Amid nineteenth-century America’s fierce battles over slavery and freedom, few proslavery partisans argued more vehemently for the supremacy of the white race than John Van Evrie (1814–96). A New York–based propagandist, writer, book publisher, and editor of the New York Day Book, Van Evrie leveraged the era’s rapidly expanding media and communications landscape to advance his cause. Throughout his career, he promoted pseudoscientific justifications for racism, proclaimed slavery ...

The sectional conflict over slavery in the United States was not only a clash between labour systems and political ideologies but also a viscerally felt part of the lives of antebellum Americans. This book contributes to the growing field of emotions history by exploring how specific emotions shaped Americans' perceptions of, and responses to, the sectional conflict in order to explain why it culminated in disunion and war. Emotions from indignation to jealousy were inextricably embedded i...

As the sectional crisis gripped the United States, the rancor increasingly spread to the halls of Congress. Preston Brooks’s frenzied assault on Charles Sumner was perhaps the most notorious evidence of the dangerous divide between proslavery Democrats and the new antislavery Republican Party. But as disunion loomed, rifts within the majority Democratic Party were every bit as consequential. And nowhere was the fracture more apparent than in the raging debates between Illinois’s Stephen Do...

As the son of a California Highway Patrolman who was a contemporary of the slain officers in the famed 1970 Newhall shooting, Michael E. Wood grew up hearing about the event and its influence on the CHP and law enforcement community. That experience led to his authoring Newhall Shooting: A Tactical Analysis, arguably the most thoroughly researched and documented account of the shooting to date. He is a lifelong shooter and student of armed self-defense and a gradu...

**Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in HistoryFinalist for the 2022 Lincoln PrizeWinner of the American Historical Association's Littleton-Griswold Prize • Winner of the John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History • Winner of the American Society for Legal History's John Phillip Reid Book AwardOne of NPR's Best Books of 2021 and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021A groundbreaking history of the movement for equal rights that courage...

A riveting narrative of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, an act which revolutionized the U.S. constitution and shaped the nation's destiny in the wake of the Civil WarThough the end of the Civil War and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation inspired optimism for a new, happier reality for blacks, in truth the battle for equal rights was just beginning. Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor, argued that the federal government could not abolish slavery. In Johnso...

Historians overwhelmingly have blamed the demise of Reconstruction on Southerners' persistent racism. Heather Cox Richardson argues instead that class, along with race, was critical to Reconstruction's end. Northern support for freed blacks and Reconstruction weakened in the wake of growing critiques of the economy and calls for a redistribution of wealth.Using newspapers, public speeches, popular tracts, Congressional reports, and private correspondence, Richardson traces the chan...

This provocative Civil War history offers "perceptive, fine-grained analysis" to show that the conflict was rooted in economics—not moral principles ( Publishers Weekly ).Drawing on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, historian Marc Egnal demonstrates that between 1820 and 1850, patterns of trade and production drew the North and South together and allowed sectional leaders to broker a series of compromises. After m...

The 1850s offered the last remotely feasible chance for the United States to steer clear of Civil War. Yet fundamental differences between North and South about slavery and the meaning of freedom caused political conflicts to erupt again and again throughout the decade as the country lurched toward secession and war. With their grudging acceptance of the Compromise of 1850 and the election of Franklin Pierce as president in 1852, most Americans hoped that sectional strife and political uph...

"In this engaging work, Van Atta . . . provides an in-depth analysis of the 1820 Missouri Compromise, a seminal event on the road to the Civil War." — ChoiceIn Wolf by the Ears, John R. Van Atta discusses how the question of slavery surfaced in the divisive fight over Missouri statehood. As Thomas Jefferson wrote at the time, a nation dealing with the politically implacable issue of slavery essentially held the "wolf" by the ears—and could neither ...

Dive deep into the history of Causes of the Civil War anywhere you go: on a plane, on a mountain, in a canoe, under a tree. Or grab a flashlight and read Shmoop under the covers. Shmoop's award-winning US History Guides are now available on your eReader. Shmoop eBooks are like having a trusted, fun, chatty, expert history-tour-guide always by your side, no matter where you are (or how late it is at night).Shmoop US History Guides offer fresh analysis, timelines of important events, brief bio...

From the "preeminent historian of Reconstruction" (New York Times Book Review), the prize-winning classic work on the post-Civil War period that shaped modern America.Eric Foner's "masterful treatment of one of the most complex periods of American history" (New Republic) redefined how the post-Civil War period was viewed.Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unl...