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.…
An American Colony
Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern Culture
By Edward Watts
The Old Northwest—the region now known as the Midwest—has been largely overlooked in American cultural history, represented as a place smoothly assimilated into the expanding, manifestly-destined nation.…
American Coverlets and Their Weavers
Coverlets from the Collection of Foster and Muriel McCarl
Coverlets woven in vibrant colors of red, blue, white, and green are as popular today as they were in the nineteenth century.American Coverlets and Their Weavers is a lavishly illustrated guide to one of the premier collections of coverlets in the nation.…
American Pantheon
Sculptural and Artistic Decoration of the United States Capitol
Edited by Donald R. Kennon and Thomas P. Somma
Like 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.…
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.…
An Amulet of Greek Earth
Generations of Immigrant Folk Culture
The boys and men who left their Greek valley and mountain villages in the early 1900s for America came with amulets their mothers had made for them. Some were miniature sacks attached to a necklace; more often they were merely a square of fabric enclosing the values of their lives: a piece of a holy book or a sliver of the True Cross representing their belief in Greek Orthodoxy; a thyme leaf denoting their wild terrain; a blue bead to ward off the Evil Eye; and a pinch of Greek earth.…
Art and Empire
The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860
The subject matter and iconography of much of the art in the U.S. Capitol forms a remarkably coherent program of the early course of North American empire, from discovery and settlement to the national development and westward expansion that necessitated the subjugation of the indigenous peoples.…
Art As Image
Prints and Promotion in Cincinnati, Ohio
Edited by Alice M. Cornell
Cincinnati was a major printing and publishing center from the earliest days of the Old Northwest Territory. The spectacular technological and artistic developments in the 19th-century printing trade nationally were reflected in the Cincinnati printmakers' achievements, many of which were promotional in nature.…
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.…
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.…
Black Hills Ghost Towns
By Watson Parker and Hugh K. Lambert
The Black Hills have been famous ever since the gold rush days of the 1870s when General George A. Custer’s expedition in the summer of 1874 found and advertised placer gold in the Black Hills valleys and a rush to the Hills began.…
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.…
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.…
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.…
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.…
Buckeye Women
The History of Ohio's Daughters
By the last two decades of the twentieth century, Ohio women had held positions as university presidents, chief executive officers, judges, superintendents of schools, and lieutenant governor. They had won Pulitzer Prizes and, in one case, the Nobel Prize for Literature.…
Building on a Borrowed Past
Place and Identity in Pipestone, Minnesota
Why 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.…
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.…
The Center of a Great Empire
The Ohio Country in the Early Republic
Edited by Andrew R. L. Cayton
By Stuart D. Hobbs
Nowhere 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.…
Closing Arguments
Clarence Darrow on Religion, Law, and Society
By Clarence Darrow
Edited 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.…
