In his presidential Farewell Address of 1796, George Washington presented a series of maxims to guide the construction of a wise foreign policy. He believed, as did generations of his adherents, that if the United States stayed true to the principles he discussed, the country would eventually attain national greatness and international respectability. These principles quickly became engrained in the DNA of what it meant to be an American in the first half of the nineteenth century, shaping the formation of U.S. foreign policy, politics, and political culture. The Declaration of Independence affirmed American ideals, the Constitution established American government, and the Farewell Address enabled Americans to understand their country and its place in the world. While the Declaration and Constitution have persisted as foundational documents, our appreciation for the Farewell Address has faded with time.

Dissolving Tensions dismisses the long-held argument that a British-American rapprochement did not occur until the mid-1890s. Instead, author Phillip E. Myers shows that the rapprochement was distinct prior to the Civil War, became more distinctive during the conflict, and continued to take shape afterward. 

For sixty years the journal Civil War History has presented the best original scholarship in the study of America’s greatest struggle. Civil War History Readers reintroduce the most influential articles published in the journal. From military command, strategy and tactics, to political leadership, race, abolitionism, the draft, and women’s issues, as well as the war’s causes, its aftermath, and Reconstruction, Civil War History has published fresh and provocative analyses of the determining aspects of America’s “middle period.”

In the two decades before the Civil War, free Americans engaged in “history wars” every bit as ferocious as those waged today over the proposed National History Standards or the commemoration at the Smithsonian Institution of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In One Nation Divided by Slavery, author Michael F. Conlin investigates the different ways antebellum Americans celebrated civic holidays, read the Declaration of Independence, and commemorated Revolutionary War battles, revealing much about their contrasting views of American nationalism.

Drawing upon Lewis Cass’s voluminous private papers, correspondence, and published works, Willard Carl Klunder provides the first comprehensive biography of the man who was the Democratic spokesman for the Old Northwest for more than half a century.  A champion of spread-eagle expansionism and an ardent nationalist, Cass subscribed to the Jeffersonian political philosophy, embracing the […]

“Provides new information and fresh insights into a number of important and poorly understood aspects of West Virginia’s early constitutional, legal, and political history.”
—Brent Tarter, Library of Virginia

The arrival of the Shakers in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana in the decades after 1805 saw a substantial escalation in the movement. In Richard McNemar, Music, and the Western Shaker Communities, Carol Medlicott and Christian Goodwillie reconstruct a vast repository of early Shaker hymns, using them to uncover the dramatic history of Shakerism’s bold expansion to the frontier. With newly discovered tunes for more than one hundred Shaker hymns, this volume illuminates a little-known dimension of American folk hymnody.

The letters in this collection were written mostly by British military officers and diplomats reporting directly to their superiors in London. Many of the writers were actively engaged in fighting the Americans from 1775 until 1783; others were colonial administrators traveling through North America assessing the progress of British troops.

This history of Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation paints a gritty portrait of the successes and failures of the American steel industry. The 131-year life of this “American Business” is presented from its origins as one of the many struggling iron makers in the mid-19th century through its leadership in technological innovation and progressive worker/management relations in the early 20th century to its demise in 1984. J & L Steel, however, was more than just the management styles of the Jones & Laughlin families. From the beginning, its workers were intensely loyal and creative, and Portraits in Steel portrays the sometimes stormy relationship between iron and steel workers and management.

This exhaustive study chronicles the life of career army officer John C. Tidball, from action in major Civil War battles to postwar service in the West. Beginning with the first Battle of Bull Run, Tidball, saw action in nearly all the major engagements in the Eastern Theater, including Chancellorsville, Yorktown, Williamsburg, Gettysburg, Antietam, and Petersburg. Using previously unpublished wartime letters and memoirs, Eugene C. Tidball captivates the reader with the story of his most famous relative’s years in service to his country. Tidball’s account extends beyond the Civil War, to include recounting his presence at the Supreme Court’s delivery of the Dred Scott decision; his commanding of the military District of Alaska; his traversing the Southwest in 1853 as a member of the 35th Parallel Pacific Railway Survey; and his service as aide-de-camp to General-in-Chief William Tecumseh Sherman.