Winner, 2009 Outstanding Book Award, History of Education SocietyWinner, 2009 Richard Slatten Prize for Excellence in Virginia Biography, Virginia Historical SocietyConceptual founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, William Barton Rogers was a highly influential scientific mind and educational reformer of the nineteenth century. A. J. Angulo recounts the largely unknown story of one man's ideas and how they gave way to the creation of one of America’s premier institut...

A provocative history of for-profit colleges and universities.Honorable Mention, PROSE Education Practice Award by the American Association of Publishers, FY17The most significant shift in higher education over the past two decades has been the emergence of for-profit colleges and universities. These online and storefront institutions lure students with promises of fast degrees and “guaranteed” job placement, but what they deliver is often something quite d...

A provocative collection that explores how intentional ignorance seeps into formal education.Honorable Mention for the PROSE Education Theory Award of the Association of American PublishersIgnorance, or the study of ignorance, is having a moment. Ignorance plays a powerful role in shaping public opinion, channeling our politics, and even directing scholarly research. The first collection of essays to grapple with the historical interplay between education a...

**An Independent Press BestsellerA Pulitzer-finalist historian charts a 250-year-old intellectual and political tradition—the conviction that all Americans are NOT created equal.**The story of American history is often told as a hard-won march toward the promise of equality, derived from Thomas Jefferson’s famous proclamation that “all men are created equal.”But this inspiring story obscures a parallel tradition: an enduring and organized argument against equality i...

"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...

Making Whiteness is a profoundly important work that explains how and why whiteness came to be such a crucial, embattled--and distorting--component of twentieth-century American identity. In intricately textured detail and with passionately mastered analysis, Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how, when faced with the active citizenship of their ex-slaves after the Civil War, white southerners re-established their dominance through a cultural system based on violence and physical ...

**A powerful exploration of the past and present arc of America’s white supremacy—from the country’s inception and Revolutionary years to its 19th century flashpoint of civil war; to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and today’s Black Lives Matter.“The most profoundly original cultural history in recent memory.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University“Stunning, timely . . . an achievement in writing public history . . . Teaching White Supremacy should be r...

A Pulitzer Prize finalist in History, this eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor.The industrializing North and the agricultural South—that’s how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early nineteenth century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slavery’s long reac...

In the later 19th century, French-Canadian Roman Catholic immigrants from Quebec were deemed a threat to the United States, potential terrorists in service of the Pope. Books and newspapers floated the conspiracy theory that the immigrants seeking work in New England's burgeoning textile industry were actually plotting to annex parts of the United States to a newly independent Quebec. Vermette's groundbreaking study sets this neglected and poignant tale in the broader context of North Amer...

The first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery.Karl Marx’s writings on enslavement and labor have fallen out of favor among historians, but David McNally injects new life into them. Slavery and Capitalism gives the first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery—using colonial travel literature, planter records and diaries, and slave narratives—to support the provocative claim for ensla...

"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...

"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...