Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - General

It is beyond dispute that slavery has always been abhorrent and, wherever it still exists, should be abolished. Where most scholarly writing on slavery in the past has concentrated on examining slaves as victims, recent writings have taken a more nuanced view of slavery in focusing on the slaves themselves and their cultural and psychological accomplishments in captivity. Also, studies of the system's profitability have shown that, from an economic perspective, slavery worked for the slaveholders and their society.

In Slavery, Emancipation, and Freedom, the distinguished scholar Stanley...

This pioneering work in African American history begins with the earliest experiences of blacks in the United States and offers an in-depth account of slavery, post-Civil War urban life, the place of religion in African American life, political activism, and the changing occupational and economic status of blacks.

Gregory Nobles shows how American leaders, beginning with Washington and Jefferson, pursued a policy of national expansion and development that enabled the United States to become the dominant power on the North American continent. Within this broad framework, he explores the settlers' diverse and complex interactions with Indians as enemies, allies, and trading partners. The result is a sensitive, perceptive account of the patterns of contact and conquest on America's frontiers over the course of four centuries.

Nineteenth-century globalization made America exceptional. On the back of European money and immigration, America became an empire with considerable skill at conquest but little experience administering other people's, or its own, affairs, which it preferred to leave to the energies of private enterprise. The nation's resulting state institutions and traditions left America immune to the trends of national development and ever after unable to persuade other peoples to follow its example.

In this concise, argumentative book, Eric Rauchway traces how, from the mid-1800s to the early...

"Lincoln's Smile demonstrates why Alan Trachtenberg has been the leading scholar in American studies for more than four decades." --Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia University

Alan Trachtenberg has always been interested in cultural artifacts that register meanings and feelings that Americans share even when they disagree about them. Some of the most beloved ones--like the famous last photograph of Abraham Lincoln, taken at the time of his second inaugural--are downright puzzling, and it is their obscure, riddlelike aspects that draw his attention in the scintillating...

A provocative new book that shows us why we must put American history firmly in a global context--from 1492 to today

Americans like to tell their country's story as if the United States were naturally autonomous and self-sufficient, with characters, ideas, and situations unique to itself. Thomas Bender asks us to rethink this "exceptionalism" and to reconsider the conventional narrative. He proposes that America has grappled with circumstances, doctrines, new developments, and events that other nations, too, have faced, and that we can only benefit from recognizing this....

In tracing the evolution of federal imprisonment, Paul W. Keve emphasizes the ways in which corrections history has been affected by and is reflective of other trends in the political and cultural life of the United States.

The federal penal system has undergone substantial evolution over two hundred years. Keve divides this evolutionary process into three phases. During the first phase, from 1776 through the end of the nineteenth century, no federal prisons existed in the United States. Federal prisoners were simply boarded in state or local facilities.

It was in the second phase,...