Written by leading historians of the mid–nineteenth century United States, this book focuses on the continental dimensions of the U.S. Civil War. It joins a growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand the place of America’s mid-nineteenth-century crisis in the broader sweep of world history. However, unlike other studies that have pursued the Civil War’s connections with Europe and the Caribbean, this volume focuses on North America, particularly Mexico, British Canada, and sovere...

When it came to the Civil War, Michiganians never spoke with one voice. At the beginning of the conflict, family farms defined the southern Lower Peninsula, while a sparsely settled frontier characterized the state’s north. Although differing strategies for economic development initially divided Michigan’s settlers, by the 1850s Michiganians’ attention increasingly focused on slavery, race, and the future of the national union. They exchanged charges of treason and political opportunism wh...

The Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens examines the political interests, relationships, and practices of two of the era’s most prominent politicians as well as the political landscapes they inhabited and informed. Both men called Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, their home, and both were bachelors. During the 1850s, James Buchanan tried to keep the Democratic Party alive as the slavery debate divided his peers and the political system. Thaddeus Stevens, meanwhile, as Whi...

**• A New Republic Best Book of the Year • The Globalist Top Books of the Year • Winner of the Maine Literary Award for Non-fictionParticularly relevant in understanding who voted for who during presidential elections, this is an endlessly fascinating look at American regionalism and the eleven “nations” that continue to shape North America—by the bestselling author of Nations Apart**According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodar...

The Oxford History of the United States is by far the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. In this Pulitzer prize-winning, critically acclaimed addition to the series, historian Daniel Walker Howe illuminates the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War, an era when the United States expanded to the Pacific and won control over the richest part of the North American continent. A panoramic narrative, What Hath God Wrought p...

Staking Claims to a Continent is a highly readable examination of how Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, and Sir John A. Macdonald took part in a daring game of nation building that has impacted the global order to the present day.Three political leaders presided over the reshaping of the North American continent during the fiery 1860s. Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln were both born in Kentucky, Davis in June 1808 and Lincoln the following February. Joh...

An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rightsSpanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like ...

**Winner of the 2022 New-York Historical Society Book Prize in American HistoryA Washington Post and BookPage Best Nonfiction Book of the YearFrom a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the powerful story of a fragile nation as it expands across a contested continent.**In this beautifully written history of America’s formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning de...

**Alan Taylor is featured in THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, a film by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt on PBS"Excellent…deserves high praise. Mr. Taylor conveys this sprawling continental history with economy, clarity, and vividness." —Brendan Simms, Wall Street Journal**The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the nation its democratic framework. Alan Taylor, a two-time Pulitzer Pri...

The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross is the companion book to the six-part, six-hour documentary of the same name. The series is the first to air since 1968 that chronicles the full sweep of 500 years of African American history, from the origins of slavery on the African continent and the arrival of the first black conquistador, Juan Garrido, in Florida in 1513, through five centuries of remarkable historic events right up to Barack Obama’s second term as president, when the United...

**A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian’s "breathtakingly original" (Junot Diaz) reinterpretation of the eight decades surrounding the Civil War. "Capatious [and] buzzing with ideas." --The Boston GlobeVolume 3 in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner**In this ambitious story of American imperial conquest and capitalist development, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Steven Hahn takes on the conventional histories of the nineteenth century and ...

Born out of violence and the aspirations of its early settlers, the United States of America has become one of the world's most powerful nations. The book begins in colonial America as the first Europeans arrived, lured by the promise of financial profit, driven by religious piety and accompanied by diseases which would ravage the native populations. It explores the tensions inherent in a country built on slave labour in the name of liberty, one forced to assert its unity and reassess its ...