First published in 1956, this is an account of the arming of the Union forces in the Civil War, and of Lincoln's part in it. It has never been told in any comprehensive way before, and shows Lincoln in a new and engaging light.Lincoln was determined to win the war, yet his generals seemed unable to give him a victory, so he reasoned that a more efficient weapon would have to be invented. However, his main opponent, General James W. Ripley, who sat in charge of army ordnance, believe...

A prominent public personality, Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), inventor of the telephone, teacher of the deaf, phonetician, showman and sage, was also a very private individual. With unrestricted access to Bell’s vast personal files, Robert V. Bruce takes the proper measure of Bell the man in this biography, which portrays Bell as intense, curious, struggling to overcome his very real limitations as a scientist and the negative effects of early fame (he invented the telephone while sti...

Winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in History“For readers born since the 1930’s, who have grown up assuming the United States leads the world in science, The Launching of Modern American Science 1846-1876 will come as something of a shock. It shows that little over a century ago the American scientific community was small, mediocre and unpromising... Mr. Bruce has performed an invaluable service in retrieving from numerous archives the letters and diaries of mid-19th-centur...

National Book Award FinalistFrom one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve.Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sister than he wrote to anyone else, was the original America...

This acclaimed biography captures the inspiring life and philosophy of an influential American thinker: "a moving portrait of a brilliant, complex man" ( The New York Times).Henry David Thoreau's attempt to "live deliberately" in the woods outside his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, has inspired individualists since the publication of Walden in 1854. But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member...

"The Invisible Line" shines light on one of the most important, but too often hidden, aspects of American history and culture. Sharfstein's narrative of three families negotiating America's punishing racial terrain is a must read for all who are interested in the construction of race in the United States."--Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Hemingses of MonticelloIn America, race is a riddle. The stories we tell about our past have calcified ...

Washington, D.C., is home to the most influential power brokers in the world. But how did we come to call D.C.—a place once described as a mere swamp "producing nothing except myriads of toads and frogs (of enormous size)," and which was strategically indefensible, captive to the politics of slavery, and the target of unbridled land speculation—our nation's capital? In Washington, acclaimed, award-winning author Fergus M. Bordewich turns to the backroom deal-making and shifting al...

By the bestselling author of American Nations and Nations Apart, the story of how the myth of U.S. national unity was created and fought over in the nineteenth century--a myth that continues to affect us todayUnion tells the story of the struggle to create a national myth for the United States, one that could hold its rival regional cultures together and forge an American nationhood. On one hand, a small group of individuals--historians, ...

"Randel is endlessly fascinating, and Holloway’s biography tells his life with great skill." —Steve Weinberg, USA TodayJohn Randel Jr. (1787–1865) was an eccentric and flamboyant surveyor. Renowned for his inventiveness as well as for his bombast and irascibility, Randel was central to Manhattan’s development but died in financial ruin. Telling Randel’s engrossing and dramatic life story for the first time, this eye-opening biography introduces an unherald...

"A compelling read" that reveals how maps became informational tools charting everything from epidemics to slavery ( Journal of American History).In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and No...

"Tells a story of a period when the quest for accurate timekeeping became an obsession in the US." — ChoiceThe public spaces and buildings of the United States are home to many thousands of timepieces—bells, time balls, and clock faces—that tower over urban streets, peek out from lobbies, and gleam in store windows. And in the streets and squares beneath them, men, women, and children wear wristwatches of all kinds. Americans have decorated their homes with...

“We forget, living in this era of heavily patented research and closely guarded results, how wonderfully exciting the scientific world used to be. In Stealing God’s Thunder, the story of Benjamin Franklin’s invention of the lightening rod and the resulting consequences, that sense of wonder and excitement and even fear comes beautifully to life. Philip Dray does a remarkable job of illuminating the ever-fascinating Franklin and, more than that, the way that he, and his invention, helped cr...