Product Description: In this monumental story of American imperial conquest and capitalist development, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Steven Hahn dismantles the conventional histories of the nineteenth century and offers a perspective that promises to be as enduring as it is controversial...read more

Emphasizing the role of kinship, labor, and networks in the African American community, the author retraces six generations of black struggles since the end of the Civil War, revealing a 'nation' under construction.

Product Description: In the aftermath of civil war and emancipation, Southerners whose lives had been shaped by the slave system had to confront the fact that all people of African descent would be free. Some people - most but not all of them former slaves - rejoiced at the prospect...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Attempts to explain how small Southern farmers became involved in the Populist movement and looks at the effects of the Civil War on Southern agriculture

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This volume represents one of the first efforts to harvest the rapidly emerging scholarship in the field of American rural history. Building on the insights and methodologies that social historians have directed toward urban life, the contributors explore the past as it unfolded in the rural settings in which most Americans have lived during most of American history.The essays cover a broad range of topics: the character and consequences of manufacturing and consumerism in the antebellum countryside of the Northeast; the transition from slavery to freedom in Southern plantation and nonplantation regions; the dynamics of community-building and inheritance among Midwestern native and immigrant farmers; the panorama of rural labor systems in the Far West; and the experience of settled farming communities in periods of slowed economic growth. The central theme is the complex and often conflicting development of commercial and industrial capitalism in the American countryside. Together the essays place rural societies within the context of America's "Great Transformation."