"A character-driven narrative history about the nineteenth-century radicals--from Fanny Wright and Henry David Thoreau to John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison--who demanded that the United States live up to its revolutionary ideals, and what their successes and failures can teach us today"--

"The Yoruba deity of the sea, Yemaya, is brought to vivid life as she discovers the power of Black resilience, love, and feminine strength in antebellum America. Shallow Waters imagines Yemaya, an Or©¯sha - a deity in the religion of Africa's Yoruba people - cast into mid-1800s America. We meet Yemaya as a young woman, still in the care of her mother and not yet fully aware of the spectacular power she possesses to protect herself and those she...

"Americans have long regarded the freedom of travel a central tenet of citizenship. Yet, in the United States, freedom of movement has historically been a right reserved for whites. In this book, Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor shows that African Americans fought obstructions to their mobility over 100 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. These were "colored travelers," activists who relied on steamships, stagecoaches,...

For well over a century, traditional Civil War histories have concluded in 1865, with a bitterly won peace and Union soldiers returning triumphantly home. In a landmark work that challenges sterilized portraits accepted for generations, Civil War historian Brian Matthew Jordan creates an entirely new narrative. These veterans--tending rotting wounds, battling alcoholism, campaigning for paltry pensions--tragically realized that they stood as unwelcome...

From the author comes the story of the rise of American industry between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. It describes industry in America between the War of 1812 and the Civil War and how this period of growth in the first half of the century built the platform for Carnegie, Rockefeller and Morgan in the second half. In the thirty years after the Civil War, the United States blew by Great Britain to become the greatest economic power in world history....

One of the greatest African American leaders and one of the most brilliant minds of his time, Frederick Douglass spoke and wrote with unsurpassed eloquence on almost all the major issues confronting the American people during his life from the abolition of slavery to women's rights, from the Civil War to lynching, from American patriotism to Black Nationalism. Between 1950 and 1975, Philip S. Foner collected the most important of Douglass's hundreds...

Chronicles the life and accomplishments of Sojourner Truth, and discusses her years as a slave, her escape in 1826, and her actions as an activist for the rights of both women and African-Americans.

"A prominent historian brings to life the story of a man who defied every convention of his time by becoming Wall Street's first black millionaire in pre-Civil War New York, marrying a white woman, owning railroad stock on trains he was not legally allowed to ride and outsmarting his contemporaries"--NoveList.

"A breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes...