19Th Century category: 5646 books

Nineteenth-century France was one of the world's great cultural beacons, renowned for its dazzling literature, philosophy, art, poetry and technology. Yet this was also a tumultuous century of political anarchy and bloodshed, where each generation of the French Revolution's 'children' would experience...

The earliest known prison memoir by an African American writer—recently discovered and authenticated by a team of Yale scholars—sheds light on the longstanding connection between race and incarceration in America. “[A] harrowing [portrait] of life behind bars . . . part confession, part...

By the nineteenth century the British had ruled India for over a hundred years, and had consolidated their power over the sub-continent. Until 1858, when Queen Victoria assumed sovereignty following the Indian Rebellion, the country was run by the East India Company - by this time a hybrid of state...

This comprehensive and beautifully illustrated collection of essays conveys a vivid picture of a fascinating and hugely significant period in history, the Fin de Siècle. Featuring contributions from over forty international scholars, this book takes a thematic approach to a period of huge upheaval...

Edward Everett Hale is remembered by millions as the author of The Man Without a Country. This popular and gifted nineteenth-century writer was an outstanding and prolific contributor to the fields of journalism, fiction, essay, and history. He wrote more than 150 books and pamphlets (one novel sold...

In 1981, decades before mainstream America elected Barack Obama, James Chase became the first African American mayor of Spokane, Washington, with the overwhelming support of a majority-white electorate. Chase’s win failed to capture the attention of historians—as had the century-long evolution...

Family Money explores the histories of formerly enslaved women who tried to claim inheritances left to them by deceased owners, the household traumas of mixed-race slaves, post-Emancipation calls for reparations, and the economic fallout from anti-miscegenation marriage laws. Authors ranging from...

A famous defender of the underdog, the oppressed, and the powerless, Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) is one of the true legends of the American legal system. His cases were many and various, but all were marked by his unequivocal sense of justice, as well as his penchant for representing infamous and...

In James G. Blaine: Architect of Empire, author Edward P. Crapol assesses Blaine's role as an architect of empire and revisits the ambitious imperialistic goals of this two-time secretary of state. Crapol examines Blaine's pivotal role in shaping American foreign relations and looks at some of the...

In the middle of the nineteenth century one of the vergers of Winchester Cathedral, where Jane Austen is buried, was mystified by the number of visitors who requested to be shown her grave. ‘Was there anything particular about this lady?’ he asked. There was no indication on the tablet marking...

Silver mining was a hot topic in the mid nineteenth century, with one discovery following another in the western United States. Across the border in Mexico the mines were much older, and not being worked with the modern methods of US mining. This is a mid nineteenth century tour of some of those mines.

Though one of America’s best known and loved novels, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has often been the object of fierce controversy because of its racist language and reliance on racial stereotypes. This collection of fifteen essays by prominent African American scholars and critics...

Gareth Stedman Jones returns Karl Marx to his nineteenth-century world, before later inventions transformed him into Communism’s patriarch and fierce lawgiver. He shows how Marx adapted the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and others into ideas that would have—in ways inconceivable to Marx—an overwhelming impact in the twentieth century.

Ben Wilson's The Making of Victorian Values is the history of an era rather like our own-a time when dissenters and rebels were hemmed in by conformists and hardheaded authoritarians, a time when a nation on the eve of global domination fretted about its future. It was, however, a period when those...