United States History

New England is as rich in ghosts as it is in history. Listeners will find just the right amount of scariness for a cold, dark night.

Between 1846 and 1873, California's Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide.

This audiobook offers an immersive journey into the foundational documents of the United States of America, masterfully narrated by Jason McCoy. Instead of merely presenting the text, McCoy brings to life the Constitution of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights through his engaging and thoughtful narration. This unique auditory experience allows listeners to delve deep into the essence of these pivotal documents, which are the bedrock of American democracy and encapsulate the nation's ideals and aspirations.

“It can start with a knock on the door one morning. It is the local Indian agent, or the parish priest, or, perhaps, a Mounted Police officer.” So began the school experience of many Indigenous children in Canada for more than a hundred years, and so begins the history of residential schools prepared by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC).

This national best-seller vividly reconstructs one of the most unbelievable and controversial battles in American military history—General Custer’s Last Stand in 1876. Why would a seasoned leader like Custer lead 200 U.S. Army soldiers into battle against 2,000 Native American warriors? The answer lies in this book, which captures in stunning detail the heroism, foolishness, and brutality that led to this legendary battle.

In this narrative history of the Mohawk River Valley and surrounding region from 1713 to 1794, Professor Richard Berleth charts the passage of the valley from a fast-growing agrarian region streaming with colonial traffic to a war-ravaged wasteland. The valley's diverse cultural mix of Iroquois Indians, Palatine Germans, Scots-Irish, Dutch, English, and Highland Scots played as much of a role as its unique geography in the cataclysmic events of the 1700s - the French and Indian Wars and the battles of the American Revolution.

Smartly dressed and smiling, Canada’s black train porters were a familiar sight to the average passenger - yet their minority status rendered them politically invisible, second-class in the social imagination that determined who was and who was not considered Canadian. Drawing on the experiences of these influential black Canadians, Cecil Foster’s They Call Me George demonstrates the power of individuals and minority groups in the fight for social justice and shows how a country can change for the better.

For over 100 years, thousands of Aboriginal children passed through the Canadian residential school system. Begun in the 1870s, it was intended, in the words of government officials, to bring these children into the “circle of civilization,” the results, however, were far different. More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse. Using previously unreleased government documents, historian John S. Milloy provides a full picture of the history and reality of the residential school system.

The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. It is a tale of rivers diverted and dammed, of political corruptions and intrigue, of billion-dollar battles over water rights, of ecologic and economic disaster. In Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner writes of the earliest settlers, lured by the promise of paradise, and of the ruthless tactics employed by Los Angeles politicians and business interests to ensure the city's growth. He documents the bitter rivalry between two government giants to transform the West.

The award-winning Revisioning American History series continues with this “groundbreaking new history of Black women in the United States” (Ibram X. Kendi)—the perfect companion to An Indigenous People’s History of the United States and An African American and Latinx History of the...

From one of the world’s leading economists, a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, yet left us unsatisfied Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward...

Trusting an overly optimistic guidebook, the Donner Party sets out for the Promised Land in May of 1846 - unaware that they're following only rumor-fueled speculations. But after betting their lives on a bogus shortcut, the starving travelers soon struggle to survive the November snows of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Praying for a miraculous rescue, 48 of the original 88 escape certain death by living off the flesh of their dead comrades.

John Adams told Thomas Jefferson that “history is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine.” Thomas Edison called him “the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible.” He was a founder of both the United States and the French Revolution. He invented the phrase, “The United States of America.” He rose from abject poverty in working-class England to the highest levels of the era’s intellectual elite. And yet, by the end of his life, Thomas Paine was almost universally reviled.

With dramatic flair, Jeff Guinn delivers the definitive portrait of Bonnie and Clyde. These media-savvy outlaws appealed to America's Depression-era hunger for swashbuckling characters. Glowing radio and newspaper reports transformed these "public enemies" into celebrities - much like the cinema gangsters of the time.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history. This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches.

On the evening of December 16, 1773, a group of disguised Bostonians boarded three merchant ships and dumped more than 46 tons of tea into Boston Harbor. The Boston Tea Party, as it later came to be known, was an audacious and revolutionary act. In this thrilling book, Benjamin L. Carp tells the full story of the Tea Party - exploding myths, exploring the unique city life of Boston, and setting this extraordinary event in a global context. Carp illuminates how a determined group shook the foundations of a mighty empire, and what this has meant for Americans since.

In The Comedians, comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff brings to life a century of American comedy with real-life characters, forgotten stars, mainstream heroes and counterculture iconoclasts. Based on over 200 original interviews and extensive archival research, Nesteroff's groundbreaking work is a narrative exploration of the way comedians have reflected, shaped, and changed American culture over the past 100 years.

This newest volume in Oxford's acclaimed Pivotal Moments series offers an unforgettable portrait of the Nez Perce War of 1877, the last great Indian conflict in American history. It was, as Elliott West shows, a tale of courage and ingenuity, of desperate struggle and shattered hope, of short-sighted government action and a doomed flight to freedom.

Set in New York City in the ’90s, Angela Shanté’s poems and stories paint a mosaic of childhood that is shaped by the past and reverberates into the present. As Shanté navigates the city through memory, this timeless book illuminates the places where Black girls are nurtured or boxed in, through stories and poems about expectations, exploitation, love, loss, and self-realization.

This is the first volume of distinguished historian Dumas Malone's Pulitzer Prize-winning six-volume work on the life and times of Thomas Jefferson. Based on a myriad of sources, it covers Jefferson's ancestry, youth, education, and legal career; his marriage and the building of Monticello; the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the Notes on Virginia; his rich, fruitful legislative career; his highly controversial governorship; and his early services to the development of the West.