American & Canadian History

Winner of the 2015 LGBT Studies Award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation. Unearths connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture that has largely been ignored until now. Scholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the...

"Yellowstone meets Matlock" (Tom Clavin) in this dazzling tale of land lust and the American West, chronicling the rise and fall of a wind farm that triggers a 21st-century range war between a struggling fifth-generation rancher and the billionaires next door. Most locals in Big Timber, Montana, learn to live with the wind. Rick Jarrett sought his fortune in it....

A descendant of one of the oldest cocktails, the brandy milk punch has become a calling card for New Orleans brunch culture. In The Brandy Milk Punch, Sharon Keating and Christi Keating Sumich explore the cocktail's origins and its relationship to the Crescent City's food scene. With a versatile recipe that offers space for creative reimagining, the brandy milk punch...

This book analyses, for the first time, innovative Mexican television drama of the current decade. It provides an account of the processes of production and reception for seven series, offering close textual readings of individual episodes. At this critical time for the medium, the transition between national network television (Televisa) and transnational streaming platforms (Netflix and Amazon Prime), Mexican creators,...

During the first quarter-century after its founding, the United States was swept by a wave of land speculation so unprecedented in intensity and scale that contemporaries and historians alike have dubbed it a "mania." In Speculation Nation, Michael A. Blaakman uncovers the revolutionary origins of this real-estate bonanza—a story of ambition, corruption, capitalism, and statecraft that stretched across millions of...

In Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Patricia Dunlavy Valenti presents Nathaniel Hawthorne's spouse on her own terms, situating her remarkable life within its own historical, philosophical, and cultural context, and freeing her from notions that Nathaniel constructed and that his biographers perpetuated. The first of this two-volume work recounts Sophia's accomplishments as one of America's first professional women artists, a...

Forty years after its original publication, David McCullough's masterful history of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge has become a classic work and is now being reissued with a new preface from the author. The building of the Brooklyn Bridge was a time of optimism and corruption, a time when Americans were the world's greatest engineers and could collectively create...

Named a 2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title In Shades of Gray, Molly Littlewood McKibbin offers a social and literary history of multiracialism in the twentieth-century United States. She examines the African American and white racial binary in contemporary multiracial literature to reveal the tensions and struggles of multiracialism in American life through individual consciousness, social perceptions, societal expectations, and subjective...

Settling Debt overturns the familiar tale of early antislavery as a pure moral triumph by revealing its uneasy ties to colonial ambition and economic anxiety. Cameron Seglias shows how, from the late seventeenth century through the American Revolution, settlers and religious writers condemned slavery as a threat to their own prosperity and salvation. Debt, understood both as money owed and...

The story of an unexpected group of performing artists who led one of the most influential artistic movements in contemporary American history. After World War II, personal fulfilment emerged as a defining American cultural ideal. Self-realisation—the quest to become our authentic selves—remains a powerful part of American culture and arts today. In Self-Realization Nation, John Kapusta provides a lively cultural...

The story of an unexpected group of performing artists who led one of the most influential artistic movements in contemporary American history. After World War II, personal fulfilment emerged as a defining American cultural ideal. Self-realization—the quest to become our authentic selves—remains a powerful part of American culture and arts today. In Self-Realization Nation, John Kapusta provides a lively cultural...

Includes a collection of writings by and about Robert Franklin Williams as an internationalist, pragmatist, and civil and human rights champion. Williams was a compassionate man. He was an intelligent American citizen and Korean War veteran, who claimed his right to American citizenship. Acutely aware of the broken promises of the US government, he remained fully invested in the rights,...

Featuring original essays by Michael W. McConnell, Thomas S. Kidd, Jane E. Calvert, Meir Y. Soloveichik, and Vincent Phillip Muñoz. The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of American independence, yet the founding is controversial now in ways it has not been in decades. The American Enterprise Institute offers a major intellectual and educational project to reintroduce Americans to the...

As the first major U.S. urban centre located west of the Appalachian Mountains, Cincinnati depended on the Ohio River for its early development, eventually becoming one of the country’s iconic river cities, with incredible growth during the golden age of steamboats. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the river had lost its shine and became known as the...

As the first major U.S. urban centre located west of the Appalachian Mountains, Cincinnati depended on the Ohio River for its early development, eventually becoming one of the country’s iconic river cities, with incredible growth during the golden age of steamboats. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the river had lost its shine and became known as the...

Government regulation of the railroads is probably the most important example of federal intervention in the economy from the Civil War to World War I. It is also a key to an assessment of the impulses and motives behind Progressivism. In Railroads and Regulation, Gabriel Kolko presents a case study of the relationship of the economy to the political process...

Winner of the 2006 Booker Worthen Literary Prize and the 2004 Ragsdale Award A dominating spirit of public service animated the life of Sidney Sanders McMath (1912–2003), the thirty-fourth governor of Arkansas. Promises Kept, completed and published when McMath was in his nineties, tells his story in his own words—from the piney hills of South Arkansas to the battlefields of...

Behind the gates of Camp David—where presidents find solitude, forge diplomacy, and shape history in absolute secrecy. The Presidential Retreat Camp David is shrouded in mystery, and rightfully so. The hidden retreat atop the Catoctin Mountains is the one place the President, First Family, and invited guests can gather in absolute secrecy for relaxation, rejuvenation, and world-changing decisions. Because of...

Po'Boy tells the story of how a humble sandwich became a symbol of New Orleans culture, history, and cuisine. Invented to help feed a crowd of out-of-work individuals in New Orleans's streetcar industry, the po'boy is a submarine-like sandwich served on French bread, with common fillings that include fried seafood, roast beef and gravy ("debris"), and hot sausage. Rich with...

Wetlands—particularly swamps—have evoked contradictory responses from different groups in the United States, from the early republic to the end of World War I. White, enslaved, and Indigenous peoples alternately envisioned swamps as future agricultural paradises, uninhabitable wastelands, portals to freedom, spaces to gather vital resources, eugenic sanctuaries, and future homes for settlers. This contested, evolving thinking shaped how Americans interacted...

One element of historical work that greatly enriches the entire field is the importance of perspective in understanding the past. Approaching history from diverse individuals' points of view, or with a particular sensitivity to group objectives or experiences, or through a particular disciplinary lens can yield distinctive new understandings of the past. The articles of the Winter 2025 issue of...

The Creole praline arrived in New Orleans with the migration of formerly enslaved people fleeing Louisiana plantations after the Civil War. Black women street vendors made a livelihood by selling a range of homemade foods, including pralines, to Black dockworkers and passersby. The praline offered a path to financial independence, and even its ingredients spoke of a history of Black...

Nature's Mountain Mansion is the first anthology on Yosemite that focuses exclusively on the nineteenth century, the critical period in which Yosemite was "discovered" by an expanding nation and transformed into one of the country's most visited national parks. While there are volumes that provide readings about Yosemite in the nineteenth century, few provide critical—sometimes even disparaging—eyewitness reflections on the...

Whether it's building skyscrapers, running successful restaurants, researching diseases, performing music, cleaning hotel rooms, or holding public office, immigrants are changing Nashville from a mid-sized city known for its country music industry to an increasingly diverse, multicultural destination. In Metro Nashville schools today, students speak more than 120 languages. The city is bigger, more congested, and more expensive than it's...

Discover the hidden mysteries of America’s national parks! America’s national parks are best known for stunning beauty and outstanding adventure—but these natural wonders also hold some of the world’s greatest mysteries. Why did an ancestral civilisation abandon their stone cities in the mountains of Colorado? Flying past Mt. Rainier, did a pilot really spot nine shiny objects that spawned the...

Read 22 chilling stories, written by two paranormal investigators, about reportedly true encounters with monsters in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. A pastor's afternoon hike takes a horrifying turn when a creature follows him home and terrorises his family. A woman's routine drive becomes a heart-pounding encounter when a Sasquatch chases a deer into the path of her car. A child's...

An on-the-ground study of how faith communities create belonging and build bridges across one of the most diverse urban landscapes in the world Micro-City follows congregations, clergy, and everyday New Yorkers across twelve Queens neighbourhoods to show how religious life both shelters difference and connects it in public. Blending theories from urban sociology and the sociology of religion with fieldwork,...

Mercy in Disaster is about the forgotten nurse in America’s signature, iconic photograph of Civil War wounded: abolitionist Abby Hopper Gibbons. Hung in museums large and small, pictured in books, and found across the internet, rarely is what the New York Times called “one of the most remarkable women of this century” identified. More practitioner than pundit, an organiser and...

John D’Emilio is one of the leading historians of his generation and a pioneering figure in the field of LGBTQ history. At times his life has been seemingly at odds with his upbringing. How does a boy from an Italian immigrant family, in which everyone unfailingly went to confession and Sunday Mass, become a lapsed Catholic? How does a family...

Conservatives have disagreed about many things, but they have long been united by the belief that the mainstream—or "liberal"—media is biased against them. Why did conflict with the press become so central to conservative identity, and how has antipathy toward the media shaped the modern conservative movement? A. J. Bauer traces how decades of right-wing criticism of the liberal media...

WINNER OF THE 2024 PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY Featured on Amazon's Al Woolworth's Top 10 Books of the Past 25 Years A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award Named one of the ten best books of 2023 by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Time A New York Times bestseller and notable book of 2023 One of...

Using a blend of global, intellectual, and cultural history, this book explores the geopolitics of Juan Perón and their relationship to, and impact on, the international history of the mid-20th century. Beginning with Perón’s formative years, it analyses the concepts that helped shape his anti-imperialist views and traces these ideas over decades from his time in the Argentine Army through...

Jesse Helms (1921–2008) dominated the political landscape of North Carolina during the last half of the twentieth century. Though Helms’s thirty years in the US Senate are most remembered for what he opposed rather than what he achieved, he was a central figure in modern conservatism. In this concise interpretive biography, William A. Link centres Helms in the political realignment...

Invisible Blackness explores the complex lives of Creoles of mixed race born in Louisiana to enslaved women and the white men who enslaved them. Individuals such as Alice Thomasson Grice forged their own identities—and often reinvented themselves—within the increasingly strict racial order of antebellum and postbellum Louisiana. Alice Thomasson Grice occupied an unusual position among mixed-race Creoles of her era,...

In the 1960s, a musical revolution took place in the industrial landscapes of Cleveland and Detroit. Disenchanted with the strictures of bebop, musicians forged a new style—free jazz—that took inspiration from a vast range of sources. These included figures such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane; African and Middle Eastern music; avant-garde modernism; and the politics and aesthetics...

The New York Times Bestseller Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of the year, an NPR Staff Pick "Consistently both startling and absorbing . . . Immerwahr vividly retells the early formation of the [United States], the consolidation of its overseas territory, and the postwar perfection of...

Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West contributes to discussions in the environmental humanities and western U.S. studies about how we read past cultural history in light of our determined yet unknown future under climate catastrophe. Examining an eclectic but interrelated and interdisciplinary range of photographs, films, and novels of the West; Western historiography; geological science; Tony Kushner's Angels in...

Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West contributes to discussions in the environmental humanities and western U.S. studies about how we read past cultural history in the light of our determined yet unknown future under climate catastrophe. Examining an eclectic but interrelated and interdisciplinary range of photographs, films, and novels of the West; Western historiography; geological science; Tony Kushner's Angels...

Since its Broadway debut, Hamilton: An American Musical has infused itself into the American experience: who shapes it, who owns it, who can rap it best. Lawyers and legal scholars, recognizing the way the musical speaks to some of our most complicated constitutional issues, have embraced Alexander Hamilton as the trendiest historical face in American civics. Hamilton and the Law...

Forging America: Volume Two since 1863 speaks to both the complexities of historical experience and the meanings of the past for our present-day lives. Warning against the assumption of preordained outcomes, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn focuses the reader's attention on those moments when historical change occurs. He weaves a history that is continental and transnational, a history of the...

This book examines the climatic and economic origins of the last national famine to occur in Scotland, the nature and extent of the crisis which ensued, and what the impact of the famine was upon the population in demographic, economic and social terms. Current published knowledge about the causes, extent, and impact of the famine in Scotland is limited, and...

This book explores nearly two hundred letters from Confederate deserters to Governor Zebulon B. Vance from 1861 to 1865. It shares the voices of deserters or friends and family petitioning on their behalf. Deserter Declarations helps us understand who deserters were and lets us tease out some of the factors that motivated soldiers to leave their posts. These letters add...

NAACP 2017 Image Award Winner With his trademark acerbic wit, incisive humour, and infectious paranoia, one of our foremost comedians and most politically engaged civil rights activists looks back at 100 key events from the complicated history of black America. A friend of luminaries including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Medgar Evers, and the forebear of today's popular black...

Declared Defective is the anthropological history of an outcast community and a critical reevaluation of The Nam Family, written in 1912 by Arthur Estabrook and Charles Davenport, leaders of the early twentieth-century eugenics movement. Based on their investigations of an obscure rural enclave in upstate New York, the biologists were repulsed by the poverty and behaviour of the people in...

Breaking nearly eight decades of silence, Essie Mae Washington-Williams comes forward with a story of unique historical magnitude and incredible human drama. Her father, the late Strom Thurmond, was once the nation's leading voice for racial segregation (one of his signature political achievements was his 24-hour filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, done in the name of saving...

When most people picture the US-Mexico border, they think of walls, fences, concrete, and wire. However, in this first history of how the environment influenced physical boundary-making between the two nations, Mary E. Mendoza focuses on how the natural world shaped ideas about race, gender, and security. In so doing, she unearths surprising origins of the modern-day immigration debate. Mexican...

Before Jamestown. Before Plymouth. There was St. Augustine. In 1565—fifty-five years before the Pilgrims set foot at Plymouth Rock—Spanish ships slipped along the Florida coast and anchored in a shallow inlet guarded by marsh and sand. What they built there would become the oldest continuously occupied European-founded city in the continental United States. Yet its story has been pushed to...

Daily Life in the American West explores the lives of a wide range of people who struggled to make a home for themselves in this harsh and unforgiving region. It includes descriptions of how various people lived their daily lives, from nomadic Indian tribes to Chinese immigrants, and from cowboys to city-dwellers. The book conveys how these individual lives are...

In Cry of Murder on Broadway, Julie Miller shows how a woman's desperate attempt at murder came to momentarily embody the anger and anxiety felt by many people at a time of economic and social upheaval and expanding expectations for equal rights. On the evening of November 1, 1843, a young household servant named Amelia Norman attacked Henry Ballard, a...

How definitions of childhood in early America codified social hierarchies and remain with us today As of 2025, in the United States an eleven-year-old child can be charged with a federal crime, while in many states it is illegal to leave a twelve-year-old home alone. Twenty-six states allow children younger than sixteen to marry, while the legal drinking age remains...

In the 1820s, there was a little-known quest to unite the world by building a waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. As new Spanish American nations declared independence and new canals intensified US expansion and British industrialisation, many imagined the construction of an interoceanic canal as predestined. With dreams substituting for data, an international cast of politicians, lawyers, philosophers,...

The basis for the documentary Join or Die—now streaming on Netflix! Updated to include a new chapter about the influence of social media and the Internet—the 20th anniversary edition of Bowling Alone remains a seminal work of social analysis, and its examination of what happened to our sense of community remains more relevant than ever in today's fractured America. Twenty...

After a near-fatal stroke and a separation, amidst a global pandemic, Rick Van Noy decided to go for a paddle. In Borne by the River, he charts the story of discovery and healing that came from this solo canoe journey. Paddling two hundred miles on the Delaware River to his boyhood home just upriver from Trenton, New Jersey, Van Noy...

What happens to species when climate disruption causes suitable habitat within one country to move or vanish? In Borders of Biodiversity, Will Wright examines the histories of transnational conservation efforts to address the tension between a warming world in which living things are on the move and an increasingly walled world in which their movements are constrained. Focusing on the...

The untold story of the academics who became OSS spies, invented modern spycraft, and helped turn the tide of the war At the start of WWII, the U.S. found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today's CIA, was quickly formed—and, in an effort to fill its ranks with experts,...

Black at Baylor: Vital Voices of the First Generation explores the stories of thirteen of the first Black students to enrol at Baylor University in the 1960s and early 1970s. Each chapter chronicles an individual student's account of their lived experience of integration within spaces segregated for over a century at the oldest university in Texas. The thirteen students varied...

From the cotton boll to the Cotton Bowl in modern American culture There are few places on earth as thoroughly identified with a crop as the American South is with cotton. Burgundy is known for wine, and Java has coffee. In the South, for most of its history, cotton was king. Through much of the twentieth century, cotton cultivation determined...

From the cotton boll to the Cotton Bowl in modern American culture There are few places on earth as thoroughly identified with a crop as the American South is with cotton. Burgundy is known for wine, and Java has coffee. In the South, for most of its history, cotton was king. Through much of the twentieth century, cotton cultivation determined...

In a sweeping reinterpretation of the history of disfranchisement, Steve Suitts illuminates how a century of political conflicts in Alabama came to shape both some of America’s best achievements in voting rights and its continuing struggles over voter suppression. A War of Sections tells the unknown political history symbolised today by the annual pilgrimage of presidents and celebrities across the...

In A Southern Moderate in Radical Times, David I. Durham offers a comprehensive and critical appraisal of one of the South's famous dissenters. Against the backdrop of one of the most turbulent periods in American history, he explores the ideological and political journey of Henry Washington Hilliard (1808–1892), a southern politician whose opposition to secession placed him at odds with...

Nestled between Brazil, Venezuela, and Suriname, Guyana is the third-smallest sovereign state in mainland South America, and one of its youngest. Originally a Dutch colony, Guyana remained under British rule from the late eighteenth century until gaining independence in 1966 and becoming a republic in 1970. Apart from the 1978 mass murder-suicide of cult leader Jim Jones’s followers in Jonestown,...

The traumatic Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica, and the Ibero-Catholic colonialism that followed, truly transformed Indigenous political, economic, and socio-cultural practices. Confronted by dogmatic European literary regimes, strident indoctrination, and acts of structural violence, how could 'Aztec' education have survived in colonial times? An Unholy Pedagogy rethinks education studies by centring discussions on Indigenous visions of learning that shaped schooling throughout...

Riveting... Inspiring... Entertaining—this is how some of America's leading influencers are describing this breakout bestseller. As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, this is the one book you cannot afford to miss. Whether you are a seasoned history buff or someone who never quite "got" history, you will absolutely enjoy this book. Experience true and awe-inspiring stories of courage,...

American Revolution provides a kaleidoscope of resources and entries on the people, places, and events that coalesced into the American Revolution. This guide offers a concise introduction to one of the most famous revolutions ever fought. Though the American Revolution is often described within the thematic model of suppression versus freedom, the true significance of the event can be found...

2025 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title A concise history that proves that dissent is patriotic The history of America is a history of dissent. Protests against the British Parliament's taxation policies led to the American Revolution and the creation of the United States. At the Constitutional Convention, the founders put the right to protest in the First Amendment of the Bill...

This volume collects the proceedings of the concluding conference in Turin of the SERICA project and hosts the contributions of 20 scholars on topics related to cultural contact between East and West from classical antiquity to the 19th century. It focuses mainly on a literary and linguistic perspective, while also considering some examples of material culture, such as books, artifacts,...

The United States's superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the...

Above the Oxbow is a journey through the tangle of rich narratives surrounding Mount Holyoke, a locally cherished mountain in Western Massachusetts. It explores how visitors have forged connections with the mountain through various activities over the past two centuries. In an accessible blend of storytelling and scholarly analysis, Danielle Raad shows the significance of the landscape, historic sites, and...

Photographs are more than just illustrations of a moment in time, they offer a powerful way to interpret and understand the past like no other historical source can. U.S. History in 15 Photographs introduces this power through 15 iconic and lesser-known photographs representing key eras in American History. Taking the reader from Reconstruction and Westward Expansion, to the Roaring Twenties...

America’s getting old. It’s soon to celebrate its 250th birthday. But it’s getting harder and harder for its citizens to find anything to agree on. Students pull down statues of Abraham Lincoln, while others rally around Confederacy symbols. In one version of the story, the first ‘Americans’ are brave pioneers; in another, they are settler colonialists. For some, the Founding...

A thrilling new biography of Dwight Eisenhower set in the months leading up to D-Day, when he grew from a well-liked general into one of the singular figures of American history. "This is hands-down the most deeply researched, sensitive, intimate, and nuanced portrait of Eisenhower." —DAVID KENNEDY, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for History "A masterly portrait." —General WESLEY CLARK...

A synthesis of legal, political, and social history to show how the post-founding generations were forced to rethink and substantially revise the U.S. constitutional vision. Between 1815 and 1861, American constitutional law and politics underwent a profound transformation. These decades of the Interbellum Constitution were a foundational period of both constitutional crisis and creativity. The Interbellum Constitution was a set...

The Four Heavens brings to life the cultural and visual splendour of the ancient Maya, drawing on the oldest indigenous texts of the Americas and the latest archaeological discoveries to present an entirely new history of this spectacular civilisation. Renowned historian and archaeologist David Stuart, who has made groundbreaking contributions to the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics, shows how there was...

For many Stockholmers, the Johnson Line was long a household name and an essential part of their existence. One of those fascinated by the sea-crossings of these ships as a young boy was the author and journalist Nathan Shachar. In the autumn of 1904, when the businessman Axel Johnson decided to establish scheduled service between Sweden and Latin America, there...

In Individualism and Conformism in the United States, Sartre probes the paradox at the heart of American identity: a culture that claims to exalt the self even as it channels that self into mass movements, uniform mores, and ideological frameworks. Drawing on travel, reportage, and philosophical reflection, he examines how the rhetoric of liberty masks the deeper pressures toward standardisation,...

Here, by popular demand, is the updated edition to Joel Best's classic guide to understanding how numbers can confuse us. In his new afterword, Best uses examples from recent policy debates to reflect on the challenges to improving statistical literacy. Since its publication ten years ago, Damned Lies and Statistics has emerged as the go-to handbook for spotting bad statistics...

Long before Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, computer technology shaped how people worked, how markets operated, and how businesses became big. After World War II, military officials and their partners in industry looked to the newly invented electronic computer as they sought to cut costs, speed up labour, manage supply chains, and—they hoped—bring stability to the postwar economy. Their efforts would...

Brazil offers a knowledgeable appreciation of a complex, vital South American giant, destined to be one of the world’s premier economic powers. Experts believe that Brazil, the world’s fifth largest country and its seventh largest economy, will be one of the most important global powers by the year 2030. Yet far more attention has been paid to the other rising...

Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer died at the hands of Native Americans by the banks of the Little Big Horn in Montana on 25th June 1876. This is an established undisputed fact. What is disputed is the real reason that he died. So forget all you have been indoctrinated to believe and begin to learn the truth. George Custer was...

This "important and timely" (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America—and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that...