American Social History

How do Americans know that government papers are real? If you see an eagle holding a shield, and a pyramid with an eye above it, the papers are no fakes. Listen to Benjamin Franklin as he talks about the birth of the Great Seal in 1782 and why it's still so important to our country today.

When Congress originally created the National Security Council in 1947, it was intended to better coordinate foreign policy after World War II. Nearly an afterthought, a small administrative staff was established to help keep its papers moving. President Kennedy was, as John Gans documents, the first to make what became known as the NSC staff his own, selectively hiring bright young aides to do his bidding.

Americans have always put the past to political ends. The Union laid claim to the Revolution - so did the Confederacy. Civil rights leaders said they were the true sons of liberty - so did Southern segregationists. This book tells the story of the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of the nation's founding, including the battle waged by the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and evangelical Christians to "take back America".

From its origins in the 1750s, the White-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of "moral suasion" and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. Through tactical violence, argues Carter Jackson, Black abolitionist leaders accomplished what White nonviolent abolitionists could not: creating the conditions that necessitated the Civil War.

In 1966 Fan Shen, a newly minted Red Guard, plunged happily into China's Cultural Revolution. Disillusionment soon followed, then turned to disgust and fear when Shen discovered that his compatriots had tortured and murdered a doctor whose house he'd helped raid and whose beautiful daughter he secretly adored. A story of coming of age in the midst of monumental historical upheaval, Shen's Gang of One is more than a memoir of one young man's harrowing experience during a time of terror.

Impassioned antislavery rhetoric made antebellum Boston famous as the nation’s hub of radical abolitionism. In fact, the city was far from a beacon of equality. In No Right to an Honest Living, historian Jacqueline Jones reveals how Boston was the United States writ small—a place where the soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism was easy, but justice in the workplace was elusive. Highlighting the everyday struggles of ordinary Black workers, this book shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston—and the United States—from securing true equality for all.

When Annette Gordon-Reed's groundbreaking study was first published, rumors of Thomas Jefferson's sexual involvement with his slave Sally Hemings had circulated for two centuries. Among all aspects of Jefferson's renowned life, it was perhaps the most hotly contested topic. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings intensified this debate by identifying glaring inconsistencies in many noted scholars' evaluations of the existing evidence. In this study, Gordon-Reed assembles a fascinating and convincing argument that the evidence for the affair has been denied a fair hearing.

In 1921, Tulsa’s Greenwood District - known then as the nation’s “Black Wall Street” - was one of the most prosperous African American communities in the United States. But on May 31 of that year, a white mob, inflamed by rumors that a young black man had attempted to rape a white teenage girl, invaded Greenwood. By the end of the following day, thousands of homes and businesses lay in ashes, and perhaps, as many as 300 people were dead.

David E. Stuart incorporates extensive new research findings through groundbreaking archaeology to explore the rise and fall of the Chaco Anasazi and how it parallels patterns throughout modern societies in this new edition.

Jeffries spares no one and nothing in this explosive new book. The atrocities of Union troops during the Civil War, and Allied troops during World War II, are documented in great detail. The Nuremberg Trials are presented as the antithesis of justice. In the follow-up to his previous, bestselling book Hidden History: An Exposé of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics, Jeffries demonstrates that crimes, corruption, and conspiracies didn't start with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, Zinn's A People's History is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of, and in the words of, its women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers. Here we learn that many of our country's greatest battles (labor laws, women's rights, racial equality) were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance.

For more than a century, the city of Atlanta has been associated with Black achievement in education, business, politics, media, and music, earning it the nickname "the Black Mecca." Atlanta's long tradition of Black education dates back to Reconstruction, and produced an elite that flourished in spite of Jim Crow, rose to leadership during the civil rights movement, and then took power in the 1970s by building a coalition between White progressives, business interests, and Black Atlantans. But Atlanta's political leadership has consistently mishandled the Black poor.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove grew up in the Bible Belt in the American South as a faithful church-going Christian. But he gradually came to realize that the gospel his Christianity proclaimed was not good news for everybody. The same Christianity that sang, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound" also perpetuated racial injustice and white supremacy in the name of Jesus. His Christianity, he discovered, was the religion of the slaveholder. Just as Reconstruction after the Civil War worked to repair a desperately broken society, compromised Christianity requires a spiritual reconstruction.

Here is the behind-the-scenes story of how the United States forged its wartime alliance with Britain, told from the perspective of three key American players in London: Edward R. Murrow, Averell Harriman, and John Gilbert Winant. Drawing from a variety of primary sources, Olson skillfully depicts the dramatic personal journeys of these men who, determined to save Britain from Hitler, helped convince a cautious Franklin Roosevelt and a reluctant American public to support the British at a critical time.

As one of a handful of journalists allowed in the courtroom, for 23 days Jonathan Alter sat just feet away from the most dangerous threat to democracy in American history, watching the spectacle of the century: the felony trial of Donald Trump. Highly publicized but untelevised and thus largely hidden from public view, this landmark trial offered hope of real justice amid a grueling eight-year national ordeal and foreshadowed the drama of the 2024 presidential election.

In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first American woman to obtain a medical degree. Following in her footsteps in the early 1980s, Brenda Berkman was the first woman to challenge New York City’s ban on female firefighters. During the last few centuries, countless women have made amazing contributions to society. Women are now Nobel Peace Prize winners, world-class athletes, and talented inventors and adventurers.

The story of Christine Jorgensen, America's first prominent transsexual, narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives. Their erasure from trans history masks the ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-19th century to present-day anti-Black and anti-trans legislation and violence.

The first new edition in 10 years of this important study of Latinos in US history, Harvest of Empire spans five centuries - from the first New World colonies to the first decade of the new millennium. Latinos are now the largest minority group in the United States, and their impact on American popular culture - from food to entertainment to literature - is greater than ever.

Over more than two centuries men, women, and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered. Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the maroons whose stories are the subject of this book have been forgotten.

Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the new labor history pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger's widely acclaimed book provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, he argues, cannot be explained simply with reference to economic advantage; rather, white working-class racism is underpinned by a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforce racial stereotypes, and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks.