American History Book List · 
Featured Titles
Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s
Edited by Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon
During 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. 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.…
The Jury in Lincoln’s America
In 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.…
Nightmare
The Underside of the Nixon Years
This extraordinary book had an extraordinary genesis. In July 1973, for the first time in its history, The New York Times Magazine devoted a full issue to a single article: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Lukas's account of the Watergate story to date.…
Inventing Congress
Origins and Establishment of the First Federal Congress
Edited by Kenneth R. Bowling and Donald R. Kennon
On March 4, 1789, New York City's church bells pealed, cannons fired, and flags snapped in the wind to celebrate the date set for the opening of the First Federal Congress. In many ways the establishment of Congress marked the culmination of the American Revolution as the ship of state was launched from the foundation of the legislative system outlined in Article I of the Constitution.…
Brave Are My People
Indian Heroes Not Forgotten
By Frank Waters
Pontiac, Sequoyah, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, and Chief Seattle. These legendary names are familiar even to the uninitiated in Native American history, yet the life stories of these great spiritual leaders have been largely unknown.…
Home and Away
The Rise and Fall of Professional Football on the Banks of the Ohio, 1919–1934
Early in this century, growing cities seeking to promote their communities came to view the budding local football team as an agent of civic progress and took the necessary measures to see that their interests were ably represented.…
Mountain People in a Flat Land
A Popular History of Appalachian Migration to Northeast Ohio, 1940-1965
In the early 1940s, $10 bought a bus ticket from Appalachia to a better job and promise of prosperity in the flatlands of northeast Ohio. A mountaineer with a strong back and will to work could find a job within twenty-four hours of arrival.…
Frozen in Silver
The Life and Frontier Photography of P. E. Larson
In 1898 men and women from all over the world converged on Alaska. Gold had been discovered. In the Yukon Territory, all winter long eager gold seekers struggled over the mountain passes connecting Canada with the United States.…
The Negro in the American Rebellion
His Heroism and His Fidelity
By William Wells Brown
Edited by John David Smith
In 1863, as the Civil War raged, the escaped slave, abolitionist, and novelist William Wells Brown identified two groups most harmful to his race. “The first and most relentless,” he explained, “are those who have done them the greatest injury, by being instrumental in their enslavement and consequent degradation.…
Athens, Ohio
The Village Years
Two hundred years ago, Rufus Putnam, leader of the Ohio Company, sent eleven men west into the Ohio Country to found what is now the City of Athens. As one of the oldest communities in Ohio, Athens has a heritage rich in history and lore.…
The Golden Dream
Seekers of El Dorado
One of the most persistent legends in the annals of New World exploration is that of the Land of God. Its mythical site was located over vast areas of South American (and later, North America); it drove some men mad with greed and, often as not, to their deaths.…
The Centennial Atlas of Athens County, Ohio
Illustrations, History, Statistics
Edited by Fred W. Bush
The original The Centennial Atlas of Athens County, Ohio was compiled and edited in 1905 by Fred W. Bush, then editor of The Athens Messenger and Herald. It was a history sponsored primarily by the people who were part of it: citizens and businesses paid to have their family stories, photographs of themselves, their homes or farms, and their businesses included in this volume.…
Upper Mississippi River Rafting Steamboats
As a Wisconsin historical marker explains: “After 1837 the vast timber resources of northern Wisconsin were eagerly sought by settlers moving into the mid-Mississippi valley. By 1847 there were more than thirty saw-mills on the Wisconsin, Chippewa, and St.…
Barns of the Midwest
Edited by Allen G. Noble and Hubert G. H. Wilhelm
For many, the barn is the symbol of the Midwestern United States. It represents tangible wealth, solid citizenship, industry, stability, and other agrarian values associated with its conservative, Anglo-Saxon settlers.…
Way’s Packet Directory, 1848–1994
Passenger Steamboats of the Mississippi River System Since the Advent of Photography in Mid-Continent America
The first Mississippi steamboat was a packet, the New Orleans, a sidewheeler built at Pittsburgh in 1811, designed for the New Orleans-Natchez trade. Packets dominated during the first forty years of steam, providing the quickest passenger transportation throughout mid-continent America.…
To Possess the Land
A Biography Of Arthur Rochford Manby
By Frank Waters
Ambitious and only 24 years old, Arthur Manby arrived from England in the Territory of New Mexico in 1883, and saw in its wilderness an empire that he believed himself destined to rule. For his kingdom, he chose a vast Spanish land grant near Taos, a wild 100,000 acres whose ancient title was beyond question.…
George Montague Wheeler
The Man and the Myth
Until Dawdy's “The Wyant Diary” appeared in Arizona and the West in 1980, it was virtually unknown that Lt. Wheeler was the leader of the government exploring party from which artist A. H.…
Suicide or Murder?
The Strange Death of Governor Meriwether Lewis
The death of Meriwether Lewis is one of the great mysteries of American history. Was he murdered at Grinder’s Stand or did he commit suicide? Vardis Fisher meticulously reconstructs the events and presents his own version of the case with the precision and persuasiveness of a fine trial lawyer.…
Weather Pioneers
The Signal Corps Station at Pikes Peak
At 14,110 feet, the weather station atop Pikes Peak, Colorado, was the highest in the world in 1873. Young men trained by the Signal Corps took turns living year-round on the isolated mountain, where they endured loneliness, primitive living conditions, lack of financial support and appreciation, and deteriorating health.…
Log Construction in the Ohio Country, 1750–1850
Log construction entered the Ohio territory with the seventeenth-century fur traders and mid-eighteenth-century squatters and then spread throughout most of the area after the opening of the territory in the 1780s.…
Goldfield
The Last Gold Rush on The Western
“The discovery of Goldfield, Nevada, in 1902, along with the earlier discovery of Tonopah in 1900, marked the revival of mining in Nevada. Mining production, which had escalated after the discovery of the Comstock Lode in 1859, dropped to almost nothing with the decline of the Comstock in the 1870s.…
