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

Product Description: Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics challenges the way historians interpret the causes of the American Civil War. Using Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas's famed rivalry as a prism, Robert E. May shows that when Lincoln and fellow Republicans opposed slavery in the West, they did so partly from evidence that slaveholders, with Douglas's assistance, planned to follow up successes in Kansas by bringing Cuba, Mexico, and Central America into the Union as slave states...read more

Product Description: When Martha Summerhayes (1844–1926) came as a bride to Fort Russell in Wyoming Territory in 1874, she “saw not much in those first few days besides bright buttons, blue uniforms, and shining swords,” but soon enough the hard facts of army life began to intrude...read more

Product Description: This thematic biography demonstrates how Stephen Douglas's path from a conflicted youth in Vermont to dim prospects in New York to overnight stardom in Illinois led to his identification with the Democratic Party and his belief that the federal government should respect the diversity of states and territories...read more

The Republic in Crisis, 1848-1861 analyzes the political climate in the years leading up to the 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 organization and their resulting ideologies. John Ashworth emphasizes factors often overlooked in explanations of the war, including the resistance of slaves in the South and the growth of wage labor in the North. Ashworth acquaints readers with modern writings on the period, providing a new interpretation of the American Civil War's causes.

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