ABSTRACT South Carolina’s antebellum upcountry was home to a group of free black farmers who achieved meaningful degrees of economic security and whose lives mirrored those of some of their white neighbours in ways that challenged the boundary between race and class. Though just a segment of rural free people of colour, these farmers more closely resembled non-elite whites than they did the enslaved

ABSTRACT This essay illustrates how slavery supporters and abolitionists, through their use of the popular press, invoked the recent histories of Central America Texas, and Mexico to justify their views on the United States’ peculiar institution. Slaveholders cast the historical legacy of post-independence Mexico and Central America as the story of floundering countries, comprised of unproductive people

ABSTRACT Much is known about Swedes in America, but little is known about the portrayals of Native Americans in Swedish-American newspapers. Considering their centrality in Swedish American settler communities, this article explores newspaper portrayals as processes of boundary construction. By utilizing the Eliadean concept of cosmisation it is shown how and argued that newspapers served as canvases

(2021). American Intelligence: Small-Town News and Political Culture in Federalist New Hampshire. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 89-90.

(2021). Jeffersonians in Power: The Rhetoric of Opposition Meets the Realities of Governing. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 90-92.

(2021). The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, Volume 16: June 1820 to February 1821. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 92-94.

(2021). Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788-1865. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 94-96.

(2021). The Emergence of Capitalism in Early America. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 96-97.

(2021). Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 98-99.

(2021). Arguing Until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American Democracy. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 99-101.

(2021). Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 101-103.

(2021). Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 103-105.

(2021). The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves, and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 105-107.

(2021). Made in Britain: Nation and Emigration in Nineteenth-Century America. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 107-108.

(2021). Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 108-110.

(2021). Forging the Trident: Theodore Roosevelt and the United States Navy. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 110-112.

(2021). Books Reviewed. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 113-113.

ABSTRACT This article examines the use of propaganda to promote enlistment in the Union military during the American Civil War. The concept of propaganda offers historians of the Civil War a useful framework for understanding the means by which power structures and community pressure manifested in Northern recruitment. In addition to arguing for the importance of these power dynamics, this article

(2020). Books Reviewed. American Nineteenth Century History: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 327-327.

ABSTRACT This article aims to further understand the Irish immigrant experience with U.S. slavery by studying Irish enslavers in Louisiana. The profits extracted from slavery in New Orleans created the possibility for some Irish immigrants to accumulate immense wealth. Irish enslavers were immigrants who took advantage of enslaved people. Indeed, the Irish families examined in this article took to

ABSTRACT Between 1911 and 1914, four major Southern public universities – the University of North Carolina, the University of Virginia, the University of Georgia, and the University of Alabama – conferred honorary degrees upon former students who had abandoned their studies to join the Confederate military. Some 400 Confederate veterans received this tribute a half century after their enlistment, during

ABSTRACT This article reviews 30 years of synthetic works on Jacksonian America and argues that while most are still political narratives, the elements of a new synthesis are emerging. Recent scholarship suggests three broad areas from which a newer, more relevant synthesis might come: slavery, race, and gender; political culture; and the new history of capitalism. Furthermore, some key building blocks

ABSTRACT This study goes beyond the debate on anti- and philo-American discourses to focus on the role U.S. cultural diplomacy played in shaping Spanish views on the United States in the late nineteenth century. Drawing from a wide variety of contemporary sources, it argues that the outbreak of the American Civil War led to the active promotion of American democratic ideals in Spain by a host of official

Laura Sandy’s new book aims to upend the stereotype of the overseer on southern plantations, one of a violent and largely unskilled man drawn from the lowest white social class. Instead, Sandy pres...

Derrick Spires’ The Practice of Citizenship is a beautifully written and brilliantly evocative work that centres print culture in the early United States as a site for the theorization and practice...

Recent years have been a boon for Mormon studies. With publications from top university presses, the establishment of university chairs across the country, and the development of Mormon studies as ...

In Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco, Amy K. DeFalco Lippert adroitly explores one of the most storied eras of modern American history – the Gold Rush – throu...

Sarah Anne Carter, curator and director of research at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, begins her book by providing a twenty-first century definition of an object lesson: “an unexceptional m...

This work follows a pattern that has become increasingly prevalent in nineteenth-century literary-historical studies. It considers a number of noted (and some less regarded) writers – in this case,...

It is difficult to know when Louisa Smith realized that the Civil War had changed her life. Perhaps it was in the spring of 1863, when Louisa and her husband, Israel, fled to Goodrich’s Landing, Lo...

The American Civil War began with a surrender of a federal installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina in April 1861. Four years later, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virg...

The field of environmental history has entered its fifth decade, yet only in the past eight years has it produced book-length studies of U.S. history’s most written-about event. Making up for lost ...

In his introduction to Lincoln’s Informer, esteemed historian Carl Guarneri cites a 2013 Civil War Monitor poll of era specialists that pronounces Charles Anderson Dana as one of the “Twenty-five M...

When the great southern rebellion came to an ignominious end in 1865, Radical Republicans could be forgiven if they felt a greater degree of satisfaction or indulged in heartier self-congratulation...

This brief volume seeks to assess the “oppositional communities” of lowcountry Georgia, where African Americans used “strategic resistance” to survive the “daily assault” of slavery “on the humanit...

The railroad was never just a railroad in the nineteenth-century United States. It was a symbol of national progress and technological innovation; an iron horse which seemed to annihilate time and ...

Why, in the first half of the nineteenth century, did successive Americans undertake an arduous journey to Fiji, reputedly populated by “cannibals”? Nancy Shoemaker compellingly argues that to answ...

For several decades, historians have singled out elite southern women to better understand their roles in enslavement, plantation management, army recruitment, Confederate support, and the Lost Cau...

Scholars have long addressed the impact of war on the United States’ citizen soldiers. Pathbreaking work by historians such as James M. McPherson and James I. Robertson, Jr. shed light on how the h...

Transnational Frontiers is an illustrated exploration of transnational connections in the Franco-American art world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Specifically, the book exam...

“What a politician you have made me?” Abigail Adams wrote to husband John on 5 July 1780. “If I cannot be a voter upon this occasion, I will be a writer of votes.” Every detail of Abigail’s proud c...

Recent histories of the American Civil War, such as those produced by Enrico Dal Lago and Steve Sainlaude, have usefully placed the conflict within a broader international context. In The Second Am...

ABSTRACT Utilizing newspapers and manuscripts to examine the first conventions, this article further challenges the association of Jacksonianism with increasing democratization. The rise of democratization evident through the increased political engagement apparent in the conventions was not purely Jacksonian, instead manifesting itself in anti-Jacksonian political activity. The Anti-Masonic Party

When specialists in comparative urban history think of nineteenth-century Philadelphia, about four things come to mind. First, the City of Brotherly Love began the century as a modest-sized city ma...

In 1845, as Frederick Douglass remembered his time enslaved, he wrote that his “tendency was upward.” Douglass observed that, “A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantat...

ABSTRACT A scholarly consensus has emerged in recent years that the Declaration of Independence was the “apple of gold” in Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery political thought and moral grounding. Prior to Congress’s passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, however, he had mentioned the document only twice, and in his Peoria Address of October 1854, he referred to it as “the white man’s charter of freedom.”

ABSTRACT This article argues that Americans, influenced by British economist David Ricardo, initially blamed banking and the decay of America’s ethic of labor for causing the Panic of 1857. Americans’ stress on the negative influence of banking on labor set the terms for political debate about the Panic. Southern radicals used the Panic to justify slavery and secession. Republicans and other antislavery

ABSTRACT The extent of the multi-ethnic integration of the Seminoles remains a cause of debate in both Florida history and the wider field of Indigenous studies. This article argues against the notion that the Black experience among the Seminoles prior to the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) was homogenous and considers the role of those who experienced the restrictions of enslavement: the Estelusti

Early on Jay Sexton sets the ambitious agenda for his newest work—to tell the history of the United States. In just 200 pages Sexton tells that history by focusing on periods of crisis. Sexton shie...

geology. Strang highlights the significance of Gulf Coast enslavers and their networks for naturalists in Philadelphia, and by extension, the central role violence – and especially plantation slavery – played in American intellectual life. We see how the collection of geologic specimens relied on the labor of enslaved people, and how theoretical arguments at the vanguard of geology were being used

Circus Life provides an excellent and relatively unexplored view of the world of the circus in five chapters, each of which explores a different aspect of circus history and culture. Rather than fo...

raged against the kapu: they fired cannons, formed mobs, and lay much of the blame on the recently-arrived missionaries. The Kingdom and the Republic, however, shows how the kapu and its enforcement were less a consequence of missionary leadership – as the sailors erroneously assumed and scholars have subsequently suggested – and instead evidence of indigenous governance and sovereignty in response

ABSTRACT During the era of westward expansion, Americanism became tied to visions of conquering the West with American customs and values. Public schools especially served the interests of promoting nationalism and inducing assimilation. Implicitly Protestant Christian school curricula, however, repelled many Catholics and immigrants from the very institution designed to induce their assimilation.

ABSTRACT From the late nineteenth century up to the end of World War I, approximately half a million people immigrated to the United States from the Greater Syria region of the Ottoman Empire to make money and improve their lives. This article aims to shed light on the history of the Ottoman-Syrian immigration to the United States, particularly focusing on their economic and social integration into

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship on slavery has begun to draw attention to the ubiquity of mobility among America’s bound workers. They moved as boatmen, teamsters, lady’s maids, turpentine hands, and fugitives. They moved as commodities in a booming interstate trade. Most of all, they moved as workers. Functioning at one and the same time as the lifeblood, the infrastructure, and the lubricant of American

ABSTRACT This study evaluates the attitudes of slaveholders towards slavery in Maryland’s Tidewater region during the Early Republic, through the examination of their claims for slave property lost in the War of 1812. Of the minority of claimants who created a discourse about their slaves’ escapes, about half refused to believe their slaves wanted to escape, suggesting that the paternalistic ideology

Heerman observes, “virtually no free people in Illinois fought for slavery’s abolition” (p. 59). The author frequently supports these macro-level examinations of slavery and emancipation in Illinois with microhistorical vignettes – plucked from obscure archival sources – that offer humanizing glimpses into the daily lives of so-called “French Negroes” in Illinois. The final three chapters explore the

Matthew Fox-Amato's Exposing Slavery is a compelling and important text. Fox-Amato makes a convincing case for the significant role photography played in shaping and reflecting the ideologies of mu...

Recent historiography has recast our understanding of U.S. slavery's geographic borders, demonstrating that the institution remained national rather than only southern well into the antebellum peri...

reading of the Revolutionary era. Two counter-examples will suffice. Tidewater Virginia featured the same social structure in the eighteenth century that Nabors lays out for the oligarchy of the 1850s. Yet Virginia was the home of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Henry – in short, the most prominent of the Founders. Why were they less oligarchic than Jefferson Davis and Alexander Hamilton Stephens?