Revolutions and Reconstructions gathers historians of the early republic, the Civil War era, and African American and political history to consider not whether black people participated in the politics of the nineteenth century but how, when, and with what lasting effects. Collectively, its authors insist that historians go beyond questioning how revolutionary the American Revolution was, or whether Reconstruction failed, and focus, instead, on how political change initiated by Af...

It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing electio...

Revolutions and Reconstructions gathers historians of the early republic, the Civil War era, and African American and political history to consider not whether black people participated in the politics of the nineteenth century but how, when, and with what lasting effects. Collectively, its authors insist that historians go beyond questioning how revolutionary the American Revolution was, or whether Reconstruction failed, and focus, instead, on how political change initiated by Af...

The Oxford History of the United States is by far the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, two New York Times bestsellers, and winners of the Bancroft and Parkman Prizes. Now, in the newest volume in the series, one of America's most esteemed historians, Gordon S. Wood, offers a brilliant account of the early American Republic, ranging from 1789 and the beginning of the national government to the end of the War of 181...

**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...

Since its publication twenty-five years ago, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men has been recognized as a classic, an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the causes of the American Civil War. A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern American historians, it remains the only full-scale evaluation of the ideas of the early Republican party. Now with a new introduction, Eric Foner puts his argument into the context of contemporary scholarsh...

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...

The Republic in Crisis, 1848–1861 analyses the political climate in the years leading up to the American Civil War, offering for students and general readers a clear, chronological account of the sectional conflict and the beginning of the Civil War. Emerging from the tumultuous political events of the 1840s and 1850s, the Civil War was caused by the maturing of the North and South's separate, distinctive forms of social organisation and their resulting ideologies. John Ashworth emphasises...

"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 ...

In the decades of the early republic, Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten their opponents. As Elizabeth Varon shows, “disunion” connoted the dissolution of the republic — the failure of the founders' effort to establish a stable and lasting representative government. For many Americans in both the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, a cataclysm that would plunge the nation into the kind of fear and misery that seemed to pervad...

This anthology presents a variety of scholarly perspectives on the nation's most enigmatic Founding Father.Revolutionary War officer, co-author of the Federalist Papers, our first Treasury Secretary, Thomas Jefferson's nemesis, and victim of a fatal duel with Aaron Burr: Alexander Hamilton's legacy is complex, multifaceted, and difficult to pin down. On the one hand, Hamilton was the quintessential Founding Father, playing a central role in every key debate and eve...

An admiring biography of John C. Calhoun by Margaret Coit won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. A little later John F. Kennedy chaired a committee that declared Calhoun to be one of the five greatest U.S. Senators of all time.The times have changed and recent writers have once more relegated Calhoun to a dark corner of American history.In the first half of the 19th century Calhoun was for 40 years one of the half dozen most important public men of America. Seldom victorious, he w...