Product Description: Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America offers a series of fresh perspectives on one of the most familiar themes - the nation's encounter with Catholicism - in nineteenth-century American history. While religious and immigration historians have construed this history in univocal terms, Jon Gjerde bridges sectarian divides by presenting Protestants and Catholics in conversation with each other...read more

Product Description: Coming of Age in Chicago explores a watershed moment in American anthropology, when an unprecedented number of historians and anthropologists of all subfields gathered on the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition fairgrounds, drawn together by the fair’s focus on indigenous peoples...read more

Product Description: Winner of the 2014 Western Heritage Award for Nonfiction from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage MuseumThis thoughtful examination of a century of travel writing about the American West overturns a variety of popular and academic stereotypes...read more

A page-turning narrative, Heaven's Ditch offers an excitingly fresh look at a heady, foundational moment in American history. ''The Erie Canal rubbed Aladdin's lamp. America awoke, catching for the first time the wondrous vision of its own dimensions and power.'' -- Francis Kimball, American architect. The technological marvel of its age, the Erie Canal grew out of a sudden fit of inspiration. Proponents didn't just dream; they built a 360-mile waterway entirely by hand and largely through wilderness. As excitement crackled down its length, the canal became the scene of the most striking outburst of imagination in American history. Zealots invented new religions and new modes of living. The Erie Canal made New York the financial capital of America and brought the modern world crashing into the frontier. Men and women saw God face-to-face, gained and lost fortunes, and reveled in a period of intense spiritual creativity.Heaven's Ditch illuminates the spiritual and political upheavals along this ''psychic highway,'' from its opening in 1825 through 1844. ''Wage slave'' Sam Patch became America's first celebrity daredevil. William Miller envisioned the apocalypse. Farm boy Joseph Smith gave birth to Mormonism, a new and distinctly American religion. Along the way, one encounters America's very first ''crime of the century,'' a treasure hunt, searing acts of violence, a visionary cross-dresser, and a panoply of fanatics, mystics, and hoaxers.A page-turning narrative, Heaven's Ditch offers an excitingly fresh look at a heady, foundational moment in American history.

At the dawn of the 19th century the stakes for American expansion were incalculably high. Even after the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, Spain coveted that land and sought to retain it. With war expected at any moment, Jefferson played a game of strategy, putting on the ground the only Americans he could: a cadre of explorers who finally annexed it through courageous exploration. President Jefferson most famously recruited Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, but at the same time other teams did the same work in places where it was even more crucial. William Dunbar, George Hunter, Thomas Freeman, Peter Custis, and Zebulon Pike were all dispatched on urgent missions to map the frontier and keep a steady correspondence with Washington about their findings. They weren't always well-matched-with each other and certainly not with a Spanish army of a thousand soldiers or more. These tensions threatened to undermine Jefferson's goals for the country, leaving the United States in danger of losing its foothold in the West. Jefferson's America rediscovers the robust and often harrowing action from these seminal expeditions and illuminates the president's vision for a continental America.

[Read by Robert Fass]A soul-stirring biography of John Marshall, the young Republic's great chief justice who led the Supreme Court to power and brought law and order to the nation.In the political turmoil that convulsed America after George Washington's death, the surviving Founding Fathers went mad - literally pummeling each other in Congress and challenging one another to deadly duels in their quest for power. Out of the political intrigue, one man emerged to restore calm and dignity to the government: John Marshall. The longest-serving chief justice in American history, Marshall transformed the Supreme Court from an irrelevant appeals court into the powerful and controversial branch of government that Americans today either revere or despise.Drawing on rare documents, Harlow Giles Unger shows how, with nine key decisions, Marshall rewrote the Constitution, reshaped government, and prevented Thomas Jefferson from turning tyrant. John Adams called his appointment of Marshall to chief justice his greatest gift to the nation and ''the pride of my life.''

Product Description: Abraham Lincoln’s faith has commanded more broad-based attention than that of any other American president. Although he never joined a denomination, Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Episcopalians, Disciples of Christ, Spiritualists, Jews, and even atheists claim the sixteenth president as one of their own...read more

Product Description: Did you know that fatal gun mishaps have been so common in America that for centuries, newspapers carried regular columns reporting on “melancholy accidents”?It came as a surprising discovery when, while conducting research that involved reading colonial-era newspapers, acclaimed writer Peter Manseau stumbled upon one report after another of “melancholy accidents”—instances of local people accidentally discharging firearms to disastrous results...read more

Product Description: In the early years after the Revolution, Americans were on the move, seeking to establish a new way of life. And, more than the church or the school or the courthouse, it was the family that nurtured the American Dream.In this novel-like narrative, Daniel Blake Smith vividly brings to life the Fletchers, a family of loving, ambitious, at times insecure pioneers who scattered across the vast expanse of post-revolutionary America but kept in touch through letters despite their wildly different life paths...read more

Product Description: The story of the legendary Pinkerton detective who took down the Molly Maguires and the Wild BunchThe operatives of the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency were renowned for their skills of subterfuge, infiltration, and investigation, none more so than James McParland...read more