19Th Century category: 5646 books

The definitive biography of a radical activist and intellectual Max Eastman (1883–1969) was a prolific writer, radical, and public intellectual who helped shape the twentieth century. While researching this masterful work, acclaimed biographer Christoph Irmscher was granted unprecedented access to...

For far too long, the history of the modern era has been written as a history of isolated nation states. This book which presents both interpretation and primary source documents challenges a nation-centred account, exploring the interconnected and interrelated nature of societies in the nineteenth...

In 1849, the Morning Chronicle, a leading Victorian newspaper, embarked on a social investigation of working class life in England and Wales. Set in the immediate context of concern over Chartism and the cholera epidemic, its intention was to provide a full and detailed description of the moral, intellectual,...

A portrait of 18th century England, from its princes to its paupers, from its metropolis to its smallest hamlet. The topics covered include - diet, housing, prisons, rural festivals, bordellos, plays, paintings, and work and wages.

When wealthy Mississippi cotton planter Isaac Ross died in 1836, his will decreed that his plantation, Prospect Hill, should be liquidated and the proceeds from the sale be used to pay for his slaves' passage to the newly established colony of Liberia in western Africa. Ross's heirs contested the...

Changes to the landscape of higher education in the United States over the past decades have urged scholars grappling with issues of privilege, inequality, and social immobility to think differently about how we learn and deliberate. Thinking Together is a multidisciplinary conversation about how...

Before the Bible Belt fastened itself across the South, competing factions of evangelicals fought over their faith's future, and a contrarian sect, self-named the Primitive Baptists, made its stand. Joshua Guthman here tells the story of how a band of antimissionary and antirevivalistic Baptists defended...

One of the most celebrated women of her time, a spellbinding speaker dubbed the Queen of the Lyceum and America's Joan of Arc, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was a charismatic orator, writer, and actress, who rose to fame during the Civil War and remained in the public eye for the next three decades. J....

This book presents a historical study of the phenomenon of Holy Land tourism among American Protestants during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. During this period, overseas travel was newly available to the Protestant middle class due to the invention and...

"It didn't occur to me until fairly late in the work that I was writing a book about the beginnings of a national celebrity culture. By 1860, a few boxers had become heroes to working-class men, and big fights drew considerable newspaper coverage, most of it quite negative since the whole enterprise...

A lively, street-level history of turn-of-the-century urban life explores the Americanizing influence of the Irish on successive waves of migrants to the American city. In the newest volume in the award-winning Penguin History of American Life series, James R. Barrett chronicles how a new urban...

The Great Divergence brings new insight to one of the classic questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As Ken Pomeranz shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two...

At age thirteen, Dayton Hyde, a spirited beanpole of a boy, ran away from home in Michigan to Yamsi, his uncle’s ranch in eastern Oregon. This was in the 1930s, and Yamsi was one of the last great cattle ranches of the West. Soon the boy, nicknamed “Hawk,” was riding a horse, soaking up ranch...

In 1897 a small landholder named Robert Eastham shot and killed timber magnate Frank Thompson in Tucker County, West Virginia, leading to a sensational trial that highlighted a clash between local traditions and modernizing forces. Ronald L. Lewis’s book uses this largely forgotten episode as a...