspects of Civic Duty is an attempt by then Secretary of War Taft to bring to the attention of his audience the importance of civic duty from the perspective of the university graduate, the judge on the bench, the colonial administrator, and the national executive branch of government.…
The Collected Works of William Howard Taft, Volume II
Political Issues and Outlooks: Speeches Delivered Between August 1908 and February 1909
Edited by David H. Burton
The second volume of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft is dedicated to the speeches and writings that displayed his thinking in the autumn of 1908 and the following winter. At this time he was campaigning for the presidency against the well-known William Jennings Bryan, and in Taft’s writings is evidence of the contrast in style between Taft and Bryan and between Taft and his predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt.…
The Collected Works of William Howard Taft, Volume III
Presidential Addresses and State Papers
Edited by David H. Burton
The third volume of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft imparts an appreciation of the range of the twenty-seventh president’s interests. Beginning with his inaugural address and concluding with a detailed exposition of governmental expenses and needed economies, President William Howard Taft showed himself willing to tackle the routine as well as the rarified responsibilities of executive rule.…
The Collected Works of William Howard Taft, Volume IV
Presidential Messages to Congress
Edited by David H. Burton
“A time when panics seem far removed is the best time to prepare our financial system to withstand a storm. The most crying need this country has is a proper banking and currency system. The existing one is inadequate, and everyone who has studied the question admits it.…
The Collected Works of William Howard Taft, Volume V
Popular Government and The Anti-trust Act and the Supreme Court
Edited by David H. Burton, David Potash and Donald F. Anderson
The fifth volume of The Complete Works of William Howard Taft presents two publications Taft wrote as Kent Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale University, the position he assumed in 1913 after he was defeated in his bid for re-election as U.…
The Collected Works of William Howard Taft, Volume VI
The President and His Powers and The United States and Peace
Edited by David H. Burton, W. Carey McWilliams and Frank X. Gerrity
Volume VI of The Collected Works of William Howard Taft follows the career of William Howard Taft upon his leaving the White House. It consists of two short publications from 1914 and 1915. The first, The President and His Powers, is based on a series of lectures delivered at Columbia University and draws on Taft’s experience in the presidency and the executive branch.…
The Collected Works of William Howard Taft, Volume VII
Taft Papers on League of Nations
Edited by Frank X. Gerrity
Eager to turn the congressional election of 1918 into a confirmation of his foreign policy, President Woodrow Wilson was criticized for abandoning the spirit of the popular slogan “Politics adjourned!” His predecessor, William Howard Taft, found Wilson difficult to deal with and took issue with his version of the League of Nations, which Taft felt was inferior to the model proposed by the League to Enforce Peace.…
The Collected Works of William Howard Taft, Volume VIII
“Liberty under Law” and Selected Supreme Court Opinions
Edited by Francis Graham Lee
William Howard Taft’s presidency (1909-1913), succeeding Theodore Roosevelt’s, was mired in bitter partisan fighting, and Taft sometimes blundered politically. However, this son of Cincinnati assumed his true calling when President Warren G.…
Available June 2008 (est.)
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 Federalists left the Jeffersonian Republicans in control of virtually all important governmental offices.…
Available December 2008 (est.)
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.…
DeVoto’s West – On Sale
History, Conservation, and the Public Good
Edited by Edward A. Mueller
By Bernard DeVoto
Social commentator and preeminent western historian Bernard DeVoto vigorously defended public lands in the West against commercial interests. By the time of his death in 1955, DeVoto had published criticism, history, and fiction.…
Divine Expectations
An American Woman in Nineteenth-Century Palestine
Barbara Kreiger's intriguing narrative presents the account of Clorinda Minor, a charismatic American Christian woman whose belief in the Second Coming prompted her to leave a comfortable life in Philadelphia in 1851 and take up agriculture in Palestine.…
The Documentary Heritage of Ohio
Edited by Phillip R. Shriver and Clarence E. Wunderlin Jr.
Key to the successful teaching and learning of history is its personalization. In presenting documents that help Ohio's rich history come alive in the minds of its readers, this book has purposely sought to provide eyewitness, first-person narratives that will make the reader want to turn the page and keep on reading.…
Dust Bowl, USA
Depression America and the Ecological Imagination, 1929–1941
Whether romantic or tragic, accounts of the dramatic events surrounding the North American Dust Bowl of the “dirty thirties” unearthed anxieties buried deep in America's ecological imagination.…
The Emergence of the Moundbuilders
The Archaeology of Tribal Societies in Southeastern Ohio
Edited by Elliot M. Abrams and AnnCorinne Freter
Native American societies, often viewed as unchanging, in fact experienced a rich process of cultural innovation in the millennia prior to recorded history. Societies of the Hocking River Valley in southeastern Ohio, part of the Ohio River Valley, created a tribal organization beginning about 2000 bc.…
Establishing Congress – On Sale
The Removal to Washington, D.C., and the Election of 1800
Edited by Kenneth R. Bowling and Donald R. Kennon
Establishing Congress: The Removal to Washington, D.C., and the Election of 1800 focuses on the end of the 1790s, when, in rapid succession, George Washington died, the federal government moved to Washington, D.…
The Exile Mission
The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939–1956
By Anna D. Jaroszynska-Kirchmann
At midcentury, two distinct Polish immigrant groups—those Polish Americans who were descendants of economic immigrants from the turn of the twentieth century and the Polish political refugees who chose exile after World War II and the communist takeover in Poland—faced an uneasy challenge to reconcile their concepts of responsibility toward the homeland.…
Extracting Appalachia
Images of the Consolidation Coal Company 1910–1945
As a function of its corporate duties, the Consolidation Coal Company, one of the largest coal-mining operations in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, had photographers take hundreds of pictures of nearly every facet of its operations.…
The Fairer Death
Executing Women in Ohio
Women on death row are such a rarity that, once condemned, they may be ignored and forgotten. Ohio, a typical, middle-of-the-road death penalty state, provides a telling example of this phenomenon. The Fairer Death: Executing Women in Ohio explores Ohio’s experience with the death penalty for women and reflects on what this experience reveals about the death penalty for women throughout the nation.…
