Because history is as fallible as the people who record it, many of the figures who have shaped our country have receded from public memory. In order to celebrate and call attention to these lives, Oxford University Press asked fifty accomplished personalities from a diverse range of interests to each select a person from the 24-volume American National Biography that they felt deserved more attention.
In Invisible Giants, the biographies of these forgotten figures appear alongside the often-personal comments of their selectors. We discover the man who inspired Sherwin Nuland to become a...

American National Biography is the first new comprehensive biographical dicionary focused on American history to be published in seventy years. Produced under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies, the ANB contains over 17,500 profiles on historical figures written by an expert in the field and completed with a bibliography. The scope of the work is enormous--from the earlest recorded European explorations to the very recent past.

Told more as stories than history lessons, the biographies in American National Biography, Supplement 2 recount the tales of all the different people who shaped America--leaders, composers, entertainers, entrepreneurs, writers, scientists, and outlaws. Each one written by an expert in the field and masterfully woven together to present the most accurate and up-to-date information, the entries bring forth a powerful narrative of America's past and some of the most important figures that went into its formation.
As the second in a series, iSupplement 2r includes a fascinating miscellany of...

The stereotype of the Victorian man as a flinty, sexually repressed patriarch belies the remarkably wide variety of male behaviors and conceptions of manhood during the mid- to late- nineteenth century. A complex pattern of alternative and even competing behaviors and attitudes emerges in this important collection of essays that points toward a "gendered history" of men.

Freemasons, Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias-why did millions of nineteenth-century American men belong to these and other secret orders? In this engrossing study, Mark C. Carnes argues that fraternal rituals created a fantasy world antithetical to prevailing religious practices, gender roles, and institutional structures, offering a male religious counterculture that opposed an increasingly liberal and feminized Protestantism. " An] original and compelling study. . . . Making use of anthropology as well as social history, Carnes is probably the first outsider to take these rituals seriously....

Charting the history and geographic development of the major American religions, this atlas displays in detail the intimate relationship between American religion and the events that formed the nation. These maps explore a wide range of American creeds, encompassing such diverse groups as the English Puritan settlers, the Catholic immigrants of the 19th and 20th-centuries, and the African American Southern Baptist movement.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

For decades, women's history has been one of the most dynamic fields in all of American history. More recently, the study of manhood has drawn the attention of scholars, students, and general readers. Despite the obvious intersections of female and male gender roles, the nineteenth-century doctrine of -separate spheres- has dominated historical inquiry. The shared experiences and complementary lives of men and women have rarely been considered. This important new anthology, reflecting recent trends in the history of men and women, calls for the reintegration of the study of gender.

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