American History Book List · 
Featured Titles
Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s
Edited by Paul Finkelman and Donald R. KennonDuring the long decade from 1848 to 1861 America was like a train speeding down the track, without an engineer or brakes. The new territories acquired from Mexico had vastly increased the size of the nation, but debate over their status—and more importantly the status of slavery within them—paralyzed the nation.…
In the Shadow of Freedom
The Politics of Slavery in the National Capital
Edited by Paul Finkelman and Donald R. KennonFew 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.…
The Jury in Lincoln’s America
By Stacy Pratt McDermottIn the antebellum Midwest, Americans looked to the law, and specifically to the jury, to navigate the uncertain terrain of a rapidly changing society. During this formative era of American law, the jury served as the most visible connector between law and society.…
The Papers of Clarence Mitchell Jr., Volume II
1944–1946
Edited by Denton L. WatsonClarence Mitchell Jr. was the driving force in the movement for passage of civil rights laws in America. The foundation for Mitchell's struggle was laid during his tenure at the Fair Employment Practice Committee, where he led implementation of President Roosevelt's policy barring racial discrimination in employment in the national defense and war industry programs.…
Closing Arguments
Clarence Darrow on Religion, Law, and Society
By Clarence DarrowEdited by S. T. Joshi
Clarence Darrow, son of a village undertaker and coffinmaker, rose to become one of America's greatest attorneys—and surely its most famous. The Ohio native gained renown for his central role in momentous trials, including his 1924 defense of Leopold and Loeb and his defense of Darwinian principles in the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial.…
Testaments
Two Novellas of Emigration and Exile
By Danuta MostwinPolish émigrés have written poignantly about the pain of exile in letters, diaries, and essays; others, more recently, have recreated Polish-American communities in works of fiction. But it is Danuta Mostwin's fiction, until now unavailable in English translation, that bridges the divide between Poland and America, exile and emigration.…
Ohio Volunteer
The Childhood and Civil War Memoirs of Captain John Calvin Hartzell, OVI
Edited by Charles I. SwitzerWhen his captain was killed during the Battle of Perryville, John Calvin Hartzell was made commander of Company H, 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He led his men during the Battle of Chickamauga, the siege of Chattanooga, and the Battle of Missionary Ridge.…
The Emergence of the Moundbuilders
The Archaeology of Tribal Societies in Southeastern Ohio
Edited by Elliot M. Abrams and AnnCorinne FreterNative 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.…
Building on a Borrowed Past
Place and Identity in Pipestone, Minnesota
By Sally J. SouthwickWhy is there a national monument near a small town on the Minnesota prairie? Why do the town's residents dress as Indians each summer and perform a historical pageant based on a Victorian-era poem? To answer such questions, Building on a Borrowed Past: Place and Identity in Pipestone, Minnesota shows what happens when one culture absorbs the heritage of another for civic advantage.…
Frontiers of Freedom
Cincinnati’s Black Community 1802–1868
By Nikki M. TaylorNineteenth-century Cincinnati was northern in its geography, southern in its economy and politics, and western in its commercial aspirations. While those identities presented a crossroad of opportunity for native whites and immigrants, African Americans endured economic repression and a denial of civil rights, compounded by extreme and frequent mob violence.…
DeVoto’s West
History, Conservation, and the Public Good
Edited by Edward K. MullerBy 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.…
Establishing Congress
The Removal to Washington, D.C., and the Election of 1800
Edited by Kenneth R. Bowling and Donald R. KennonEstablishing 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 Center of a Great Empire
The Ohio Country in the Early Republic
Edited by Andrew R. L. Cayton and Stuart D. HobbsNowhere did the revolutions in politics, commerce, and society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries occur more quickly or more thoroughly than in the Ohio country. A forested borderland dominated by American Indians in 1780, Ohio was a landscape of farms and towns inhabited by people from all over the world by 1830.…
Terrible Swift Sword
The Legacy of John Brown
Edited by Peggy A. Russo and Paul FinkelmanMore than two centuries after his birth and almost a century and a half after his death, the legendary life and legacy of John Brown go marching on. Variously deemed martyr, madman, monster, terrorist, and saint, he remains one of the most controversial figures in America’s history.…
Coal and Culture
Opera Houses in Appalachia
By William Faricy CondeeOpera 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.…
Immigration, Diversity, and Broadcasting in the United States 1990—2001
By Vibert C. CambridgeThe last decade of the twentieth century brought a maturing of the new racial and ethnic communities in the United States and the emergence of diversity and multiculturalism as dominant fields of discourse in legal, educational, and cultural contexts.…
A Second Voice
A Century of Osteopathic Medicine in Ohio
By Carol Poh MillerDoctors of osteopathy today practice side by side with medical doctors, employing the same diagnostic and curative tools of scientific—with a difference. A Second Voice: A Century of Osteopathic Medicine in Ohio is the story of that difference.…
The History of Ohio Law
By Michael Les Benedict and John F. WinklerHistory of Ohio Law is a complete sourcebook on the origin and development of Ohio law and its relationship to society. A model for work in this field, it is the starting point for any investigation of the subject.…
The Exile Mission
The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939–1956
By Anna D. Jaroszyńska-KirchmannAt 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.…
Music Hall and Modernity
The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture
By Barry J. FaulkThe late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture. Music Hall and Modernity demonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare.…
The Collected Works of William Howard Taft, Volume VIII
“Liberty under Law” and Selected Supreme Court Opinions
Edited by Francis Graham LeeWilliam 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.…
American Pantheon
Sculptural and Artistic Decoration of the United States Capitol
Edited by Donald R. Kennon and Thomas P. SommaLike the ancient Roman Pantheon, the U.S. Capitol was designed by its political and aesthetic arbiters to memorialize the virtues, events, and persons most representative of the nation's ideals—an attempt to raise a particular version of the nation's founding to the level of myth.…
Religion in Ohio
Profiles of Faith Communities
Edited by Dr. Tarunjit Singh Butalia and Dianne P. SmallReligion in Ohio tells the story of Ohio's religious and spiritual heritage going back to the state's ancient and historic native populations, and including the westward migration of settlers to this region, the development of a wide variety of faith traditions in the years preceding the mid-twentieth century, and the arrival of newer immigrants in the last fifty years, each group bringing with it cherished traditions.…
