By Peter J. Aschenbrenner
April 08, 2022
When James Monroe became president in March 1817, the United States urgently needed a national transportation system to connect new states and territories in the west with older states facing the eastern seaboard. In 1824, the Supreme Court declared that Congress had the power to regulate traffic ...
By Kay Retzlaff
November 19, 2021
Redefining Irishness in a Coastal Maine City, 1770–1870: Bridget's Belfast examines how Irish immigrants shaped and reshaped their identity in a rural New England community. Forty percent of Irish immigrants to the United States settled in rural areas. Achieving success beyond large urban centers ...
By Larry Hartenian
April 29, 2021
Hartenian’s history of George W Bush propaganda for an invasion of Iraq returns the administration’s approach to its conceptual origins. Hartenian places "evidence" in the center of his analysis, showing that Rumsfeld’s "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" meant that no evidence was...
Edited
By Ari Helo, Mikko Saikku
November 13, 2020
This collection focuses on conceptions of the unfamiliar from the viewpoint of mainstream American history: aliens, immigrants, ethnic groups, and previously unencountered ideas and ideologies in Trumpian America. The book suggests bringing historical thinking back to the center of American Studies...
By Laura R. Sandy
April 20, 2020
Enmeshed in the exploitative world of racial slavery, overseers were central figures in the management of early American plantation enterprises. All too frequently dismissed as brutal and incompetent, they defy easy categorisation. Some were rogues, yet others were highly skilled professionals, ...
By James O’Neil Spady
February 21, 2020
This is the first historical monograph to demonstrate settler colonialism’s significance for Early America. Based on a nuanced reading of the archive and using a comparative approach, the book treats settler colonialism as a process rather than a coherent ideology. Spady shows that learning was a ...
By Alexander Polikoff, Elizabeth Lassar
February 13, 2020
This "brief history" presents the essential story of the subordination of African Americans in the U.S., captured in a 1968 cartoon by Pulitzer-prize-winning cartoonist John Fischetti. The drawing is of a black man handcuffed to a wall with cuffs labeled "White Racism." The caption reads, "Why don’...
By Adam S.R. Bartley
November 28, 2019
This book assesses and evaluates the decision-making behavior of United States presidents and their chief advisers from Roosevelt to Kennedy pertaining to China. Seeking to dispel with the notion that each administration sought policy outcomes on the basis of a rational decision-making model, ...
By Jonathan M. Bullinger
October 10, 2019
During the 1980s and 1990s, aging Baby Boomer parents constructed a particular type of memory as they attempted to laud their own parents’ wartime accomplishments with the label "The Greatest Generation." This book is the first to tell the entire story of this particular type of U.S. World War II ...
By Jonathan Michaels
June 24, 2019
This volume explores the response of liberals to rightwing attacks during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s, establishing it as a defensive approach aimed at warding off efforts to conflate liberalism with communism, but not at striking back at the opposing ideology of conservatism ...
By Seth Offenbach
March 21, 2019
The Vietnam War was the central political issue of the 1960s and 1970s. This study by Seth Offenbach explains how the conflict shaped modern conservatism. The war caused disputes between the pro-war anti-communists right and libertarian conservatives who opposed the war. At the same time, Christian...
Edited
By Laura R. Sandy, Marie S. Molloy
February 05, 2019
Following the suggestion of the historian Peter Parish, these essays probe "the edges" of slavery and the sectional conflict. The authors seek to recover forgotten stories, exceptional cases and contested identities to reveal the forces that shaped America, in the era of "the Long Civil War," c...
