Frances Willard founded the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1884 to carry the message of women’s emancipation throughout the world. Based in the United States, the WCTU rapidly became an international organization, with affiliates in forty-two countries. Ian Tyrrell tells the extraordinary story of how a handful of women sought to change the mores of the world — not only by abolishing alcohol but also by promoting peace and attacking prostitution, poverty, and male control of democra...

River Dreams reveals the complex history of the Cooks River in south-eastern Sydney—a river renowned as Australia's most altered and polluted. While nineteenth century developers called it "improvement," the sugar mill, tanneries, and factories that lined the banks of Sydney's Cooks River had drastic consequences for the health of the river. While much of the river has been rehabilitated in recent decades by passionate local groups and through government initiatives, it continues ...

A powerful dissection of a core American myth.The idea that the United States is unlike every other country in world history is a surprisingly resilient one. Throughout his distinguished career, Ian Tyrrell has been one of the most influential historians of the idea of American exceptionalism, but he has never written a book focused solely on it until now. The notion that American identity might be exceptional emerged, Tyrrell shows, from the belief that the nascen...

Reforming the World offers a sophisticated account of how and why, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American missionaries and moral reformers undertook work abroad at an unprecedented rate and scale. Looking at various organizations such as the Young Men's Christian Association and the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, Ian Tyrrell describes the influence that the export of American values had back home, and explores the methods and networks used...

Long before people were “going green” and toting reusable bags, the Progressive generation of the early 1900s was calling for the conservation of resources, sustainable foresting practices, and restrictions on hunting. Industrial commodities such as wood, water, soil, coal, and oil, as well as improvements in human health and the protection of “nature” in an aesthetic sense, were collectively seen for the first time as central to the country’s economic well-being, moral integrity, and inte...

Across the course of American history, imperialism and anti-imperialism have been awkwardly paired as influences on the politics, culture, and diplomacy of the United States. The Declaration of Independence, after all, is an anti-imperial document, cataloguing the sins of the metropolitan government against the colonies. With the Revolution, and again in 1812, the nation stood against the most powerful empire in the world and declared itself independent. As noted by Ian Ty...

Are we now, or have we ever been, a nation?As this century comes to a close, debates over immigration policy, racial preferences, and multiculturalism challenge the consensus that formerly grounded our national culture. The question of our national identity is as urgent as it has ever been in our history. Is our society disintegrating into a collection of separate ethnic enclaves, or is there a way that we can forge a coherent, unified identity as we enter the 21st...

**"Defying his discipline's preference for theory over history, Vitalis has demonstrated how detailed, archive-based historical accounts can lift the veil on the racism running through international relations as field and practice."**â• Carol Polsgrove â• American Historical ReviewRacism and imperialism are the twin forces that propelled the course of the United States in the world in the early twentieth century and in turn affected the way that diplomatic history ...

The United States today cries out for a robust, self-respecting, intellectually sophisticated left, yet the very idea of a left appears to have been discredited. In this brilliant new book, Eli Zaretsky rethinks the idea by examining three key moments in American history: the Civil War, the New Deal and the range of New Left movements in the 1960s and after including the civil rights movement, the women's movement and gay liberation.In each period, he argues, the active involvement of the ...

School vouchers. The Pledge of Allegiance. The ban on government grants for theology students. The abundance of church and state issues brought before the Supreme Court in recent years underscores an incontrovertible truth in the American legal system: the relationship between the state and religion in this country is still fluid and changing.This, the second of two volumes by historian and legal scholar James Hitchcock, offers a complete analysis and interpretation of the Court's ...

"A must-own title." — National Review OnlineAmerican Conservatism: An Encyclopedia is the first comprehensive reference volume to cover what is surely the most influential political and intellectual movement of the past half century. More than fifteen years in the making—and more than half a million words in length—this informative and entertaining encyclopedia contains substantive entries on those persons, events, organizations, and concepts of ma...

The first full-scale biography of Canada’s first prime minister in half a century by one of our best-known and most highly regarded political writers.The first volume of Richard Gwyn’s definitive biography of John A. Macdonald follows his life from his birth in Scotland in 1815 to his emigration with his family to Kingston, Ontario, to his days as a young, rising lawyer, to his tragedy-ridden first marriage, to the birth of his political ambitions, to his commitment to the all-but-...