United States History

This addition to Oxford's Very Short Introductions series traces how Americans have addressed the issues and events of their time and place, whether it is the Civil War, the Great Depression, or the culture wars of today.

Can you keep a beat and bust a rhyme? Did you know that learning can help you earn a hard dime? With rhythm and flow, the voices of U.S. history hip-hop to life.

During those dark pre-antibiotic days, when tuberculosis killed one in seven people, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed facility, dubbed “the pest house” where “no one left alive.”

From the legendary former Fed Chairman and the acclaimed Economist writer and historian, the full, epic story of America's evolution from a small patchwork of threadbare colonies to the most powerful engine of wealth and innovation the world has ever seen.

In this third volume of Michael Logusz's epic study of the Wilderness War of 1777, a sizable British military force, augmented with German and loyalist soldiers, attacks the Northern Army's southern front in the fall of 1777 in hopes of assisting a much larger British Army that is threatened to the north of New York City in the wilderness region of Saratoga.

Through the eyes and words of survivors and victims alike, as well as the careful research for which Newberry Honor Award winner Jim Murphy is known, listeners will experience one of the most devastating natural disasters in U.S. history and understand why and how life in the United States was forever changed.

I Hear My People Singing shines a light on a small but historic black neighborhood at the heart of one of the most elite and internationally renowned Ivy League towns - Princeton, New Jersey. The vivid first-person accounts of more than 50 black residents detail aspects of African American life throughout the 20th century.

What was it like to meet our 16th president? Was he really as kind and honest as we perceive him to be today? This astonishing new book is an inspiring and eye-opening collection of stories, anecdotes, and quotes from people who sought out Lincoln for his wisdom, his help, or just his irresistible wit. He offered a patient ear to almost anyone who came to see him, and his compassion and understanding bettered the lives of hundreds who crossed his threshold.

Packed with fun facts and presidential trivia, The President Is Dead! tells you everything you could possibly want to know about how our presidents, from George Washington to George H. W. Bush (who was the most recent president to die), met their ends, the circumstances of their deaths, the pomp of their funerals, and their public afterlives, including stories of attempted grave robbings, reinterments, vandalism, conspiracy theories surrounding their deaths, and much more.

In May 1974, as President Richard Nixon faced impeachment following the Watergate scandal, the House Judiciary Committee commissioned a historical account of the misdeeds of past presidents. The account, compiled by leading presidential historians of the day, reached back to George Washington's administration and was designed to provide a benchmark against which Nixon's misdeeds could be measured. What the report found was that, with the exception of William Henry Harrison, every American president has been accused of misconduct.

Mania surrounding messianic prophets has defined the national consciousness since the American Revolution. From Civil War veteran and virulent anticapitalist Cyrus Teed, to the dapper and overlooked civil rights pioneer Father Divine, to even the megalomaniacal Jim Jones, these figures have routinely been dismissed as dangerous and hysterical outliers. After years of studying these emblematic figures, Adam Morris demonstrates that messiahs are not just a classic trope of our national culture; their visions are essential for understanding American history.

In 1868 Congress impeached President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, the man who had succeeded the murdered Lincoln, bringing the nation to the brink of a second civil war. Enraged to see the freed slaves abandoned to brutal violence at the hands of their former owners, distraught that former rebels threatened to regain control of Southern state governments, and disgusted by Johnson's brawling political style, congressional Republicans seized on a legal technicality as the basis for impeachment - whether Johnson had the legal right to fire his own secretary of war, Edwin Stanton.

Abraham Lincoln began his presidency admitting that he knew "but little of ships," but he quickly came to preside over the largest national armada to that time, not eclipsed until World War I. Naval historian Craig L. Symonds' Lincoln and His Admirals unveils an aspect of Lincoln's presidency unexamined by historians until now, revealing how he managed the men who ran the naval side of the Civil War, and how the activities of the Union Navy ultimately affected the course of history.

Over the past decade, Mary Pipher has been a great source of wisdom, helping us to better understand our family members. Now she connects us with the newest members of the American family - refugees. In cities all over the country, refugees arrive daily. Lost Boys from Sudan, survivors from Kosovo, families fleeing Afghanistan and Vietnam: they come with nothing but the desire to experience the American dream. Their endurance in the face of tragedy and their ability to hold on to the virtues of family, love, and joy are a lesson for America. Their stories will make you laugh and weep.

In The Safety of the Kingdom, J. Michael Martinez takes up the question of how the United States government has responded to terrorist attacks and, in the absence of an attack, the fear of foreign and subversive elements that may harm the nation. In some cases the government “overreaction” led to a series of abuses that amplified the severity of the original threat.

Instead of the system that the Constitution intended, judges have created a system in which bureaucrats and appointed officials make most of the important policies. While the government claims to be a representative republic, somehow hot-button topics from gay marriage to the allocation of Florida's presidential electors always seem to be decided by unelected judges. What gives them the right to decide such issues? The judges say it's the Constitution.

One man finds himself torn between two cultures in this sweeping tale of frontier life in post–Civil War era Texas. In the years following the American War Between the States, the once vacated military presence in west Texas is on the rise to protect the waves of settlers moving into the region. Living peaceably with the Mescalero Apache, half-breed former military scout Holton Lang promotes the tentative harmony between the US cavalry and the Native American population.

A young mother in Mexico City, captive to a past that both overwhelms and liberates her, and a house she cannot abandon or fully occupy, writes a novel of her days as a translator living in New York. A young translator, adrift in Harlem, is desperate to translate and publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet who lived in Harlem during the 1920s and whose ghostly presence haunts her in the city's subways. And Gilberto Owen, dying in Philadelphia in the 1950s, convinced he is slowly disappearing, recalls his heyday decades before.

When John Brown decided to raid the federal armory in Harper's Ferry as the starting point of his intended liberation effort in the South, some closest to him thought it was unnecessary and dangerous. Frederick Douglass, a pioneering abolitionist, refused Brown's invitation to join him in Virginia, believing that the raid on the armory was a suicide mission. Yet in front of Douglass, "Emperor" Shields Green, a fugitive from South Carolina, accepted John Brown's invitation. When the raid failed, Emperor was captured with the rest of Brown's surviving men and hanged on December 16, 1859.

John Henry Cole is an operative of Ike Kelly's Detective Agency, based out of Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory. Returning to Cheyenne from what had been a deadly assignment in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, Cole has decided that he has no alternative but to resign from the agency and pursue a different line of work. However, in Cheyenne, Cole learns that Ike Kelly has been murdered and his body burned in a fire that destroyed both the agency office and the shop next door.