Showing results for "The Americas" in 19th Century

Strange and Obscure Stories of the Civil War is an entertaining look at the Civil War stories that don’t get told, and the misadventures you haven’t read about in history books. Share in all the humorous and strange events that took place behind the scenes of some of the most famous Civil War moments.

The incredible story of a flood of near-Biblical proportions - its destruction, its heroes and victims, and how it shaped America’s natural-disaster policies for the next century. The storm began March 23, 1913, with a series of tornadoes that killed 150 people and injured 400. Then the freezing rains started and the flooding began. It was the nation’s most widespread flood ever - more than 700 people died, hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings were destroyed, and millions were left homeless.

In this beautifully written history of America’s formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny.

From the acclaimed author of The Pattons and Patriot Pirates: a book that celebrates America’s forgotten war correspondents, men who were legends in their time; who, between 1860 and 1910, between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War - when empires fell and dynasties flourished - led romantic, thrilling lives on the edgiest frontiers of time and place: seeing the world, breaking the stories, making news themselves during the time when newspapers made the most foreign of landscapes available, and the circulation wars were revolutionizing contemporary life, shaping global events, and making history.

In 1872, China—ravaged by poverty, population growth, and aggressive European armies—sent 120 boys to America to learn the secrets of Western innovation. They studied at New England's finest schools and were driven by a desire for progress and reform. When anti-Chinese fervor forced them back home, the young men had to overcome a suspicious imperial court and a country deeply resistant to change in technology and culture. Fortunate Sons tells a remarkable story, weaving together the dramas of personal lives with the fascinating tale of a nation's endeavor to become a world power.

A riveting narrative about America's ferocious drive towards empire during the Gilded Age, told by one of our most acclaimed historians. On February 15, 1898, the American ship USS Maine mysteriously exploded in the Havana Harbor. News of the blast quickly reached U.S. shores, where it was met...

Robert Wedderburn (1762-1834/5) was one of the most charismatic, irascible, and radical intellectuals of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Born to an enslaved woman and a slavemaster in Jamaica, and moving in the radical working-class circles of London, Wedderburn made his name as a fiery political writer and orator—before dying, forgotten, in poverty. From award-winning scholar Ryan Hanley, this is the first full-length biography of a man increasingly recognized as central to Black radical political thought in the Revolutionary Atlantic.

The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.

"Lee Is Trapped, and Must Be Taken": Eleven Fateful Days After Gettysburg: July 4 to July 14, 1863 focuses on the immediate aftermath of the battle of Gettysburg and addresses how Maj. Gen. George G. Meade organized and motivated his Army of the Potomac in response to President Abraham Lincoln's mandate to bring about the "literal or substantial destruction" of Gen. Robert E. Lee's retreating Army of Northern Virginia.

Between 1886 and 1888, Sgt. James Brooks of Texas Ranger Company F was engaged in three fatal gunfights, endured disfiguring bullet wounds, engaged in countless manhunts, was convicted for second-degree murder, and rattled Washington, DC, with a request for a pardon from the US president. His story anchors the tale of Joe Pappalardo’s Red Sky Morning, an epic saga of lawmen and criminals set in Texas during the waning years of the “Old West.”

With Musket and Tomahawk is a vivid account of the American and British struggles in the sprawling wilderness region of the northeast during the Revolutionary War. Combining strategic, tactical, and personal detail, this book describes how the patriots of the recently organized Northern Army defeated England's massive onslaught of 1777, thereby all but ensuring America's independence.

The Underground Railroad was the passage to freedom for many slaves, but it was rife with dangers. There were dedicated conductors and safe houses, but also arduous nights in the mountains and days in threatening towns. For those who made it to Midnight (the code name given to Detroit), the Detroit River became a River Jordan and Canada became their land of Canaan - the Promised Land where they could live freely in black settlements under the protection of British law.

From a historian and senior editor at Atlas Obscura comes a fascinating account of the daring nineteenth-century women who moved to South Dakota to divorce their husbands and start living on their own terms. For a woman traveling without her husband in the late nineteenth century, there was only...

In The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution, Dan Robinson presents a new history of politics in colonial America and the imperial crisis, tracing how ideas of Europe and Europeanness shaped British-American political culture. Reconstructing colonial debates about the European states system, European civilization, and Britain's position within both, Robinson shows how these concerns informed colonial attitudes towards American identity and America's place inside - and, ultimately, outside - the emerging British Empire.

Abraham Lincoln began his presidency admitting that he knew "but little of ships," but he quickly came to preside over the largest national armada to that time, not eclipsed until World War I. Naval historian Craig L. Symonds' Lincoln and His Admirals unveils an aspect of Lincoln's presidency unexamined by historians until now, revealing how he managed the men who ran the naval side of the Civil War, and how the activities of the Union Navy ultimately affected the course of history.

For all the talk of the Civil War "pitting brother against brother", until now there has never been a single book that traces the story of one family ravaged by that conflict. And no family could better illustrate the personal toll the war took than Lincoln's own. Mary Todd Lincoln was one of 14 siblings who were split between the Confederacy and the Union. Three of her brothers fought, and two died, for the South.

How did a land and people of such immense diversity come together under a banner of freedom and equality to form one of the most remarkable nations in the world? Everyone from young adults to grandparents will be fascinated by the answers uncovered in James West Davidson's vividly told A Little History of the United States.

In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to 19th-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude.

The requirements needed to be a peace officer in the Wild West were often determined only by the individual's skill with a gun, and their courage. At times, judgment was needed with only seconds to determine it, and that also meant that there was the odd occasion where justice and law never quite meant the same thing. The expression "justice without law" was never truer than in the formative years of the West.

From the bestselling author of Flags of our Fathers, Flyboys, and The Imperial Cruise, a spellbinding history of turbulent U.S.-China relations from the 19th century to World War II and Mao's ascent. In each of his books, James Bradley has exposed the hidden truths behind America's engagement in...