This essay collection presents a transnational history of mid-nineteenth century North America, a time of crisis that forged the continent's political dynamics.North America took its political shape in the crisis of the 1860s, marked by Canadian Confederation, the US Civil War, the restoration of the Mexican Republic, and numerous wars and treaty regimes conducted between these states and indigenous peoples. This crisis wove together the three nation-states of moder...

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...

CONTENTS:Introduction, Jean H. Baker and Charles W. Mitchell“Border State, Border War: Fighting for Freedom and Slavery in Antebellum Maryland,” Richard Bell“Charity Folks and the Ghosts of Slavery in Pre–Civil War Maryland,” Jessica Millward“Confronting Dred Scott: Seeing Citizenship from Baltimore,” Martha S. Jones“‘Maryland Is This Day . . . True to the American Union’: The Election of 1860 and a Winter of Discontent,” Charles W. Mitchell...

About half of today’s nation-states originated as some kind of breakaway state. The end of the Cold War witnessed a resurgence of separatist activity affecting nearly every part of the globe and stimulated a new generation of scholars to consider separatism and secession.As the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War approaches, this collection of essays allows us to view within a broader international context one of modern history's bloodiest conflicts over secession. The cont...

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...

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.

When we talk about the Civil War, we often describe it in terms of battles that took place in small towns or in the countryside: Antietam, Gettysburg, Bull Run, and, most tellingly, the Battle of the Wilderness. One reason this picture has persisted is that few urban historians have studied the war, even though cities hosted, enabled, and shaped Southern society as much as they did in the North.Confederate Cities, edited by Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers, shifts the focus ...

The third volume in the #1 nationally bestselling Dark Tower Series, involving the enigmatic Roland (the last gunfighter) and his ongoing quest for the Dark Tower, is “Stephen King at his best” (School Library Journal).Several months have passed since The Drawing of the Three, and in The Waste Lands, Roland’s two new tet-mates have become trained gunslingers. Eddie Dean has given up heroin, and Odetta’s two selves have joined, be...

The fourth volume in the brilliant Dark Tower Series is “splendidly tense…rip-roaring” (Publishers Weekly)—a #1 national bestseller about an epic quest to save the universe.In Wizard and Glass, Stephen King is “at his most ebullient…sweeping readers up in…swells of passion” (Publishers Weekly) as Roland the Gunslinger, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake survive Blaine the Mono’s final crash, only to find themselves stranded in an alternate version...

The second volume in Stephen King’s #1 bestselling Dark Tower Series, The Drawing of the Three is an “epic in the making” (Kirkus Reviews) about a savage struggle against underworld evil and otherworldly enemies.“Stephen King is a master at creating living, breathing, believable characters,” hails The Baltimore Sun. Beginning just less than seven hours after The Gunslinger ends, in the second installment to the thrilling Dark Tow...

"A sweeping epic.… Promises to do for the war in the Pacific what Rick Atkinson did for Europe." —James M. Scott, author of RampageIn 1937, the swath of the globe east from India to the Pacific Ocean encompassed half the world’s population. Japan’s onslaught into China that year unleashed a tidal wave of events that fundamentally transformed this region and killed about twenty-five million people. This extraordinary World War II narrative vividly portrays ...

In 1937, the swath of the globe east from India to the Pacific Ocean encompassed half the world’s population. Japan’s onslaught into China that year unleashed a tidal wave of events that fundamentally transformed this region and killed about twenty-five million people. This extraordinary World War II narrative vividly portrays the battles across this entire region and links those struggles on many levels with their profound twenty-first-century legacies. In this first volume of a trilogy, ...