In examining how the United States gained control over the northern borderlands of Spanish America, this work reassesses the diplomacy of President James Madison. Historians have assumed Madison's motive in sending agents into the Spanish borderlands...

A sailing ship that becomes stalled with its bow to the wind is said to be "in irons". In this groundbreaking examination of America's Revolutionary War economy, the phrase is an apt metaphor for the inability of that economy to free itself from the...

Historians have long viewed the massive reshaping of the American landscape during the New Deal era as unprecedented. This book uncovers the early twentieth-century history rich with precedents for the New Deal in forest, park, and agricultural polic...

In this fascinating book Monica Rico explores the myth of the American West in the nineteenth century as a place for men to assert their masculinity by "roughing it" in the wilderness and reveals how this myth played out in a transatlantic context. R...

Before Woodrow Wilson became president of the United States, he spent 25 years at Princeton University, first as an undergraduate, then professor, and finally as president. His experiences at the helm of Princeton-where he enjoyed four productive yea...

The California Gold Rush began in 1848 and incited many "wagons west". However, only half of the 300,000 gold seekers travelled by land. The other half travelled by sea. And it's the story of this second group that interests Malcolum Rohrbough in his...

Americans cherish their national myths, some of which predate the country's founding. But the time for illusions, nostalgia, and grand ambition abroad has gone by, Patrick Smith observes in this original book. Americans are now faced with a choice: b...

John Brown's "Spy" tells the nearly unknown story of John E. Cook, the person John Brown trusted most with the details of his plans to capture the Harper's Ferry armoury in 1859. Cook was a poet, a marksman, a boaster, a dandy, a fighter, and a woman...

Making extensive use of archival and other primary sources, David Schorr demonstrates that the development of the "appropriation doctrine", a system of private rights in water, was part of a radical attack on monopoly and corporate power in the arid...

This timely book holds up for scrutiny a great paradox at the core of the American Dream: a passionate belief in the principle of democracy combined with an equally passionate celebration of the creation of wealth. Americans treasure an open, equal s...