Amid nineteenth-century America’s fierce battles over slavery and freedom, few proslavery partisans argued more vehemently for the supremacy of the white race than John Van Evrie (1814–96). A New York–based propagandist, writer, book publisher, and editor of the New York Day Book, Van Evrie leveraged the era’s rapidly expanding media and communications landscape to advance his cause. Throughout his career, he promoted pseudoscientific justifications for racism, proclaimed slavery ...

As the sectional crisis gripped the United States, the rancor increasingly spread to the halls of Congress. Preston Brooks’s frenzied assault on Charles Sumner was perhaps the most notorious evidence of the dangerous divide between proslavery Democrats and the new antislavery Republican Party. But as disunion loomed, rifts within the majority Democratic Party were every bit as consequential. And nowhere was the fracture more apparent than in the raging debates between Illinois’s Stephen Do...

The sectional conflict over slavery in the United States was not only a clash between labour systems and political ideologies but also a viscerally felt part of the lives of antebellum Americans. This book contributes to the growing field of emotions history by exploring how specific emotions shaped Americans' perceptions of, and responses to, the sectional conflict in order to explain why it culminated in disunion and war. Emotions from indignation to jealousy were inextricably embedded i...

As the son of a California Highway Patrolman who was a contemporary of the slain officers in the famed 1970 Newhall shooting, Michael E. Wood grew up hearing about the event and its influence on the CHP and law enforcement community. That experience led to his authoring Newhall Shooting: A Tactical Analysis, arguably the most thoroughly researched and documented account of the shooting to date. He is a lifelong shooter and student of armed self-defense and a gradu...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • In a grand and immemsely readable synthesis of historical, political, cultural, and economic analysis, a prize-winning historian describes the events that made the American Revolution. Gordon S. Wood depicts a revolution that was about much more than a break from England, rather it transformed an almost feudal society into a democratic one, whose emerging realities sometimes baffled and disappointed its founding fathers.

Here is a vividly written and compact overview of the brilliant, flawed, and quarrelsome group of lawyers, politicians, merchants, military men, and clergy known as the "Founding Fathers"--who got as close to the ideal of the Platonic "philosopher-kings" as American or world history has ever seen. In The Founding Fathers Reconsidered, R. B. Bernstein reveals Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and the other founders not as shining demigods but as imperfect human bein...

**A New York Times bestseller!"Of those writing about the founding fathers, [Gordon Wood] is quite simply the best." —The Philadelphia Inquirer**In this brilliantly illuminating group portrait of the men who came to be known as the Founding Fathers, the incomparable Gordon Wood has written a book that seriously asks, What made these men great, and shows us, among many other things, just how much character did in fact matter.The life of each—Washing...

Beneath the surface of the apparently untutored and deceptively frank Abraham Lincoln ran private tunnels of self-taught study, a restless philosophical curiosity, and a profound grasp of the fundamentals of democracy. Now, in Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction, the award-winning Lincoln authority Allen C. Guelzo offers a penetrating look into the mind of one of our greatest presidents. If Lincoln was famous for reading aloud from joke books, Guelzo shows that he also plunged deep...

Lt.Michael Patrick Murphy, a Navy SEAL, earned the Medal of Honor on 28 June 2005 for his bravery during a fierce fight with the Taliban in the remote mountains of eastern Afghanistan. The first to receive the nation's highest military honor for service in Afghanistan, Lt. Murphy was also the first naval officer to earn the medal since the Vietnam War, and the first SEAL to be honored posthumously. A young man of great character, he is the subject of Naval Special Warfare courses on charac...

"Traces the history of abolition from the 1600s to the 1860s . . . a valuable addition to our understanding of the role of race and racism in America."— Florida CourierReceived historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radic...

Most Americans hold basic misconceptions about the Confederacy, the Civil War, and the actions of subsequent neo-Confederates. For example, two thirds of Americans—including most history teachers—think the Confederate States seceded for “states' rights.” This error persists because most have never read the key documents about the Confederacy.These documents have always been there. When South Carolina seceded, it published “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justif...

Palace Cobra picks up where Ed Rasimus's critically acclaimed When Thunder Rolled left off. Now he's flying the F-4 Phantom and the attitude is still there.In the waning days of the Vietnam War, Rasimus and his fellow pilots were determined that they were not going be the last to die in a conflict their country had abandoned. They were young fighter pilots fresh from training and experienced aviators who came back to the war again and again, not f...