"A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Abraham Lincoln was president when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions inextricably bound up with money, power, race, identity, and faith. He was hated and hailed, excoriated and revered. In Lincoln we can see the possibilities of the presidency - as well as its limitations. At once familiar...

"The absorbing narrative of Frederick Douglass's heated struggle with President Andrew Johnson reveals a new perspective on Reconstruction's demise. When Andrew Johnson rose to the presidency after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, African Americans were optimistic that Johnson would pursue aggressive federal policies for Black equality. Just a year earlier, Johnson had cast himself as a "Moses" for the Black community. Frederick Douglass, the country's...

"Aware of the racial tumult in the years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Mei tries to remain blissfully focused on her job, her close friendship with the camp foreman's daughter, and telling stories about Paul Bunyan--reinvented as Po Pan Yin (Auntie Po), an elderly Chinese matriarch."--

From one of our most distinguished historians, a new examination of the vitally important years of Emancipation and Reconstruction during and immediately following the Civil War-a necessary reconsideration that emphasizes the era's political and cultural meaning for today's America. Drawing on a wide range of long-neglected documents, Eric Foner places a new emphasis on the centrality of the black experience to an understanding of the era. We see...

"This long-overdue biography reestablishes William Monroe Trotter's essential place next to Douglass, Du Bois, and King in the pantheon of American civil rights heroes. William Monroe Trotter (1872- 1934), though still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political...

In the years after the Civil War, black and white Union soldiers who survived the horrific struggle joined the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR)--the Union army's largest veterans' organization. In this thoroughly researched and groundbreaking study, Barbara Gannon chronicles black and white veterans' efforts to create and sustain the nation's first interracial organization. According to the conventional view, the freedoms and interests of African...

"A prominent historian brings to life the story of a man who defied every convention of his time by becoming Wall Street's first black millionaire in pre-Civil War New York, marrying a white woman, owning railroad stock on trains he was not legally allowed to ride and outsmarting his contemporaries"--NoveList.

"A gripping and true story about five boys who were kidnapped in the North and smuggled into slavery in the Deep South -- and their daring attempt to escape and bring their captors to justice, reminiscent of Twelve Years A Slave and Never Caught"--

"Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining thousands of acres of their homeland in what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and U.S. development in the Old Northwest. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates, the credit for Native persistence...

"This book examines the foundational role of deliberate misrepresentation in various elements of white supremist Lost Cause mythology, from Confederate soldiers' military prowess, loyalty, motivation, and unity, to mythical black Confederates, to the evolution of Lost Cause myths to support present-day white supremacy. It adds to the understanding of the memory and reality of the American Civil War as American society debates historical monuments...