Vigilante Wars

How the 1849 Gold Rush in California brought mob rule ...


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American History Titles

Browse our American History titles listed below.

In Search of the Next Kick

Jack Kerouac and the Making of the Beat Generation

by John Tytell

United States History, American History, U.S. History, Biography

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957 burst onto a fifties America supposedly safe and stuffy, and announced the coming of the “beat” generation. This new and wildly disorganized view of life seemed to extol amorality and self-gratification. Here is an insightful mini-biography of the beats’ icon.

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Vigilante Wars

Gang Democracy and the Collapse of Government in San Francisco's Gold Rush Years

by Cecelia Holland

United States History, American History, U.S. History, U.S. Government

The 1849 Gold Rush in California brought to a boiling point the new state’s unruly politics and produced mob rule in the muddy streets of San Francisco. Cecelia Holland’s compelling account of these events reveals a disturbing underside of democratic government in a nation headed for civil war.

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The Oregon Trail

The American West as It Once Was

by Francis Parkman

United States History, American History

In 1846, Francis Parkman traveled some seventeen hundred miles through the unspoiled West, meeting trappers, gamblers, woodsmen, soldiers, emigrant pioneers, and Indians, and hunting buffalo with a band of Oglala Sioux. His account remains one of the great books ever produced by an American.

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Oppenheimer's Lives

Reflections on the Father of the Atomic Bomb

by Jeremy Bernstein

United States History, Military History, American History, U.S. History, U.S. Government, Biography, Biography

Jeremy Bernstein remembers the “father” of the atomic bomb—a man unsure of his identity and scarred by the famous government hearing that took away his security clearance.

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Family Intervention, Ku Klux Klan Style

The Hooded Remedy for Social Misbehavior

by Thomas R. Pegram

United States History, American History, U.S. History

In the social unease that followed World War I, some groups sought to preserve white Protestant morality in the face of new challenges to the old order. A reborn Ku Klux Klan focused not on racial matters but on social behavior, with a peculiar, not-so-subtle intervention in family affairs. 

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The Hundred Days' War

Franklin Roosevelt Takes Command in the Depths of the Great Depression

by William E. Leuchtenburg

United States History, Political Science, American History, U.S. History, U.S. Government, Essays

When Franklin Roosevelt came to the White House, 13 million—roughly 25 percent of the work force—were unemployed. By the day of  his inauguration, thirty-eight states had closed their banks. Soon the nation would witness the most furious period of legislative activity in American history.

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The Art of Money-Getting

by P.T. Barnum

United States History, Philosophy, American History

The greatest showman of his age, P. T. Barnum was also the most gifted advocate for the Gospel of Success in nineteenth-century America. Barnum’s autobiography, The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself, which sold almost half a million copies, included the “Rules of Success.” They were also incorporated into his lecture, “The Art of Money-Getting,” which he delivered more than a hundred times. Horace Greeley thought it “worth a hundred-dollar greenback to a beginner in life.”

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Mostly He Won

Kubrick, Bobby Fischer and the Attraction of Chess

by Jeremy Bernstein

United States History, European History, American History, U.S. History, Sports History, Essays, Sports

The 1972 world championship chess match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky was an event of international importance—and a media bonanza. Out of a heady cast of characters, Jeremy Bernstein fashions a tale of large personalities involved in an intense, brainy competition.

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