How global competition brought the plantation kingdom to its knees.In 1850, America’s plantation economy reigned supreme. U.S. cotton dominated world markets, and American rice, sugarcane, and tobacco grew throughout a vast farming empire that stretched from Maryland to Texas. Four million enslaved African Americans toiled the fields, producing global commodities that enriched the most powerful class of slaveholders the world had ever known. But fifty years later—a...

**• A New Republic Best Book of the Year • The Globalist Top Books of the Year • Winner of the Maine Literary Award for Non-fictionParticularly relevant in understanding who voted for who during presidential elections, this is an endlessly fascinating look at American regionalism and the eleven “nations” that continue to shape North America—by the bestselling author of Nations Apart**According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodar...

A National Book Award winnerThe New York Times bestselling history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society.**“An engrossing and relentless intellectual history of prejudice in America.” -**Washington PostSome Americans insist that we’re living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America—...

The classic history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people.**"Gripping." —**New York Times**“A stinging indictment of slavery.” —**NPR Books?Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution—the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bon...

"Superb . . . the best one-volume economic history of the United States in a long time and, perhaps, ever." — NewsweekIn this illuminating history, John Steele Gordon tells the extraordinary story of the world's first economic superpower. He shows how the American economy became not only the world's largest, but also its most dynamic and innovative. Combining its English political inheritance with its diverse, ambitious population, the nation was able to de...

A leading historian offers a sweeping new account of the African American experience over four centuriesFour great migrations defined the history of black people in America: the violent removal of Africans to the east coast of North America known as the Middle Passage; the relocation of one million slaves to the interior of the antebellum South; the movement of more than six million blacks to the industrial cities of the north and west a century later; and since th...

The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multivolume history of the American nation. In the newest volume in the series, The Republic for Which It Stands, acclaimed historian Richard White offers a fresh and integrated interpretation of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as the seedbed of modern America. At the end of the Civil War the leaders and citizens of the victorious North envisioned the country's future as a free-labor republic, with a homogeno...

How the United States underdeveloped AppalachiaAppalachia—among the most storied and yet least understood regions in America—has long been associated with poverty and backwardness. But how did this image arise and what exactly does it mean? In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll launches an original investigation into the history of Appalachia and its place in U.S. history, with a special emphasis on how generations of its inhabitants lived, worked, survived, and dep...

In 1776 the U.S. owed huge sums to foreign creditors and its own citizens but, lacking the power to tax, had no means to repay them. This is the first book to tell the story of how foreign-born financial specialists—the immigrant founders Hamilton and Gallatin—solved the fiscal crisis and set the nation on a path to long-term economic prosperity.

The story of America is a story of dreamers and defaulters. It is also a story of dramatic financial panics that defined the nation, created its political parties, and forced tens of thousands to escape their creditors to new towns in Texas, Florida, and California. As far back as 1792, these panics boiled down to one simple question: Would Americans pay their debts—or were we just a nation of deadbeats?From the merchant William Duer’s attempts to speculate on post–Revolutionary Wa...

In 1915, forty years after the original Ku Klux Klan disbanded, a former farmer, circuit preacher, and university lecturer named Colonel William Joseph Simmons revived the secret society. By the early 1920s the KKK had been transformed into a national movement with millions of dues-paying members and chapters in all of the nation’s forty-eight states. And unlike the Reconstruction-era society, the Klan in the 1920s exerted its influence far beyond the South. In The Rise of the Ku Klux ...

Britain's Black Debt is the first scholarly work that looks comprehensively at the reparations discussion in the Caribbean. It looks at the origins and development of reparations as a regional and international process.