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Wild rumors of a Devil Baby--a child who has miniature horns and a forked tail and appears in retribution for a husband's cruelty--at Hull-House brought a flood of curiosity-seekers to Jane Addams's door. To her surprise, many of the most adamant about seeing the Devil Baby were older, working-class, immigrant women. These women, usually rather ......
With a legacy stretching back into legend and folklore, the vampire in all its guises haunts the film and fiction of the twentieth century and remains the most enduring of all the monstrous threats that roam the landscapes of horror. In The Living and the Undead, Gregory A. Waller shows why this creature continues to fascinate us, and why every ......
While the debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas are undoubtedly the most celebrated in American history, they may also be the most consequential as well. The issues so fiercely debated in 1858 were about various interrelated aspects of one momentous, nation-threatening issue: slavery. The contest between Lincoln and Douglas became ......
''Believers in conspiracy are not discouraged by the lack of evidence, because they can easily convince themselves that the evidence has been destroyed by conspirators seeking to protect themselves or others.'' As William Hanchett suggests, believers in conspiracies are a determined and passionate lot. For more than a century now, they have been ......
The Lincoln Image documents how popular prints helped make Lincoln's a household face, deliberately crafting the image of a man of the people, someone with whom an ordinary American could identify. Featuring the work of Currier and Ives, John Sartain, and other artists and printmakers, this lavishly illustrated volume pairs original photographs ......
On April 22, 1865, Brevet Colonel H. L. Burnett was assigned to head the investigation into the murder of President Abraham Lincoln and the attempted murder of Secretary of State William H. Seward. Burnett orchestrated the collection of thousands of documents for the Military Commission's trial of the conspirators. This deep archive of documentary ......
For more than fifty years, Phineas T. Barnum embodied all that was grand and fraudulent in American mass culture. Over the course of a life that spanned the nineteenth century (1810-91), he inflicted himself upon a surprisingly willing public in a variety of guises, from newspaper editor (or libeler) to traveling showman (or charlatan) and ......
Black Women's Global Activism during Jim Crow and Apartheid
Revered in South Africa as "An African American Mother of the Nation," Madie Beatrice Hall Xuma spent her extraordinary life immersed in global women's activism. Wanda A. Hendricks's biography follows Hall Xuma from her upbringing in the Jim Crow South to her leadership role in the African National Congress (ANC) and beyond. Hall Xuma was already ......
