Hailed as the definitive portrait of the sixteenth president, Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame's impressive two-volume biography has been masterfully abridged and revised. Sixteenth president of the United States, the Great Emancipator, and a surpassingly eloquent champion of national unity, freedom, and democracy, Abraham Lincoln is arguably ......
The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law
In 1788, Mary Smith was ruined and banished from "civilised" society when her neighbor accused her of carrying a bastard child. To silence the ruinous rumors and vindicate her name, Smith sued him for defamation. But in court, she faced the onerous burden, entrenched within English law of sexual slander, of proving "special damage." Smith ......
From childhood dreams of joining the British Royal Navy to a dotage spent riding on a seesaw to improve his health, the true story of Napoleon Bonaparte is every bit as bizarre and fascinating as it is controversial. Napoleon rose up out of the chaos and horror of the French Revolution to offer a shattered nation dreams of future glory, honor ......
Body Snatching, Bloodletting, and Anatomy in America
Throughout the seventeenth century, medical lecturers demonstrated human anatomy by dissecting a cadaver while surrounded by students. After the Revolutionary War, though, instructors realized that they needed many more cadavers to serve a growing number of medical students. Enter the "resurrectionists" - body snatchers. Resurrectionists were a ......
How Millennialists Helped Abolish Slavery and Reform America
Shows how apocalypticism helped drive anti-slavery abolitionism and inspire progressive social reform in nineteenth-century America
In March 1844, Melissa Botsford of Meriden, Connecticut, defiantly left her local Methodist church because it supported slavery and other “sins” that permeated America. Botsford was ......
Ottoman Sociability and War-Making in the Long Eighteenth Century
It is easy to believe that manners are empty gestures, little more than social artifice or practiced etiquette whose sole purpose is to project civility and facilitate social interaction. But if we look more closely, they can tell us much more than we might first suppose, revealing what conventional accounts of state, economy, and religion often ......
The Mexican-American War of the 1840s, precipitated by border disputes and the U.S. annexation of Texas, ended with the military occupation of Mexico City by General Winfield Scott. In the subsequent treaty, the United States gained territory that would become California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado. In ......
Brasseur de Bourbourg's Travels through Central America and Mexico, 1854-1859
In two decades of traveling throughout Mexico, Central America, and Europe, French priest Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg (1814-1874) amassed hundreds of indigenous manuscripts and printed books, including grammars and vocabularies that brought to light languages and cultures little known at the time. Although his efforts yielded many of the ......
The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 2
Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) is best known for his masterpiece of military theory On War, yet that work formed only the first three of his ten-volume published writings. The others, historical analyses of the wars that roiled Europe from 1789 through 1815, informed and shaped Clausewitz's military thought, so they offer invaluable insight into ......
