The untold story of how America's Progressive-era war on smallpox sparked one of the great civil liberties battles of the twentieth century.At the turn of the last century, a powerful smallpox epidemic swept the United States from coast to coast. The age-old disease spread swiftly through an increasingly interconnected American landscape: from southern tobacco plantations to the dense immigrant neighborhoods of northern cities to far-flung villages on the edges of ...

The untold story of how America's Progressive-era war on smallpox sparked one of the great civil liberties battles of the twentieth century.At the turn of the last century, a powerful smallpox epidemic swept the United States from coast to coast. The age-old disease spread swiftly through an increasingly interconnected American landscape: from southern tobacco plantations to the dense immigrant neighborhoods of northern cities to far-flung villages on the edges of ...

Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the righ...

**The nearly forgotten story of the fight against the American Plan, a government program designed to regulate women’s bodies and sexuality“A consistently surprising page-turner . . . a brilliant study of the way social anxieties have historically congealed in state control over women’s bodies and behavior.” —New York Times Book Review**Nina McCall was one of many women unfairly imprisoned by the United States government throughout the twentieth century. Tens, prob...

**#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New American Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Esquire, Marie Claire, Electric Lit, Ms. magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist**In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of...

A vivid political history of the schemes, plots, maneuvers, and conspiracies that have attempted -- successfully and not -- to remove unwanted presidentsTo limit executive power, the founding fathers created fixed presidential terms of four years, giving voters regular opportunities to remove their leaders. Even so, Americans have often resorted to more dramatic paths to disempower the chief executive. The American presidency has seen it all, from rejecting a sitti...

Between the years 1918 and1920, influenza raged around the globe in the worst pandemic in recorded history, killing at least fifty million people, more than half a million of them Americans. Yet despite the devastation, this catastrophic event seems but a forgotten moment in our nation's past. American Pandemic offers a much-needed corrective to the silence surrounding the influenza outbreak. It sheds light on the social and cultural history of Americans during the pandemic, uncovering bot...

From the end of postwar Reconstruction in the South to an analysis of the rise and fall of Black Power, acclaimed historian Adam Fairclough presents a straightforward synthesis of the century-long struggle of black Americans to achieve civil rights and equality in the United States. Beginning with Ida B. Wells and the campaign against lynching in the 1890s, Fairclough chronicles the tradition of protest that led to the formation of the NAACP, Booker T. Washington and the strategy of accomm...

Become a US trivia whiz with this crash course through four centuries of change, rebellion, conflict, and triumph in the United States.Where was America's lost colony? What tipped the balance in the Civil War? Were there second thoughts about dropping the atomic bomb?Acclaimed historian Dan Roberts—host of radio's A Moment in Time—takes readers on a bite-sized romp through five-hundred years of American history. With just one minute a day, y...

He inherited a sense of entitlement (and obligation) from his family, yet eventually came to see his own class as suspect. He was famously militaristic, yet brokered peace between Russia and Japan. He started out an archconservative, yet came to champion progressive causes. These contradictions are not evidence of vacillating weakness: instead, they were the product of a restless mind bend on a continuous quest for self-improvement.In Theodore Roosevelt, historian ...

A disturbing chronicle of the US government's mistreatment of American soldiers and veterans throughout history, with a new introduction by Charles Sheehan-MilesTime and time again, the sacrifices made by veterans and their families have been repaid with scorn, discrimination, lack of health services, scant financial compensation, and other indignities. This injustice dates back as far as the American Revolution, when troops came home penniless and without prospects...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY • An “important, deeply affecting—and regrettably relevant” (New York Times Book Review) chronicle of a sinister idea of freedom: white Americans’ freedom to oppress others and their fight against the government that got in their wayAmerican freedom is typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, ma...