A groundbreaking history of abolition that recovers the largely forgotten role of African Americans in the long march toward emancipation from the American Revolution through the Civil War. Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois...

Andrew Lipman's eye-opening first book is the previously untold story of how the ocean became a "frontier" between colonists and Indians. When the English and Dutch empires both tried to claim the same patch of coast between the Hudson River and Cape...

More than one-third of adults in the United States are obese. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that there are over 112,000 obesity-related deaths annually, and for many years, the government has waged a very public war on the...

The dramatic, untold story of how Norman Vincent Peale and a handful of conservative allies fueled the massive rise of religiosity in the United States during the 1950s Near the height of Cold War hysteria, when the threat of all-out nuclear war felt...

The Alaska Purchase – denounced at the time as "Seward's Folly" but now seen as a masterstroke – is well known in American history. But few know the rest of the story. This book aims to correct that. Lee Farrow offers here a detailed account of just...

When we think of segregation, what often comes to mind is apartheid South Africa, or the American South in the age of Jim Crow – two societies fundamentally premised on the concept of the separation of the races. But as Carl H. Nightingale shows us i...

For decades, the city of San Francisco has been nearly synonymous with the word "liberal", known for its diversity and acceptance, environmental activism, and thriving art scene. But this has not always been the case. Liberalism in San Francisco in t...

Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern's pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular...

In the years following World War II many multi-national energy firms, bolstered by outdated U.S. federal laws, turned their attention to the abundant resources buried beneath Native American reservations. By the 1970s, however, a coalition of Native...

Among the great figures of Progressive Era reform, Edith and Grace Abbott are perhaps the least sung. Peers, companions, and coworkers of legendary figures such as Jane Addams and Sophonisba Breckinridge, the Abbott sisters were nearly omnipresent in...