A renaissance in Illinois history scholarship has sparked renewed interest in the Prairie State's storied past. Students, meanwhile, continue to pursue coursework in Illinois history to fulfill degree requirements and for their own edification.This Common Threads collection offers important articles from the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. Organized as an approachable survey of state history, the book offers chapters that cover the colonial era, early sta...

**• 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...

A new, incisive history of the transcontinental railroads and how they transformed America in the decades after the Civil War.The transcontinental railroads of the late nineteenth century were the first corporate behemoths. Their attempts to generate profits from proliferating debt sparked devastating panics in the U.S. economy. Their dependence on public largess drew them into the corridors of power, initiating new forms of corruption. Their operations rearranged space and time, a...

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...

Was Roger Williams too pure for the Puritans, and what does that have to do with Rhode Island? Why did Augustine Herman take ten years to complete the map that established Delaware? How did Rocky Mountain rogues help create the state of Colorado? All this and more is explained in Mark Stein's new book.How the States Got Their Shapes Too follows How the States Got Their Shapes looks at American history through the lens of its borders, but, while How The States Got Their Shapes told ...

The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multivolume history of the American nation. In the newest volume in the series, The Republic for Which It Stands, acclaimed historian Richard White offers a fresh and integrated interpretation of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as the seedbed of modern America. At the end of the Civil War the leaders and citizens of the victorious North envisioned the country's future as a free-labor republic, with a homogeno...

'…from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called ‘path breaking,’ ‘seminal,’ ‘essential,’ a ‘must read.’ How the Irish Became White is such a study.' John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachussetts, AmherstThe Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country – a la...

"This thoughtful, engaging examination of the Reconstruction Era . . . will be appealing . . . to anyone interested in the roots of present-day American politics" ( Publishers Weekly).The story of Reconstruction is not simply about the rebuilding of the South after the Civil War. In many ways, the late nineteenth century defined modern America, as Southerners, Northerners, and Westerners forged a national identity that united three very different regions i...

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 revelatory look at a momentous undertaking-from the workers' point of viewThe Panama Canal has long been celebrated as a triumph of American engineering and ingenuity. In The Canal Builders, Julie Greene reveals that this emphasis has obscured a far more remarkable element of the historic enterprise: the tens of thousands of workingmen and workingwomen who traveled from all around the world to build it. Greene looks past the mythology surrounding the can...

This "enlightening" social history of the construction of the Erie canal explores "19th-century perceptions of progress, politics, and the common good" ( Kirkus Reviews).Woven from a rich tapestry of research, The Artificial River is more than just a historical account of the Erie Canal—it encapsulates a pivotal era in United States history, especially the monumental strides in engineering, commerce, and socio-cultural shifts between the War of 181...

**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 ...