A sweeping history of how Union victory in the American Civil War inspired democratic reforms, revolutions, and emancipation movements in Europe and the AmericasThe Age of Reconstruction looks beyond post–Civil War America to tell the story of how Union victory and Lincoln’s assassination set off a dramatic international reaction that drove European empires out of the Americas, hastened the end of slavery in Latin America, and ignited a host of democratic ...

When Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address in 1863, he had broader aims than simply rallying a war-weary nation. Lincoln realized that the Civil War had taken on a wider significance -- that all of Europe and Latin America was watching to see whether the United States, a beleaguered model of democracy, would indeed "perish from the earth."In The Cause of All Nations, distinguished historian Don H. Doyle explains that the Civil War was viewed abroad as part of a ...

Cities were the core of a changing economy and culture that penetrated the rural hinterland and remade the South in the decades following the Civil War. In New Men, New Cities, New South, Don Doyle argues that if the plantation was the world the slaveholders made, the urban centers of the New South formed the world made by merchants, manufacturers, and financiers. The book’s title evokes the exuberant rhetoric of New South boosterism, which continually extolled the “new men” who d...

When Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, he realized that the Civil War had taken on a wider significance-that in Europe and Latin America people were watching to see whether the democratic experiment in "government by the people" would "perish from the earth." In The Cause of All Nations, distinguished historian Don H. Doyle explains that the Civil War was more than an internal American conflict; it was a struggle that spanned the Atlantic Ocean. This book follows the agents...

How Union victory in the American Civil War inspired democratic reforms, revolutions, and emancipation movements globallyIn this international history of Reconstruction, Don Doyle chronicles the world events inspired by the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1870, France withdrew from Mexico, Russia sold Alaska to the US, and Britain proclaimed the new state of Canada. British workers demanded more voting rights, Spain toppled Queen Isabella II and ended slavery in its Ca...

Reconstruction is one of the most complex, overlooked, and misunderstood periods of American history. The thirteen essays in this volume address the multiple struggles to make good on President Abraham Lincoln’s promise of a “new birth of freedom” in the years following the Civil War, as well as the counter-efforts including historiographical ones—to undermine those struggles. The forms these struggles took varied enormously, extended geographically beyond the former Confederacy, influence...

Jonathan Daniel Wells and Jennifer R. Green provide a series of provocative essays reflecting innovative, original research on professional and commercial interests in the nineteenth-century South, a place often seen as being composed of just two classes—planters and slaves. Rather, an active middle class, made up of men and women devoted to the cultural and economic modernization of Dixie, worked with each other—and occasionally their northern counterparts—to bring reforms to the region.

No period of United States history is more important and still less understood than Reconstruction. Now, at the sesquicentennial of the Reconstruction era, Vernon Burton and Brent Morris bring together the best new scholarship on the critical years after the Civil War and before the onset of Jim Crow, synthesizing social, political, economic, and cultural approaches to understanding this crucial period.Reconstruction was the most progressive period in United States history. Althoug...

“A magnificent debut” (Laila Lalami) that explores loneliness and community, religion and repression, and the pleasure and pain of womanhood.By turns tender and irreverent, the 11 genre-bending stories in Please Don't Touch the Body are thrillingly concerned with the devastation-and power-of being alive today.In the collection's first story, a Japanese woman finds healing in a secret life as a sex advice columnist after being fetishized by her white...

"Murphy's skillful storytelling and optimistic spirit give even the grimmest moments of her difficult life story levity in this hopeful, spunky sister to Angela's Ashes."- Publishers WeeklyMaura Murphy's memoir of life in Ireland and beyond resonates with the people, places, and struggles of an almost forgotten generation. Born "chronically ugly and cross as a briar" into a poor, rural homestead in 1920s Ireland, Maura faced adversity from birth. She grew up in the...

What if there were a land where people lived longer than anywhere else on earth, the obesity rate was the lowest in the developed world, and women in their forties still looked like they were in their twenties? Wouldn't you want to know their extraordinary secret?Japanese-born Naomi Moriyama reveals the secret to her own high-energy, successful lifestyle–and the key to the enduring health and beauty of Japanese women–in this exciting new book. The Japanese have the pleasure of eati...

This is the story about an Orange County Surfer's entry into the law enforcement field and how he ultimately found himself policing America's worst gang infested murder capital.Brought up in an all-white suburbia neighborhood, surfing and hanging out at the beach was his existence. Never exposed to gangs or crime, he lived the idyllic life. That is until after graduating from college and his dream job failed, he was convinced by his brother to enter law enforcement. Believing polic...