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.…
An African American in South Africa
The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche 28 September 1937–1 January 1938
Edited by Ralph Bunche and Robert R. Edgar
Ralph Bunche, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, traveled to South Africa for three months in 1937. His notes, which have been skillfully compiled and annotated by historian Robert R. Edgar, provide unique insights on a segregated society.…
Tales Never Told Around the Campfire
True Stories of Frontier America
By Mark Dugan
Ten outlaws, ten states, ten stories of nineteenth-century fugitives remarkable because the events really took place. Mark Dugan’s latest outlaw chase reins in enough evidence to corral the cynics. There is new information on the strange relationship between Wild Bill Hickok, his enemy and victim, David McCanles, and the beautiful Sarah Shull of North Carolina.…
Knight of the Road
The Life of Highwayman Ham White
By Mark Dugan
The American public has long been fascinated by the Old West and the so–called heroes that it produced. Even before the days of Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and the dime novel, the public’s heroes have always been somewhat tainted.…
Quivira
Europeans in the region of the Santa Fe Trail, 1540–1820
New Mexico was a frontier to the wilderness, for Europeans, for almost three hundred years. No other frontier history in the area of what is now the United States can support such continuity, or even come close.…
George Kennan and the American-Russian Relationship, 1865–1924
George Kennan’s career as a specialist on Russian affairs began in 1865, with his first journey to the Russian empire. A twenty-year-old telegraphic engineer at the time, he was a member of the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition, a now virtually unknown but nevertheless remarkable nineteenth-century adventure story.…
Ghost Towns of the American West
By Robert Silverberg
Illustrations by Lorence Bjorklund
The story of the American mining frontier can be traced in the ghost towns- from the camps of California's forty-niners to the twentieth-century ruins in the Nevada desert. They mark an epoch of high adventure, of quick wealth and quicker poverty, of gambling and gun-slinging and hell-raising.…
Buckeye Rovers in the Gold Rush
An Edition of Two Diaries
By H. Lee Scamehorn
Edited by Edwin P. Banks and Jamie Lytle-Webb
When “California Fever” raced through southeastern Ohio in the spring of 1849, a number of residents of Athens County organized a cooperative venture for traveling overland to the mines. Known as the “Buckeye Rovers,” the company began its trip westward in early April.…
Klondike Women
True Tales of the 1897–1898 Gold Rush
Klondike Women is a compelling collection of historical photographs and first-hand accounts of the adventures, challenges, and disappointments of women on the trails to the Klondike gold fields.…
Survival On a Westward Trek, 1858–1859
The John Jones Overlanders
When gold was discovered in the Fraser River country of British Columbia in the 1850s, St. Paul, Minnesota became the departure point for the plunge westward, as was St. Louis for the American gold rushes.…
Mexico Mystique
The Coming Sixth World of Consciousness
By Frank Waters
In Mexico Mystique Frank Waters draws us deeply into the ancient but still-living myths of Mexico. To reveal their hidden meanings and their powerful symbolism, he brings to bear his gift for intuitive imagination as well as a broad knowledge of anthropology, Jungian psychology, astrology, and Eastern and esoteric religions.…
Breaking With Burr
Harman Blennerhassett's Journal, 1807
By Harman Blennerhassett
Edited by Raymond E. Fitch
For fifty-three days in the steamy summer of 1807, Harman Blennerhassett, arrested for his part in Aaron Burr’s conspiracy to sever the United States, was confined in the Richmond Penitentiary awaiting his trial for treason.…
Newport in the Rockies
The Life and Good Times of Colorado Springs
In 1871, General William Jackson Palmer, a Civil War cavalry hero, dreamed of a Rocky Mountain resort town where sedate, temperate, wealthy folk could enjoy life in tranquil comfort. From its inception as a tiny resort hamlet, Colorado Springs has grown into the second largest city in the Colorado Rockies, with a projected population by 1990 of 400,000.…
Life, Journals and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler, L L. D.
By Julia P. Cutler and William P. Cutler
“The settlement of the Ohio Country, sir, engrosses many of my thoughts, and much of my time…there are thousands in this quarter who will emigrate to that country as soon as the honorable Congress make provisions for granting lands there, and locations and settlements can be made with safety.…
Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787
James Madison’s record of the Constitutional Convention traces day by day the debates held from May to September, 1787, and presents the only complete picture we have of the strategy, interests, and ideas of the founding fathers at the Convention itself.…
The Mound Builders
In Illinois, the one-hundred-foot Cahokia Mound spreads impressively across sixteen acres, and as many as ten thousand more mounds dot the Ohio River Valley alone. The Mound Builders traces the speculation surrounding these monuments and the scientific excavations which uncovered the history and culture of the ancient Americans who built them.…
Bonanza Trail
Ghost Towns & Mining Camps of the West
This is the story of the men who sought for gold, from California to the eastern rim of the Rocky Mountains. Wolle writes colorfully of the unbelievable privations the men endured in penetrating the fastnesses of the high Sierra and the Rockies and in crossing the desert wastes of Arizona, Utah and Nevada; of the mines first discovered in New Mexico by Coronado and his men four centuries ago; and the first great rush that hit California in 1849.…
Stampede to Timberline
The Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of Colorado
This book includes the story of 240 of Colorado’s mining camps, with emphasis on the human side. The men who swarmed to the mountains to find precious metal came in successive waves from the late 1850s on, combing the gulches, scrambling over the passes and climbing the peaks.…
