Wilson R. Bachelor was a Tennessee native who moved with his family to Franklin County, Arkansas, in 1870. A country doctor and natural philosopher, Bachelor was impelled to chronicle his life from 1870 to 1902, documenting the family's move to Arkansas, their settling a farm in Franklin County, and Bachelor's medical practice. Bachelor was an avid reader with wide-ranging interests in literature, science, nature, politics, and religion, and he became a self-professed freethinker in the 18...

"A pioneer work in . . . the sexual structuring of society. This is not just another book about witchcraft."--Edmund S. Morgan, Yale UniversityConfessing to "Familiarity with the Devils," Mary Johnson, a servant, was executed by Connecticut officials in 1648. A wealthy Boston widow, Ann Hibbens, was hanged in 1656 for casting spells on her neighbors. In 1662, Ann Cole was "taken with very strange Fits" and fueled an outbreak of witchcraft accusations in Hartford a generation before...

This enthralling work of scholarship strips away abstractions to reveal the hidden--and not always stoic--face of the "goodwives" of colonial America. In these pages we encounter the awesome burdens--and the considerable power--of a New England housewife's domestic life and witness her occasional forays into the world of men. We see her borrowing from her neighbors, loving her husband, raising--and, all too often, mourning--her children, and even attaining fame as a heroine of frontier con...

Civil Disobedience is an essay by Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. It argues that people should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War. Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

"[A] solidly researched, briskly presented popular history that helps sharpen our picture of a surprisingly pivotal era." — Los Angeles Times1776, 1861, 1929. Any high-school student should know what these years meant to American history. But wars and economic disasters are not our only pivotal events, and other years have, in a quieter way, swayed the course of our nation. 1831 was one of them, and in this striking new work, hist...

They began their existence as everyday objects, but in the hands of award-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, fourteen domestic items from preindustrial America–ranging from a linen tablecloth to an unfinished sock–relinquish their stories and offer profound insights into our history.In an age when even meals are rarely made from scratch, homespun easily acquires the glow of nostalgia. The objects Ulrich investigates unravel those simplified illusions, revealing important clu...

"A triumph of scholarly maturity, imagination, and narrative art." —Arnold RampersadSojourner Truth: formerly enslaved person and unforgettable abolitionist of the mid-nineteenth century, a figure of imposing physique, a riveting preacher and spellbinding singer who dazzled listeners with her wit and originality. Straight-talking and unsentimental, Truth became an early national symbol for strong Black women—indeed, for all strong women.In this modern class...

A transplanted American, Katherine Morrison has long been fascinated with the attempts of Canadians to articulate how their culture differs from that of their southern neighbor. Examining three hundred years of cultural traditions, Morrison takes the reader through the historical, political and sociological milieux of Canada and the United States. Comparing mythologies, she examines national views of the past and the role of nature and images of place and home in literary writing. Using sp...

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, hailed in The Washington Post as "a work of enormous imagination and enterprise" and in The New York Times as "an important, original book," Southern Honor revolutionized our understanding of the antebellum South, revealing how Southern men adopted an ancient honor code that shaped their society from top to bottom. Using legal documents, letters, diaries, and newspaper columns, Wyatt-Brown offers fasc...

Longlisted for the 2014 National Book AwardThe astonishing story of a unique missionary project—and the America it embodied—from award-winning historian John Demos.Near the start of the nineteenth century, as the newly established United States looked outward toward the wider world, a group of eminent Protestant ministers formed a grand scheme for gathering the rest of mankind into the redemptive fold of Christianity and “civilization.” Its core element was...

A woman is running for US President! Socialism is gaining ground in America, and a campaign is underway to redefine marriage, causing a culture war between Christian leaders and feminists. The year is 1872, and Victoria Woodhull is leading the radical faction of the women's rights movement along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. On the other end of the women's rights spectrum, more philosophically aligned with Lucy Stone and Mary Livermore, a movement that would put women i...

The long-hidden stories of America's black pioneers, the frontier they settled, and their fight for the heart of the nationWhen black settlers Keziah and Charles Grier started clearing their frontier land in 1818, they couldn't know that they were part of the nation's earliest struggle for equality; they were just looking to build a better life. But within a few years, the Griers would become early Underground Railroad conductors, joining with fellow pioneers and o...